In roughly 100 CE, Plutarch first posed the now-infamous Ship of Theseus problem: If you replace every plank, every rope, every nail, at what point does the ship stop being itself? 2,000 years later, we have a modern update, courtesy of Live Nation: the newly announced Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foreigner joint tour, featuring none of the musicians who originally built either vessel, yet somehow still sailing under the same names. If the music industry has proven anything, it’s that the ship stays the ship as long as the name on the hull still sells tickets. Truly, the philosophers of old could only dream of such brand consistency.
In the grand tradition of American legacy institutions persisting long after anyone involved with their founding has retired, died, or reincarnated as a Margaritaville franchise, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foreigner have announced their Double Trouble Double Vision co-headline tour for 2026. 19 dates across North America, VIP packages, meet-and-greets, photo ops—the whole modern touring apparatus—just without the original humans whose existence once justified the logos. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s last original member, Gary Rossington, died in 2023, and Foreigner’s founding guitarist Mick Jones will be skipping these shows because of his Parkinson’s disease diagnosis.
So now it’s just IP-generated legacy rock by way of corporate necromancy: the band as a legal entity, a touring chassis with the original parts long recycled, refurbished, or resting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame slideshow montage. There’s something admirable and bleak about the confidence: the assumption that the name alone can do the lifting, like a franchise restaurant that keeps burning down and rebuilding itself with cheaper materials but insists the fries taste the same. The worst part of it all, though, is that, chances are, they’re probably right—the tickets will sell anyways, and the state of music will just hurtle ever faster into a future where rock music becomes the world’s loudest intellectual property law seminar. Nostalgia is the commodity here; musicians are just the optional packaging.
Still, maybe that’s always been the natural endgame. Maybe the Ship of Theseus was always going to wind up as a deluxe VIP upcharge experience (because seriously, why are we offering exorbitantly expensive photo ops with what is essentially a glorified cover band?). Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question all these years—maybe it’s not “at what point does the ship stop being itself?” so much as “at what point do we realize people don’t give a fuck either way so long as the silhouette remains distinct enough to sell T-shirts?”
After all, at the end of the night, everyone goes home happy. The band-name custodians get their checks. The promoters get their margins. The audience gets to feel, for 90 well-branded minutes, like they brushed up against a past that no longer exists. And the music industry gets to stay the course on its current trajectory: replacing humanity with intellectual property one tour announcement at a time, confident that no one will bail as long as the chorus hits on cue. As long as the audience keeps squinting hard enough to see the ghosts of the originals in whatever version shows up onstage, the enterprise can go on indefinitely, a kind of sonic Weekend at Bernie’s with better lighting. And hey, isn’t that what art’s all about?
