This is a question that a lot of people have asked but it is a question so obviously lacking in interest - judging from the Billboard pop charts these days - that it's almost rhetorical and moot. But I'll try to answer it.
Rock and roll, of course, was the dominant pop form in music in the 1960s and 1970s. In this century - not this decade, this century - rock has all but disappeared from the radio and hip-hop and dance pop have overtaken it, along with streaming services as well as in the charts - much to the delight of the fans and performers of all of the newer forms of "music" that are so popular at this time. Oh, there are still new rock acts out there, but the ones that actually get signed to a record deal are rare and the few who are lucky enough to get a recording contract are all to quickly written off as being retreads of many of the bands and solo artists from the classic-rock era. When rock is represented in popular media, it's usually in a fiercely negative light; need I remind you of the Trolls movie Trolls World Tour from 2020, in which the Queen of the Rock Trolls tribe plans to unite the trolls under rock music - and the Rock Trolls are the bad guys?
Is it any wonder that, whenever YouTube rock-music hosts like Michael Noland and Rick Beato do videos on this question, they look like someone is about to hit them upside the head with a two-by-four?
How about the disappearing rock stations on terrestrial radio, with the Greater New York area down to one classic-rock station in the city and two AOR stations in the suburbs, neither of which have enough wattage to reach the city?
And what about the latest successes of rock and roll, likely to be the last - a new single from the Beatles and a new album from the Rolling Stones, a point of fact I mentioned in my November 6 post? When was the last time a rock band had a number-one album?
Veteran Los Angeles DJ Jim Ladd, who now broadcasts on Sirius XM's Deep Tracks channel and has been in radio for as long as Abbey Road has existed, recently noted on his show all of the young people who listen to him today and are inspired to form new bands. Why do I get the impression that the same kids forming bands now will be working in offices in a few short years? And why was Ladd's weekday show reduced to just Mondays? And why was Deep Tracks, a channel that plays obscure rock songs from forgotten albums and forgotten bands, as well as the "other" songs on albums like Led Zeppelin IV besides "Stairway to Heaven" and "Black Dog," moved to a channel many people with older cars and older radios can't access because it's a three-digit channel?
So where exactly did rock and roll's decline begin? While I wouldn't say it began in the seventies, there were definitely some troublesome stirrings as that decade came to a close, as the leading rock acts of the late seventies - and early eighties - included too many "corporate bands" - bands so faceless, professional and sterile, their music was as empty as a diet soft drink. Nothing the Police or Elvis Costello couldn't handle, and indeed, no one really cares about Loverboy anymore. Certainly John Lennon's murder in 1980 had a monumentally adverse effect on rock and roll, and the best the early eighties could offer in its aftermath were Journey and REO Speedwagon. But there were several new acts that arrived in the early eighties, such as the Go-Go's (the female Beatles) and Men at Work, among others, who, if given time and the chance, could have become formidable mainstays of the decade. Many rock fans would likely point to the premiere of MTV as the start of rock's decline, or at least a couple of years after its August 1981 debut, when it became apparent that the most commercially successful new "artists" the cable channel would spawn were musically bankrupt but visually savvy performers who could use video to promote even the thinnest and most cottony pop - you know who they are, I won't mention their names. The rise of rap certainly accelerated rock's decline, even as rock relied increasingly on grizzled veterans who were becoming less interesting with each new record they put out. Several of the newer rock bands that debuted, meanwhile, were the so-called "hair bands" who, in typical MTV fashion, cared more about their coiffes than their chords. A few efforts were made to reverse the decline of rock and roll, most notably the grunge revolt, but when such efforts ran out of steam, so did rock.
The point of no return for rock came probably came in 1999, when the most talked-about musical performer was Britney Spears and what was left of the alternative-grunge scene in the aftermath of Kurt Cobain's suicide came to an ignominious end at the disastrous Woodstock '99 festival, also known as Altamont East. But the fatal blow might have come in the 2000s, when writer Kelefa Sanneh wrote his now-infamous 2004 New York Times essay "The Rap Against Rockism," in which he defined "rockism" as an elitist conceit in which a listener prefers rock music to manufactured and slickly produced pop because of its authenticity and its traditionalism, suggesting that the average rock fan tends to look down on those who listen to pop divas or boy "bands." Sanneh could have stopped there, but he went on to suggest that racism, sexism and homophobia were involved - rock fans, like much of the music they listened to, tended to be straight, white, and male, and thus pitted themselves against everyone else in their desire to eschew any music made with computers, autotuners, or synthesizers to the exclusion of guitars, basses, pianos and drums.
I'll be the first person to admit that rock got too white and too male (but it never got too straight, so long as Elton John and Freddie Mercury have remained rock icons). Rock fans in the seventies and eighties should have gone beyond War and listened to more black bands like Bloodstone or the Bus Boys, and Fanny, a band David Bowie idolized, is one of the great lost female bands - no, one of the great lost bands, period - of all time because too many guys who apparently never heard of Suzi Quatro thought that women don't play hard rock. But for Sanneh to suggest that rockism is racism ("Black rock guitarist and singer Gary Clark, Jr. responded, 'What a breakthrough! Now I can hate . . . myself!'" 😉 ) and not even consider the idea that a penchant for musical authenticity might mean a respect for craft and technical proficiency and a dislike for any sound generated by a programmed machine no matter who - black, white, red, yellow, green - programs the machine is a dereliction of duty as a writer.
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