Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Wyatt

Wyatt’s jab lands because it skewers rock’s most durable pose: the performance of seriousness. “Hard to take rock groups very seriously” isn’t a cranky dismissal of the music so much as a refusal to genuflect before the band-as-institution, that macho little unit built on volume, hierarchy, and a kind of rehearsed angst. He zooms in on the image rather than the sound: “gloomy young men” convening like a secret society to “bang away,” as if intensity alone could be mistaken for depth.

The word “absurd” does the real work. It reframes rock not as rebellion but as ritual, a repetitive, almost comic choreography of brooding faces and loud instruments that demands respect on principle. Wyatt, coming out of the Canterbury scene and Soft Machine’s art-rock mischief, had good reason to distrust rock’s self-mythology. His own career leaned into vulnerability, oddness, and political clarity - qualities that don’t always benefit from the clenched-jaw aesthetics of a four-man wall of sound.

There’s also a class-and-gender subtext: the “young men” aren’t just individuals, they’re an emblem of who gets to take up space, make noise, and be treated as important. Wyatt’s humor isn’t cruelty; it’s a puncture. He’s reminding us that rock’s authority is partly theater, and that the moment you notice the costumes - the gloom, the banging, the insistence on gravitas - the spell breaks.