26
Part of Eno's criticism of rock doubtless stemmed from the fact that after his collaborations
with David Bowie and Talking Heads in the late 1970s, he found himself personally less
drawn to rock as a medium. With those collaborations, he felt, at least temporarily, that he had
taken rock as far as he wanted to go with it. He began to draw less sustenance from the types
of sound that rock had to offer. In 1982, he said:
Effectively, what I've done is abandoned rock music, because, for me,
rock isn't capable of producing that spiritual quality anymore. And, in
fact, I don't really hear anything at the moment that disputes my feel-
ing. Despite all the criticism that's been made of psychedelic music, it
certainly was committed to the production af an expanded awareness.
7
And a year later:
I don't get the feeling of discovering new worlds from pop music that I
used to get, just of being shown old ones over and over. One automati-
cally thinks that's because I'm getting old, which is true but that
doesn't mean one is getting jaded. I still get feeling and experience
from other areas, but not rock.
8
More recently, Eno made the following personal observation:
One of the nice things about the kind of music I'm doing now is that it
makes me feel quite unimportant. I like that feeling. Rock music, on
the other hand, tends to make you feel very important.
9
How much of Eno's loss of interest in rock music is due to personal factors his own musical
background and development and how much may be attributed to a real stagnation in the
field of rock music itself? The question is a complex one, and there is no simple answer. Some
rock critics have tended to extol the music of the 1950s and 1960s, and to denigrate the 1970s
and 1980s as a time of homogenization, commercialization, and creative stagnation. The late
1960s are frequently portrayed as a kind of golden age of experimentation, variety, and in-
tense musical ferment, in contrast with the following period of bland corporate rock. The crit-
ics who make such statements are of course themselves children of the 1950s and 1960s, in-
evitably tending to see the music of their youth as belonging to a kind of golden age. Many
who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on the music of the big bands, Broadway, and Tin Pan
Alley lost all interest in the development of popular music beyond those particular halcyon
days.
Critics with a sociological bent like Simon Frith go so far as to define rock as the music of
youth, and make no further bones about it.
10
There is plenty of statistical data on age-linked
patterns of music consumption to back him up. After reaching the age of thirty or so, people in
7
George Rush, "Brian Eno: Rock's Svengali Pursues Silence," Esquire 98 (Dec. 1982), 132.
8
Mick Brown, "On Record: Brian Eno," Sunday Times Magazine, 31 Oct. 1982, 10.
9
Jensen, "Sound of Silence," 25.
10
Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock'n'Roll (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981).