By dead, I mean has rock and roll become irrelevant as a force in pop music?
If you look at the charts, I think the answer has to be yes. Rap and hip-hop are where it is at. But I’m not sure this is a relevant measure.
Maybe it is worth putting another way. Think about jazz. It was the young, vibrant musical genre that defined popular music for the first half of the 20th century. But I would say it is a genre that has clearly died. Not only are there fewer and fewer jazz fans today (as evidenced by the lack of jazz stations out there), but the best selling jazz artists are all people that are either dead or well past their prime.
Can we say the same thing of rock and roll?
Just a question I’ve been rolling around in my head today. It makes me sad to think rock is over. But, then again, people have been predicting rock’s demise for 40 years. And it continues to renew itself. So I hold out hope. What do you guys say?
I pay so little attention to what you normally hear on the radio that it hurts, but certainly from what I’ve seen rock is becoming surprisingly more obscure, which is really surprising for me considering that my childhood exposure to music was basically rock and country with me and my dad listening to the radio.
So even though I’m not actually qualified to say anything I’d agree, but I’d like to point out that there still are noticeable developments in the area of alternative rock.
The vast majority of money spent on music is from the upper working ages. The trick is that the marketing agencies, commonly referred to as “record companies”, have a problem targeting that demographic with anything new.
From experience, people are pulling away from what’s generally pop music (this includes a mainstream conception of rock n roll) and find other outlets. If you simply go by the charts, then you’re looking in the wrong place. If you want to find music, then the radio is the last place you want to find it.
Websites have posted that Swans’ The Seer was the best post-rock album of 2012. They’ve been playing since the early 80’s and can still play sold out shows (I actually had tickets to see them a 2nd time in NYC with Marissa Nadler, but due circumstances sold the tickets off, and they went fast). I can gaurantee that a majority (if not all the people) on this site have no clue who Swans are.
Statistics in music doesn’t go well, you cannot go off what’s marketed - especially for record companies, because they fail to actually see music, they only see numbers. There’s black metal fans all over the globe, but there’s not one black metal radio station. It’s ludicrous to make an analysis off of that to state black metal is dying out.
Is rock and roll dead? If your idea of rock music is that which is marketed by record companies, yes. If they giveth, they’ll taketh away, and will only keep in rotation which brings in the money. If your definition or rock music is not limited to the radio, then it’s constantly thriving.
Find any music site (one that’s actually geared towards music and not top 40) and they’ll give you their top picks of the year for various genres from various contributors. Usually, none of it is top 40.
Well, I agree that radio does not dominate music distribution like it used to. I was going to mention that in my original post, but thought it was too long already.
However, I also kind of think it is beside the point. What you are saying is that there are still rock bands out there producing music you like that you can access through the web and other means.
I don’t disagree, but that isn’t really what I am talking about. Everything you just said could equally apply to jazz. There are still plenty of jazz musicians out there producing jazz people love.
Does that mean that jazz still holds the same cultural influence it had in 1920 or even 1960?? I don’t think so. Worse yet, modern jazz musicians don’t even dominate their own genre! When you think of jazz, who do you think of? John Coltrane? Died. 1967. Thelonious Monk? Died. 1982. If you were a “true” jazz fan, I am sure you could name your favorite musicians playing today. But that really wouldn’t change the fact that Coltrane and Monk probably also outsell them each year even though they’ve been dead for decades.
Jazz is a product produced for a niche market. Maybe the same will be said of rock and roll in 10 years?
Rust Never Sleeps is a deep album. And written at a time when Neil Young’s career (and the future of rock and roll) was a bit uncertain too.
It just made me wonder if this is 1979 all over again for Rock (with many more great years ahead and a new generation of fans waiting to be exposed) or is this more like 1965 was for jazz (with a shrinking fan base and shrinking output from new artists in our future).
Rock and roll lasted as long as it did because the sound changed every few years. I mean, does anyone sound like Bill Haley and the Comets anymore?
My gut response on hearing that Neil Young song is “generic, yawn”. I feel like I have heard it a million times before I even heard it once.
Multiply that by several years running, and you know why r & r is done.
BTW a song about rock and roll is a sure sign of nothing left in the tank of the song writer. Great songs are all about powerful emotions, be they happy or sad or what have you, not about whether rock and roll is here to stay or not.
First, why in the world would you say that rock music is a subgenre of pop music? that about made me throw up. Michael Jackson and Madonna are not rock and roll.
Rock and roll died in the early 70’s. No, hair metal is not rock and roll. Numetal is not rock and roll. Disco is not rock and roll.
you must have been in a coma for the last 40 years…
Technically speaking, “rock and roll” was the kind of music that came out of the Chuck Berry/Buddy Holly era, which in turn emerged out of Jazz and other variations of “black music.” (RACIST!!!)
That kind of music however, died out as early as the mid-to-late 60s. Right around there was when the British started invading, giving their own take on “rock and roll” which turned into “rock music” (yes, the two are seperate). Around that time came the hippie pestilence, and the psychadelic era. All of that seemed to decline around the mid-to-late seventies, and was further rendered dead by the hipster invasion of the 90s. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the explanation for the terrible, terrible music calling itself “rock” today.
Rock music died for me when Guns and Roses split, although I loved most styles in the 90s. I haven’t listened to much at all since probably the year 2000. I blame Limp Bizkit.
+1 for Marko and -infinite for the 15 year old who doesn’t really listen to music. No one has even mentioned BLUES. BLUES is the foundation for rock not jazz. Blues was around before jazz too (seeing as it was slave music).
Student, I actually really enjoy that Young song and I’ve been wanting to cover it for a while now.
Anyway, as far as marketing and top 40 goes, rock music is there, but as always it will always be under the radar compared to what they can sell. Another example, Jack White had referred to the band The Gun Club as an essential band in rock history and should be taught to people interested in music, but as one can guess not many people know who The Gun Club are.
It’s like in the early 80’s when some jackass (Gary Bushell) says punk is dead, well yes and no. It was dead to market for the record companies. Why? Everyone who was into the music started their own labels and distributing their own material. Then the “media” says “hair metal is dead” because the major companies decided to start marketing grunge, but hair metal didn’t “die” it’s just they didn’t market it to the public anymore.
To put in a more relative example, we can all sit here and read stuff from Austrians and talk about the correct methods of economics, but the mainstream view is Keynesian. One simply does not look at this view and say “Well, Austrian econ is dead,” because simply it’s just not what they want to market anyway.
Honestly, I could say the same about folk music. I’ll look on sites for “folk albums of the year” and they all SUCK. Even the older guys can’t even put out decent albums. Then you have indie-folk and alternative-folk. I came to the realization the other day while listening to Birch Book (generally only known in neofolk circles) that this stuff is way better than what’s marketed, yet is completely unknown.
This is an interesting question I’ve been thinking about.
I do think there is a definite paradigm shift, what it is is a bit harder to say. There are quite a few ways to look at the issue like: how the internet and computers for better or worse has effects music, is the “spirit” of rock actually ever meant to become mainstream - or just show a significant cultural force that rears it’s head up to the top 40 every so often. I think a better question might be is Rock and Roll still vital as a culture / sub culture, I don’t think it has been for at least a decade.
You could also ask if this new wave of pop is really just a product of rock and R&B I guess. Is or did the market (and most other amature arts) become WAY oversaturated and watered down within the past 10 years or so? And why am I continually bombarded with effeminate and pointless “indie rock”?
This may also point to a fundamental change in how cultural forces form and associate in a new type of era,Personally, it seems like a comfortably narcisstic, bourgoise “last man” type of culture - it becomes very hard, though it still can be done, to find much in movies (though this was a better couple years for film than usual), music, tv, or “sub cultures” that really truly excites - if our “sub culture” is defined by @##!!! hipsters, that is not a good thing. This may be representitive of how Europe was in the 1890’s.
Perhaps there are signs of cultural exhaustion all around in the US? EIther way, it is certainly sad that music culture seems to have lost a certain type of thunder to it, and I do believe we are witnessing a paradigm shift. I think rap is way past it’s prime as well. Techno / dance / dub or big club music seems more in now.