Lock Up Your Great-Great-Grandmothers, It’s Pantomime Season Again

It doesn’t get more rock ‘n’ roll than this: The Rolling Stones playing their hundredth anniversary gig.
   The corporate logos light the backdrop as, for support, U2’s grandchildren take to the stage dressed as Morrissey Dancers, cavorting meaninglessly to a medley of their one tune: four-and-a-half notes played through The World’s Most Complicated Effects Unit, which no-one remembers. Paul McCartney’s seventh wife, a new remix of “Hey Jude” (accidentally released from a computer in Barbados) sings backing tambourine.
   After a forty-five minute ad-break for the new Blueberry iWantitnow!, The World’s worst Rock Band, their corpses wheeled out like Lenin’s Red Square Freak-Show, unleash their manifesto on an unsuspecting world (maaa-an!):

“Rock ‘n’ Roll is Dead.”

   As Salman Rushdie later gushes in his review for the Business Section of The Financial Times: “The carcass of Lord Jagger of Tax Haven rippled across the stage in the most unconvincing spectacle the world has ever seen. This, then, was the True Spirit if Rock ‘n’ Roll made decomposing flesh. I loved every minute. Hey, these guys are my pals, actually, so I do have rock credibility credentials and a leather jacket.” A review for which the NME issues another one of its fatwahs.

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It’s all so unnecessarily tragic.
   When Bill Hicks said (always a statement which carries a sainthood-alert caveat), “I want my rock stars dead,” I don’t think this is what he had in mind.
   Rock ‘n’ Roll is Dead?
   It doesn’t get more rock ‘n’ roll than this, then, does it?

(25^th July a.m. Bandanas-dels-Asphalts)

Fergusthepoet only listens to embarrassing pop music or opera, so what do he knows, eh? Pffft.