Bono wrote recently in The New York Times of his late friend Frank Sinatra being “the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music.” Which got me thinking, if unsentimentality is a valued trait in musicians, where are all the unsentimental voices today? Or, put another way – what happened to all the sex and drugs in my rock and roll?

Bono’s regard for the Chairman’s emotional detachment counters all of today’s conventional wisdom about what makes the music of white men (and particularly the aged and dead ones) appealing. Consider the Beatles: once a hard-living band of playboys and potheads, now reinvented as some perpetually introspective minstrel-poets. My case in point: the Lennon/McCartney duo wrote mostly on three topics; love, sex and drugs. Only one, “Love,” is seen as deserving of its own compilation.

And what have we done to Bob Dylan! A man who once callously referred to two of his lovers as “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35,” and ended a relationship with the undeniably unsentimental statement of fact: “most likely you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.” In the latter of which we hear Bob say it plain: “sometimes it gets so hard to care.” Yet today we find Dylan recast through so many retrospectives as the unceasing messiah of care, the Godfather of Emo.

I’m certainly grateful during times of feeling loved and lost to have around reliable, pre-packaged shots of emotional support like the Beatles “Yesterday” or Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” But I’m beginning to wonder whether decontextualizing those emotions, and then representing them as characteristic, or worse, crowning, of a life’s work in collections like “Love” does more harm than good.

Then there are those few, rewarding times we still get to hear rockers being rockers. Shouting “pour some sugar on me” on the dance floor will always provide a certain animalistic satisfaction. Consider the Rolling Stones’ most recent hits compilation: Forty Licks. Such a delightful double meaning it is, evoking the Stones’ indelible guitar-work as well their equally legendary appreciation for oral stimulation. While it is undoubtedly Richards’ riffs that make these tunes so timeless, Mick’s sex drive, apparent in every Stones song that ever was, is what makes the songs forever timely.

Particularly today, the Stones’ riffs on hooking up (“let’s spend the night together”), and nightlife (“I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis”) provide a much richer soundtrack for the college experience than any of the depressed ballads with which we are supposed to identify. Morning conversations after a successful night at The Keg rarely contain lines like “I want to hold your hand.” “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday/who could hang a name on you” sounds more like it.

SESP senior Jake Wertz can be reached at [email protected].