The next time you wonder why old white men care so much about a passé art form, you should realize there are stories that go past the musical merits of said musical style and into what the music does
Quite apart from commercial considerations, the thing that afflicts most (not all) rock made these days is the dreary use of cookiecutter mixing/mastering styles, including but not limited to autotune. There's still some marvellous music around, much of it Scandinavian (Motorpsycho, Spidergawd, Elder, Wobbler, Hallas etc), but postproduction techniques make most contemporary rock , which was always best when it at least *tried* to sound loose and spontaneous, artistically as well as commercially dubious. It just sounds sort of disposible.
100 percent. That Rick Beato video I linked at the top of this post gets into how corporate consolidation and simple greed led to the decline of different and risky music because only cookie-cutter stuff would get funded. He and his colleague in the video put it in very stark terms but it’s a credible explanation.
Rock music just doesn’t sound as good as it used to. Even songs where the actual notes sound good are missing that vibe, that LIFE, of the very best music. Very sad.
In the Metal genre I also see a correlation of advanced but similar mixing/mastering styles and an increase in sterility in the music. Nowadays, the instruments are all crystal-clear in the mix (Jason Newsted would be existed), but the mix sounds totally lifeless.
It’s a fine line between clarity and warmth, or life. Sometimes the old fuzzy sounding recordings had more energy because you could hear that it was a bunch of musicians playing together in the same room and not endless, separately recorded parts and overdubs.
Yes gone are the days when you would buy a new album (who does *that* these days?) and wonder how e.g. the drums were gonna sound compared to those on the band's last album. For instance I remember being quite absorbed (I was only a kid) by the difference between the respective drum sounds on Primus's Sailing the Seas of Cheese and Frizzle Fry from a year or two before.
By way of comparison, and as all-time a band as they are, Elder's drum sounds never vary from album to album; this is the case even though they changed drummers a few years ago.
Aha yeah they say exactly the same thing in Beato vid (believe it or not I didn't watch it before commenting). Their account of the origins of the problem is indeed interesting and plausible. It's also in part familiar: BLAME NICKELBACK. Has any rock band ever been worse disdained?
Well, he wasn’t blaming Nickelback for existing, just saying that they were so huge, every record company wanted the next Nickelback. No different than when people were looking for the next Elvis, or next Beatles, or next Led Zeppelin, or next Madonna, or next whatever.
I've always said that if you're a male and you don't like any form or subgenre of Rock music then there might be something wrong with you, but the fact of that matter is that there is something so distinctly male about it that I've never met any guy who hasn't at least made an exception for something or the other.
Since we're in a time where masculinity is bad word in big industry, it's just the exact sort of thing they don't want to promote. Even "geek rock" back in the day had testosterone (Weezer, Nada Surf, Nerf Herder, and Ash . . . kinda), and is too much for modern radio.
I don't see the genre disappearing overnight or anything, but given the climate we're in, it's going to be rough goings for it for a long time.
Oh, it’s total guy music. White guy music. These see the explicit reasons rock always had to be attacked and retconned in a way no other musical form is (not even country).
I think what happened with rock is simple. Disturbingly so, so we discuss it more trying to find a more elegant explanation.
1. A standard rock band (guitarr, bass, drums) is a pretty limited musical palette. Which is bad given that the culture of the genre required endless new songs. It's actually rather amazing how much has been done with such limited options.
2. That palette started to peter out I'm the early 90's. Personally I think the history of rock is the process of getting more and more extreme. I mean this in multiple ways: loudness and aggression and all that, but also song length, virtuosity, etc. This basically led to metal and way out prog rock stuff. Metal gets to grindcore and theres no where else to go and prog eventually basically turns back towards jazz and classical. Whether you agree with metal as the endpoint or not, the basic truth of "not too many places left to go, at least not ones catchy enough to have mass appeal, with this simplistic music after about 40 years" still stands, imo.
3. Not only did this happen but the internet made things impossible to forget. So even if YOU discovered something you felt was new and fresh in your playing some guy on the internet will be like, "That's not new. British underground rock legend Argus McFaddle was doing that in 68. Here's a link to his album". Which kinda kills the "endless new songs" need discussed in item 1.
4. Other popular music genres (like the thing we call "Pop" itself) have more musical options still to explore. But they'll die too. I remember hearing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" for the first time and I literally thought it was just a cover or remix of Madonna's "Express Yourself". By which I mean you're going down too eventually Pop!
That's a long way of saying "We just ran out of new stuff in a literally physical sense of what we could do with vibrating strings on a guitar."
What happens next? I dunno. Repertory rock acts? I could see that. Everybody gets super into some weird new music centered around violins and scat singing. More unlikely....but possible.
Good points. I often think about point number 2. I also can’t hear new music without hearing how it’s just a reskin of an old song. At least Weird Al didn’t lie about a who or what his original compositions were in the style of.
One band doing new things is black midi. They’re very proggy, very heavy at times, very extreme and there only like 23 or so. Really bracing stuff.
"1. A standard rock band (guitarr, bass, drums) is a pretty limited musical palette. Which is bad given that the culture of the genre required endless new songs. It's actually rather amazing how much has been done with such limited options."
True. I think that the greatest invention in the history of music is the symphonic orchestra, due both to its majesty and its versatility. A rock band can definitely make some great music, but is much more limited in terms of variety. I've heard great orchestral remixes, rearrangements, etc, of music from almost every genre.
In a way, I think that orchestral music is the "tortoise" to the "hare" of various trends that come and go. It may not run as fast, but it's steady. It has been around in some form or another for several centuries, and is arguably still more secure than most other genres.
Not all that many people go to symphonies, but almost everyone watches movies and television, where orchestral/symphonic music is the primary featured form. If you took 10 random people who were each a fan of a different style of music (rock, pop, metal, country, etc) with little knowledge of music outside of their preferred genre, probably every single one of them would recognize at least five themes by John Williams (Star Wars March, Imperial March, Superman March, Indiana Jones March, Jurassic Park theme, etc), the Fellowship theme from Howard Shore's "Lord of the Rings", Alan Silvestri's Avengers theme, and a variety of others.
"Personally I think the history of rock is the process of getting more and more extreme. I mean this in multiple ways: loudness and aggression and all that, but also song length, virtuosity, etc. This basically led to metal and way out prog rock stuff. Metal gets to grindcore and theres no where else to go and prog eventually basically turns back towards jazz and classical."
I think you hit the nail on the head. Whether it's about "rebellion" or not, rock has always had a tendency to push musical boundaries. Experimenting, mixing and mashing other things together, trying to develop new sounds, etc. And there's only so far that this can go while still remaining a mainstream genre that's palatable to a majority of people.
Traditions tend to exist for a reason. There's a reason for the old saying that if we can see farther than our ancestors, the only reason is that we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Rock and roll was born out of country, folk, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other such tried and true musical traditions. So of course it was great - it stood on the shoulders of years of musical tradition of other great genres. And later, some rockers took influence from classical music, opera, etc.
But once something fully becomes its own thing and begins to divorce itself from the traditions of its roots (and also fails to seek out and draw from the time-tested traditions of other roots), it runs the risk of becoming an inferior copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and losing the je ne sais quoi that made it what it was in the first place.
The 20th century was a time of rapid musical innovation and experimentation. That resulted in more new genres and styles being invented than ever before, but it also meant that some of them were bound to burn out their potential for going in new directions in record time.
That doesn't mean that rock has to stay dead. But going forward, maybe it's time to stop treating it as the boundary-pushing, innovative music of the youth, because that's only sustainable for a while, and I think most of that while has run out. It might be time to start treating it as an old tradition like folk or classic country. There's nothing wrong with creating new music in old traditions. And just because something doesn't have an innovative new sound doesn't mean it has to be a rehash of existing works. People made new but traditional folk music for centuries without worrying whether it was innovative or different from their grandparent's folk music. And sometimes there's a happy accident and something is new and different. But catching lightning in a bottle is something that can't be forced or easily replicated.
"3. Not only did this happen but the internet made things impossible to forget. So even if YOU discovered something you felt was new and fresh in your playing some guy on the internet will be like, "That's not new. British underground rock legend Argus McFaddle was doing that in 68. Here's a link to his album". Which kinda kills the "endless new songs" need discussed in item 1."
Yes. And the endless variety of the Internet means that the youth of today, if they so choose, can try out all manner of music with an ease unheard of in past decades.
"4. Other popular music genres (like the thing we call "Pop" itself) have more musical options still to explore. But they'll die too. I remember hearing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" for the first time and I literally thought it was just a cover or remix of Madonna's "Express Yourself". By which I mean you're going down too eventually Pop!"
To me, "pop" is the most confusing genre term. It's a shortened version of "popular", which one would think would refer to anything that's popular at the time. But people tend to use it to refer to something more specific. And yet what is classified as "pop" in various decades can vary drastically. For example, Patti Page is generally classified as a pop singer. And yet she sounded absolutely nothing like any mainstream music classified as "pop" being released today. The same goes for the Carpenters and ABBA; they're classified as "pop", but none of today's mainstream music classified as "pop" sounds remotely similar.
I do think that the Michael Jackson/Madonna type of pop that arose in the 1980s (which I can still hear echoes of of in today's pop) has a very limited shelf-life, though. In fact, frankly, I don't know how it lasted as long at it has.
No. It’s an attack on everybody. It’s an attack on me. I did that too. Music is a great part of life but I mean if you do what some band tells you to do…come on.
I don’t think you, or Metal fans, actually do that though.
Rock is testosterone set to music. Unfortunately, all rock bands sound like bands of schoolboys in comparison to Thrash Metal bands which are oozing testosterone. Listening to bands like Metallica, Slayer and others is like being connected directly to a power socket, the energy is flowing through the whole body. Beware, that I am only talking about the golden age of thrash metal (1983-1992). After that time, you can hear in the music the decrease of the musician´s testosterone due to increased age. They were also following musical trends from the 90ies which were very weepy like the music from the guy who blew his brain out in 1994, which led to a further decrease in energy (or testosterone). The patient was dead and every attempt to revive it sucked.
The less testosterone-fueled rock got, the worse. I’ll have to relate my story about the lamest band I ever heard that made me realize how dire the situation was. Maybe I’ve already mentioned them in a past post.
Unfortunately, rock isn't the music of youth culture anymore. It's been completely supplanted by hip hop (and very bad hip hop too, I might add!). The music industry really needs a kickstart. Great article, thanks for sharing!
I think the barrier to entry is much lower for something like hip-hop or electronic music. Learning to play an instrument or actually sing/write is less appealing when you can have a set of tools on your laptop do a large portion of the heavy lifting.
True. And new cool sounds can come from that. But at the price of musicianship, which I think leads to stagnation just as much as everyone trying to shred identically. Everything needs balance. Incorporate the new sounds and electronic approaches but keep it interesting. That’s what Radiohead did in their heyday, and why they were so important.
One thing that I've been pondering lately is exactly how musical genres are defined and how meaningful these definitions are. Most notably, what's the difference between "rock and roll" and just plain "rock? And exactly what defines "pop"? And when did they all start to decline?
My own perspective when it comes to the decline (musically, not in popularity) of rock and roll/rock is that the genre was mostly at its best in the 1950s and 1960s when it still sounded a lot like its original influences (country, rhythm and blues, and gospel) and still featured mostly acoustic instruments with the occasional electric guitar or two. There were some interesting and sometimes great things done with it later as well (such as bands like Queen incorporating some operatic influences), but by the end of the 1980s the genre had (other than some outliers like the Stray Cats) largely become an exercise in excess (too much noise*, too much dependence on electric instruments or too many of them, too much sound drowning out the singer's voices, etc).
I'm probably in the minority in that view, though. A lot of musicians and bands who I consider much too noisy are very popular and even downright revered by many people. Maybe it just means that I mostly prefer "rock and roll" to "rock" and find much of the latter hard to appreciate, although I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins.
* By "noise", I don't mean "loudness" in and of itself. A lot of my favorite music of all time in various genres (classical, rock and roll, movie scores, etc) is loud. "Noise" to me signifies something different that I can't quite put into words.
I get what you’re saying. I appreciate the “noise,” and weird stuff, because they’re attaching outside influence to the rock paradigm, which is the only way to get to something original. I’m all for simple done well though too.
But yeah, rock has gotten far away from the blues and country influence because so many bands and musicians did that so well decades ago. Nowhere else to go, right?
For me and maybe I'm a weirdo (or actually I know I am)
Rock = Rock N Roll = Popular music. I would use any of these terms to describe the post jazz music that resulted from the mix of African and European musical ideas. Country kinda had its own seperate carve out for a while but that's dead. Luke Combs ain't less rock than, say, Tom Petty.
"Pop" and "Rock"/ "Rock N Roll" are also genres in and of themselves. Rock being almost always guitar based and slightly aggressive or assertive. "Pop" usually being much more keyboard or horn based and concerned more with catchiness.
I always thought I didn't like the Wonder Years because it was on TV at the same time of a difficult and stressful period of my childhood, but now I think I was just picking up on those nihilistic undercurrents you mention. I think that show was very weird. Since I haven't watched it in like 30 years and I was too young to get it, I have an impression more than a memory of it hammering this random, discordant humor over synthetic maudlin sentiment. Maybe it was making a joke at Boomers' expense and daring them to recognize it, or maybe that' s what popcult nihilism smelled like back then.
I'm a Millennial with Boomer and GenX taste in music. Rap was becoming the big thing when I was a kid, but I always hated it (although in comparison to modern hip hop, I think '80s and early '90s rap is pretty rad). There are only a couple of bands that came out after 2000 that I can stand listening to, but I've seen The Who, Robert Plant, Neil Young, and Blue Oyster Cult in concert since that time. My kids love metal -- especially Sabaton -- even more than goofy Pokemon polkas, and they usually ask me to sing "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" before bed. Rock ain't dead, it's just resting.
Quite apart from commercial considerations, the thing that afflicts most (not all) rock made these days is the dreary use of cookiecutter mixing/mastering styles, including but not limited to autotune. There's still some marvellous music around, much of it Scandinavian (Motorpsycho, Spidergawd, Elder, Wobbler, Hallas etc), but postproduction techniques make most contemporary rock , which was always best when it at least *tried* to sound loose and spontaneous, artistically as well as commercially dubious. It just sounds sort of disposible.
100 percent. That Rick Beato video I linked at the top of this post gets into how corporate consolidation and simple greed led to the decline of different and risky music because only cookie-cutter stuff would get funded. He and his colleague in the video put it in very stark terms but it’s a credible explanation.
Rock music just doesn’t sound as good as it used to. Even songs where the actual notes sound good are missing that vibe, that LIFE, of the very best music. Very sad.
In the Metal genre I also see a correlation of advanced but similar mixing/mastering styles and an increase in sterility in the music. Nowadays, the instruments are all crystal-clear in the mix (Jason Newsted would be existed), but the mix sounds totally lifeless.
It’s a fine line between clarity and warmth, or life. Sometimes the old fuzzy sounding recordings had more energy because you could hear that it was a bunch of musicians playing together in the same room and not endless, separately recorded parts and overdubs.
Yes gone are the days when you would buy a new album (who does *that* these days?) and wonder how e.g. the drums were gonna sound compared to those on the band's last album. For instance I remember being quite absorbed (I was only a kid) by the difference between the respective drum sounds on Primus's Sailing the Seas of Cheese and Frizzle Fry from a year or two before.
By way of comparison, and as all-time a band as they are, Elder's drum sounds never vary from album to album; this is the case even though they changed drummers a few years ago.
Aha yeah they say exactly the same thing in Beato vid (believe it or not I didn't watch it before commenting). Their account of the origins of the problem is indeed interesting and plausible. It's also in part familiar: BLAME NICKELBACK. Has any rock band ever been worse disdained?
Well, he wasn’t blaming Nickelback for existing, just saying that they were so huge, every record company wanted the next Nickelback. No different than when people were looking for the next Elvis, or next Beatles, or next Led Zeppelin, or next Madonna, or next whatever.
I've always said that if you're a male and you don't like any form or subgenre of Rock music then there might be something wrong with you, but the fact of that matter is that there is something so distinctly male about it that I've never met any guy who hasn't at least made an exception for something or the other.
Since we're in a time where masculinity is bad word in big industry, it's just the exact sort of thing they don't want to promote. Even "geek rock" back in the day had testosterone (Weezer, Nada Surf, Nerf Herder, and Ash . . . kinda), and is too much for modern radio.
I don't see the genre disappearing overnight or anything, but given the climate we're in, it's going to be rough goings for it for a long time.
Oh, it’s total guy music. White guy music. These see the explicit reasons rock always had to be attacked and retconned in a way no other musical form is (not even country).
"I've always said that if you're a male and you don't like any form or subgenre of Rock music then there might be something wrong with you..."
100% true
Hahah my brother used to say something similar.
Sorry this got long.
I think what happened with rock is simple. Disturbingly so, so we discuss it more trying to find a more elegant explanation.
1. A standard rock band (guitarr, bass, drums) is a pretty limited musical palette. Which is bad given that the culture of the genre required endless new songs. It's actually rather amazing how much has been done with such limited options.
2. That palette started to peter out I'm the early 90's. Personally I think the history of rock is the process of getting more and more extreme. I mean this in multiple ways: loudness and aggression and all that, but also song length, virtuosity, etc. This basically led to metal and way out prog rock stuff. Metal gets to grindcore and theres no where else to go and prog eventually basically turns back towards jazz and classical. Whether you agree with metal as the endpoint or not, the basic truth of "not too many places left to go, at least not ones catchy enough to have mass appeal, with this simplistic music after about 40 years" still stands, imo.
3. Not only did this happen but the internet made things impossible to forget. So even if YOU discovered something you felt was new and fresh in your playing some guy on the internet will be like, "That's not new. British underground rock legend Argus McFaddle was doing that in 68. Here's a link to his album". Which kinda kills the "endless new songs" need discussed in item 1.
4. Other popular music genres (like the thing we call "Pop" itself) have more musical options still to explore. But they'll die too. I remember hearing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" for the first time and I literally thought it was just a cover or remix of Madonna's "Express Yourself". By which I mean you're going down too eventually Pop!
That's a long way of saying "We just ran out of new stuff in a literally physical sense of what we could do with vibrating strings on a guitar."
What happens next? I dunno. Repertory rock acts? I could see that. Everybody gets super into some weird new music centered around violins and scat singing. More unlikely....but possible.
Good points. I often think about point number 2. I also can’t hear new music without hearing how it’s just a reskin of an old song. At least Weird Al didn’t lie about a who or what his original compositions were in the style of.
One band doing new things is black midi. They’re very proggy, very heavy at times, very extreme and there only like 23 or so. Really bracing stuff.
"But going forward, maybe it's time to stop treating it as the boundary-pushing innovative music of the youth."
To quote Mick Jagger (or rather to quote Ace Frehley's much better version): "My kids just don't understand me at all."
"1. A standard rock band (guitarr, bass, drums) is a pretty limited musical palette. Which is bad given that the culture of the genre required endless new songs. It's actually rather amazing how much has been done with such limited options."
True. I think that the greatest invention in the history of music is the symphonic orchestra, due both to its majesty and its versatility. A rock band can definitely make some great music, but is much more limited in terms of variety. I've heard great orchestral remixes, rearrangements, etc, of music from almost every genre.
In a way, I think that orchestral music is the "tortoise" to the "hare" of various trends that come and go. It may not run as fast, but it's steady. It has been around in some form or another for several centuries, and is arguably still more secure than most other genres.
Not all that many people go to symphonies, but almost everyone watches movies and television, where orchestral/symphonic music is the primary featured form. If you took 10 random people who were each a fan of a different style of music (rock, pop, metal, country, etc) with little knowledge of music outside of their preferred genre, probably every single one of them would recognize at least five themes by John Williams (Star Wars March, Imperial March, Superman March, Indiana Jones March, Jurassic Park theme, etc), the Fellowship theme from Howard Shore's "Lord of the Rings", Alan Silvestri's Avengers theme, and a variety of others.
"Personally I think the history of rock is the process of getting more and more extreme. I mean this in multiple ways: loudness and aggression and all that, but also song length, virtuosity, etc. This basically led to metal and way out prog rock stuff. Metal gets to grindcore and theres no where else to go and prog eventually basically turns back towards jazz and classical."
I think you hit the nail on the head. Whether it's about "rebellion" or not, rock has always had a tendency to push musical boundaries. Experimenting, mixing and mashing other things together, trying to develop new sounds, etc. And there's only so far that this can go while still remaining a mainstream genre that's palatable to a majority of people.
Traditions tend to exist for a reason. There's a reason for the old saying that if we can see farther than our ancestors, the only reason is that we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Rock and roll was born out of country, folk, rhythm and blues, gospel, and other such tried and true musical traditions. So of course it was great - it stood on the shoulders of years of musical tradition of other great genres. And later, some rockers took influence from classical music, opera, etc.
But once something fully becomes its own thing and begins to divorce itself from the traditions of its roots (and also fails to seek out and draw from the time-tested traditions of other roots), it runs the risk of becoming an inferior copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and losing the je ne sais quoi that made it what it was in the first place.
The 20th century was a time of rapid musical innovation and experimentation. That resulted in more new genres and styles being invented than ever before, but it also meant that some of them were bound to burn out their potential for going in new directions in record time.
That doesn't mean that rock has to stay dead. But going forward, maybe it's time to stop treating it as the boundary-pushing, innovative music of the youth, because that's only sustainable for a while, and I think most of that while has run out. It might be time to start treating it as an old tradition like folk or classic country. There's nothing wrong with creating new music in old traditions. And just because something doesn't have an innovative new sound doesn't mean it has to be a rehash of existing works. People made new but traditional folk music for centuries without worrying whether it was innovative or different from their grandparent's folk music. And sometimes there's a happy accident and something is new and different. But catching lightning in a bottle is something that can't be forced or easily replicated.
"3. Not only did this happen but the internet made things impossible to forget. So even if YOU discovered something you felt was new and fresh in your playing some guy on the internet will be like, "That's not new. British underground rock legend Argus McFaddle was doing that in 68. Here's a link to his album". Which kinda kills the "endless new songs" need discussed in item 1."
Yes. And the endless variety of the Internet means that the youth of today, if they so choose, can try out all manner of music with an ease unheard of in past decades.
"4. Other popular music genres (like the thing we call "Pop" itself) have more musical options still to explore. But they'll die too. I remember hearing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" for the first time and I literally thought it was just a cover or remix of Madonna's "Express Yourself". By which I mean you're going down too eventually Pop!"
To me, "pop" is the most confusing genre term. It's a shortened version of "popular", which one would think would refer to anything that's popular at the time. But people tend to use it to refer to something more specific. And yet what is classified as "pop" in various decades can vary drastically. For example, Patti Page is generally classified as a pop singer. And yet she sounded absolutely nothing like any mainstream music classified as "pop" being released today. The same goes for the Carpenters and ABBA; they're classified as "pop", but none of today's mainstream music classified as "pop" sounds remotely similar.
I do think that the Michael Jackson/Madonna type of pop that arose in the 1980s (which I can still hear echoes of of in today's pop) has a very limited shelf-life, though. In fact, frankly, I don't know how it lasted as long at it has.
Tangentially related: The actress who played Winnie Cooper has converted to Christianity.
Great news!
"That people base their entire lives over a musical genre is fucking pathetic."
Is this an attack on every metal subgenre scene, sir?
No. It’s an attack on everybody. It’s an attack on me. I did that too. Music is a great part of life but I mean if you do what some band tells you to do…come on.
I don’t think you, or Metal fans, actually do that though.
You ever get in an argument with a black metal fan? LOL
Great article btw. Rock, in all it's forms and down to the teensiest microgenre will always matter, even if it's not making the top 40.
No I can’t say I’ve ever argued with a black metal fan!
And thanks for the kind words. Rock will always matter to some people because every art form has people it resonates with. And that’s beautiful.
Rock is testosterone set to music. Unfortunately, all rock bands sound like bands of schoolboys in comparison to Thrash Metal bands which are oozing testosterone. Listening to bands like Metallica, Slayer and others is like being connected directly to a power socket, the energy is flowing through the whole body. Beware, that I am only talking about the golden age of thrash metal (1983-1992). After that time, you can hear in the music the decrease of the musician´s testosterone due to increased age. They were also following musical trends from the 90ies which were very weepy like the music from the guy who blew his brain out in 1994, which led to a further decrease in energy (or testosterone). The patient was dead and every attempt to revive it sucked.
The less testosterone-fueled rock got, the worse. I’ll have to relate my story about the lamest band I ever heard that made me realize how dire the situation was. Maybe I’ve already mentioned them in a past post.
Which band is the lamest rock band?
This video: https://youtu.be/Io8PqddrRIs?si=_dbvz2qv2UpT7x-y
I also would like to hear more.
Maybe the often maligned Nickelback...
Rock music is my jam. I’m not a musician, but rock makes me feel alive like no other music. Thank you for this awesome article.
A kindred spirit! Thanks for the comment and I’m glad you liked the article.
Unfortunately, rock isn't the music of youth culture anymore. It's been completely supplanted by hip hop (and very bad hip hop too, I might add!). The music industry really needs a kickstart. Great article, thanks for sharing!
Also, since you love music, you'll LOVE my biographical articles about musicians: https://hothistory.substack.com/t/celebrity
Thank you sir! I’ll check that article out.
I think the barrier to entry is much lower for something like hip-hop or electronic music. Learning to play an instrument or actually sing/write is less appealing when you can have a set of tools on your laptop do a large portion of the heavy lifting.
True. And new cool sounds can come from that. But at the price of musicianship, which I think leads to stagnation just as much as everyone trying to shred identically. Everything needs balance. Incorporate the new sounds and electronic approaches but keep it interesting. That’s what Radiohead did in their heyday, and why they were so important.
One thing that I've been pondering lately is exactly how musical genres are defined and how meaningful these definitions are. Most notably, what's the difference between "rock and roll" and just plain "rock? And exactly what defines "pop"? And when did they all start to decline?
My own perspective when it comes to the decline (musically, not in popularity) of rock and roll/rock is that the genre was mostly at its best in the 1950s and 1960s when it still sounded a lot like its original influences (country, rhythm and blues, and gospel) and still featured mostly acoustic instruments with the occasional electric guitar or two. There were some interesting and sometimes great things done with it later as well (such as bands like Queen incorporating some operatic influences), but by the end of the 1980s the genre had (other than some outliers like the Stray Cats) largely become an exercise in excess (too much noise*, too much dependence on electric instruments or too many of them, too much sound drowning out the singer's voices, etc).
I'm probably in the minority in that view, though. A lot of musicians and bands who I consider much too noisy are very popular and even downright revered by many people. Maybe it just means that I mostly prefer "rock and roll" to "rock" and find much of the latter hard to appreciate, although I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins.
* By "noise", I don't mean "loudness" in and of itself. A lot of my favorite music of all time in various genres (classical, rock and roll, movie scores, etc) is loud. "Noise" to me signifies something different that I can't quite put into words.
I get what you’re saying. I appreciate the “noise,” and weird stuff, because they’re attaching outside influence to the rock paradigm, which is the only way to get to something original. I’m all for simple done well though too.
But yeah, rock has gotten far away from the blues and country influence because so many bands and musicians did that so well decades ago. Nowhere else to go, right?
For me and maybe I'm a weirdo (or actually I know I am)
Rock = Rock N Roll = Popular music. I would use any of these terms to describe the post jazz music that resulted from the mix of African and European musical ideas. Country kinda had its own seperate carve out for a while but that's dead. Luke Combs ain't less rock than, say, Tom Petty.
"Pop" and "Rock"/ "Rock N Roll" are also genres in and of themselves. Rock being almost always guitar based and slightly aggressive or assertive. "Pop" usually being much more keyboard or horn based and concerned more with catchiness.
I always thought I didn't like the Wonder Years because it was on TV at the same time of a difficult and stressful period of my childhood, but now I think I was just picking up on those nihilistic undercurrents you mention. I think that show was very weird. Since I haven't watched it in like 30 years and I was too young to get it, I have an impression more than a memory of it hammering this random, discordant humor over synthetic maudlin sentiment. Maybe it was making a joke at Boomers' expense and daring them to recognize it, or maybe that' s what popcult nihilism smelled like back then.
I'm a Millennial with Boomer and GenX taste in music. Rap was becoming the big thing when I was a kid, but I always hated it (although in comparison to modern hip hop, I think '80s and early '90s rap is pretty rad). There are only a couple of bands that came out after 2000 that I can stand listening to, but I've seen The Who, Robert Plant, Neil Young, and Blue Oyster Cult in concert since that time. My kids love metal -- especially Sabaton -- even more than goofy Pokemon polkas, and they usually ask me to sing "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" before bed. Rock ain't dead, it's just resting.
We sound about the same age with simple tastes. And I agree with your assessment: rock is resting. It’s in a state of repose.