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Music

Aging & Music: How The New Offspring Video Sparked My Quarter-Life Crisis

What the hell does it mean for a musician to "age gracefully," anyway?

My fear of becoming a 50-something has-been rocker hit me hard this past June. My band mates and I were sitting around our friend’s kitchen table in Portland, OR after a home-cooked meal. Sipping on dark, stiff ale, we got to talking about bad music videos. Someone mentioned The Offspring’s latest effort.

“Have you seen it? It’s terrible. You must see it.”

We still had half an hour before we had to go load in for our show, so we relocated to the computer.

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The music video for The Offspring’s new song “California Cruisin’ (Bumpin’ In My Trunk)” made my entire body wince. On screen, the members of the once respected rock band rap-sang simplistic lyrics about girls, summer, California, and turning up the beat as a slutty Asian teenager in shredded clothing grinded on a stripper pole. I know you hear that bass bumpin’ in my trunk. One of the girls sucked on a lollipop. Another wore cheap lingerie and black glasses suited for a librarian in a porn movie. The girl with the gloss and a G-string just like floss. Noodles, the infamous guitar player of The Offspring, with his heavy-rimmed glasses and skunk-like hair, had a shameful look on his face. He knew this was mortifying. They all did. They must have! My friend’s are drinking. This line coming from a 46-year-old Dexter Holland with bleached blonde hair and rickety, awkward dance moves. I was watching the world’s greatest practical joke, but no one on screen was hip to it.

They tell you to “age gracefully,” whatever that means. I’m a woman, so I guess I should find myself a nice husband, quit dying my hair at 45 years old, and grow a nice vegetable garden I can tend to in a floppy sun hat. I don’t want to age like that, but I also don’t want to swing so far the other way. I’m a woman, but I’m also a musician. Like athletes, musicians often come with an expiry date. (Unless, of course, you are a legend like Patti Smith or Bob Dylan, who have mastered aging gracefully. They have it down to an art. They are basically walking poetry.)

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I’m terrified of becoming an old rocker. I’m terrified of relying on music as my only source of income. What happens when people no longer care? When you are no longer relevant? In the 90s, the Ramones went to South America and played to gigantic stadiums of 10,000 people. They were the freakin’ Beatles to this foreign audience. Then, they would come back to New York and barely sell-out a modest club.

“You know you are no longer relevant when you have to leave your country to sell-out shows,” my friend Nick Tolliday said to me as we watched Sublime With Rome play to a stoned crowd of thousands. I was reviewing the show for the local paper and Tolliday was keeping me company. “You know Sublime With Rome still tours Europe and makes money.”

It was gross. Sublime With Rome, the whole thing was gross. I don’t even like Sublime, but it seemed wrong to me that a new singer had replaced the original frontman Bradley Nowell, who overdosed on junk in 1996. Rome, the new guy, was singing all Bradley’s songs referencing his drug addiction, his life, his beloved dog—in short, his world that disappeared when he did over a decade ago. And people bought it. They were singing, dancing, and yelling. They didn’t give a shit. The only original member was the bass player. Nowell’s estate fought to not have the Sublime name used in this hack-ass project. Imagine Nirvana with Milan? Nirvana fans would never accept that. Sublime fans are too stupid to care. As I watched this karaoke performance play out, I thought about my own band.

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“If I died tomorrow,” I said to Tolliday. “And then, for some reason, our band blew up and my bandmates got some blonde idiot to replace me so they could tour and make money…” I’d do nothing. I’d be dead.

When you make the stupid plunge and decide, “Yes, I’m going to try to play music and tour and do this for real,” you give up the idea of having a stable future. You are just gambling forever and that is why you need a back-up plan. And I don’t mean waitressing or being a barista or marrying rich, I mean a real plan. The music world is disgusting and fleeting. It’s fast, over-saturated and it expects too much. Realistically, most “indie” bands get their 15 minutes and try to drag it on for a year, but it doesn’t work that well. PR people aren’t unicorns. Labels die like your libido will. This generation will never have to worry about a Sublime With Rome or a second coming of a Billy Corgan type, because none of us are going to ever get that big, especially not in his scene. I talked about this before. I’m curious to see what happens. I hope I’m wrong.

I have never believed in relying on music for money, because when you rely on music for money, it drops you like a sack of potatoes. Music knows better than to let you prostitute it like that. Music is too special to get that gross. I never want to be an aging rocker singing about “bumpin’ trunks” because that’s what sells now that I am not longer relevant. I never want to use music like that. I don’t want to stoop to that level. I’m on my punk rock high horse now, because I’m relatively young and the idea of not being able to pay my mortgage or rent that hall for my daughter’s wedding is not a reality yet. All I know is that I never want to rely on music for money. And now that I’ve declared it out loud, I have to pull through.

@myszkaway