Come on pilgrims, let rock'n'roll shrines rest in peace

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/06/ian-curtis-the-libertines-jim-morrison

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The current campaign to turn Ian Curtis’s home in Macclesfield into a museum dedicated to the late Joy Division singer has left New Order’s Bernard Sumner “torn”, as he believes it might become a “monument to suicide”. If the campaign is successful, it’ll be among a number of sites regarded as worthy of “pilgrimages” by the supposed rock’n’roll faithful.

The recently sold house in which Paul McCartney grew up in Liverpool might suffer a similar fate. Kurt Cobain’s house in Seattle is regularly gawped at by Nirvana fans from the nearby park bench. Meanwhile, Abbey Road Studios’ website has a webcam feed that at any time of day shows passing tourists filming each other re-enacting the Fab Four striding over the zebra crossing outside, while oncoming traffic shows remarkable restraint.

For Libertines fans, there is an alley in Bethnal Green to which they can flock and leave their felt-tip scrawl where the band’s Up the Bracket video was shot, and then go home and feel good about an afternoon well spent. In Manchester, fans of Factory Records can go look at an apartment block and say to themselves: “That used to be the famous nightclub the Haçienda.”

Then there is the ultimate and, in every respect, saddest shrine: Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a veritable idiot magnet, subject over the years to defacement, orgies, devil-worship rites and the attempted robbery of the singer’s remains. If there is a God, then His patience in not reaching down and slapping the pilgrims who descend on these shrines about the head with a giant hand is at least the equal of the Abbey Road drivers.

At worst, these sites attract morbid rubberneckers. At best, they display a superstitious misapprehension concerning the properties of inanimate objects, similar to those wealthy fools who buy guitars once owned by Jimi Hendrix as if they bear actual, physical traces of his genius.

To reduce rock’n’roll to mere objects and places feels like a lazy and touristic way of “doing” the genre, much as one might “do” London by paying cursory trips to Big Ben, Madame Tussauds and Tower Bridge; done once and then ticked off forever, perhaps marked with an accompanying selfie. It is rock’n’roll as dead museum matter, the stuff of heritage, rather than a living, sonic thing that continues to pulsate as long as there are the means to play it. To fixate on shrines is to misunderstand in every respect the spirit of rock.

Rock music is made by transient human beings, some of whom have vanished altogether. The places they occupied, the things they touched, the alleys they spent a bit of time in are inconsequential. If you want to pay a visit to experience a true sense of the greatness of the stars, visit a record shop. Unlike rock shrines, they are in danger of becoming extinct.