Well guess what - this didn't exist once - and hence life was much simpler:
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Is rock music "dead"?
- Thread starter Jagella
- Start date
A lot of them went away when country music started raging for the machine, but they're still out there.
For instance, there's Childish Gambino's "This is America" (2018)... and Dropkick Murphys put out their album "This Machine Still Kills Fascists" in 2022.
I don't think there will ever be another Beatles (group and solos), Stones, Aerosmith, Seger, Dylan, Clapton, Presley, Berry, et al., or 50s-80s decades, the height of rock 'n roll and classic rock. I don't think anyone today can come close to their achievements and innovations. Of course, this could be the prejudices of a 66 year old who grew up with these musicians. The only "new" music I'm being drawn to is the likes of The Dead South, Steeldrivers, The Devil Makes Three, Trampled by Turtles, and other CBGB and fusions thereof.
In the 50s-80s, people were lamenting that there would never be another Benny Goodman or Gene Krupa and saying that nobody then could come close to their innovations.
It's natural to be sentimental about the music we grew up with and to have less of a connection to the music that came later. This is more about us than anything intrinsic to the music.
Also, we've had decades to forget about all the unremarkable crap in the music scene in the 50s-80s... and there was a lot of it. With modern music, we're experiencing the crap and the gems in real time; switching metaphors, modern music hasn't had the chaff separated from the wheat yet.
PureX
Veteran Member
I disagree. benny Goodman didn't take over the world like the Beatles did. Or the Rolling Stones, or Elvis. Rock-n-roll struck a nerve and expressed a feeling that young people all over the globe recognized immediately as unique to themselves.
I was 7 years old when I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and even at that age I knew immediately that this was something unique in the world. This was new, and different, and it was made specifically by and for the young. This wasn't the adults controlling things. This was US kids doing our own thing. And the musicians knew it too. So they spoke out about the things that young people cared about. Not just boy meets girl, or let's dance, but a lot more then that.
LadyJane
Member
When intellectual property is the driving force the art is bound to suffer.
Concerts used to be affordable and people used to rally around a common purpose. The more folks separated into silos the harder it was for those of us who enjoy many different types of music. The days of waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio or venturing out to the record store are a thing of the past, replaced by the frivolous need for immediate gratification. A lot of bands in the early nineties reminded us all what we were missing. Donning spectacular variations of plaid flannel.
Algorithms won't take me from Iron Maiden to Coltrane.
LadyJane
Member
There are great tunes fer sure. They just don't seem to reach as wide an audience as songs like Revolution or Ohio. Where you don't have to seek them out...they find you.
Yerda
Veteran Member
Rock as a cultural force is over. People will still continue to make great rock albums, though. Much like jazz and blues are still being made but don't represent anything of cultural significance to us anymore.
My take, when I want to bore my friends, is that rock n roll was Western culture's dominant cultural force for about 60 years (bookended by the Elvis and The Strokes) and that we will never run out of amazing rock music to listen to. I'm still finding Rolling Stones songs that I didn't realise were so great.
My take, when I want to bore my friends, is that rock n roll was Western culture's dominant cultural force for about 60 years (bookended by the Elvis and The Strokes) and that we will never run out of amazing rock music to listen to. I'm still finding Rolling Stones songs that I didn't realise were so great.
I didn't have to seek out "This is America."
In 1971, did people the age that you are now feel like Ohio "just found them"?
The average show I go to, the tickets are around $40.
Sorry but this made me laugh a bit because the Beatles started out as a boy band singing vapid boy/girl love songs like any pop group. I wonder if it was the same episode my mom told me about seeing (she would've been in her teens). She said her dad called her in, expecting her to love these clean cut boys singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Well, my mom was bored by it and left the room. Soon after, the Stone were on Sullivan playing "Let's Spend the Night Together". My mom loved that, much to her dad's dismay!
(My mom ended up being a rebellious hippie during the '60s and ran away from Ohio to San Francisco.)
Hopefully you skipped Iron Maiden.
Back when I was a dinosaur and the young ruled the Earth, I recall discovering that for the most part, the rock tracks that got played on the radio were generally not the best tracks on the albums...(although I must admit that there were a few cases where, indeed, the hit single was by far the best track that the band could put together...)
The whole issue was commercialism, then as now, and as I used to describe it (at the time), "My half of the 1970s" was reflected in music that never got played on the radio...often not even on the indie stations...
The whole issue was commercialism, then as now, and as I used to describe it (at the time), "My half of the 1970s" was reflected in music that never got played on the radio...often not even on the indie stations...
Eh? All of those things are still cultural forces and influential.
I noticed that in this thread, it seems like people think that it has to be topping the charts and selling out stadiums to matter. That's a really shallow view of art, imo.
PureX
Veteran Member
Correction, they INVENTED the cute boy-band template and then moved far beyond it. And keep in mind that I was 7 at the time. It wasn't the content of their songs that impressed me so much as it was their delivery. Very tight, very strong, very purposeful, and yet fun to the point of being sarcastic. Almost like they were making fun of the whole teenage boy-meets-girl meme. And a month or so later the Rolling Stones came on the show, And Mick Jagger was the nightmare boy every parent was afraid their daughter would date. So ofcourse every daughter wanted to date him!
This was the rock-n-roll theme. It was a youth uprising, and every young person saw it, and heard it, from Elvis to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Iggy Pop, and on. And they reveled in it. They finally had a voice in a world being run (badly) by the adults and there was nothing the adults could do about it. That was rock-n-roll.
I wonder if it was the same episode my mom told me about seeing (she would've been in her teens). She said her dad called her in, expecting her to love these clean cut boys singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Well, my mom was bored by it and left the room. Soon after, the Stone were on Sullivan playing "Let's Spend the Night Together". My mom loved that, much to her dad's dismay!
LadyJane
Member
The Kent State shootings happened and Neil Young grabbed his guitar and they managed to record the song twelve days later. It was then played across the nation and reverberates to this day. So, yes, I think they did.
PureX
Veteran Member
I was fortunate to have an "underground" station that would play all those longer, less pop tracks. I was also close enough to Detroit to listen to all the Motown stuff as it was happening.
I still remember being a teenager laying in bed late at night listening to this underground radio station and hearing them play Black Sabbath for the first time. An absolute revelation. Scary and exhilerating all at once!
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I don't know if Rock music is dead, given that I hardly listen to much of this these days apart from some 60s and 70s artists, and I have no way of knowing if any period had 'better' music than any other, but in the periods cited there was a sprouting of so many different genres even if so much did build on the past - as so often happens. I can remember the excitement and joy I felt when the three guitars and drums format gave us the sound of the early Yardbirds rather than that of the Beatles or similar, but like so many Blues groups, their material mostly came from black solo Blues musicians and often unamplified ones too.
Yerda
Veteran Member
I wouldn't say that things don't matter if they don't top the charts. We're moved by whatever moves us, and as far as I can tell that all that matters when it comes to art.
That touches on the thing that is dead now: top 40 radio.
There was a time when anything outside that week's top 40 just wouldn't be played on mainstream radio stations and you had no real way to hear other songs unless you bought an album.
Now, everyone has access to uncountably many piece of music. There's way more music out there, so it's way harder for there to be some specific song that "everyone" is listening to.
... but this doesn't mean the death of rock. It's a Renaissance of music across the board.