The Nature of Rock and Roll

Stephen Metcalf, in his review of Nick Hornby's new book, penned this remarkable insight:

Nick Hornby has built his admirable career, as comedian of manners for the album rock era, out of a single, hedgehoglike insight: The majority of people touched by rock music weren't makers of rock music. In fact, they weren't even remotely like the makers of rock music. They were consumers of rock music, or dorky suburban boys in poster-filled bedrooms.

People who love rock music are people who see refracted in the rock idols, the sublimation of their desires, which for the briefest of moments, lifts them out of their (typically) middle-class homogenity. Or, as Stephen Metcalf puts it:

Sublime banality and self-centered mediocrity and a pitiful moonlit pining: Hornby captured perfectly the voice of the Baby Boomer more or less permanently fixed to the emotional vocabulary of his own pubescence.