Posted on 10/11/2024 9:03:31 AM PDT by Angelino97
Not only is rock music dead, it’s been dead for quite a while. Like the jazz, blues, and classical genres, it rests now in an afterlife of soundtracks and in the tombs of dark clubs and gilded concert halls, where the remnant priesthood still perform the ancient rituals. But it has no thriving existence.
Rock is a form of music distinct from, but closely related to, the earlier doo-wop, rockabilly, and rock ‘n roll. It draws inspiration from the same genres of jazz, blues, gospel, country, and the folk music of the British Isles transplanted to the American backwoods. It first leaped on to the cultural scene with “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in 1963, and came into its own as an art form, along with the Boomers, in the late 1960s, from which point it arguably displaced Hollywood as the principal global cultural force.
But no idea, product, or music, takes off unless there’s a receptive market for it. The post-World War II baby boom was followed by an economic boom lifting even working class families into the consumer class. For the first time there were lots of young people with free time and cash. With such wildy different material and social circumstances separating parents and children it’s little wonder the so-called Generation Gap became a real sociological, cultural, and economic factor. Teenagers, or youths, suddenly became real entities distinct from children and adults. It can be argued that modern Western culture is Boomer culture, and that culture, and rock music especially, is inseparable from Boomers. As they matured, so it matured. It reflected their youthful hubris and idealism in their early years, their cynicism and greed in their prime; and as they declined, so did the music.
Demographics is destiny, even in music. Rock was largely by, and almost completely for, young white men. But, people will interject, rock has roots in black music. What of Jimi Hendrix? Where did Hendrix break big? Not back home, but in the very white UK of the 1960s. And it was specifically among men. The cool boys made noise in a garage and sat around listening to albums and smoking—their girlfriends were along for the ride. Left to their own devices they’d have preferred to listen to The Carpenters, disco, and ABBA, not Led Zeppelin.
The counter culture, which was so important to rock, had always been an expression of what, going back to Homer’s Iliad, was Western civilization form of self-criticism. The West evolved by always questioning itself and established assumptions. Along the way, however, some figured out that you could short circuit that virtue into a vice: to critique, not to improve, but to remove. Deconstructionism is less interested in new creation than in the ruins. And the upshot is that the media and academia struck ever more wedges into the common culture, to the point of even questioning the value of that culture as a whole. West and white were out.
This trend was reflected in the following decades in demographic changes all across the West. And the raw numbers belie the real impact of the increasing immigrant populations, as they were concentrated in the urban boiler rooms of the cultural engine, and among the young. Not only are whites a rapidly shrinking part of the population, but even more so among the younger cohorts. And what young white men there are, are increasingly demoralized and emasculated—from rage and melancholia, to artistically barren collective clinical depression.
As the artists, and the audience they reflected, went from, “I’m a superstar!” to “I’m a creep!” to “Whatever, nevermind,” the technological and business side of things was going through massive changes as well. Rock music may have flaunted a devil-may-care aura of rebellion and working class attitude and style, but there were always substantial barriers to entry, for good and ill. these barriers ran the gamut—from what your local, regional, and national radio stations chose to give airtime to, to what the A&R (Artists & Repertoire) people signed, to what the studios marketed, and the music magaziness wrote about, and, not least, to what your local record store stocked.
And those barriers became almost impossibly high, before crashing completely. In February 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act, clearing the way for giant conglomerates like ClearChannel to buy up vast swathes of radio stations across the country. As a result, programming was centralized and homogenized. Local radio stations could no longer break local bands. Video may have already killed the radio star by the 1990s; but radio was now no longer even a credible stepping stone to stardom. And then something even bigger happened.
Computer technology was about to remove almost all the barriers to entry in the music industry, most income streams for musicians, the very need for a band as a requirement for producing music, and just about any quality control along with these things. The first change was on the production side with the introduction of digital mixing. In the old days, bands could work for years before ever setting foot in that hallowed place, “The Studio,” the sanctum of machines you dare not touch with money burning by the minute. Now that whole stack of equipment, the rooms that used to house it, and the select few who had access to learn to use it could be reduced to a guy with a laptop in a basement. And then Napster happened.
Modern popular music had been born from a leap in technology, the invention of physical media. Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby became global stars through record sales. Later idols, like Frank Sinatra, adapted their singing in ways that were contingent on microphones and amplification. Royalty checks from the sale of LPs and even just one hit wonders financed yachts, fancy houses, and a lifetime of drinks in kidney shaped pools filled with fashion models. But what technology giveth, technology taketh away.
This business loop was so profitable, and, not least, so well rehearsed and dependable, that the major labels recoiled in reflexive horror at any idea of subverting it. The labels didn’t want to change their distribution model, so the pirates did it for them. And even though Napster, and similar filesharing apps like Kazaa and Limewire, were eventually sued into submission, the labels did not adapt and come to own the legal alternatives that replaced them.
Two interrelated facts had become the new reality: One was that music was basically worth nothing, and the second was that all music was easily available. In 1991 Nirvana was competing against Guns N’ Roses. New artists today are competing against all the music ever made.
The income side of the music business has collapsed. Albums, singles, CDs, and all physical media sales plummeted. Labels, as well as independent artists, were forced to make cuts on the other side of the ledger. And rock was expensive. Instruments cost money, amps cost money, recording those instruments well cost a lot of money. Setting up the mics for a drum kit is a skill in itself. So it became much more cost effective for labels to just sign guys who could produce the whole thing on their laptop. Tech, Hip-Hop, and House was in the ascendant.
This artificial and formulaic music could be reproduced in ever more mechanically automated ways. The 1970s German pioneers of electrical music, Kraftwerk, had triumphed—both in the philosophical and the practical sense. Music was becoming an industrial product. Digital audio workstations like Pro Tools, with plugins like Beat Detective, in effect, turned even live drums into just an interface for a drum machine. Auto Tune could carry the tune for you. In fact it could take a text to voice recording and make it sing.
Together these digital editing tools allowed you to “quantize” music into interchangeable samples on a grid that could be moved around like Lego blocks. It turned even “indie” rock into techno. The band was now a vestigial, or just the PR image part of the music production. Sample by sample, preset by preset, music was becoming similar. By the time AI that was good enough to mass produce music came along, the industry had already reduced it to such a simple and mechanical formula that AI didn’t even have to be very sophisticated to do it.
Moreover, the generation gap that had spawned rock music was closing. Mother and daughter dance to the same disconnected tracks. Father and son groove to the same timeless, as in being uprooted from any cultural context, wall-to-wall carpet Americana one can find on the “Classic Rock” station. The counter culture had triumphed, but, like a dog chasing a car, faced the question “Now what?” Paul Joseph Watson once wrote, “Conservatism is the new punk!” Being outspokenly right-wing today is far more, literally, dangerous than being a hippy, punk, or even death metaller ever was.
The original rockers, reaching their socio-cultural apotheosis at the 1987 Live Aid moral orgasm, are now the establishment—censoring people, arresting them for counter-revolutionary wrong-think, and reintroducing conscription to send the kids off to imperialist wars. The twists of fate have resulted in rock becoming the conservative music of the age, but specifically conservative, not right-wing, which would have been truly counter-cultural and “dangerous.” From the shock of Elvis’s hips and Black Sabbath’s antics to politically correct muzak.
And it ends in ever more dour festivals, where the banned cigarette smoke no longer covers the stench of BO and stale vegan sausages, and anemic Eloi gyrating in faithless facsimile to try to conjure up a teen spirit long since dead and departed. From culture to compost.
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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