You invent the future

And now they're back together, flogging The Dance, yet another well-presented-but-to-what-end collection of hits like "Rhiannon" and new numbers like Buckingham's "My Little Demon," which is actually pretty good. It's not quite good enough, however, to dispel the image of Fleetwood Mac homing in on the smell of aging boomers' cash like a pig on a truffle bender, no doubt impelled by impending boat payments, the beamer's need for a major overhaul, or that last unsettling meeting with the accountant about retirement. Babysitters across the metroplex will rake in the cash, and the members of Fleetwood Mac will hope that if we don't have fond memories of their music, we will at least have fond memories of the people we were while their music played.

They had better hope that we don't remember the last time they reunited, in order to preside over the crowning moment in the co-opting of rock and roll. There they were, one-time monsters of rock reduced to seeing one of their more mediocre (and annoying) songs turned into the theme song for the boomer's geek prom, with student-council wonks ascendant: the 1993 inauguration of Bill Clinton, the unnatural dawn of an epoch in which the president will, by God, rock if he wants to. The iconography, poses, and secret codes of what was once a great moment in our social history--the very embodiment of rebellion--became just another way of selling soap.

Perhaps that's the real reason to go see Fleetwood Mac--to capture in your mind's eye a picture of a true dinosaur: big and slow-moving, standing at the end of its allotted span. Loaded down with old knowledge and quaintly erroneous maps, it contemplates the changing winds of a coming time it knows it won't live to see. Still, it didn't have to be quite this way: If the Mac had taken better care of itself, it could've been more fit, stronger; more like the Rolling Stones, able to squeeze in a few more months of uncomfortable, compromised life before the ice closes in on them too. As it is, Fleetwood Mac will stand in memory as a once-respected, once-important band that piddled away a hard-earned and once-considerable reputation, its birthright, and ultimately its very life.

Oh, well.

Fleetwood Mac plays the Starplex Amphitheater Thursday, November 4.