Oh no! U2 neutered rock 'n' roll!

Just finished listening to Mutemath's latest: Armistice. Red-flags, anyone? Is it just me, or should a rock band never be named Mutemath? And Armistice is borderline. It calls to mind some grand, important, serious statement. And rock 'n' roll should never be grand, important, or, above all, serious. Whatever happened to the sweat and the sex in rock? It really hasn't been there since the Rolling Stones. Here's my theory as to how the the lusty house of rock that Chuck Berry built got bulldozed.

The Rolling Stones may be to blame (I'm getting to U2). They were so sexy, so sleazy, and so exciting that I think every rock band wanted to be like them, one way or another. So every band tried to outsex the Stones and what we got in the '70s was one bare-chested band after the next, strutting their hot sweaty stuff, pumping out the jams like musical stallions. And rock became so big, so anthemic and so dripping in machismo that we . . . had had enough of it by the end of the decade. Except for the 80s hair metal bands who kinda kept the machismo thing alive but dropped the sexy. (Unless u think spandex is sexy?)

Enter punk rock. Rock kept its angst but it was stripped of sex: in other words, it was stripped of the blues. And those bad-ass brats were so ugly . . . intentionally. It takes a special breed of groupie to daydream about getting her upper protuberance snagged on some guy's lip ring, and her fingers tangled in his greasy, half-grown out mohawk. Don't matter if he's a rock star: ew. Punk rock is not sexy and that's what one thing, among many things, that made it inconoclastic in its day.

And then there was college rock. I guess that would be rock music for literate, thoughtful people like Michael Stipe. Again, cool and fun and catchy, but not sexy. Not rock 'n' roll. But at least you can hear the punk influence, and at least punk has an edge.

And then U2 and all of U2's alternative offspring (Coldplay) come along. The music is stripped of its thrashing, punk angst. We are left with cavernous spaces, tribal beats, and the wild voice of a native (Bono) belting out the heart-wrenching progressive message of truth, telling the tale the Native Americans never lived to tell. (?) Either that or singing the song of the repentant sinner. (How far away from Mick Jagger can you get?!!) The Edge's minimalistic guitar scintillates with nary a blue note. And everybody hails these guys as the best thing to happen to rock because, well, their music is so "good" and "spiritual" and all that jazz. And it's loud and has a backbeat, so therefore it must be rock, right?

Wrong! You take the blues out of rock and you no longer have rock. You take the sex out of rock and you no longer have rock. You have potentially good music with energy and a back beat, essentially amped-up singer-songwriter fare . . . but not rock.

I bet you can guess which side of the line Mutemath fall on.

After listening to an hour of Mutemath, I recovered by listening to Prince.