I think the whole rock'n'roll myth of living fast and dying young (with a good-looking corpse) is a ridiculous cliche.
Iggy Pop, Keith Richards, Tom Waits - of these guys had died young, the world would've missed out on some great music - especially in Tom Waits' case.
Also, to come back to the Neil Young lyric - he sings "this is the story of Johnny Rotten" when he sings that line.
Rotten/Lydon commented on this in a biography i read recently.
Young actually got the name wrong, presumably - it was Sid Vicious, not Rotten that "burn[ed] out" and died young.
Lydon is typically scathing in his respose to the lyric; he sees Sid's death as completely wasteful, exploitative and pointless.
The "glamourous" myth of heroin in rock'n'roll is nothing to aspire to or admire, he argues - the only people that benefit from an artist dying young is the record company that sells their music posthumously.
It's much cooler to
live, he argues - and i agree with him.
Death isn't glamourous. It's all just a cliche about living a "wild" life of excess - of risk-taking, of the myth of rock'n'roll being a youthful, adolescent stlye of music and way of living.
All idealised cliches.
I'm in my 30s and enjoying life just as much - if not more - than i did in my 20s. And my music keeps getting better too, even past the age of 27
I saw Leonard Cohen perform about 5 years ago - and he absolutely incredible, despite his age.
Same with Bo Diddley - shit, he was one of the innovators of rock'n'roll in the 1950s and 60s - but even as an old man in his late 70s - he was still a fantastic performer.
Buddy Holly died young - one of the earliest rock'n'rollers to do so - but did it make his music/career/legacy better than Bo Diddley, who lived to a ripe old age?
I don't think so.
All it does is increase his
mystique, increase interest in his music and his life.
Is it better to burn out than to fade away?
It totally depends on the context. I see plenty to live for - but i don't want to live forever.
Having said that, i may feel differently when i'm old and feeling my time running out; but then again, my Grandmother was always open about the fact that she was ready for death, in her final years.
Quality of life is more important to me than how long i do or don't live.
But if you look at it from the point of view of an artist - in this case a rock musician - there is a perception that when people grow out of their "youth".
There are countless examples of this - just look at some of the music made in the 80s and 90s by rock stars of the 1960s.
There is also the superficial - the loss of youthful good-looks as rock stars grew up.
Fans of musicians who died young are sometimes left with their early work, and nothing else.
I get the impression this music is regarded as somehow
untainted by the aging process - that somehow older people's musical output isn't as good.
While there seems to be
some truth to this idea, i don't think it is an accurate assumption.
But maybe "fading away" means being forgetten - and opposed to "burning out", which
could mean burning bright and living every day with the sort of intensity that continually creates great things (art, music, whatever)
Maybe "burning out" can be understood in a way that has nothing to do with self-destruction.