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Burning Out, Fading Away in The Random Age
It’s not The COVID-19 New World Order, The Trumpian Epoch, or the Time of I-Thing— “Random” is the word of the decade for a reason.
The reckless, impassioned romanticism of Canadian rocker Neil Young’s line It’s better to burn out than fade away is irresistible to a certain type of person. The line appears in two versions of a song on the 1979 album RUST NEVER SLEEPS — itself a title for the ages, a metaphor rich and complete and profound, yet no more than a plumbing company’s slogan, read by Young on a hand-painted sign during a mid-1970s road trip through rust-belt America. The 19th century Romantic Poets — Keats, Shelly, and Lord Byron — burned out within three years of one another; Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, James Dean and Heath Ledger burned out; we don’t know the names of those who faded away, but The Unknown Soldier, Everyman, John Doe, G.I. Joe, Rosie the Riveter are allegories of unnamed, heroic protagonists in America’s epic. An entire generation of the anonymous has been dubbed The Silent Majority, and their children inherited a legacy as pervasive, strong and invisible as gravity.
