Over the past week, I've soaked in James McMurtry's new album, "The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy" (2025), the way I once soaked in a new Jackson Browne or Leonard Cohen record: on headphones, lights low, the rest of the world politely suspended. These songs -- about tired lawmen outliving their legend, ghosts who slip under locked doors, debts of memory that won't forgive the living -- feel like dispatches from a world that pretends it doesn't exist anymore. McMurtry reminds me, line by line, that music can still do more than decorate our playlists. It can hold our hands while the floorboards creak.

People complain about pop's brain-rot lately, like TikTok invented musical candy. It didn't. Pop has always been candy first. Youth is cheap to sell, easy to polish. Age costs more because honesty costs more. The con is eternal: Promise them freedom, sell them another hit.

Rock 'n' roll was a cunning business plan. In the postwar boom, marketers discovered that teenagers, once just smaller versions of their parents, were suddenly an untapped gold mine: flush with allowance money, free time, and a hunger to define themselves against Mom and Dad's polite swing records.

Labels, radio programmers, and film studios pounced. They packaged rebellion in a three-chord format, dressed it up in jeans and Brylcreem, and sold it back to kids as revolution. The product was fresh, the money real, and every A&R man from New York to Memphis knew the formula: Find a pretty face, slap a catchy chorus behind it, and watch the allowances roll in. In that sense, pop's arrested development was baked in from the start.

Before rock 'n' roll gave teenagers their own soundtrack, Frank Sinatra set the template as America's first true teen idol. In the 1940s, long before Elvis shook his hips, bobby-soxers screamed themselves hoarse for a skinny crooner with sad eyes and a voice that promised every heartbreak was worth surviving.

GREATEST MONUMENTS

Sinatra's Capitol albums -- more than 50 of them -- are still some of the greatest monuments to adult feeling in American culture. Records like "In the Wee Small Hours" were torch songs for men trying not to break down in public. He could have coasted on charm, but he chose shadows and regret. When he moved on to Reprise, the industry shifted under him. They wanted bombast. They wanted Rat Pack swing for Las Vegas showrooms, not a man at a bar crying into a shot glass at 3 a.m. Sinatra's voice stayed honest longer than the world deserved.

The Beatles carried that torch across the ocean, repackaging it for a new generation. At first, they were the squeakiest clean product a label could print money with -- "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You" and matching suits for Ed Sullivan's living room audience. Then they outgrew themselves in real time: "Rubber Soul," "Revolver," songs about doubt, alienation, drugs, adulthood creeping up behind them like a debt collector. By........

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