By Judy Pak

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

The stability and thorny future of the rock star is uncertain.

Sound, image, and sex. Year after year and minute by minute, the elements of rock ’n’ roll are changing. But as long as there are bedroom walls to poster and parents screaming to lower the volume, people will forever dream of being rock stars – gods among the mortals.

The music that people love around their 20s usually sticks with them forever; then they start whining about how good music used to be.

This leads one to ask: so what is a rock star? If someone can be the image of the excess an audience feels, then they’re a rock star.

Sometimes stardom crushes them. Sometimes it just makes them dress weird.

That’s not the whole description of a rock star’s job, though. As rock moves into its adulthood, what is most dramatically affixed to the duties of stardom is also what’s changed most.

Long ago, in a far-off land, the constitutive job of rock stars was to annoy parents, to push them away so teens could have some private space to be angry freaks, wreck things and to become “free.”

Rock stars were a social revolution, a way of separating the world into “Us and Them,” the hipsters and the squares.

But everyone’s a hipster now and, inevitably, the rock stars’ role has changed.

Whereas Elvis’ groin was once banned from the airwaves, there are now entire channels dedicated to letting Marilyn Manson prance around in his bikini.

Punk music itself started out of an attempt to revise the rock star’s job description, and punks were adorable with their tear-down-the-wall-between-fans-and-stars dogma. But the thing is, they made great stars; the punk bonfire of self-destruction was as starry as anything in the rock heavens.

It was indie rock’s “We’re Just Plain Folks” hair and T-shirts that truly brought the concept to its knees. As rock got old enough to get its own jokes, ironic self-awareness took over and cutting yourself down to size became all the rage.

Meanwhile, out in the world, oppressing yourself never quite caught on. Garth Brooks turned out to be one of the biggest rock stars of the decade, with Sean “Puffy” Combs chasing after him, because Oklahoma and Harlem World never gave up on bigness.

Their triumphs are a victory for their fans; country and hip hop fans know how to give love to stars without all that super, clever irony, and the stars aren’t required to hide their mega-ambitions.

As traditional rock tries to figure out what’s real and what’s fake, a whole new generation has filled the vacuum. No matter how wack hip hoppers get, they still insist on the classic virtues of keeping it real, staying true to the game, and representing for the fans. And then they get up on stage with oversized images like rock stars always have.

The Notorious B.I.G.’s ability to rock in Versace while still maintaining his ghetto sensibility makes a perfect parable of rock stardom.

Of course, hip hop culture has always been the bedrock of realness in America – a convenient faith for kids trying to imagine their way out of suburban lives. Getting in on the myth of realness worked for Elvis and Mick Jagger, and it’s still in effect for Korn and Limp Bizkit, earning them an unconflicted fandom every rock star would be so lucky to have.

Jonathan Davis may be something of an animation, but he’s a genius rock star; hooking up with the emotions of the oppressed adolescent and the street hip hop style, he reads as the realest thing on two legs.

For rock stars, there’s no contradiction between fantasy and realness. The ability of rock stars to represent fans’ sense of the surreal is exactly what makes them real; no matter how much they fake it onstage and in the studio, the capacity to embody the excess is the realest thing rock stars can do.

Mark McGrath will never be a rock star because deep down he’s terrified ten million in sales makes him fake, and that fake is bad. So he goes out of his way to be smaller than life, and wonders what it’s like to be a superhero.

Courtney Love might sell 1/10 as much as McGrath but no matter, she still dresses up and messes up like rock is the biggest story in the world, and that’s the hallucination rockers are charged with maintaining.

Consider Busta Rhymes, as fiction-strange a character as anybody could invent. Still, he’s the very image of the feeling that street-corner life could explode into something a million times grander.

It may also be the case that hip hop produces relatively irony-free stars because rap is still young. Meanwhile, even younger styles are starting to throw up the next generation of heroes, and, inevitably, as the music changes, so does the nature of stardom.

In some ways this tradition hasn’t changed at all: the *NSyncs of the world will always be with us, safe teapots to contain the hormonal tempests of adolescents.

But music’s very relationship to bodies is also changing. As music moves further and further from organic, being the body that represents the sound gets more difficult.

Still, it’s not as easy as New Styles equals New Stars. The world has changed.

Indie rockers had a point about bloated music; just as surely, girls have a point about the boy-centric nature of stardom, and the lameness of hotel-thrashing, groupie-banging, jet-set trash.

The love fans give to rock stars is a weird love, and it makes any star who can hold it bigger, mythic.

By the time he was 21, Elvis was everywhere. By the time he made Seattle a central rock locale, Kurt Cobain couldn’t do anything but mortally wound himself down to size.

For the moment, Lauryn Hill is exploding and bulletproof; and somewhere out in the boonies, the next big thing is trying on some crazy outfits.