Is rock'n'roll going the way of the dodo, like jazz did?

Cafe Society
41

Wow - sounds like you might get some value in listening a bit harder. The White Stripes are no more a tribute band than Zep was when they took Willie Dixon tunes and re-cast them in a rock vein (and eventually got around to compensating him for it, too). Sure both Zep and WS take obvious influences - but they build on then and do very interesting things that the influences didn’t do. There is a lot more going on with The White Stripes than mere aping.

As for “pissing your parents off” - I do think that rock music, at its core, is dangerous if it is done right. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it angers your parents - it means that there is something challenging and open about it - it reaches into places folks don’t normally go, or takes risks musically. The issue is that when a whole genre “reaches into places folks don’t normally go” you can run out of places that are dangerous - society gets used to that new openness, just like porn is mainstream now…

42

Black Sabbath used to be the Polk Tuna Blues Band, if I recall correctly. You’d be surprised where the blues lives. That said, I think rap is on its way out. It’s definitely been desaturated from the top 40.

43

Lesse…for the week ending 5/5/07:

1 - Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne
2 - Give It To Me - Timbaland & Nelly Furtado
3 - Don’t Matter - Akon
4 - Glamorous - Fergie
5 - Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’) - T-Pain
6 - I Tried - Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
7 - The Sweet Escape - Gwen Stefani
8 - Cupid’s Chokehold - Gym Class Heroes
9 - What I’ve Done - Linkin Park
10 - Beautiful Liar - Beyonce & Shakira
11 - This Is Why I’m Hot - Mims
12 - Throw Some D’S - Rich Boy
13 - U & Ur Hand - Pink
14 - Like A Boy - Ciara
15 - With Love - Hilary Duff
16 - Pop, Lock & Drop It - Huey
17 - Candyman - Christina Aguilera
18 - Lost Without U - Robin Thicke
19 - What Goes Around - Justin Timberlake
20 - Last Dollar (Fly Away) - Tim McGraw
21 - Rock Yo Hips - Crime Mob
22 - Say It Right - Nelly Furtado
23 - If Everyone Cared - Nickelback
24 - This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race - Fall Out Boy
25 - Home - Daughtry
26 - Anyway - Martina McBride
27 - Get It Shawty - Lloyd
28 - Lips Of An Angel - Hinder
29 - Summer Love - Justin Timberlake
30 - Because Of You - Ne-Yo
31 - The Way I Live - Baby Boy Da Prince
32 - Wasted - Carrie Underwood
33 - Big Girls Don’t Cry - Fergie
34 - Waiting On The World To Change - John Mayer
35 - I’m A Flirt - R. Kelly
36 - 2 Step - Unk
37 - Everything - Michael Buble
38 - Keep Holding On - Avril Lavigne
39 - How To Save A Life - Fray
40 - Baby We Takin’ Over - DJ Khaled

I count 10 rap acts in there (although it’s possible that number is slightly off – I don’t know every act on there, and I’m trying to distinguish rap from straight R&B). I don’t know if I would call 25% representation “desaturated”.

44

Wonderfully put.

I’d also like to point out that the ads at the bottom of this thread are shilling Led Zepelin ring tones. When being ‘bad’ is hip, when rebeliousness is marketed and handed down to teens by ad execs and MTV, when danger and life “on the edge” are mainstream, where do you find the spark that created the music revolution of the 60s and 70s?

45

My survey is an unscientific summation of what’s in constant rotation on Z-100.
Last summer: All rap, occasional pop.
This summer: Light pop, occasional rap.

46

IMO, rock is on its way out. The last real rock bands with any real commercial impact, and a spark of originality, were REM and the grunge bands.

This is not to say that great rock isn’t being made now, but mostly you have to dig for it. It’s not on the commercial stations. If you have to work to get it, then yeah, it’s like jazz. All the stuff about rock being about rebellion is only part of its allure. It more importantly about a broad agreement about what constitutes a moving musical experience. It seems to me that hiphop occupies that niche nowadays, although the people I know who like that stuff say it peaked with Notorious BIG, and has been declining ever since. I wouldn’t know; my ear for hiphop is like my dad’s ear for rock. All sounds the same.

Also, rock was always corporate. The great rock acts (and the ones that totally sucked) of the past were big business. The great rock acts of today are cottage industries.

You never know what’s going to happen, though. After all, Bach came in at the tail end of the baroque period, and was completely ignored for 80 years.

47

Eh. The death of rock gets predicted on a semi-regular basis. I remember 1990, when rap and hair metal dominated the charts and people were asking whether rock was dead. Then in 1991 Jesus Jones put out a straightforward rock record that seemed like a lone voice crying in the wilderness, and Rolling Stone (or maybe it was Spin) ran a cover story with the caption: Can Jesus Jones Save Rock Music?

Of course the huge wave that was Nirvana crashed ashore soon thereafter, and any doubts about the future of rock were resolved.

You could have written that in 1990, back when all those alternative bands were just bubbling around on college radio. Back when they were, you know, alternative.

48

I stand by my story.

49

This thread is really sad (for one, how can sane person think all rock music is going away?), but it reminds me of a paraphased rock truism that goes back to the beginning.

“If you think rock is dead, you’re too old.”

I could list great (and popular) rock bands until the cows came home and I don’t think it would do any good. All of you fogeys have already made up your minds.

It’s not about rebellion. It’s not about being louder than the last guy. It’s not about scaring your parents (WTF?). And it’s not about constantly reinventing the rock wheel. It’s about good music, that’s all.

And there’s plenty of it out there.

50

Hey - what am I, chopped liver? :smiley:

As an old fogey, I was arguing that there is a lot of great rock out there! Or else, what am I going to do with this new Kings of Leon CD I have loaded into my player? (okay, I still buy the occasional CD - so sue me…obviously a vestige of my fogey-ish nature…)

51

You’re right. I did’t mean to slather everyone in this thread with that brush. Just the people who keep shouting “rock is dead” like that means something in a world where the biggest bands are U2 and Green Day.

52

I am of the opinion that the primary driving force behind the rock revolution was technology. Prior to the electrified guitar, music was for centuries the domain of instruments that could fill a room with sound without a speaker system.

When the solid-body electric guitar came out in 1950, it became possible for fewer people to play to a bigger audience than ever before. Add to that the phenomenon of television and the baby boom, and the next fifty years of music became tech-driven: electric bass, electric piano, electric organ, synthesizers, digital reverb, sampling, drumboxes, stereo, quadrophonic sound, digital recording, compact discs, and so on.

Sampling rates and digital keyboards have surpassed the fidelity detectable by the human ear. Any waveform you want, you can create. Any sample you want, you can record in stereo. Technology isn’t driving music now — marketing is.

Right now the record industry seeks a way to make us buy our albums all over again. The technology has crested, to a degree, in that sound fidelity is so good that people are no longer motivated to switch media. We traded our platters for vinyl, our vinyl for 8-tracks, our 8-tracks for cassettes, and our cassettes for CDs, and we’re ripping our CDs to iPods, but we’re not replacing our CDs with whatever the latest technology is.

Part of what fragmented the listening audience in years past was, in my opinion, the variety of incompatible media. You didn’t listen to Frank Sinatra in your car because you didn’t have a turntable in your car, you had a cassette player.

Now it’s possible to listen to damn near anything on CD, so younger listeners have a wider variety of music available on their iPods than I ever had, for instance, on my Walkman. This isn’t the death of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s the cross-pollination of fifty years of music as music availability finally catches up with the innovation of new media.

That’s just my two cents, of course.

53

Well fine then - I consider myself un-slathered :smiley:

And **Fish **- good points.

And if anyone wants to wander over my thread about the Fountains of Wayne song Subaru - by all means please do! Great song - power-pop more than rock (although the song *does rock), but further proof that cool stuff is still happening in guitar-based rock land…

*as I said, and as I think is key to the OP, rock should be dangerous in some way or another. This FoW song is great, is guitar-based, and does rock - but isn’t dangerous in any way…

54

That brings up an interesting tangent–what’s dangerous these days?

55

**uf **- all-powerful, deeply-knowledged (?) music dude (and genetics expert) that you are - I nominate you to start a new thread about that! Seems like a smart question worthy of its own attention…

56

That’s true, I think. On my iPod I have the stuff my parents listened to growing up: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Elvis, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bob Dylan, and lots of others. I have stuff from the 70s: Led Zeppelin, Peter Frampton, Queen, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath. I’ve got stuff from the 80s: early U2, Duran Duran, The Police, late ZZ Top. Some of this overlapped of course, I’m just trying to give an idea. And of course I have the stuff I listened to as a teenager: Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, The Offspring, Metallica, Nirvana, Beck, Stone Temple Pilots and many more. Lots of other music as well–I’ve got rap, I’ve got various forms of electronic, I’ve got world fusion, soundtracks, all sorts of instrumental stuff. I’ve got Elton John and Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and Simon and Garfunkel and Santana.

According to iTunes, I’ve probably got over 300 different artists on my hard drive, not counting compilations. I have probably 150 physical CDs, and iTunes claims nearly 400 different album titles. There’s better than 4,000 individual songs on my iPod. I could listen every minute of every day for more than a week before I started to repeat my collection. I doubt my father had that sort of collection, not to mention easier of storage and high-quality reproduction when he was in grad school 30-35 years ago. And I walk to and from my research and studies every single day with that much music on my hip, as well as some movies and TV shows.

57

Rock and roll is here to stay, it’ll go down in history…

Rock is dead they say, long live rock!

Next wave, new phase, it’s still rock and roll to me.

We should try to list all the songs that are reactions to people saying Rock is Dead.
There’s some seriously kicking rock out there. Want to find it? Well… the problem is, the radio sucks, so how do you find good bands? Me, I listen to people reccomending. Also, I read www.questionablecontent.net and every time they namecheck a band, I check to see if I like them. I’ve heard some really good stuff that way. And a lot of crap.

58

Sure there is. Is it relevant? Does it make a statement?

Try looking at rock music and instead of the label rock, substitute it for jazz. In fact, re-read all this thread and substitute “rock” with “jazz” in all post advocating that rock is alive and well.

There a great musicians out there, there are new songs being written, and it’s being labeled rock. But it’s still only re-heating stuff that’s been done before. It’s like Harry Connick - he’s not adding anything to the crooning genre, he’s just recycling

[tangent]
Which is also why I liked Blake Lewis’ take on Bon Jovi this week. It actually added something to an old standard.

[/]

59

I’m sorry, but I look at the “innovation theory” as total crap. Nothing is “innovative” anymore and even if it was that word lost all meaning a long time ago.

The same debate rages in video game circles. There are those of us who are happy to be playing good games and there are those that want every game to completely reinvent the wheel with new control styles, new graphical views and new genres shoved into classic franchises.

I say reinventing the wheel is overrated, it’s still rock and roll to me.

60

Sorry for the hijack, just had to nitpick for a sec.

Yamaha, not Roland, manufactured the DX-7. It wasn’t a cheap home synth, costing around $1,700 when it first came out, and it had no sampling capability whatsoever. It used digital oscillators to create its sounds. It was also used on literally thousands of records (especially ballads) in the 80’s for its bright, bell-like, electric piano tones.

Sampling was available at the time, through instruments like the Fairlight, Synclavier, and Kurzweil. They were certainly not inexpensive.