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I was born in 1973.

That year, the war ended in Vietnam; Richard Nixon admitted to the White House coverup of Watergate; Bruce Lee died; J.R.R. Tolkien died; Pablo Picasso died.

By 1973, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., JFK and RFK had all come and gone in the last decade.

By 1973, something already was beginning to change.

Maybe the documentaries -- my only way of seeing into the past before I was born -- idealize that time. But I don't think it was just camera angles and clever editing that I saw Monday night when I walked in late to Mountain Movie's showing of "Festival Express."

There on the screen was Janis Joplin.

Her face was a little heavy from drinking. She had acne. She wasn't wearing a swipe of makeup.

But I was transfixed. She had such a stage presence as she screamed into the mic from somewhere deep in her gut.

I've never seen Janis Joplin perform. She died in 1970, three years before I was born.

Her song ended and all I wanted out of that movie was to see her sing again.

I thought of the women I had seen perform recently. Popular music is pockmarked with them -- Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears -- empty shells posing as "women," posing as "singers." Hollow Barbie dolls that dance for money.

(I can think of a few inspiring women in music, such as Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs or Kim Gordon, but right now I'm talking about the pod people we call pop stars.)

I watched Janis sing, and I watched a chubby Jerry Garcia next to her with his huge prescription glasses, and I wondered if they would ever make it today. Would the pop music machine ever accept two people with such obvious physical faults?

Since 1970 -- when "Festival Express" recorded an epic train trip with candid clips of the Grateful Dead, Joplin, Buddy Guy and The Band jamming for days and somehow making music without a stylist -- music has become more visual.

Let's blame it on MTV.

I haven't watched MTV (with enthusiasm, at least) since the days of Adam Curry, Kennedy and Downtown Julie Brown.

Adam Curry stopped feathering his hair. I stopped watching, and somewhere along the line, MTV stopped showing music.

And somewhere in that timeline, uncharted by my naÃive teenage-music-consumer mind, the heart of music started to die.

Security is the great killer of men's souls. Give a man some money -- musician or music businessman -- and watch what he becomes trying to hold onto it.

The cogs of the music machine have gained momentum during the years. They pump out enough albums to fill the music departments of Wal-Mart and Tower Records and Barnes and Noble.

They create people like the members of Metallica, who I also watched on screen this weekend. Mountain Movie showed a documentary that followed the "greatest heavy metal band ever" during the making of its latest album.

The remaining members of the band are so fattened by money; when they were asked to write songs from scratch, their first reaction was, "I'm scared."

The label hired a $40,000 a month therapist to talk them through their anxiety. It wasn't very rock 'n' roll. It was just the industry protecting their investment inside a lot of foam packing.

I ended my week of documentaries with a PBS look at the presidential campaign and assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. They showed a buck-toothed man with nice hair but a high voice start a successful redevelopment project in the poverty-stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City. They showed the heartfelt speech he gave on the day that Dr. King was assassinated. They showed the pain in people's faces on the day he was shot. I went to bed that night, again thinking -- would that man ever make it today?

Maybe this feeling will pass, but after this week, I feel that I am a member of the wrung out, "anything for a paycheck" generation. Generation S for superficial.

Maybe it was always like this and the past has been idealized by time and celluloid.

I'll never know. I was born in 1973.