Quote:
Originally Posted by Angel69
My parents are no longer the dynamos they were just ten years ago. Does this mean I should just give up on them and put them out to pasture. My dog is 11 years old and I remember the days of her running around the park like a raging lunatic. Today she can barely make it up the stairs. Should I have her euthanized? And believe me I have been shelling out money on family members, friends and pets for years and all of them have changed in some way. Does this mean that I give up? They are still the same beings just different! Sorry that Stevie dissapoints you and others, but I hardly think it is time for her to put away the shawls.  |
you are not the first person to draw a parallel between the relationship he has with stevie and the relationships he has with people who are closer to him. this is interesting to me because no matter how great a connection anyone feels with her music, no one here is a close friend of stevie's. no one here is her family. the reality is that the relationship you have with stevie is not analogous to the relationship you have with your friends and family.
all that aside, i don't think anyone is taking issue with
change. change is not inherently bad. it's an inevitability. experience, circumstance, and our own temperaments conspire to shape us through the years. the changes many of us see in stevie reveal her to be disengaged, inert, and contemptuous towards music consumers, and those are the qualities that leave a bitter taste in our mouths.
and, ironically, in many ways it is her inflexibility that rankles. she isn't making new music. she isn't offering new perspectives on the old stuff. she isn't collaborating with interesting people, branching out into other forms of art and media, or connecting with her fans in innovative ways. i mean she abandoned the nicks fix for a gazillion years and then the best we got was "the kennedy's" (sic)?
despite her convincing arguments on the destiny rules doc against the double album concept, she does not understand this brave new music world. while other older artists, like annie lennox, are embracing the (not so) new technology of itunes and youtube, stevie has deemed computers evil and has said that making a new album isn't worth it because people will just steal the music anyway.
lindsey is arguably the most shameless member of the band when it comes to admitting that the "unleashed" tour is nothing but a cash grab, but even he has released 2 albums in the last 2-3 years, well aware that he could never dream of approaching rumours-era sales. this leads me to believe that latter-day stevie is little more than a mercenary whose muse dried up decades ago.
and re: giving up on the people in your life who have changed:
that depends heavily on the circumstances. but i have cut people out of my life who turned into utterly unrecognizable incarnations of themselves. i don't see anything wrong with limiting or eliminating your exposure to someone whose presence in your life results in a net loss. i think that's what many of us have experienced with stevie.