Tuesday, 22 April 2008 - 6:18 PM EDT
Name:
www.lincoln
Home Page:
http://www.lincoln.tripod.com/rock/
Rock music's been around for half a century. When I was a kid, there wasn't that much rock & roll music, you didn't hear it much, and it was constantly decried and belittled. The people who enjoyed rock music in the '60s are now four decades older and to a good extent in charge of things. We've got the power, daddyo!
Sure, stupidity still rules: Writers claim that the success of the Rock and Roll Cafe proves that rock is well-liked, rather than that Corporate Amerika will jump onto any and every bandwagon, and that the mindless masses will buy their ludicrous claims rather than think for themselves. Yeah, rather.
But the point is that rock music is a lot more accepted these days. Rock & roll is one of the big joys of people in our times. Our lives may not totally revolve around rock and roll but then they don't revolve around past Presidents or flowering trees either.
There are fifty states in the U.S.A. There are thousands of counties. There are a heck of a lot of new subdivisions being developed each year. Hasn't there been at least one developer who was either rich enough or loony enough to not care how the names of his new streets struck people, if not believing that rockly named streets would actually attract purchasers (let alone publicity)?
New York City renamed a street corner Joey Ramone Place. Melbourne renamed a back lane ACDC Lane. Berlin renamed a 1-1/2-mile formerly numbered street Frank-Zappa-Straße. I've always taken the practice of honorary street namings to be an insult rather than an honor -- illustrating that the person or organization or whatever is not even worthy to have a street actually named for it but rather simply a pretend name (which doesn't actually serve as the address) for a block of one street out of a thousand.
The Frank Zappa Street sounds like a real street and really renamed but still __ why aren't there hundreds more examples like this? As "Brian Micklethwait" wrote in his http://www.brianmicklethwait.com/culture/archives/2004/10/a_street_name_t.html blog several years ago, "Now that rock and roll is so respectable, there must be lots of other such roads, including some equally bizarre ones." Yeah, one would sure figure so. My on-line searching sure hasn't turned up examples however.
There are a million new Pleasant Oak Ways and Crabtree Meadow Lanes going in each year in all the new subdivisions. How about some Crucifucks or Mötley Crüe or even Beatles Streets? Here's your chance to show me up. Yeah, I'm ignorant and out-of-touch. Are there rock-named streets out there, for bands or records or lyrics?
