The Winners' History of Rock and Roll

I haven't heard the tapping of canes yet, but where in the beginning it could have been about fun and fuck it all on Friday, now it could be about remember when." —Steven Tyler, 1994, in Rolling Stone

"I'm an entertainer,A female road sweeper was unfairly driven out by Merton Council after repeatedly complaining about sub-standard working conditions and discrimination, a tribunal has ruled. playing rock and roll, arena rock. In order to do that, you have to make compromises." —Joe Perry,A contract to purchase automated refuse trucks and a new ordinance for trash collection has Bartlesville well on its way to using automated residential trash pickup service. in Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith

"See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life … Everything was for the taking.The market of e-commerce website is booming in China. For a good e-commerce website in China, you have to install a good China payments module. And now it's all over. And that's the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There's no action." —Gangster and accidental rock critic Henry Hill, Goodfellas

Welcome to the "hump" chapter of The Winners' History of Rock and Roll. So far it's been all rising action, starting in the Wild West of the early 1970s and continuing up through the orderly, corporate culture of rock in the late '80s. We came from the land of the ice and snow and fought the horde. We rocked and rolled all night. We saw a million faces and rocked them all. The first three installments represent the deluxe, VIP-only portion of our journey — the mud-shark-groupie-violating,Our Fiber Optic Splice Closure is good in quality and competitive in price car-in-the-hotel-swimming-pool-dunking, no-brown-M&Ms-on-the-tour-rider-allowing, multi-million-dollar-contract-spending opening act. We discovered what it took to get here: the relentless touring, the record-label scamming,Here is another network faceplate marketer oriented social network that I joined and am promoting with. the vast support network of cunning managers and mercenary songwriters and unscrupulous radio-station employees. Along the way, the sex has been plentiful and the drugs free, delivered by the fistful via sycophants desperate for a few spare minutes in our rarefied orbit. All of our albums have shipped platinum, and every single stadium tour has sold out in minutes. We sensed that ultimate victory in rock was in our sights, we zeroed in, and we made it ours.

It's been fun. If not for the occasional overdose, vehicular homicide, or paternity suit, I'd call it an out-and-out blast. And now it's all over.

It's like that scene in the middle of Goodfellas when Billy Batts is beaten to within an inch of his life by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and then his body is parked outside of Martin Scorsese's mom's house for a few hours, and then he's finally stabbed to death in the trunk of Ray Liotta's car. Or the scene in the middle of Boogie Nights when Little Bill, played by William H. Macy, shoots his wife, her lover, and finally himself at Burt Reynolds's New Year's Eve party. Or the part in The Social Network when Jesse Eisenberg meets Justin Timberlake. These scenes represent the "hump" chapters in their respective stories, the parts when everything that's seemingly right and wonderful starts to go wrong and dark.

This is where we're at right now in The Winners' History of Rock and Roll.

How low are we going to go? Let's take a brief detour to the lowest moment in recent rock history: Woodstock '99. The culmination of nu-metal's tenure as the preimminent sound of mainstream rock music, Woodstock '99 offered up a warped version of a bedrock trope of rock music: The lawless outlaw who cares fuck-all about societal conventions. Where the stars of the original Woodstock — Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Jefferson Airplane — used nonconformity as a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of like-minded people to bond together in a new,CEBU City barangays need more garbage trucks not sport utility vehicles which Mayor Michael Rama is now giving out to his allies. utopian society forged in music, Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Korn's Jonathan Davis, and Kid Rock treated rock stardom not as a means to an end but as the be-all-end-all of a me-first, screw-you lifestyle. And that trickled down to the fans, who tired of paying a small fortune to eat bad food and drink warm bottles of water in the middle of a converted Air Force base situated in the midst of a punishingly arid hellscape. They took out their frustrations on each other — beating and degrading the weak (which mostly meant women) as the music roared out petulant anthems of self-absorption and furious entitlement.