I get into these periods of great ambition, where I want nothing less than life-changing, world-changing results from something I create. Then I get to thinking that I've come along too late.
Anyone who tries to tell you that you can't create anything new or original is just a lazy fuck who's given up or'd rather sell out for the easy life. The only people who believe that are too jaded from all the rehashments of the same fucking stories for the last eon or so. Of course new material can be made, but now we just have to work a little bit harder. The only reason why people think otherwise is because they don't have the mental capacity to even fathom there being anything new to make. It's one thing to pave the way when there's nothing but uncharted land ahead, but it's quite another to fucking work your ass off creating something cool and original in a sea of watered-down bullshit.
Over my marathon 32+ hours of intermittent toilet-play, I've been reading the Rolling Stone "Immortals" issue. Yeah, don't ask me how fucking Clapton, Miles Davis and the Dead didn't make the top fifty, but that's beside the point. Taking the full hundred into account, it's easy to fucking notice that the bulk of the immortals had their haydays in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when Rock was new and getting entrenched into the American and Earthly conscience. Really, this leaves little room for anyone coming out today. I think Radiohead cracked the top 75, and Eminem got his usual Rolling Stone cocksucking, and there was Guns N' Roses and the Beasties and a few other rappers. But, for the most part, any kind of modern rock pretty much stopped with Nirvana as far as immortality is concerned. Think about all the bands you know and love making music right now. Most likely, none of them will ever be considered immortal. Fifty years from now, who are they gonna be talking about? They'll probably still be talking about Nirvana and then the vast wasteland of rock n' roll landscape that invaded the planet with utter homogeneousness. See, no one's all that different anymore, and those who are aren't making the impact of someone up for that Immortality prize. Even with a band like Radiohead, you gotta figure they're lucky to crack a million records sold. They've got a strong, devoted fanbase, and they're making music like no other band out there today worth their weight in relevance, but they're not freakazoid huge, nor are they paving any kind of new ground in the lexicon of Rock music.
So, we'll tread back to Nirvana. What made them so special? Well, they came out in a period of time where music really sucked major ass. With the exception of a few metal bands still kicking, and the usual college musical fare getting widely ignored, there was nothing out there. You've got bands like Warrant and Nelson and Slaughter and fucking Winger trying to cling to their last minutes of fame with their falsetto fucking pretty-boy singers and run-of-the-mill high-fallutin' guitar solos; I mean really, how much of the same fucking thing do you expect us to take before we run in the complete opposite direction? And then there's Nirvana and it's like fucking Christ has been born. We've got our fucking savior, take us out from the valley of darkness. But, honestly, musically, can I say they're in the top 50 bands of all time? Top 50 Immortals? Mmm, that's a tough one. They came along at the right time, though, what can I say? That's the only way you can really become immortalized nowadays. When everything starts sounding the same, you gotta come with a power-blow from the opposite direction that catches fire and kicks the asses of everyone in your path.
Writers have it tougher, though. People don't read. Hunter S. Thompson just died. Fifty years from now, they'll remember him as an obscure reference to a Johnny Depp film; not necessarily from anything he actually wrote. And he's probably one of the greatest American writers to come out in the last fifty years. There's really only a few select groups of people who bother reading fiction for fun. You've got your intellectuals, your college-type people who sit around sipping merlot in their dens, underlining their favorite passages and trotting them out to their friends at dinner parties. You've got your middle-aged housewives who read nothing but true-crime, romance, and the occasional Stephen King/Dean Koontz horror novel. And then you've got your kids and your kids-at-heart types. They're the ones reading books specifically made for children (Goosebumps, Harry Potter and the like). They're also the ones reading the latest Seinfeld/Drew Carey/Howard Stern autobiographies, because they're easy fucking reads, they're true for the most part, and they're full of anything but substance, which sets the kids-at-heart types just fine.
The problem with this bleak scenario is the fact that everything has to be marginalized. You've got to find a genre and you've got to write to a type of person and you've got to make it marketable. I don't think like that. I write for myself. I write what entertains me; which is why I'm so vain about it, which is why I re-read my own fucking posts, which is why I'm probably the only person in the history of the world who's actually his own favorite writer. Of course, if I didn't write what I, at the very least, thought was interesting, then I really shouldn't be doing it, now should I?
Now, I've just got to find a way to make what I think is interesting accessible and desirable to the rest of the world. Because, I really can't stop until I'm one of the immortals