The Day the Music Died

This being the fiftieth anniversary of the plane crash that sparked the song, it is hard to remember that once upon a time rock and roll music was a fragile thing, in the hands of a few artists whose death might have brought the tender movement to an end.

It takes imagination to revive that lost feeling of insecure rebellion, of teenage tragedy, the fear that it might all be over with the death of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.

Now, the music that mainstream radio stations refused to play is all they play. Remember how you never heard Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin on the radio back in the 1970s? Is there anything else today?

Perhaps we could let the music rest in peace? Let it die with whatever tragic dignity rock might still have left. It clearly can never regain the dorky youth that Buddy Holly represented, but does it have to live on like a David Bowie vampire?

What a fantasy to think that the whole rock era could really be over, replaced by something else, not necessarily a new rebellion, just a sound from another corner, one that is not yet fully owned?

No, at this point, the death of rock music is just a perverse fantasy, an impossible hope.

That having been said, I can't stop listening to the Arctic Monkeys