David Brooks scores the coolest interview of the day. It's with Steven Van Zandt, aka "Little Steven" of E Street Band fame and Silvio Dante of the greatest television series of the twenty-first century (so far!). Here's Brooks:
[Van Zandt] argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock. And he says that most young musicians don't know the roots and traditions of their music. They don't have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs. As a result, much of their music (and here I'm bowdlerizing his language) stinks. He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres. It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.
Hmm. It may be a stretch to link Steven Van Zandt's thoughts on the state of pop music with the "driving fear" behind "the entire Obama candidacy," but Brooks's overall theme about fragmented America, global narrow-cast culture, and the anxieties to which both phenomena give rise seems right to me.