DRUMMER CAFE

That's all well and good, but I don't really see the harm in being critical about music and setting high standards for yourself and others.
I write tv music and yeah it's great when the director loves everything I submit.
Sometimes I get a job with a nit picky guy and the whole project turns into a nightmare of depressing proportions. But when you listen back to that music a year later you think, wow, that's some of the best stuff I've ever done!
The same goes for Sting and Rush and the rest of them. Why should we applaud everything they put out? I think that's half the problem, they become too powerful, surround themselves with 'yes men' and no one's got the cojones to say "err Sting old bean, this song's rubbish".
Having said all that, I do think there is a lot of truth in Iron Cobra's post.
Recently The Alarm released a track under an alias. Before that they were tragically unhip and no radio stations would play their records. The stations jumped on the track by this suppossed unheard of band and the general public sent it flying up the charts.........then The Alarm told the press it was actually them.  
BTW, The Mercury Awards that I mentioned earlier coincidentally announced the short list for this years prize:
*Basement Jaxx - Kish Kash
*   Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress
*   Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
*   Jamelia - Thank You
*   Keane - Hopes and Fears
*   Snow Patrol - Final Straw
*   Joss Stone - The Soul Sessions
*   The Streets - A Grand Don't Come for Free
*   Ty - Upwards
*   Amy Winehouse - Frank
*   Robert Wyatt - Cuckooland
*   The Zutons - Who Killed The Zutons

Stephen King published five books - Rage, The Running Man, Road Work, The Long Walk and Thinner as Richard Bachman. He did this to find out if people were buying his books because they liked them or if they were buying the books because his name was on the cover. The experiment kind of failed, though, because, in order for the test to be true, the books had to be written like Stephen King books, and a lot of people figured out the ruse early on.

I think a big part of the issue is that rock and roll is a young man's person's game. No one over the age of 30 is going to write "My Generation," "Summertime Blues," "Surrender," etc. Those kinds of songs tap into the kind of angst that I honestly think only teenagers can feel. Your priorities change as you get older. I think Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales is a tremendous, mature album. The keyword there is mature. It's easy to dismiss Sting's later output as lacking the passion that, say, Synchronicity posessed, but I think that's a cop-out. You simply can't expect a 40-year-old man to feel what a 20-year-old man feels. His perspective is too different.

I think that the music that Tom Waits, King Crimson, John Langford (of the Mekons - remember the Mekons?) and Joe Strummer are creating/created recently is every bit as exciting as what they produced when they were in their respective 20s, but it's a different kind of exciting.

Maybe think of it this way - 50-year-old Pete Townsend probably coudn't have created "Baba O'Reilly," but Beethoven could not possibly have written his 9th Symphony first.

This is an interesting topic.  I think part of the "edge" musicians have is a combination of desire, age, and experience.  As most of us should realize, the age old tenant of creating music, lyrics, poetry, moives, etc. is that you write what you know and how you feel.  When your 20 years old, you are burning with a passion and desire to have your art taken seriously, and to succeed.  After 20 years of cranking out tunes, books, or whatever, you naturally are going to lose some of that edge.  But more importantly, you will experience a lifetime of events that directly influence you as an artist.  When I was 18, I didn't know much about much.  Since then (Almost 20 years later) I have traveled around the world, seen violence and human compassion on levels I never knew exisited, gotten a few college degrees and education in areas I never had interest in at 18, and generally became exposed to a plethora of experiences that have shaped who I am at this moment.  Individuals are a constantly evolving life form, and their art is reflective of these experiences.  To expect artists in any genre to stay relatively the same is rather boring, IMHO.  U2 is one of my favorite bands.  A big reason is because their music is a reflection of who they are as individuals and as a group at the time they wrote the songs.  To expect a band like U2 to put out a record like "Boy" in this day and age is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Absolutely.  

All creativity withers and falls from a musician like autumn leaves from a tree precisely at age 25.  There are no exceptions.  This is obvious.

I will kill everyone.

I think Rush is putting out some of their best material yet, and we all know that Neil is well past the big 'four-oh'.  Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater, Transatlantic, Liquid Tension Experiments 1 & 2) is getting near the point of 40, i think he is like 37 now, and he isnt showing signs of slowing down.

No one currently.
I have done this plenty in the past though with Rundgren and Metheny for example.

About the five year thing: I think a lot of bands fall prey to what I'll call the Rusted Root Effect. I saw Rusted Root on tour, supporting their first CD Cruel Sun. They were amazing. They'd been working on music for years, writing material, testing and refining that material in bars and clubs. Cruel Sun represented, I'll guess, the best material they came up with during their first three years as a band.

Their second CD, When I Woke, was also pretty strong. It reworked some of the material from Cruel Sun, and also probably represented the best of the songs they'd written during their initial explosion.

Their next album, frankly, completely failed to engage me. They'd made a shift from writing songs to play in bars to writing songs in a studio to record.

It's like this - during the genesis of Cruel Sun, I bet they wrote 50 songs over the course of a few years and killed all but 11. For When I Woke, I bet they wrote 20 songs in a year and kept 13. I get the feeling that by the time they wrote Remember, the pool of available songs was even smaller, and the material wasn't being tested in front of audiences.

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I will continue to purchase CDs by Rush, King Crimson and Tom Waits without preview. I dearly love David Bowie, but he's burned me a couple times. I bought the last Bob Mould CD without preview, which I really shouldn't have done.

Sparked by another thread, Im reminded of another over 40 "pop" musician whose consistantly made great albums as he aged.   Each one if not topping the last, at least showing growth from one to the next.  And showing no signs of slowing down.  David Sylvian -  46 years old this year.  

Still on the young edge of this threads topic admittedly.    But his latest album (Blemish) is, according to Sylvian himself, the most honest and personal album hes made.   Saying that hes been trying to make an album like this for ages, but the folks at Virgin wouldnt let him.   (The cost of signing to a label when youre 18?)   And now that hes free of Virgin, he can do entirely what he wants.  

Which brings up a topic touched on earlier.    Maybe some of these older folks are trying to make more creative music, but are being asked to rehash thier past successes.   Sylvian obviously had more freedom than that, but was still "caged" to some extent.   So maybe our judgement of later work is misguided in some cases and we just dont know it.  

Wow, all I can say is the ego has landed.  

BTW, thanks for posting the link to your cv so I could check out your 'world class' cv and 'image manifesto'.