Rod Stewart’s Global Victory Lap: How a Gravel-Voiced Brit Became the Soundtrack to Late-Stage Capitalism

Rod Stewart, the gravel-voiced troubadour of post-war Britain, has spent six decades proving that polyester doesn’t biodegrade and neither does celebrity. From the smoky pubs of Swinging London to the permanently-lit atriums of Dubai’s five-star hotels, his career is a living fossil—part cautionary tale, part lucrative museum piece—wheeled out whenever global capitalism needs a soundtrack that sounds like yesterday but bills like tomorrow.

In Singapore last month, he sold out the 12,000-seat National Stadium two nights running; the same week, Manila’s traffic police threatened to arrest imposters flogging counterfeit tickets outside the Mall of Asia Arena. Somewhere between those two poles—order and chaos, prosperity and grift—you’ll find Stewart’s true geopolitical significance: he is the sonic Schengen visa for baby-boomers who’d rather not confront the present. Let the kids queue for K-pop holograms; Rod gives the greying expats of the Gulf a three-minute pass back to 1978, a year when oil crises were still quaint and cocaine came with dental benefits.

It’s easy to sneer at the leopard-print scarves and the eternal blond feather-cut—now maintained, rumor has it, by a discreet clinic in Zurich whose other clients include deposed monarchs and crypto fugitives—but Stewart’s brand of nostalgia has become a transnational currency. In Buenos Aires, oligarchs who once danced to “Maggie May” while their junta friends disappeared students now pay premium peso-equivalents for VIP meet-and-greets. In Tel Aviv, he’s booked for July despite the travel warnings; the promoters insist rockets and Rod have co-existed before, citing a 2010 gig that ended thirty minutes early because the Iron Dome intercepted something overhead. Rock and roll, meet hard roll-on.

The numbers are almost charmingly absurd. A single summer tour grosses north of $60 million—roughly the GDP of the Solomon Islands, give or take a coconut subsidy. Each performance requires 19 shipping containers, three carbon-offset schemes, and one orthopedic surgeon on retainer. The carbon footprint alone could power Reykjavik for a fortnight, but fans are reassured their nostalgia is “offset” by planting eucalyptus in Uruguay, which, as any Uruguayan will tell you, is a terrific way to drain aquifers and increase wildfires. Still, the merch stands do brisk business in recycled-polyester shirts that read “Forever Young,” a slogan that would be funnier if the average age of the audience weren’t 58.

Stewart’s passport is a masterclass in soft-power irony. He was knighted by the British establishment he once mocked, yet sings “Sailing” at the drop of a commemorative coin for any navy that asks nicely. When he crooned for Russian oligarchs in pre-sanctioned Sochi, critics called it tone-deaf; the oligarchs simply called it Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Chinese market—where his back catalog was briefly banned for “decadent individualism”—now streams him at 320 kbps, presumably while factory workers assemble the next generation of smartphones he’ll use to Instagram his own encore.

And what, pray, is the broader significance of this peripatetic septuagenarian in sequins? Simply this: in an era when borders harden and algorithms fracture reality into bespoke hallucinations, Rod Stewart offers the last functioning universal. Whether you’re a Czech retiree on a Rhine river cruise or a Saudi prince hiding from diversification mandates, you all know the same two-chord bait-and-switch in “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” It’s the Esperanto of late-stage capitalism, a reminder that we may be divided by language, debt, and drone strikes, but we remain united in our willingness to pay $180 plus fees to hear a 79-year-old rasp about Brazilian girls.

So here’s to Sir Roderick David Stewart: the last rooster in a henhouse of collapsing empires, still crowing at the dawn of whatever fresh disaster awaits. He’ll keep touring, keep dyeing, keep cashing in until the day the pyro fails, the hips finally seize, or the planet politely declines to host another farewell leg. Whichever comes first, the smart money’s on the merch table surviving us all.