It’s great!  Fantastic!  Because finally the NFL figured out that it exists in the twenty first century and classic rock is aged music from another era and represents not a whit what is happening in the game today.

Hell, the soundtrack of the NFL is hip-hop.  But they can’t say that or the white folk watching the black men will ask them for their birth certificates.

The Who killed classic rock at the Super Bowl.  Sure, it was time.  If it had been another act, the result might have been the same, or maybe one more year of geriatrics, but to see these old guys going through their old hits was as disappointing as the thought of Jim McMahon and Refrigerator Perry taking the field in the game.

Time marches on.  It’s not like babies are not being born.  How come in music we only believe the past is any good?

Maybe because the Black Eyed Peas are crap.  will.i.am is lovable, but how come he has to set his sights so low?  Is he that interested in money?  The vapid lyrics and the robotic tunes…  This is like making a living selling McDonald’s, when there’s a burgeoning Food Network and every publication known to man reviews the latest hip eateries!

In other words, food is more hip than music.  More cutting edge, there’s bigger risk-taking.  Then again, you don’t need the approval of Jimmy Iovine and the other baby boomer gatekeepers in order to open a restaurant, you can do it yourself.

Which is what musicians are doing today.  They’re rejecting the mainstream, because they don’t want to make evanescent cookie-cutter crap.

Look at it this way.  The NFL finally realized it’s living in a new era, and that it can’t stay rooted to the past.  The music industry?  Take the classic rock acts out of the touring industry and you’ve got anemic numbers.

Then again, it’s the old acts overcharging that’s giving the whole industry a bad name.  There’s a burgeoning indie live scene, selling tons of tickets at cheap prices.  That’s the future, not whored out brandmeisters being overpaid to play the Live Nation sheds.

I don’t expect the NFL to employ anything but a universal act in the future.  That’s why they used classic rock, supposedly everybody loved it.  But the Super Bowl only happens once a year, and music plays constantly.  Why do we all have to listen to the same crap?  Whether it be the monochromatic new or the preserved in amber old?

Take notice.  The times they are a changing.  The sun is setting on not only the baby boomers, but their music.  The future is new and uncharted and those in power hate it.  They hate that it’s so much harder to break an act, they hate that you make so much less money, they blame the audience, as if the customer owes them anything at all.

Now there are rules in football.

But there are none in music.

Your song can be two and a half minutes long or a whole album side, even a complete CD!  You can use real horns or their digital equivalent.  Same deal with drums.  There’s a vast canvas.  And the Black Eyed Peas are only painting upon a tiny sliver of it, visible to fewer people than ever before.

It’s a free for all.  It’s a land rush.  Everything in music is up for grabs.  Pete Townshend has gotten old and eventually he will die.  Then what?  An animatronic Who?

No.  Music will be made by new people.  And they won’t be the I want to be famous at all cost TV contestants, hell, fewer people than ever are watching network TV, but those so unique and so good, so innovative that those who don’t even think they’re interested in music will be paying attention, dying to get closer.

That was the power of the British Invasion, that was the power of the Beatles.  The music created its own market.  The Black Eyed Peas are playing to the existing market.  You want to create your own.

The boomers are too old to fathom this.  But you’re not.  Are you up to the challenge?