Rock of ages?

First thing on the morning of Sept. 6, hundreds of people (at the very least), including myself, waited in a big, long queue winding through the foyer of the IU Auditorium. Why, you ask? \nFor tickets to the Oct. 19 Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello show at Assembly Hall, of course.\nYeah, but why get up early and endure the vagaries of the box office’s lottery-based queue-organizing system for this particular show? \nIf you had asked that of me, or anyone else there, we likely would have told you some variant of, “Because Dylan is a living legend.”\nOK, but why?\nI don’t mean to question Dylan’s status as a rock icon – I certainly believe he deserves it. What I’m wondering instead is how a musician or band achieves such prominence. How do we decide who’s among the greatest acts in the history of music?\nIs it popularity? If popularity is measured in terms of album sales, then there are loads of popular acts who – how do I say this nicely? – are not conventionally considered great. Nickelback keeps selling lots of albums, after all. \nIs it critical acclaim? This seems to be part of it – it is, after all, largely the critics who end up declaring and then debating about which acts are great (or, as The Onion wonderfully put it in a headline: “History Of Rock Written By The Losers”). Then again, many acclaimed groups slip between the cracks and others maintain only a cult status. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has been praised to the hilt since its 1998 release, but ask anyone outside of indie rock geekdom if they’ve heard of the band, and you’ll probably receive only blank stares. And what about the bands that were disregarded by critics in their time, most famously Led Zeppelin?\nIs it historical influence? You can make this argument for the titans of the music canon – Dylan, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys – but what about the bands who had a less-than-widely-acclaimed influence? For example, Pearl Jam spawned Creed, Staind, Nickelback and “mainstream alternative,” while Fugazi helped create emo. And what about classic metal inadvertently giving rise to hair metal?\nThen there’s the boomer factor. Most “unquestionably great” acts come from the 50s, 60s and 70s – is this because they’re really that fantastic, or because they’re what the large, wealthy, socially dominant baby boom generation grew up with? Isn’t there always a temptation (among everyone, not just boomers) to argue that music today doesn’t hold a candle to when they first got into it? And now that mass media has made finding a musical niche much easier, will younger generations even be able to come to a consensus about what makes for great acts?\nI don’t have answers for these questions, but I can say this: it all points to a need to avoid complacency, to give new music a chance and question sacred cows. We must try to listen to things with fresh ears – ones that, hopefully, don’t have too bad a case of tinnitus after all this.