Posted on 10/11/2024 9:03:31 AM PDT by Angelino97
I always wonder about who are considered rock singers. Are the Beatles considered rock? What about the Rolling Stones?
And how is rock defined? I hear terms like hard rock, acid rock, punk rock, hip hop, but as a causal listener to whatever is on the car radio, I don’t know what those terms mean. Yet some people clearly make distinctions between rock and roll, and just rock.
If the kids coming out of schools today can't read a book or do simple arithmetic, how can they write 4/4 beats with quarters and eighth-notes, triplets and rests, and chord progressions along a scale?
-PJ
Conventional Rock died with disco. Country music is still somewhat country but it ain’t what Hank started it out to be.
I still like the twang of old Country. The last great Country stars were of the George Strait era. One I cannot stand is Shania Twain - what a puke!
I don’t think rock is dead…because of the technology that is well described in the article and the heavy profit motive in the industry, it has just gone underground. Again. It’s live bands in small venues, not bands with big recording contracts. And for Rock, I think that’s where it’s real roots are.
Be it dead or alive!
Unfortunately classic rock radio is part of the problem. They only play 3 or 4 songs from each band, never going deep into the catalog. And forget anything new from these bands. Even when the band is on tour in support of a new album and guests at the station they’ll barely let the band mention the new album, forget actually playing something from it.
Deep Purple even wrote a song about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLWAF5Rjw4s
Because they only want Ian to talk about Montreaux so they can play Smoke on the Water. Forget the fact that for the last 30 years the Deep Purple line up has been incredibly stable (Jon Lord retired then died, and Steve Morris recently retired) and has made a bunch of really good albums in that time. Classic rock radio doesn’t want to hear about that, they’d rather just play Kentucky Woman for the 4th time today.
Reminds me of when Neil Young made a rockabilly album and the album execs complained that they wanted a “Rock Record”:
“And I said, ‘Do you know what rock ‘n’ roll is?’ I think they wanted me to make a hard rock record, but they didn’t ask for that. And if you’re gonna tell me to do something, yell at me and sue me, then you better to tell me to do exactly what you want, or you might get exactly what you asked for.”
What you’re talking about is the death of radio.
Is classical music “dead”, just because people only want to hear Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etc.?
Well, you had the '80s heavy metal hair bands, and the '90s grunge.
And then hip hop took over.
Sure, classic rock lives on. Classical music lives on. Jazz lives on. Ragtime and rockabilly will never die. But are they alive, or relics of the past?
I think that's the article's point. Rock is dead because it isn't creating anything new that's as great as Classic Rock.
Rock is like classical music. All the greatest classical composers have been dead for over a century. And Classic Rock is going the same path. Nothing new compares to the old masters.
In 1991 Nirvana was competing against Guns N’ Roses. New artists today are competing against all the music ever made.
True enough, but it also allows bands to benefit from the innovations that come along with a giant corpus of work that is accessible at the touch of a mouse button without paying some recording company for the privilege.
Classical music fans have already experienced this progression. Once if you wanted to hear Mozart, you had to have him in front of you. Then printed scores allowed anyone who could to play his music. Then recordings allowed anyone with the price of a record to hear anyone who could play it. Now you get Mozart on YooToob. He's not losing out by it, he's long dead along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Lennon - you get the idea.
Being outspokenly right-wing today is far more, literally, dangerous than being a hippy, punk, or even death metaller ever was.
Most metal-heads I know run way more conservative in politics than any air-headed folk singer ever did. What has happened is that the only real rebellion left is against the corporate proggie machinery that is trying to take over everyone's lives. These are the censors of today and they're a lot better at it than Tipper Gore ever was. And they're going to lose this one like they always do.
It’s like nowadays a lot of guitar players would blow Jimi Hendrix off the stage.
But Jimi created new sounds out of nothing, while these new players are just standing on the shoulders of giants.
Even Johnny Rotten became conservative.
“Well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music.”
I enjoyed reading the article but didn’t get much out of it. There are a lot of thoughts and observations. The author says rock, jazz, blues and classical are dead. Really?
Neither part of that is true. Plenty of great orchestral/ classical music and rock are being made today. They just don’t have an audience. Classical has it even harder because the aging audience they have is downright hostile to anything newer than Gershwin.
Yes. The small venue shows I go to are always packed full. Case in point, L.A. Guns, Faster Pussycat, etc. I can’t stand going to shows where you’re so far away you can barely see the band, not to mention the horrible sounding PA’s in arenas and stadiums. Recording contracts are basically gone with the wind these days. People tend to buy their music from streaming services nowadays and artists are lucky if they get $.075 per individual stream. Record contracts are not necessary these days, there is no need for commercial recording studios, you can record direct to computer at home.
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