From “Rock Is Dead,” which appeared in the November 1999 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
I am standing in my red, white, and blue kill rock stars T-shirt on the Griffiss runway with tens of thousands of kids trudging past me, bearing knapsacks and suitcases and kicking up dust like a herd of dispossessed extras in a made-for-MTV version of The Grapes of Wrath. Wandering through the carny landscape of empty pizza boxes are college kids on summer break as…