Dead Rock (Rock no longer rolls. Do Democrats?)

WASHINGTON -- Those gruesome news reports from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony the other night remind me of a conclusion I came to a few years back. Rock and Roll is dead. Rest in peace.

Through the years the peace of the grave has crept up on a lot of rockers, usually years before they arrived at the average life expectancy of almost any type of adult human being, including skydivers and inebriated jaywalkers. Given how preachy the average rocker became by the late 1960s, this is ironic. In their warbles they lectured ordinary Americans on what to eat, what to wear, even prayer. They lectured us on the value of the great outdoors and of world peace. An astonishingly high percentage of them then found themselves under arrest for random violence or ingesting substances that were decidedly unhealthy. So Rock and Roll, rest in peace. Besides, Rock and Roll has not come up with a worthwhile song in at least a decade.

Happily the replacement for these left-wing nihilists on radio has been the right-wing talker. Rush Limbaugh -- the master of the genre -- and Mark Levin, the rising oracle of the genre, are total opposites from any warbler ever featured in Rolling Stone magazine and both are probably better singers. I have no doubt that they are popular because America is an increasingly conservative country and because conservative Americans are not welcomed by mainstream media with the exception of Fox. Yet there is another reason. Rock and Roll is dead.

Radio is a medium peculiarly suited for music, but there is apparently not much of an audience left for Rock and Roll. I mean, how many decades can we listen to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and other rockers from Rock's better days? They get tiresome, and apparently there is just not a large enough audience opening for earlier musical styles, for instance, big band or swing, jazz, or folk music. Country and Western's audience is not replacing Rock and Roll, and classical music's audience seems to be in decline.

Hence we hear more and more Rush wannabes. Some are dreadful, vacuous, only dimly conservative, shouters. But then as I say we have the rising Mark Levin and doubtless there will be others.

The declining audience for music on radio, however, is a secondary reason for the rise of the conservative talker. The primary reason is politics -- and not any kind of politics but rather conservative politics. The wave toward conservatism still seems to be gaining strength even as the wave for liberalism evanesces. I can recall the late 1960s and the 1970s when talk radio was a very different land from what it is today. Most talk radio hosts were decidedly left. A conservative, for instance, the venerable Bob Grant, was rare. But at some point liberal talk show hosts lost the audience, probably about the time liberalism began to lose out wherever the citizenry's vote mattered. That would be in the early 1980s with the rise of Ronald Reagan.

I think Democrats ought to give this a little thought. Almost nowhere can they start up a successful media alternative to Rush and the gang. Not even Al Gore's opulently endowed television network shows promise. The frightful suffering of the left's Air America is well known. Some say Air America staggers because Al Franken is not funny. But it is more than that. There just are not enough votes out there in radioland to elect a left-wing Rush.

Michael Barone recently gave an analysis of this condition that bodes drearily for Democratic politics. He did not use my radio evidence to foretell a bad day at the polls in the year's off year election. He looked at voter trends, vulnerable congressional seats, and other traditional evidence to predict this fall's elections. He was the first columnist to predict the 1994 takeover of Capitol Hill by the Republicans. The Democrats see themselves duplicating that feat this fall. Barone says no. The votes are just not there. Now let him explain the death of Rock and Roll.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His most recent book is Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House (Regnery Publishing).

Have you ever noticed the biggest stars of the current MTV holocaust all look the same? Jessica Simpson, Ricki Martin, Brittany Spears, Ashton Kutcher? They all have the same face; The wide set brown eyes, the same facial structure. Do you know why? Because MTV created a standard afew years ago to what they consider the "perfect face" for teens and the music industry/entertainment industry bought into that.

A friend of mine who works in the industry told me about this, I also have met execs in my cab who have confirmed this...This is how low they go now when deciding on who to sign or promote. They don`t give a damn on talent or anything else, it is all about image and meeting their criteria.

These are the types of music executives being produced by our colleges today. Absolute souless freaks with absolutely no ballz. They are so afraid of being fired, they actually follow this nonsense about "facial standards". Music has absolutely taken a back seat. Like I tell all my musician friends all the time; The market is absolutely wide wide open. Write good songs and sell them over the internet, you will make an absolute fortune. I wish to hell I knew how to make music because the public out there is absolutely starving for good stuff. Rock and roll or good music is not dead, it is simply hidden, it is not promoted.

Popular rock music is decidely modernist in outlook. Rock has always represented the leading edge. What has died isn't so much rock, but the artistic content of popular music. (Yes, modernism can be artistic.)

Art-rock bands such as Pink Floyd, and classical-borrowing disco led to an end-of-history point by the late 1970s, epitomized, respectively, by "The Wall," and "A Fifth of Beethoven." What followed was a few oscillations back and forth bewteen supercharged post-modern movements (punk, hair metal, and grunge), new-progressivism (New Wave), deconstructionalism (Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega) and some measure of artistic recombinations of these various responses (such as Angry Young Women of the 1990s who merged all three of these musical movements).

Modernism and post-modernism in music were both fueled by technological advancements. (Post-modernism would've been very boring if it hadn't incorporated modernism into itself... and that's a critique of post-modernism in general.) Absent further developments, which seem highly unlikely, any real growth will be musicological. And those advances are resistant to the sudden developments needed to fuel popular music.

So what's next? Partly, Neo-classicalism and market fragmentation, the discovery of what was excellent absent modernism. Given the lack of enculturation in the general public, it is, ironically, the Disco and New Wave movements which have initially benefited from neo-classicalism. The record industry is panicking that people are so far content to recycle 70s and 80s music.

But the bigger trend (as demonstrated from the mediocrity of the retro music which is popular) is simply that popular music is simply degrading into folk music, albeit with a modern sound that will grate on those who like Folk Music (tm).

OK, so I don't sound pretensious, here are some quick definitions:

MODERNISM: The belief that something is better just because it is new, or that newness has "changed all the rules." Examples: cultural liberalism, the dot-com bubble.

POST-MODERNISM: A reaction against modernism which rejects the "newer-is-better" conceit of modernism, but which sustains modernism's rejection of the inherent beauty of what is traditional or classical. Examples: punk rock, yuppie decor, minimalism.

NEO-CLASSICALISM: An integration of the best of modern and post-modern developments with elements which have achieved "canonic" status. Sort of a realization that "some of this modernist stuff really is pretty neat, but it doesn't mean we have to destroy all that came before it." Examples: Southern gothic, "Principles of Economics". The use of this term musically is somewhat of a stretch, since "classic" is often used to describe Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, as well as Beethoven and Mozart.

CANONIC: Considered basic or foundational to an understanding of a given discipline. Examples: The Canonical List of Blonde Jokes, The biblican canon of scripture, the American Film Institute.

CLASSICALISM: A movement towards the most excellent and refined expressions throughout history; not to be confused with CLASSICISM, which is a system of aesthetics based on a return to Latin and Greek culture (such as Renaissance art). Again, the use in music is a little stretched, since classical music refers to music which is actually very modern (Beethoven was a contempory of Emporer Napoleon III; he hardly used techniques known to ancient Greeks and Romans. Hence, whereas some forms of art or philosophy merge classicism and classicalism, they are very seperate in the realm of music.)

CLASSIC: Originally meaning that having to do with Ancient civilizations, such as Roman, Latin, Hebrew and Persian, in music this merely means that which is excellent and not contemporary.

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