Air guitar riffs over dirty bird toasties.

I was making dinner last night, having been on the road all day, delivering various relatives to various medical appointments, and I got home pretty tired at the end of the day so I wasn’t feeling like cooking. That shouldn’t have mattered because we made a giant, tasty meatloaf on Sunday, wrapped in bacon and baked with heaps of sweet potato, thinking there’d be plenty of food leftover for Monday night.

What we didn’t account for was the presence of one large adult son in the house over the course of the day, which drew down the meatloaf stocks so severely that when I came to reheat some dinner, there was nothing to be reheated. So, off to the local supermarket I went to purchase a dirty bird. I brought back the hot chook, pulled it apart, and slapped it on toast. Gourmet stuff.

That actually wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, although I did enjoy complaining about the theft of my meatloaf. What I wanted to talk about was an idea I had while I was putting those dirty bird toasted sandwiches together. I had my AirPods in, and I’ve got some random playlist on Apple Music, which turned out to be guitar-driven rock classics. (Don’t you judge me) An idea occurred while I was making the po’ boy dinner: Maybe the sorrows of the world aren’t the fault of rapacious world-eating billionaires. Maybe everything’s fucked because rock music died.

I remember reading a piece somewhere in the last year or two, and I think I linked to it here, a story about how rock had basically disappeared from the music charts—something like less than 1% of the top 100 hits of any given year were likely to be traditional guitar-driven rock songs. I thought, maybe that’s it. Maybe the world is the way it is at the moment because mediocre white men no longer have the easy path, or at least the dream of an easy path, to rock god status.

If you think about it, 10 or even 15 years ago, even the most mediocre of white men could get a cheap pretend guitar and the latest addition of Guitar Hero, plug themselves into an Xbox or a PlayStation, and imagine themselves thrashing it out in front of 10,000 hot people on stage. They don’t have that option anymore. Maybe that’s what they’re angry about. They are reduced to air guitar riffs over dirty bird toasties.

I’m going to sit with this theory for a bit.