This Decade’s Not Getting Any Younger

So we’ve made it to the last month before the last year of the last decade of the last century of the only millennium any of us have known, at least in our present incarnations.

As pop music critic for the Times Orange County, before the next year is out I will probably be called on to weigh and ponder all the performers of the past decade and century and vote for the One Who Matters Most. (As for the musical artist of the millennium, that may be outside my jurisdiction: Somehow, in this category, I think it will be Beethoven forcing Chuck Berry and the Beatles to roll over and tell Sinatra the news).

But why procrastinate? Sit tight, ‘cause today I’m gonna pontificate like it’s 1999.

I’ll take the smallest task first and handicap the artist of the decade race for the 1990s. As a warmup exercise, I’ll run through my greatest-artists list for the four previous decades of the rock era.

All you Elvisoids are going to be outraged that my artist of the decade for the 1950s is Chuck Berry.

Sure, Presley gets the totem of the half-century award. But Berry was rock’s most influential guitarist and its first accomplished songwriter. He taught the world’s fret-benders how to crank and its songsmiths how to delight, not only with energy and tunefulness, but also with a keen lyrical wit that illuminated human foibles and cast a wry light on large swaths of the social landscape.

From the ‘60s, I love the Kinks, the Who and the Rolling Stones most dearly but acknowledge a difference between extolling one’s favorite artist and electing a greatest artist. Obviously it comes down to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Obviously it goes to the Beatles, because if pop music ever produced a breathtaking, Mozart-like cornucopia of sheer sumptuous musicality, it came from the Fabs, the fastest-moving and widest-ranging creative force rock has known.

The ‘70s are more of a free-for-all. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Stones, David Bowie and Neil Young all had big decades and rate consideration. But for me, the race comes down to Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. Marley was the musical conduit between the developed world and the Third World, a mighty accomplishment that opened a pipeline to previously untapped reserves of talent, and he wore a prophet’s stature more humbly and deservedly than any other pop figure.

Listen to Wonder’s body of work during the decade, and you’ll hear that bonanza of sheer creative genius breaking out almost as expansively as it did with the Beatles.

Buoyant and brimming with delight, or hard-edged with outrage and brooding with despair, unsurpassedly accessible or beautifully esoteric (his career-deflating but sumptuous orchestral album, “The Secret Life of Plants”)--this is a mighty body of work. In the ‘70s, Wonder single-handedly turned the synthesizer from a sound effect into as credible an extension of human sensibility as any “real” instrument.

The ‘80s? U2 was powerful but vastly overrated, because it lacked range, storytelling ability and any semblance of humor embedded in the music. I value R.E.M. highly, but, like U2, it spent a decade making the same album over and over. The race comes down to Prince against Bruce Springsteen.

The purple one was brilliant most of the time, but do you think we’re going to give artist of the decade honors to someone who was a near-monomaniac (on the subject of sex), a total egomaniac and a woeful editor of himself? Broooooce it is, for five ‘80s albums of unflagging quality.

The ‘90s, sorry to say, don’t rate when it comes to pop greatness. Nirvana had a shot, so to speak. Not to be judgmental about Kurt Cobain’s despair, but what you get for not finishing the long, hard creative race is . . . a denial.

Pearl Jam? Only if you want effort-laden, brooding sincerity all the time, with only a modicum of invention beyond standard post-Zep arena rock and none of that lightness of being that all the great ones have.

R.E.M.? Nice decade, not a great one.

Beck? For one exceptional album and reams of unintelligible lyrics? Maybe he’ll hop into contention if his ’99 release is the next “Revolver” or “Exile on Main Street.”

I could pull a Time magazine and give a collective artists of the decade award to women in rock, whose breakthroughs to creative, commercial and social parity were the most important pop development of the ‘90s. But there was no dominant female figure, as Sinead O’Connor, Liz Phair, Courtney Love, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco and Polly Jean Harvey all offered brilliant bits, but not, in each case, a brilliantly sustained body of work.

Which leaves good old Young, who turned 54 last month, as a comfortable front-runner for greatest pop artist of the ‘90s.

Young’s body of work in his fourth decade of rocking has been powerful, consistent, passionate, socially alert, morally trenchant and divided between modes satisfyingly crunching and endearingly folkish.

What could be worse than growing up in the ‘90s, loving rock ‘n’ roll and having some old guy in his 50s swipe top honors?

Look at it this way, you young’uns who want my choice to be un-Young: We all want to be 50 someday, and there is no better, more honorable rockin’ role model than the man with the black Les Paul.

Also, the rule of 9s is in Young’s favor: Young released landmark albums in 1969 (“Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”), 1979 (“Rust Never Sleeps”) and 1989 (“Freedom”). If he holds true to form in ‘99, he’ll lap the field.