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.
There are, but the music industry is brutal. It’s killing the ones it should be promoting.
I don’t know if his tour is finished or not, but George Strait did a tour this summer. I heard they were great shows.
bookmark
Maybe all the potential new rock stars just decided to become haberdashers (better hours).
And all that was garbage that followed in it’s wake, and why no one listens to that BS. It all sounds like the inside of a machine shop.
Etc. = Palestrina, Handel, the Bach sons, Vivaldi, the Haydns, Hummel, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, the Mendelssohns, yada yada yada Elgar, Rachmaninov, Holst, Gershwin, Ravel yada yada yada the list goes on. Oh, and Liszt.
It is the people who don’t listen to the above who are already dead.
Morally. Intellectually.
Emotionally.
Physically.
Down there.
In their no nos.
Prime example is The Warning, three young, talented, & beautiful sisters from Monterey, Mexico who are tearing it up and rising like a rocket. They are bilingual and sing mainly in fluent English. They play to huge crowds, and the one Spanish language cut from their latest album is Latin Grammy nominated for best rock song. Here's a performance of their song "Evolve" from the 2023 VMAs:
https://youtu.be/lPLM7z-av7g?si=o7fVSSVayw7UKfqJ
Enjoy!
Yeah, when is the last time you heard the Stones song “Connection” on the radio?
Yes, sniff. Sadly, this is true... so “Roll over Beethoven”.
And yet...all my guitar students want to learn are songs from the “Classic Rock” genre.
The Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty, CCR, Lovin’ Spoonful, Jefferson Airplane (NOT starship), Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and so on.
With ocasional foray’s into the 80’s and 90’s, and a few “Singer Songwriters”, we just keep going back to Rock.
So there’s a new generation comin’.
Rock already was unwell but Klinton put the final nail in the coffin when he signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
The 1996 TCA ended the requirement that radio be geared to serving the specific needs of the local community, and it lifted the restrictions on large conglomerates buying up oodles and oodles of radio stations. And to reduce the costs of their programming, they bought and controlled the work of the “musicians” and musical groups and involved.
Recording with a big-name rock band was famously expensive because they had grown fond of very specific studio set-ups; how many microphones, how many tracks to records on, which engineers would do their mixing, etc. All of which was taking a YUGE chunk out of the record producer’s bottom line.
So under the 1996 TCA, corporations began buying up scads of radio stations and running them on a price-point basis. Among other things, they were looking for music that was cheaper to produce than what Rock had grown into.
And the one genre that was especially cheap to produce, because it involved very few “real” musicians, mostly just home boys with a laptop, using “sampling” and computer-generated instruments to create their “music,” was cRap.
So now the airwaves are inundated with cRap and Hippity-Hop because it’s the K-Mart of music formats.
And click tracks are now being substituted for drums.
You totally tune tagged me. I love Spider and the Fly. Great song.
Just recently saw Megadeath, Slash, Jane’s Addiction etc and we have hundreds of rock bands here in raleigh at the clubs and taverns playing on weekends!
Whoever wrote lives in kamalatoe and fjb world!
Rock is so dead to me these days I didn’t even want to finish this article. I lost interest a quarter of the way through.
The advent of MTV had a lot to do with that. Bands aren’t given 2-3 records to develop anymore.
RIP Charley Daniels. I don't remember the last time I heard modern country or "rock" music...
I think the author overlooked an important outcome of the TCA. It wasn’t just the acquisition of hundreds of radio stations by corporate conglomerates that ruined the music radio business. It was the consolidation of radio stations with the major record labels — which meant you had radio stations just giving tons of airplay to bands and artists whose music was produced by the sister company of the radio station.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.