Yep, Rock is Dead. Probably.
Disclaimer # 1: I know people have been saying rock is dead ever since it was born.
Disclaimer #2: I know that rock has previously slipped into comas only to make miraculous recoveries. 1960–62 didn’t look great for mainstream rock ’n’ roll, and neither did most of the ’80s. This is why people like Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Nirvana and REM.
Disclaimer #3: Yes, people still listen to classic rock. They also listen to jazz and Renaissance music. Anything that’s good is always going to last in the form of nostalgia.
Disclaimer #4: It’s impossible to make informed judgements about today’s music industry unless you spend eight days a week listening to new releases, and I spend seven listening to a mix of just about everything.
Now that I’ve got all that out of the way, I think rock is, well, dead. It was last seen kicking and screaming somewhere around the early 2000s, when a slew of vital releases came out one after another: Elephant, Origin of Symmetry, Black Holes and Revelations, Is This It, Toxicity, Kid A, Amnesiac, Songs for the Deaf, etc, etc. Not all of these albums were debuts, but all of them came relatively early in the artists’ careers, summed up an existing movement or suggested a new one, and carried a cultural weight that later rock has lacked. Since the middle of the last decade rock bands that came to prominence in the late ‘90s/early 2000s have steadily become less interesting and there’s been a lack of newer, hungrier artists to take their place.
Of course, it’s notoriously difficult to define rock given that it’s just about the most assimilationist genre of all time. But assuming that it is a distinct entity that can be separated from rap, dance, pop, funk/fusion and singer-songwriter music, I can’t think of a single rock album since Funeral that’s combined innovation and significant mainstream success. (Oh OK, let’s call LCD Soundsystem a rock band and give 2007’s Sound of Silver some respect. But their next couple of albums haven’t had the same spark and they haven’t influenced as much great music as they should’ve.) The status of rock today has been compared to the status of jazz in the ’60s, and I think that’s right on the money. In other words, it’s heritage music enjoyed by an ever-decreasing number of loyalists.
Its death was a long, slow one. Barring a short-lived renaissance or two, I don’t think rock’s been the undisputed king of the hill since the early ’70s. In those WAXQ-friendly days the “serious” mainstream was made up almost exclusively of white dudes like Led Zep and Floyd, and rock, that fundamentally aggressive genre, dominated both the album charts and the critical conversation. Meanwhile, black artists mostly sang to each other via funk, r’n’b and soul, and female voices were largely confined to pop and the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement.
Fast-forward to today and the situation’s almost entirely reversed. Hip-hop is more culturally powerful than ever before and pop — well, the word stands for “popular”, doesn’t it? The one is a predominantly black movement and always has been, while the other is now arguably dominated by female voices, with a side-helping of incredibly androgynous male voices (rendered even more so by Autotune). The only similarly popular movements are EDM, which is an essentially depersonalised form, and the singer-songwriter scene. As rock withers away, acoustic music is now the outlet for white men that it used to be for white women. Think about it: Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Hozier…
This isn’t just a matter of album sales. White male performers are still well represented in every genre going, and a lot of them do fairly well for themselves — but none of them matter the way they used to. Today’s rock is nostalgia. Today’s male pop is anodyne. Neither category deserves, nor receives, the buzz that accompanies releases like To Pimp a Butterfly or Lemonade. They don’t make the chattering classes chatter.
The extent of this reversal is astonishing, particularly if pop culture reflects society’s values as much as it’s supposed to. It’s been said by Christgau and others that the white public has never been able to tolerate an aggressively heterosexual black male voice — hence the preference for the “otherness” of Little Richard, Prince and Michael Jackson. But today’s rap is chock full of aggressively heterosexual black males. Meanwhile, the ferocity of contemporary female singers’ pipes is matched only by the power of their personas. Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Adele et al could knock the current crop of white dudes over by blowing on ‘em.
You can see where I’m going with this. One of the main reasons rock died has to be that people eventually got sick of the Mick Jaggers and Liam Gallaghers barking their way across the airwaves. Today’s listening public has decided it wants to hear what a quiet, humbled white masculinity sounds like, and it’s time to give other demographics their turn to make some noise. After decades of rejecting black innovations until the Elvises and Eminems took them up, it seems white listeners now want to encounter them on their own terms.
Culturally speaking, this new open-mindedness is great news. But musically speaking, I miss rock ’n’ roll. The thrashings of The Who and the swagger of the Stones speak to me on a level that I don’t fully understand, and I’m pained to think that music may have left them behind for good. And the fact that ’60s nostalgia remains such big business — just look at the wild success of Paul McCartney’s new marketing campaign — indicates that I’m not alone. In fact, rock’s go-go heyday continues to exert a ridiculous amount of power over people’s imaginations given that it happened half a century ago: can you imagine Boomer kids listening to Dixieland jazz? I would argue that this is because classic rock — along with classic soul and funk — contains a potent mixture of joy and fury that we haven’t quite been able to match since.
Robert Christgau hints at why in his 1970 essay on rock and feminism, “Look at that Stupid Girl” (the title’s ironic): ‘Unless a woman wants to contend that it was only masochism that induced her to dig on “Heart of Stone” in 1965, then she has to admit that there was something there — some energy…that was good for her. Even if the energy of rock is nothing more than sublimated (or not so sublimated) machismo, such machismo can be a step on the way out, a naïve reaction against apparent sources of oppression, and in that way it is beautiful.’
I’d go a step further and say that — while it’s generally entangled with ugliness and violence, just like pretty much everything in the world — there’s something beautiful and powerful about masculinity in and of itself, just like pretty much everything in the world. Furthermore, I’m not convinced that white ’n’ male rock was ever so white ’n’ male. I’m thinking of the genre’s r ’n’ b roots, the transformational innovations of Berry, Hendrix, Sly and Prince, even the disproportionate amount of high baritones and tenors in the ranks of rock frontmen (hardly the traditional “manliness” of Sinatra, Crosby and Armstrong). Just like the literary canon that Harold Bloom’s sworn to defend, rock ’n’ roll was subversive from the get-go. Its cultural influence has been both good and bad, but never monolithic.
The Beatles epitomise all of this. At a time when Fifties rock ’n’ roll was in its last death throes, they birthed its successor, rock, by fusing the white ’n’ male energy of Jerry Lee Lewis with the black ’n’ female energy of Motown girl groups. Their groundbreaking synthesis brought together melody and rhythm, virility and tenderness, joy and despair, aggression and beauty, anger and love. As well as marrying melodic sweetness to instrumental grit the lads flaunted long hair, expressed genuine affection for each other in public and generally questioned the rigidity of society’s roles and codes. From there it was but a short hop to the Kate Bushes, Bowies and Princes. All these blendings and subversions were so thorough that you couldn’t even say which of the music’s traits were “masculine” and which were “feminine”: they were all both and neither. The songs were liberating because they encapsulated every experience at once.
When you look at rock less as a conservative throwback and more as the enemy of stiffness and excessive authoritarianism wherever they may be found, its “death” reads more like a suicide: the great subverter finally subverting itself. Having snuck all kinds of otherness into society through the Trojan Horse of white masculinity, the rockers passed on the baton once society was willing to let the “others” speak for themselves. Eventually, of course, the genre itself calcified as it became more and more tightly associated with angry dudes playing loud guitar and lost the stylistic promiscuity that had always been its greatest charm. The staunchest enemy of rigidity and inflexibility had itself become rigid and inflexible. After 15 years of grunge, indie and post-post-post-post-punk, LCD Soundsystem’s dancefloor bangers and Arcade Fire’s neo-Bandisms were too little, too late.
It’s possible that rock is in another one of its comas and will wake up any day now, or that an excessive backlash against the ugly side of current identity political trends will spawn an unpalatable “reactionary rock” movement (thus giving further ammo to everyone who equates the genre with Ted Nugent). But I think it’s more likely that mainstream Western culture has heard all from rock that it wants to hear. Culturally speaking, its job is done.
It’s just a shame I like it so damn much.
First photo by Marc-Olivier Paquin on Unsplash
