I’m still surprised when a youngster hears Phil Collins and asks who it is. I’m also surprised that they like his music enough to ask. I was in school when much of the classic rock was new, and I never guessed that multiple FM stations would still be playing the same stuff today. I thought it would be relegated to one or two AM stations like the oldies of old.
There were certainly radio stations playing big band music 30 or 40 years later. There were syndicated formats (I remember one called “The Music of Your Life”) that were far more fossilized in their playlists than any classic rock station you’ll ever hear.
There also was for many years a prime time network television show that specialized in that kind of music. It was called The Lawrence Welk Show. When it finally ended its run on the network, it went to syndication for years longer. In fact, you can still find the damn show on some PBS stations.
The fact is that popular music lasts at least as long as the people it was written for are still around. The styles of the 40’s and 50’s are finally fading away because their fans are literally dying. In a decade or two, the same thing will happen to classic rock.
Classic rock has become the new great american songbook of vernacular music. It always lurks in the background.
You don’t have to listen to overplayed cliched songs from that era. You can find radio shows, and mp3s of all kinds of stuff. You could do it for a whole lifetime.
But that’s not going to happen with classic rock because somehow it’s still generating new fans among teenagers and 20-somethings today.
Yeah, you had Iraq, Woodstock, Space shuttles, and terror of being nuked by someone else. Big difference there.
Yes, but the cell phone has made immediate sharing of music far, far easier. Naptster and iTunes are still primarily solitary affairs, but a bunch of 14yo’s with their cell phones having a “your favorite Dad song on Youtube” discussion*? Never.
Nowadays there really is no line separating old and new - sure, we could’ve turned on a different station when we were 14, but the fact that none of the other kids were listening to that station was a great inhibitor. Now the station is “Youtube” or “Pandora” and anything and everything that is on these mediums is jumbled together with nothing but a click or three separating Bing Crosby from the Ramones for the kids today.
*Happened at my house this past Christmas.
We hit one or two concerts a month. During the summer we’re at between five and six music festivals, all with our six-year-old. At a lot of indoor venues we’re somewhat near the top of the age bracket, but there’s generally a spread from teens (depending on the venue) up through people in their sixties (we’re in our forties).
Self-selected bias for sure, but there is something classic rock has that most pop (during the classic, modern, etc. eras) lacks: a focus on musicians. Not just composers, not just a great set of hooters and an auto-tunable voice, but musicians.
There are great guitarists today (there will always be great guitarists), but the era of putting *musicians *on pedestals has largely ended. Rock stars are still lauded, but you could ask a kid in the 70s and 80s to name great guitarists, great bassists, etc. and they could without a problem. While subcultres exist, mainstream music pathways don’t really have room for a Hendrix, Allman or an Iommi.
But they still have an audience both from the Boomers and similar for reasons mentioned above. But also from the very appreciative younger fans. Fans of Twiddle, the McLovins, Disco Biscuits, Dopapods, etc. are just as likely to recognize and ‘get’ not just covers of classic rock songs but musical and lyrical allusions to them. And you have bands like String Cheese Incident and Phish in the middle ground, ensuring an enormous age range of people who put music first, style second.
So you still have a lot of classic rock available because its roots took hold and there are a lot of young and not-so-young bands out there playing their hearts out in the extended branches of what it grew into. There’s a lot of respect and understanding of where the music came from.
One possibility: classic rock stands for the rebellious youth counterculture that a lot of people want to keep some connection to.
Due to more widespread societal acceptance over time the later stuff automatically got a more mainstream and “commercial” image.
The OP assumes that the current situation (classic rock persisting in popularity) is the exceptional case and that the normative case is that the current generation (at any given time) won’t listen to their parents’ generations’ music— with the example being the kids of the 60s and 70s listening to rock and having no interest in the pre-rock music their parents listened to.
I think it’s the latter situation that was the exceptional case. My parents listened to the music of their parents (music popular in the late 20s and early 30s) and their younger cousins who were born in wartime and came of age in the mid to late 50s did too.
The big rift was between rock and what came before rock. And it was cultural not just musical. It was the “generation gap” and it was not a perpetual fixture, forever sitting between teenagers and their parents’ generation, but rather aging along with the affected population. My 80 year old parents still hate anything remotely akin to rock, lumping the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Simon & Garfunkel into the same discard basket as Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden… to them it’s all horrible horrible stuff. And it has something to do with sexual excess, drugs, guys growing their hair long, opposing the Vietnam war, using cuss words, not going to church, being soft on communism, and so on.
On the other side of the divide I think there’s more appreciation now by people my age for folks like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Glenn Miller and all those cats “and his orchestra”, but yeah we mocked that stuff something awful back in the day. Because, well, we associated it with puritanical constraint, mindless obedience to authority, military haircuts, sending us (or at least our older brothers) to Vietnam, being dragged into church, hypocritical obsession with appearances, and everything else old-fashioned that had to die.
Back in the day, the innovations in music (amplication of instruments and voice, 45’s, LP’s, focus on backbeat, etc.) were generational and cultural as well as musical. You picked your choices for their cultural statements and your enemies the same way. Big Bands were “establishment” as much as the music didn’t fit with electric guitars.
Today, music is NOT the cultural/generational force it was in the '50’s - '70’s; the Internet itself is more like music was back then (parents don’t get it the way their kids do, and fear it).
So today, being a cool music fan is about acceptance and eclecticism, not drawing cultural difference lines. Classic Rock remains popular within that context. It’s been canonized, and the canon is easy to access along with other more eclectic choices.
My $.02
I’ve noticed too, that the starting date is creeping up as well. In the late 80’s, classic rock included all of the Beatles, Kinks, Who from their first albums. Now it seems hearing anything from the first Beatles albums, or the Who before 1970 is rare on the classic rock stations.
Around here, some of the oldies stations now have a good selection of 90s alternative rock in their rotation. So there is some updating going on.
But it is odd. Look later this year at the back-to-school newspaper (I know) ads. T-shirts featuring Jimi Hendrix, The (classic) Rolling Stones, etc. are the most common music oriented ones.
They just didn’t make good music, they were cool.
It is very much unlike people listening to Big Band music or whatever. The popular interest in that music died with a decade of it losing out to Rock and Jazz.
At one point we had 4 full-on oldies stations with the common focus being the mid-60s to early 70s with a wider spread either way depending on the station.
Did any city ever have 4 Big Band stations 30 years later???
Here’s one question:
Are there new bands producing “classic rock” type music which are popular with the same crowd who likes the oldies classic rock music, or is this popularity limited to the actual oldies music?
Have you heard modern Country?
My wife likes her some modern country. (As long as the lyrics aren’t love songs, which cuts the field down quite a bit.) I have to force myself to bite my tongue from repeatedly saying that it’s all a rehash of 70s California groups and southern guitar bands. Those were fun, of course. Just give me the originals. To her credit, we had a great time at an Outlaws concert. Catch them if they come around.
I’m surprised nobody has pointed out that classic rock is not some fixed, unchanging standard. Yeah, Baba O’Riley is still classic rock, but the label now encompasses 80s glam metal and 90s grunge, too.
old habits die hard and many people are very set in their ways.
I’m 65 years old and I listen to classic rock because I still like the way it sounds. If I ever hear any song that I like, I will listen to it.
It’s the perckussion.
Not to me. Not now. Not ever.
That doesn’t mean no good music has appeared since the heyday of classic rock. It’s just not classic rock.