Stylus on Fleetwood Mac

Patrick McKay does a nice job of summing up and contextualizing Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. It's one of those rare albums that was both hugely popular and actually very good. McKay writes:

While the Clash and the Sex Pistols renewed rock with a shot of youthful danger, Rumours allowed for the possibility that rock could age gracefully, and take on subjects of an emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager. This may have begat adult contemporary, VH1, and Phil Collins, but at least with Rumours, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t trying to soften rock, but to blunt its edge, to create something more expansive in effect and broader in appeal. The consequence was a career spent in the shadow of that peak; the reward was a receptive audience—of 19 million and counting.

I think this is a continuing issue in contemporary music. On the one hand pop music is driven by watered down corporate concerns (with ever diminishing artistic and financial returns). On the other, indie rock is too often motivated by resentment and artistic overreaching; always in pursuit of the new at the expense of skill, craft, and experience. What gets left out or pushed aside in the mom-rock and dad-rock name-calling of today (as Gen-Xers hasten through their 30s and into their 40s), is this desire for subjects in rock music that have that "emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager." This is the idea that music can have a purpose and be about something deeper than the latest sense of moral outrage or cause-based charity hullabaloo. That it could actually allow you to express something true about life, and how it is lived, and how people grow and change over time. In the end, music is a refuge for our most emotional, irrational selves, and it is this ability to sing your life that connects those 19 million and why we need more music like Rumours.