Rumpus columnist Rick Moody knows that the idea of the music legend isn’t dead. While everyone seems to be lamenting about “the good ol’ days” he knows there is on icon on every corner.

“It is not so unusual these days—especially in the media and especially among music writers of a certain age—to observe that we don’t have icons like we did of old, we don’t have titans of popular music, we don’t have entertainers astride the stage like we once did, there’s no rock and roll, they just don’t make it like they used to, something terrible has happened to our art form and so on. In fact, I remember this kind of thing as far back as my undergraduate days (in the early 1980s), when I was sitting backstage during a play with another cast member (his name happens to have been John F. Kennedy Jr.) as he flipped idly through Rolling Stone. In due course, this cast member launched into an impromptu cultural criticism about how none of the bands of the early 1980s had any character, not like before. As evidence: Night Ranger, Journey, Scorpions, Whitesnake.”

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