When Robert Plant sampled bits of old Led Zep hits for his 1990 hit "Tall Cool One," it seemed like a novel way to burnish music from the past to help inform songs in the present. But it also seemed like a bit of a gimmick.
Now it sounds like everyone's jumping on this train - and riding it a lot further (some rap artists and Beck are excused from this diatribe)
Does anyone except for me remember Steve Forbert's 1979 hit "Romeo's Tune"? It was a youthful take on being in love. Now Forbert's put a new, stripped down version on his latest album, and it sounds like something completely different - a lot of the wonder and joy is gone, but age'll do that to you, I suspect. Meanwhile, Steve Earle quotes his old hit "Guitar Town" in his new song, "Tennessee Blues." You've got Joni Mitchell offering up a new version of "Big Yellow Taxi" on her new Starbucks album and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters quoting from his old work on "Hello (I Love You)," a song he contributed to a recent movie soundtrack.
So I guess the question is whether the new versions of the songs offer up some new insight or angle that the orignals did not - just like a good cover version can make you hear a song in an entirely different light (a la Jimi Hendrix's cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" or Jason & The Scorchers' version of "Absolutely Sweet Marie" - great song, horrible video). Or is it a sign of something worse - that all the good songs and ideas are gone, and everyone is left to cobble together stuff from when they were more prolific and had more to say?
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I understand your point, because I also fear that there are no new ideas. And I think that's the fear we have about Bruce: while he can still bring it live, the new material pales in comparison with the old, because maybe the ideas are gone. Somewhere I've run across discussions of artists (musicians, but also authors and sometimes filmmakers) who will (post-hoc) look back on a time when they were just going through the motions despite desperately pretending to the fans and the journalists that they still saw as much relevance in the new material as in the "good old stuff." And this is what makes someone like Neil Young so fascinating. He hasn't been consistently good, but he's been consistently relevant (in the rock world, anyway), in part because he keeps trying new things.
But also, part of being an artist is being able to reflect on yourself. After all, didn't Andy Warhol essentially return to the same themes all his life? Or the Impressionists? Dylan makes and re-makes his material (again, not always successfully) with a passion that I liken to the best jazz musicians of the Miles Davis/John Coltrane/Duke Ellington bent. It's both modernism and post-modernism, and in Steve Earle's case it reflects the fact that the crux of so much of this outwardly-directed artist's work has been very, very inner-oriented.
If you know what I mean
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