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.
Drugs have changed. The drugs the rock bands use are different and Pot is 20x stronger.
Barf. Any article that links Bob Dylan with rock is insane. What Gen Xer wrote this?
Rock isn’t dead. It’s morphed into Country Music. And as the late great Tom Petty said....
Modern country music is like “bad rock with a fiddle”.
Rock has been dead for decades...It’s all been played...Over and over and over...By the late 70s there was nothing new...It was all basically the same rehashed sound with slight variations.
It’s not just that rock is disappearing (yeah I know about indie and hear a lot of great new music on Little Steven’s Underground Garage and other SXM channels).
The truth is - BANDS are disappearing!
Rick Beato explains this better than I can and has the data to prove it:
Musicians have to buck the trend to form a band and get their songs out today, and they mostly have to do it on their own, because the “music industry” could give an eff for anything other than profit.
Rock music isn’t dead. I’ve downloaded over 15,000 songs on my personal playlist. All genres of music.
Including thousands of current rock songs. Just because commercial radio stations WHICH SUCK doesn’t play them doesn’t mean that rock is dead.
Oh Jeez. What a downer. It’s all so hopeless. Alex needs to call Dr Kevorkian.
Hmmmmmm! Wonder what I’m playing at all these gigs we keep getting nearly every weekend? Sometimes even triple gigs over 2 days. Weird I know.......😊👍🎸🎛🔊🎙
Rocks not dead. It’s just not popular anymore. There’s lots of amazing rock bands formed since 2000 running around out there making amazing music and playing great live. It’s just not selling for beans and the venues are small. But it ain’t dead by any stretch.
When the Classic Rock station started listing Billy Joel as “Classic Rock”, I knew it was in trouble.
Turns out most of those tock and rollers were and are lefties. In other words, establishment, anti-God, gender confused, globalist warmongers.
Hey hey, my my....rock and roll can never die
Agreed. It’s like this guy never heard of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis.
rock (not tock)
This is bull crap really. Classic rock not only lives on, but it has a following in the new generations as well. Sadly they don’t have the dedication nor the talent to create more of it.
But classic rock stations are still on the radio. And in watching the youtube reaction channels then it is so interesting to see the rappers and hip hoppers get hooked on classic rock and leave their old music behind. It is so fun to hear them come to the realization that today’s music sucks. I have heard them say that over and over again.
Classic rock is now old people music. The rockers we listened to in the 60s and 70s and early 80s are all getting old and dying. And there are no mew rock and roll bands.
This cuts back to its Sabbatean origins in what made Weishaupt's "religious merger" of the Illuminati workable. The coming of the Messiah, His retun (both founded in Behar Sinai (Lev.25-26)), the Mahdi, the phoenix bird... ALL are founded in the idea of a perfect world that arises from the ashes of societal collapse. Hence, "if we can't be saints let's all be sinners" became the rule of the age.
I’s so old that I remember when the left was anti-establishment.
Long live rock!
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