Nicks, Mellencamp hateinternet

Wed 25th Aug, 2010 in International News

In July the 52 year old superstar Prince told the world that “the internet’s completely over” and now two fellow aging stars – Stevie Nicks and John Mellencamp – have joined the anti-interweb chorus.

In an interview with NY Daily News the 62 year old Fleetwood Mac superstar Stevie Nicks claims that “the Internet has destroyed rock.”

“Children no longer develop social graces,” she complained, “They don’t hang out anymore. I’m financially stable. I’m okay. But what about the kids trying to make it in this business? If you’re not an established band, if you don’t have a hit single, they’re gonna drop you. There are a lot of people out there as talented as we were, but they can’t sustain being in a rock ‘n’ roll band for long without success. We were able to, but we’re going to die out.”

Meanwhile the 58 year old John Mellencamp – aka Johnny Cougar, aka John Cougar, aka John Cougar Mellencamp – condemned the Internet during a speech at the Grammy Museum with the slightly exaggerated claim that “The Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb. It’s destroyed the music business. It’s going to destroy the movie business.”

Mellencamp also blames technology for ruining the audio quality of music, using the example of the remastered Beatles albums he claimed that “you could barely even recognize it as the same song. You could tell it was those guys singing, but the warmth and quality of what the artist intended for us to hear was so vastly different.”

Though perhaps the decline in quality is a good thing, after all Mellencamp believes that “After a few generations, [rock ‘n’ roll will be] gone… As important as we think it is, and as big as it was, and as much money as people made on it, and as proud as I am to say that I was part of it—at the end of the day, they’re gonna say: ‘Yeah, there was this band called the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and this guy named Bob Dylan…’ And the rest of us? We’re just gonna be footnotes. And I think that that’s OK. I’m happy to have spent my life doing what I wanted to do, playing music, make something out of life, but forgetting about the idea of legacy.”

In what is surely a pure coincidence Stevie Nicks is working with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and planing to release her first solo album since 2001, while Mellencamp’s grand accusations have coincided with the release of his new album, No Better Than This, which is available in stores and through digital retailers.