For Love Nor Money

Love rock is music for our time. Love rock is music for all time. Love rock is music for Our Time. By and large, the "listening population" right now, the most avid consumers and, most importantly, the next generation of musicians, are Millenials. That's not a dirty word. I'm a Millenial, and so is my wife. And we're mostly okay.

Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers satisfied their curiosity organically and more socially than do Millenials. Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers had little choice but to experience their music organically and more socially as well. These days, original music acts can't draw a crowd. And how can we expect them to? We, as a society whose outgoing population is mostly Millenials, know that our time is the only commodity that we haven't seen devalued to nil in our lifetimes. We have access to just about anything we want to listen to, only limited by our creativity in search terms.

Millenials live in a culture of fear. We were, by definition, 19 or younger on 2001 September 11, and our world shrank in on us quickly and fiercely. The boogeyman of Gen-Xers was the Commies. The Other. Over There. They didn't talk like us, didn't smell like us, probably didn't love their mothers as much as we did. But most importantly, they were over there, we were over here.

The boogeyman for Millenials is Terror. And Terror strikes from within our midst. Terror is present where there is happiness and gathering. Terror, we are told every day, is from within. Insurgents rise up and strike you down because they hate you individually. Existential dread is the curse of the Millenial.

Love is the opposite of Fear. Fear simply can't exist in the presence of love. In a world ruled by Fear, where every smile comes with a furrowed brow, we need love more than anything. We need love rock to make us feel optimistic, to wake up with a smile and not a groan. Love rock is about curiosity, adventure. It's about the exuberance of youth and the confidence that the rules just won't apply if you happen to run afoul of them, when adventure turns to misadventure.

Mother Love Bone didn't write music for this time. They wrote music for all time. The message of the music hasn't changed one bit: love flourishes. Love flourishes. You've got to value love supremely.