Sublime

“Mike,” I say, “we don’t ask someone why they cheat—that’s obvious. Affairs are flattering, new, exciting, sexually pleasurable. We ask someone why they don’t cheat. What makes someone say no?”

In one hundred or two hundred or five hundred years, the idea of “rock music” being represented by a two-pronged combination of Elvis and Dylan would be equitable and oddly accurate.

Lou Reed, 1970: “In his mansion Brian Epstein kept Spanish servants, none of whom could speak English. Let that be a lesson to us all in discretion.”

Edgar Winter—almost without question—is the most successful albino “keytar” enthusiast of the late 20th century. He had a lot to be happy about. “Slow Ride” opens

“Evangelicals?”

But removing the essentialism of songwriting from the rock equation radically alters the context of its social value. It becomes a solely performative art form, where the meaning of a song matters less than the person singing it. It becomes personality music, and the dominant qualities of Presley’s persona—his sexuality, his masculinity, his larger