Tom McHale's Profile

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical
view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely
accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of
success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top
performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their
craft.

With Chuck Berry, Little Richard and other icons from rock's first
generation, he pioneered an incendiary idea: that music could be more than a
medium of entertainment, that it could and should also be a tool of cultural
revolution. It was not, after all, just music that moved town fathers to ban
rock concerts and angry men with sledgehammers to smash jukeboxes containing
rock records.

No, it was what that music meant, the notion of white kids mixing with
black ones, of status quo under siege, of girls having sex before they were 30.

More, it was the realization that the staid old lives the town fathers lived
and the staid old things those angry men believed were about to be washed away
upon a tide of change.

That big bang still echoes; nearly 60 years later, we are still wed to the
idea that the music that has meaning is the music that causes unease.

But it takes more to do that now than it did in Elvis' day.

But what else can we expect in an era that accepts ungraciousness and
ungratefulness as synonyms for courage and rebellion?

This is not, let me add, an argument about sound or style, but substance.
Revolution is not a stunt.

And I submit that we actually have no shortage of conditions that still
require rebellion. What we lack is the will to act. That's sad. Once upon a
time, music was brave.

Now we have only echoes of the bang.