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.
Videogames and the internet gave those white boys something else to be interested in. Plus, rock was a response to the unprecedented situation of young people after WWII. They had their own money, they had their own subcultures. From the bomb to the pill to the electric guitar to mass affluence to surfing to car culture to television they were coming to terms with a wholly new world. Recent generations haven’t seen as much change or as much that’s new, and what is new — computers, cellphones, the internet — provides its own channels of communication that don’t go through electric music.
Gen Xer?
“We were the first band to vomit in the bar.
And find the distance to the stage too far”
Long live rock 1973 live
https://youtu.be/maD5k-vUI4o?si=DOCj3b5FJECGud8v
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 …Wow . . . rewrite history, why dontcha Alexander. There is no such thing as “rock” that is distinct from “rock & roll”, and it sure did not begin with a 1963 Bob Dylan album.
Yeah, that’s definitely analogous to Rock. Classical music is back to its roots as well.
ROCK MUSIC is certainly DEAD and BANDS have died along with it.
Guys like me formed rock and roll bands in high school in the 1960’s. We found out quickly it was a great way to attract adoring, pretty girls.
Today, young girls are being shunned by young guys who find them too crazy to deal with.
It is a sad ending for youth music and courtship.
In many ways I think that’s the future of music is anyway (bands in small venues, not international superstars beholden to the “system” and requiring technology to make music). It’s closer to the fans and far more honest, musically.
Our biggest orchestras are finally playing more music by women. What took so long?.
Finding My Voice: The lack of representation in classical music.
February 3rd. 1959
Then came the Hippie Clinton’s, and their DNC so called “music”
The point of those articles isn’t the DEI, it’s that they have such a hard time getting the orchestras to play anything by anybody that’s alive, or an audience to show up the 1 show a year when they do. Yes there are a more diverse set of people composing orchestral music now, nothing wrong with that. But if it isn’t for a movie nobody is going to hear it.
Any art form, including popular music, needs two ingredients to thrive and profit. Scarcity and taboo-breaking. Popular music was scarce when purchasing a record was required. The choice of what to buy was curated by radio program managers who set the playlist that exposed new artists to the public. Pop music was also about breaking cultural taboos in abstract or symbolic poetic forms that pushed the envelope but didn’t destroy it.
Both scarcity and taboo-breaking have been undermined by technology and culture, making pop music a commercial commodity rather than a force for change and disruption.
Finding art forms that are both scarce and taboo-breaking will require a new generation of artists liberated from the tyranny of consumer culture. I’m betting on YouTube content providers and podcasters to be at the vanguard of this edutainment revolution.
The Day it died: Feb. 3rd. 1959
Holly actually had a real marriage.
Hippie exploitation of women followed.
“ I’s so old that I remember when the left was anti-establishment.”
They and their ideology became the new establishment and they are worse than the old one. They also have no interest in the constitution
Donald Trump does have an interest in the constitution. Why the masses refuse to see that is beyond me
This be establishment are the leftists who started it. Which means brainwash the kids to love leftism- communism, atheism, dictatorship all the trappings
Anyone could have seen it coming
The old establishment was a pain in the ass with foreign wars. Viet Nam was a disgusting insult to this country and it was a turning point
This is part of that
This new establishment a leftist one can be best illustrated by Howard sterns emetic schmooze fest on air with Kamala. He is driven by some motivation that has nothing to do with the constitution in his pursuit of promoting a presidential candidate.
Rock and Roll is not political at its core. It is deeply rooted in the delta blues and jazz, the blue grass jams of Appalachia, and classical music all of who’s roots are from the cantor music of East Europe, from the people who escaped oppression for their new and beloved USA, the cotton fields of the delta the Mississippi delta, the British isles music of the Scot’s and Irish, blue grass and the classical music rhythms of Beethoven, Bach Schubert and the rest
It is the electrified amped up rendition of these old tunes and reproduced form combinations and inspirations of these
It is not dead any more that blue grass, jazz, Irish lilts, gospel hymns, cantor music and blue grass
It is alive and well in clubs
There are no more album shops and big concert venues but if I put on “At the Fillmore East” or go see my nephews at a club in the east village playing rock and roll jamming their interpretations I along with the audience are very inspired
Rock versus rock and roll someone would have to explain that to me
Big anthems like Bowie, Queen, the Who, Billy Joel ok maybe if that’s ‘rock’
Exactly right. There were so many bands in the 60's thru 80's that half of them you forgot about.
Pete was so hammered.
And now we have AI-generated music.
“Rage Against The Machine” now rages for the machine.
I host a weekly (Thursday PM) one-hour COUNTRY MUSIC radio show on a community college radio station. I identify myself only as THE COUNTRY DINOSAUR. I play Hank Williams Sr., Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, Jack Greene, Hank Snow, Patsy Cline, The Sons of the Pioneers and many others of the golden age of country music.
I AM A VOLUNTEER.
I play BOTH kinds of music...Country AND Western.
Every show is archived on the Internet to hear for two weeks. You can listen to the most recent and previous show.
archive.ksvr.org (scroll down to The Country Dinosaur and click the “play” button)
The only good country music is the older stuff like the kind that Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton made. This new stuff is awful.
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