Hellllllllllllllllooooooooooooo Otterites!
Frannie opened the proverbial can of worms this time. I just don’t even know where to begin, so I guess I’ll just go in the order he brought up his particular thoughts.
Item the first: The “great” Gene Simmons? Really? Gene and the boys have been relevant for 50 years? Seriously? Look. I get it. You like the band. I have absolutely no issue with that, beyond the whole idea that this is KISS we’re talking about, but to each his own. Still, I’m having a hard time with the relevant thing. Are they still performing? Recording? Or did they take 30 years off and then decided to jump on the nostalgia bandwagon and tour or record a new track or two? Also, I don’t think too many people our age lost their minds when he made his “Rock is dead.” statement, because almost none of us actually heard him say it. Either time.
Anyway, my mind is still reeling over this one.
Item the second: Now that I know what he said, I agree. Rock as we knew it is dead and has been for a while. Well. Not dead exactly, but it’s at least like your old uncle Stu that sits in the nursing home grab-assing all the pretty nurses and telling dirty jokes between raiding the drug locker and having booze smuggled in. In fact, I think your uncle Stu might have been one of those early Rock legends at one time, now that I think about it.
Anyway, Marty makes a good case for the overall path of that from Elvis to today.
I think where I differ with the guys is this… Rock is far too broad a term. Seriously. Before it went on life support, Rock was basically a generic label for what the kids were listening to just then. It was conflated with what’s popular. Then pop music became something else somewhere along the way when curmudgeons like Marty told the pop stars to get off his musical lawn.
Speaking of which, I once saw Musical Lawn open for Limp Bizkit back in ’94 at this little dive bar in Orlando when they were both first starting out. The lead singers hated each other (something about someone’s sister, a trained monkey and a Betamax video) and a brawl broke out between sets. Someone set fire to the Bizkit drums and the whole place went up like dry hay, a bag of airborne flower and charcoal grill soaked in three gallons of lighter fluid. Police came. Fire came. It was a mess. But I got out of my bar tab because of it, so all in all it was an awesome show.
But I digress.
I think the label Rock lost its meaning some time back. Look at who we consider to be Rock stars and what kind of music they played. Elvis and the boppers of the 50s are more related to the jazz that came before them than to the later stuff once you get into the 70s. You can see the progression from Elvis to the Beatles to the other early 60s groups, even up to the Monkees. It was mostly linear, but once the drugs really became part of the scene, almost required really, things changed dramatically.
We got folk rock. Acid rock. Hard rock. Pop rocks. Wait. That was a candy, and killer with a bottle of Coke. Anyway, then you get derivations like disco, soul music, punk, new wave, album rock, rock opera, rock paper scissors, metal, grunge and God knows what else along the way.
There are so many sub-genres of “Rock” that I’m not sure the term has meaning anymore, which is what lead to its demise in my opinion. When everything is something, then nothing is.
Would Elvis recognize Metallica as Rock? What does Puff the Magic Dragon folksy Rock have in common with Poison and Nirvana? I’m having a hard time calling them both the same kind of music. Heck, almost no one called disco Rock, but it’s from the same roots.
Item the third: The cause. As I allude above, it wasn’t tech that sent Uncle Stu, I mean Rock, to the old musician’s home. It was branding everything Rock and then getting snooty about what should be excluded. Once you start down the pop path and calling it all Rock, you can’t begin excluding stuff. Each of the types of music above has their own adherents and often can’t stand other types. If it’s all Rock, why is that? It’s not just a Journey vs. Foreigner thing either. I’m talking types of music, not the bands themselves.
Technology certainly plays a role in all change, but I don’t think Apple Music, Spotify and free music did a thing here. Frannie’s assertion that once anyone can put out music, nothing is special anymore is way off base. If you look at what gets played on those services, it’s still basically an incredibly tiny number of songs and bands. At best, tech gives newcomers a way to get their stuff out there by getting past the record company gatekeepers, but the music still has to be GOOD, or no one will listen.
Rock is not dominant anymore because I don’t think there’s a decent definition of what it is anymore. And tastes change. Rap/hip hop and related music seems to dominate now. I don’t care for it myself, but I wouldn’t call it Rock.
What I listen to is primarily is New Wave, punk and alternative music from my high school/college years. Its roots are in Rock, but I don’t consider it Rock music. Even U2, the Police and others that made it big. I guess to me, Rock didn’t even live as long as Marty and Frannie think. To me it was pretty much over by the 80s with new offshoots and evolutions taking up the reigns. There’s a progression, yes, but it’s different to me.
Item the fourth: I think Country music adapted and evolved to the point where it probably needs subgenre labels like Rock got. Hank WIlliams and Shania Twain are country, but are they really the same? Country became its own kind of pop music in many ways. It used to be more niche but became more mainstream thanks to Urban Cowboy and a few other cultural events. CMT (MTV for rednecks. KIDDING!!!) helped it grow and become more relevant as did the line dancing phenomenon for instance. Also, getting some seriously attractive women out there selling records didn’t hurt. Country, like Rock before it, was dominated by no so good-looking men for a long time. Put a guitar in an ugly guy’s hands, and he’s suddenly worth a second look.
Time to wrap this up. As usual, I’ve gone way too long.
If Rock is dead, or in the nursing home, then I blame the Boomers and the Millennials.
Rock is the music of the Boomers. It was created for and by them (with a lot of drugs) essentially. The tail end of the Boomers though took off in new directions and really was done by the time us Gen Xers started branching out with our variations. Though we still liked and listened to Rock, because it was the first music many of us were exposed to as little kids. As always, our generation could pivot and handle change. We could like music from multiple periods, artists and genres without sacrificing our favorites. I can listen to some Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Journey, Foreigner or whatever. I still go back to Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, the Furs, U2, the Police and so on though.
Boomers won’t let go of their icons so you get octogenarians touring with IV bags of vodka, gin or some other cocktail of drugs and alcohol hanging off their mic stands and charging outrageous sums to hear them wheeze through a set. Gen X will probably do the same. Millennials and Gen Z? Well, I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on with most of them. I will say that two of my kids appreciate my music and listen to real Rock and real New Wave/Punk as well as more recent stuff. Second Daughter listens more current pop stuff than First Daughter and The Boy, but she can appreciate some of the older stuff too.
If Rock is dead, it’s because it’s at the natural end of its life cycle. It has secondary conditions and comorbidities to be sure, but maybe the reality is that it just got old?
