Is The "Rock Era" Over? If so, when did it end?

In the same way an elevator-Muzak version of the Beatles is not rock.

Jacob Deraps paying homage to the rock gods: Van Halen I'm the One Cover - YouTube

For me it died at 6 am* January 12, 2005. 99.1 WHFS, a Washington DC-area station and the last Rock station I really enjoyed, changed format to Spanish language and music. There have been high-profile homicides that made more sense to me and affected me less.

Also, it died on MTV maybe a decade earlier. Rap and grunge squeezed everything else out, and then “reality television” ate those.


*Wikipedia says it was at 12 noon, but I was there. I was in my car, driving home from my graveyard shift printing job, and I witnessed this cultural atrocity myself.

The thread title asks about the end of the Rock Era, not the end of rock.

I believe that rap/hip-hop has essentially the same place in today’s world that rock held during the “Rock Era”; but I don’t know exactly when the transition happened. (And I’m not happy about that, because I subjectively hate rap. Objectively, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it. I just don’t enjoy it.)

That doesn’t mean that people weren’t making or listening to or doing really interesting things with other kinds of music, then or now.

Rock isn’t dead. Neither is country, or jazz, or soul, or bluegrass, or… But the Rock Era is dead.

I still think that hip hop doesn’t have the cultural reach that rock did. To me it’s about the lack of melodies on offer. Songs always got “remembered” that way.

This, exactly.

I would say no. My daughter is 12 and, with no influence from me whatsoever, came to the conclusion that the music of the past is great and today’s music sucks. I doubt that’s a rare opinion among a lot of young people.

That’s not a direct proof that they don’t think it sounds old, however. To argue that specific point, I would say the following. The song “Rock Around the Clock” came out on May 20, 1954, and the start of the Rock and Roll Era is often thought to begin then. Rock was seen as a dramatic break with older pop forms. The music of today is not seen as a dramatic break with 80s music (it seems to me). Because it isn’t.

Hip-hop is not a dramatic break either since it didn’t replace rock per se; it was born in the rock era and continued along with it.

The present is not like the past. The mirror of taste has fragmented into a thousand shards. The music industry is worth today about half of what it was at the end of the 1990s. A #1 hit today is not equivalent in dollars, records sold, or prestige to what it was in the 1980s.

But people can’t seem to resist the temptation to pretend that all the relationships that held in the past still hold. Kids today aren’t rebelling against their parents music, and there is no new type of music on the rise to replace the old. The musical genres are all played out, and while an infinite number of good songs could yet be written, in essence nothing new is going to happen without a complete overhauling of how society relates to popular music. (E.g., maybe we’ll collectively decide to live in a Maxfield Parrish painting and play the lyre or something.)

I can’t say whether you’re right or wrong on this, as I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I had ignored and mentally dismissed the entire 90s in the US (because I had felt totally burned by the 80s and ended up going to Japan, which I did listen to a lot of stuff in the golden age of J-pop). I ended up re-doing the 90s a few years ago when I got into Soundgarden. But even at this time what you indicated above didn’t fall on my mental radar. Not because you’re wrong but probably because, just as you say, it was a revolution that didn’t fly.

The question is: is there a support base for any kind of music any more, and if there is, will there be 20, 30, etc., years from now? My feeling is that popular music (of all genres) is going to collapse as a “thing” and it will essentially enter the realm of hobbyism, as has happened to poetry. Will there be another big rock blast before that happens? It’s possible.

If music collapses as a thing then what will happen to the muse? What was the appeal in the first place? Where does the impulse in people go?

I agree that modern music might be made, sold, enjoyed without any muse in it. Because people may just be participating in a learned consumerist behavior, where the aesthetic just got lost, in favor of volume, status, peer notions, etc.

But music would go on somewhere else in that case. It wouldn’t be mainstream and likely would be ignored here.

Music is clearly something that humans on average would not choose to live without, and music consumption itself will, I firmly believe, remain steady.

There is a big economic incentive to use music to sell something or someone, so in the year 2050, there will probably be the equivalent of Taylor Swift. But you won’t have a real Top 40 as we did in the 80s–we don’t even really have that now. The number of bands making money off of music will contract further, and the legacy acts like U2 that can really sell a big venue will come to a close as they retire and die off, since they won’t be replaced.

There is already a huge oversupply of music, and that is only going to get worse. I read a stat within the last couple months that 70% of music streams are non-recent music. As the catalog grows of good stuff, there is less and less need to listen to the new. This inevitable trend is a big part of why new classical music and new poetry aren’t something the public cares about. To the extent that people are interested in these things at all, there is plenty of good stuff by Beethoven and Whitman and so on to occupy one’s time.

The muse won’t be gone, people will still listen to music. But from the perspective of someone who wants to create and be heard–be famous, be a legend, etc.–things will be dire. And they are already dire today, really.

I don’t even think it’s that. Young people could listen to the Beatles and Stones and go to see local bands and go to open mics and whatnot and really care about music. I’ve played some open mics recently, and I think that’s the attitude. But that doesn’t mean that there is any chance that the person at the open mic could be “discovered” and be a star, no matter how good their performance and material are. Sure, the market still exists, someone is going to make it, but it’s like trying to win the lottery through force of effort. (Back in 2006, I actually tried to sell a pretty talented guy to record labels, and it was disheartening to say the least. And that was my impression at the time: it’s like trying to exert effort to win the lottery…)

Yeah, there are still poetry readings and book signings and whatnot out there, but it’s a tiny niche, and the poetry canon is closed.

Guess you never heard of the velvet underground or the stooges. That’s what underground is.

My point was that that muse doesn’t go the way of poetry. You didn’t get that out of anything I said. It always lives in the underground somewhere. it won’t be replaced by hip hop.

I can’t imagine what young people think who have all music on tap equally at all times. I don’t envy them. It’s not going to be easy to figure out what’s what. I don’t know if it’s even possible for one person to take stock of it anymore. You take a bad attitude to the beatles for not sounding like zeppelin? You are ignorant. But ignorance is going to be dominant in the future.

I listened to a bunch of versions of Jumpin Jack Flash, because someone here said it was just a fun ditty or something…JJF!? It’s monumental, in my life anyway and I wasn’t alone.

But this is what I found: if you listen to youtube versions of it and you’re in an argument on the internet about it, you can rationalize whatever you want to say. Nothing has any context and the highs and lows may be clipped, and the emphasis and essence of it may be gone, but who needs to hold back on an opinion? Good taste has no defense at long last. Arguments about music on the net are solved by youtube, and i realized there might be something really missing there. This is even less flattering to a record than AM radio was. Think about that. You knew JJF on the AM radio was a bitch. On you tube it’s fighting for survival.

I couldn’t help but notice the bolded part above.

Why don’t you believe that someone who plays an open mic will ever make it? That’s very harsh. Could you be projecting a little? The argument is not clear to me, anyway.

I wasn’t paying much attention either (I only discovered said submovement years later). By the late 90’s the radio renaissance I was hoping for had NOT come to pass, and “alternative” radio was this dull melange of the likes of Creed and other such knockoffs. Underneath that we had this pale and feeble underground, the shadow image of what alternative rock had by then become.

Note there is still a subculture out there which rabidly worships all of that indie stuff.

Do you actually mean “indie stuff” or just the garbage out of the pack?

I feel like true rock music has a certain raw authenticity that pop music doesn’t. Does Katy Perry or Taylor Swift rock as hard as Heart or Hole or Janis Joplin?

Or here’s a thought experiment. Pick a song from the last couple of years to use in a movie soundtrack to introduce a character as “bad ass” (i.e. something like AC/DC’s Thunderstruck or Back in Black or…any of their songs)

Well, Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song (released 1970) features prominently in the new Thor movie and I haven’t heard any complaints.
I’d say the “rock era” ended in the early 90s. Grunge was a reaction to the excesses and pop-ification of rock and metal in the 80s and attempted to take it back to it’s “garage band” roots. But ultimately it just ushered in the transformation of rock into “nu metal” (where it mixed with rap), power pop / pop punk, post grunge bands like Nickleback and pop indie garage “The” bands like The Killers, The Strokes, The White Stripes. But I feel like since the mid 90s, rock has been overshadowed by pop, rap, and EDM.

I do think the kids want to rock though. Which is why so many classic bands are still popular.

Possibly the rock era died when bands like Maroon 5 started being considered rock.

Let’s see… Elvis got drafted, Chuck Berry went to jail, Little Richard went to Oakwood College to become a minister, Carl Perkins was injured in a car crash, Jerry Lee destroyed his career by marrying his 14 year old cousin, and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. That added up to the end of the Rock era.

Eddie Cochrane was killed and Gene Vincent re-injured in a car accident in Bath, England while on tour. And Fats stayed in New Orleans and I dunno what happened to Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio (Train Kept a Rollin, Honey Hush).

It was so weird that in a couple of years, most of the great early rock n rollers were wiped out.

That left the Frankie Avalons and Fabians and the Doo-woppers. The Rock Era was over.

I think you are talking about the “Rock & Roll” era.

The “Rock” era had a different calendar, from the British Invasion and after. It would be pretty extreme to think the rock era ended before the beatles.