Posted on 05/11/2025 8:04:59 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Despite the ‘album era’ fast approaching its approximate 60th anniversary, the lauded rock heritage that deified stadium monsters such as Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones as the paragons of musical achievement and authentic expression still looms over a pop climate that’s undergone seismic creative and social shifts across the last half-century. It won’t be too long before the cultural totems that still command such collective veneration, rock and roll, Woodstock, and AOR, will all cease to be living memories sooner than you think.
With Rolling Stone‘s ‘rockist’ residue still colouring many muso’s quality metrics and indication of a healthy music climate, the stats collated on the absence of bands from the contemporary charts by TV personality Richard Osman triggered much online debate. Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde last year, Osman revealed that in the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks where bands were number one, with 141 weeks for the first half of the ’90s. Jump to the 2020s, and the number drops to three, one from Little Mix, another from The Beatles’ AI-drossed ‘Now and Then’, and BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge Allstars take on Foo Fighters’ ‘Times Like These’.
On the face of it, it’s all fairly humdrum, and tempting to lapse into curmudgeonly deadends lambasting the supposed artistic degradation of Gen Z and well-trodden theories on an increasingly hyper-individualist fracturing of broader pop culture in the TikTok age.
While there are grains of truth to such talking points and legitimate discussions to be had about risk-averse corporate labels favouring easily marketable solo stars over the complex bag of characters that make up a band, such critique can often feel like ruses to merely attack a youth culture whose trends and expressions alienate one’s rock puritanism, a typical lashing out when the pangs of old age irrelevancy start to rear its head.
The digital age has fundamentally freed up scores of budding artists to create their art without the need for studio time and multiple collaborators, production software and Digital Audio Workstations offering a platform for music-makers to record and release an album entirely in one’s bedroom, handling all promotion and marketing with savvy social media knack as well as send over stems and audio files anywhere in the world for mixing and mastering. Economic pressures, too, have forced artists to go it alone, the dismal revenues made from streaming and loss-incurring tours simply unviable to split across multiple parties.
But the concern for bands ‘disappearing’ only holds water if your search for such artists is as deep as who’s currently in the top ten. At the time of writing on a drizzly morning, tonight Italian kosmiche conjurers Traum are playing Dalston’s The Shacklewell Arms, Million Moons are showering New Cross Inn with their gargantuan industrial post-rock, and Fabric will be host to Decius’ squalid electronics. Beyond London, antipop metallers Gürl will be taking over Bristol’s Exchange, and Newcastle’s The Cluny will witness Renegade Brass Band’s 12-piece fusion of jazz, hip-hop and funk.
Bands are very much alive. Never mind the success of The 1975, The Last Dinner Party, Fontaines DC, and Kneecap bringing back the hip-hop group, but on a grassroots level, there’s a myriad of bands playing some of the most vital music you’ll ever hear.
The stale ‘only bands are good’ prism should die a death, fantastic and innovative art is being forged that will look and sound contrary to the rock monoliths that still serve as eternal barometers of artfulness but, buried beneath homogeneous algorithms and lazy radio curations, a thriving eco-system of bands are cutting essential soundtracks to the febrile contemporary alongside all manner of differing art ensembles and collectives. Let’s celebrate the continued shine of the band, but let’s finally shake off the notion that exciting music must conventionally look like one.
Wouldn’t it be cool if big horn bands made a comeback?
People producing music in their bedrooms without a real band and using auto tune do not qualify as great bands.
THE STONES will live forever.
“The Stones, I love the Stones. I watch them whenever I can. Fred, Barney.”
-Steven Wright
Now people worship DJs who push a few buttons.
When Will The Bass Drop?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCawU6BE8P8
That's true. But the vast majority of those combinations result in jazz, and I'm not talking Miles Davis jazz, I'm talking Sun Ra or Ornette Coleman jazz.
I say that as a lifelong jazz fan. :-)
I remember back in the early 2000s there was a short Swing resurgence.
I have had the great privilege of growing up with rock since the 60's, and playing in rock bands from 1965 onward to the present. While always an avocation not a vocation, it's nevertheless been the single constant in my life as relationships and jobs and homes have come and gone.
And sadly, I have to agree that the section of musical space/time occupied by rock has pretty much all been explored, charted, composed, played, and in many cases, played to death. Hard to imagine what a truly new rock innovation would be, and I don't see anybody coming up with one.
So our job is to keep the existing body of music alive by continuing to perform it as long as there's anybody interested in listening to it. Eventually those folks will decrease in number, and another musical era will close.
Fortunately for me, I'll probably be gone by then. I intend to keep playing as long as my fingers work and my brain can control them. But all things come to an end eventually.
And still there is a lot of music that was made in the 60s and 70s that is still to be discovered, and thanks to YouTube and other Internet sites, it’s all out there now.
Well at least hopefully being in a band will still be a good way to get the chicks. ;)
It would be interesting if you could use AI technology and converted all those old Swing-era records to make it sound like you were actually listening to it live.
That's true. And even earlier. Only a few months ago I finally got around to buying a couple of Link Wray CDs, after seeing a video of Jimmy Page talking about the influence of Wray on his music ("Rumble" in particular).
Oh it still is. But unfortunately, the "chicks" that I attract are all my age.... LOL
The reason there are no bands is that the writers are all hairdressers now. A whole generation has become hairdressers now. All they can think about is the curls in their hair. I can remember the days when this wasn’t the case.
Oh it still is. But unfortunately, the “chicks” that I attract are all my age.... LOL
LOL...Reminds me of this....
Dad Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31PrzVpMktE
**Well at least hopefully being in a band will still be a good way to get the chicks**
Shallow ones. I dated several back in the day.
I married an absolute doll almost 47 years ago. I recently showed a pic of her, when she was 20, to our pastor’s 29 year old wife. She replied, “oh my, that’s a 10 on a scale of 10”. Of course I’ve always felt that way as well.
But thing that helped me win her was that we think the same about many things. One is this subject. We liked popular music, but weren’t interested in spending much money on listening to, which included a lack of interest in going to concerts. She’d rather be at some lake in the woods.
And that girl can cook!! Baked me an apple pie a couple nights ago, and its already gone.
Probably. Probably, also, 99% of the combinations are crap.
I'm sending a link to my daughter (30) who will laugh herself silly.
Thanks!
Prayers for you both for continued marital bliss, and may God Bless.
Now, now.... as a wise jazz musician friend once told me:
"There are no 'wrong' notes. There is nothing wrong with any musical note. There are only notes that have been played at the wrong time, or in the wrong song."
The best "classical" composers are all doing film & TV soundtracks -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; The Godfather; Conan the Barbarian; Starship Troopers; Game of Thrones; Mulholand Drive.
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