It's Only Rock 'N' Roll

In the midst of his more-or-less rave of Stoppard's Rock 'N' Roll, Eric Grode gives us a spin through his iPod:

On my way to "Rock 'n' Roll," my digital music player shuffled its way through a song by the Pixies from 1990, one by Peter Bjorn and John from last year, and one by the Beatles from 1967. Kids I admired in college loved the Pixies, a coworker burned me a Peter Bjorn and John CD after taking a rare night off from watching his infant son to see them perform, and I was fascinated and slightly unnerved by my parents' "Magical Mystery Tour" album cover as a youngster.

I would never claim that these songs carved a permanent space in my worldview the way the Velvet Underground and the Plastics did for ["Rock 'n' Roll's"] Jan, or the way that Syd Barrett encapsulated a perhaps inevitable descent into obsolescence and confusion for Esme. They're just tunes with beats and harmonies, with all the comfort and chaos that implies. It's only rock 'n' roll, but I happen to like it quite a bit. Same with "Rock 'n' Roll."

Brantley, meanwhile, notices that the play has a heart, which is something I noticed as well.