Can Rock and Roll Come Back?

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 has hit them upside the head with a two-by-four?

In 1965, Queen Elizabeth II made the Beatles Members of the Order of the British Empire.  In 2023, King Charles III presented royal honors to - a K-Pop band?  When did the Republic of Korea join the Commonwealth?

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.

Nevertheless, the definition of rockism Sanneh offered up probably put rock in an unfavorable light with many pop fans and probably hastened rock's further decline to the point where it is now about to fall.  It has become a form no one wants to bother with very much.  It doesn't help that rockers have had little to say in the past twenty years - good grief, they had nothing to say in their defense when Sanneh railed against them and their audiences.

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So, to get back to my original question . . . can rock and roll come back? The answer is a resounding HELL NO!  The best we rock fans can do is to keep the music alive by listening to our old favorites and fine some new favorites among the underground and alternative bands who are keeping rock going musically, if not culturally and commercially.  Just don't bet that hip-hop fan in the cubicle next to yours at work that this new indie band from Murphysboro, Illinois, Rosedale, Mississippi, or, for that matter, Superior, Wisconsin is the band that is going to bring rock and roll back to the top of the charts.  You'll only lose.  

The Redeye State

Florida Democrats suffered a literal death blow in November 2022 when Republican governor Ron DeSantis and Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio were resoundingly re-elected despite their numerous deficiencies.  Now it may be Ohio Democrats' turn to sink into total oblivion.

Ohio has always been something of a bastion of political conservatism.  Every U.S. President who was either an Ohio native or an Ohio resident, except for one, was a Republican . . . and the exception, William Henry Harrison - sometimes credited as a founding father of the American Midwest - was a Whig, the Whigs being the forerunners of the Republicans.  (William Henry Harrison's grandson Benjamin, though born in Ohio, established himself in neighboring Indiana before assuming the Presidency.)   Ohio's most famous U.S. Senator, Robert Taft, epitomized the party's conservative values so much he was called "Mr. Republican."  No Republican has never been elected President without carrying Ohio, though two candidates - Richard Nixon in 1960 and Donald Trump in 2020 - carried  Ohio and still lost. 

But while the state has long had a largely conservative rural population, it has, up to now, had a decent urban-oriented Democratic base - socially conservative white ethnics who belong to unions, and blacks in the state's major cities.  And there were enough voters statewide who could go either way and make Ohio a swing state in presidential and congressional elections.

Well, here's the stone cold truth - Ohio is becoming more solidly and reliably Republican, thanks to a declining blue-collar base and the belief among remaining blue-collar voters - often correct - that Democrats pander too much to coastal-state elitists to care about them. Democrats haven't controlled the Ohio State Senate since 1985, they've only controlled the Ohio State House of Representatives for one period - 2009 and 2010 - in the past thirty years, Republicans dominate the State's U.S. House delegation, and the state hasn't elected a Democratic governor since 2006.

And Ohio's two U.S. Senate seats?  Well, Tim Ryan thought he had the magic formula for winning back the state's Class 3 Senate seat - not won by a Democrat since John Glenn in 1992 - by talking up working-class issues and citing his own votes against national Democratic legislation while in the House.  But he voted with Obama and Biden more than he was willing to admit on legislation Ohio voters by and large opposed, and his attitude - "I'm an ass kicker, not an ass kisser!" - didn't jibe with Midwestern niceness.  (Also, his previous efforts at higher office - House Democratic leadership, the Presidency - made him look more like a show horse than a workhorse.)  Ryan ran a strong campaign on issues the voters in his state cared about, and he still lost - and the once-rising star is now a fallen hasbeen. That's how bad off Ohio Democrats are.

Their last man standing is Sherrod Brown, the state's Democratic senior senator, and he's up for re-election in 2024.  Brown has been able to win in an increasingly Republican state three times in the past, but the reality of Ohio's one-party politics may finally catch up with him.  And it's a pretty safe bet that if Brown goes down next November what's left of the Ohio Democratic Party - which includes gadfly-cum-loser Nina Turner - will go down with him.

That will be it. That will really . . . be . . . it. 😢

No Alternative

Radio programmers have officially given up on rock and roll in New York City.

WNYL-FM, the alternative-rock station in New York that went on the air in 2017 on the 92.3-mhz frequency, signed off this past month and became WINS-FM, a simulcast of  WINS-AM, which switched from Top 40 to news back in 1965. 

The format flip allows WINS to reach more listeners on the stronger FM band, but it also makes it clear that rock and roll radio has no place in New York.  All of the great FM rock stations in the Big Apple are gone, with only a couple of rock stations with spotty reception in the northern New Jersey and Westchester County suburbs.   In the city, rock is down to WAXQ-FM, a classic rock station that is putting way too many eighties hair bands in its playlists.

Rock, of course, has been in trouble for years, many because its demographic matches that of the folks who voted for Donald Trump.  (Many political reporters have made note of Trump's heavy use of rock songs at his rallies, even as Joe Biden has hosted Olivia Rodrigo at the White House to encourage her to spread the word about COVID vaccines to young people; I would note, in addition, that he didn't send for Greta Van Fleet to publicize the vaccines.  Yeah, yeah, I know - Greta Van Fleet? Who's she?)   Rock became associated with aging white people who never changed their tastes even as tastes in popular music kept changing, which only allowed rock to calcify rather than remain open to new bands and new innovations.  It thus became so irrelevant that, if not for the rock category at the Grammy Awards, rockers wouldn't win any Grammys at all these days.   

It makes sense that, whenever YouTube guys like Rick Beato comment on whether or not rock can come back, they look like they're going through shell shock.

And although black people invented rock and roll, and despite the presence of predominantly black bands like the Alabama Shakes and TV On the Radio, as well as Gary Clark, Jr., people of color these days would rather not bother with guitar-driven blues-based numbers you can't dance to.  Among female acts, it's no accident that Taylor Swift is more pop than rock - so much, in fact, that she named one of her albums 1989 not just because she was born in that year but because 1989 was a year dominated by pop divas like herself and a year in which only one rock album - Dr. Feelgood by Mötley Crüe (one of those cassette-era bands that reaffirmed black people's decision to by and large disown rock and roll and create rap) - topped the Billboard album chart.   

And so, even an alternative-rock station in the country's biggest metropolitan area couldn't save rock and roll radio.  Or rock and roll itself.  (What, you thought they were going to flip a hip-hop FM station to simulcast WINS?)

Aah, I've long since given up on terrestrial radio, which is dying faster than rock and roll is.  Sirius XM satellite radio's rock channels have all the songs you love.  The Spectrum channel promotes new bands and plays a few classic rock songs, and the classic-rock channels Classic Vinyl and Classic Rewind are there for all of your favorite tunes.  And the Deep Tracks channels plays rock songs that may have never aired on terrestrial radio at all.   Sirius XM isn't cheap but in today's declining and falling terrestrial-radio environment, it's worth it.  In fact, it's essential.

Let, then, New York rock radio pass.  It's a pity that this song has lost all of its relevance and meaning.  

The Forty-Year Itch

I've concluded that the years between 1980 and 2020 will be looked upon by future historians - assuming that climate change doesn't wipe out the human race first - as the period in which America lost its mind.  It will be remembered as the period in which social, political, and cultural standards fell through the floor, a time when abolishing taxes on the rich and abolishing abortion services for women were considered sound government policy, a time when when privatizing public services and making private lives public domain was considered normal, a time when speaking aggressively into microphone to a computerized beat was accepted as music, a time when movies with commuter-generated special effects were heralded as great cinema, a time when advances in communication  resulted in a loss of the art of communicating, and a time when being famous for existing counted more than being famous for doing.  As Kurt Andersen recently wrote, there's always been a degree of insanity binding These States together, but the most recent four decades have been crazier than the two centuries that came before.

Attentive readers will note that this period is framed by Ronald Reagan's election to the Presidency and Donald Trump's planned bid for re-election to that office.  That, of course, is assuming he isn't forced out of office first.  But the Ronald and the Donald make perfect bookends to the most recent four decades - two entertainers fronting the Republican right wing and getting elected President with some vague promise of restoring American greatness, only to preside over a further diminishing of this land we call home.  In between, we've had as President two guys named George Bush who sought to preserve the legacy of Ronald Reagan and two young, engaging moderate Democrats who got elected because their charisma reminded people of Reagan.  And Reagan's supply-side economics made Trump possible.  Both men symbolize 1980s greed, and even today it still feels like we're still living in the 1980s.

Now, there were times before when I thought that this era of foolishness and devolution were coming to an end.  I thought so when Bill Clinton was elected President, when 9/11 shook everyone out of complacency, when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 and paved the way for Barack Obama's election to the Presidency in 2008, and when Obama was elected in the aftermath of the worst economic downturn in eighty years.  Each time, I was wrong.  And then it hit me: This era was kicked off by an insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman becoming our leader.  For this era to end, we needed another an insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman to lead us.  But not just any old insubstantial, opportunistic incompetent showman - we needed someone who made Ronald Reagan look like George Washington, someone who disrespected the norms and ideas of what leadership should be, someone who went beyond misunderstanding the facts, as Reagan did, but who instead would offer lies in the guise of "alternative facts."  We needed someone who would wake Americans up more than any terrorist attack, stock market crash, or cynical war policy ever could.  We needed Trump to show us who we are . . . and, quite frankly, what we've become.  And his current push to declare a national emergency so he can build a border wall that the majority of Americans do not want may be the tipping point.  The antidote to the rattlesnake's venom is the venom itself.

But that does not mean we're going to automatically turn the page in 2020 and start a new, more civilized, more enlightened era.  Now that Trump has us aware, we need to turn that awareness into action.  The 2018 midterms may have been an excellent start, but they were just a start. We need to work hard and push harder to get Trump out of the White House.  But even if we elect a new President with intelligence, dignity, honesty, and integrity, that won't mean diddly-squat if we all go home and let that person run the country like we did in 2009.  Because even if we have a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress in 2021, we could still have a Democratic Party beholden to corporate interests and not the people.  If we want to end stupidity and barbarism and all that stuff, we gotta hold a Democratic Congress accountable and make them educate our children better, come up with sustainable energy and transportation systems, end gun violence, help local economies, and provide all of the other nice things that make a country worth living in.  And if hate has no home here, we gotta make sure that anyone who supports a hateful person like Donald John Trump has no home in the body politic. 

And if a Democrat is somehow elected President in 2020, then we gotta hold his or her feet to the fire.  Part of the reason Franklin Roosevelt did so much to save America from the aftereffects of a similarly foolish era in our history (the Roaring Twenties) is because Americans made him do it - he wanted to give us Social Security and public works, but he couldn't have done it without the people making him and Congress do it.  Either we do this with the 46th President and the 117th (and 118th) Congress or we end our decline not with a renaissance but with a fall, like what happened with Odoacer's conquest of Rome in A.D. 476, the Norman conquest of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, or the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453.  

This is the fifth or sixth time I have believed that this era of decline was coming to an end.  This time, let's make sure it is.  It began with a smarmy showman, so let's make sure it end with the smarmy showman we have now.

Whig Out

Americans should wash their hands of the Democratic party. It's not because of what they've done, it's because of what they haven't done. They haven't delivered on important issues such as taxes and the public health insurance option. They mostly failed to stick up for their principles on the issues during the midterm elections. Those that did didn't receive enough support from the party. How else can you explain Joe Sestak losing the Senate race in Pennsylvania? And how can anyone explain wanting to throw outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi under Michael Steele's bus when she accomplished more in two weeks than Harry Reid did in two years?

James Howard Kunstler, writing on his weekly blog, has compared Barack Obama to Millard Fillmore on many an occasion. Because like the thirteenth President of the United States, Obama has accomplished a good deal but has failed to deliver on the most crucial issues of the day and is too willing to compromise with the opposition. I'd like to add the following comparison - Obama, like Fillmore, may be the last U.S. President of his party, a party doomed to extinction.

A history lesson: In 1852, President Fillmore allowed his name to be placed in nomination by his party, the Whigs, for a presidential term in his own right. (Fillmore, also the twelfth U.S. Vice President, became President upon the death of his predecessor, Zachary Taylor.) But the debate over slavery, an issue neither the Whigs nor the Democrats could resolve, split the Whigs, and the party went for that old parlor trick that had worked for them before - they nominated a war hero, the only way they had ever won the White House. And so they nominated General Winfield Scott, a hero of the U.S.-Mexican War, a war most Whigs had, in fact, opposed. General Scott was soundly defeated by Democrat Franklin Pierce in the 1852 presidential election. When it became apparent that the Whigs couldn't even win with a war hero and had nothing else to unite them, they disintegrated.

See the parallels?

I have a feeling that in 2012, Obama will be challenged and defeated for the Democratic presidential nomination by a Southern moderate - because, heck, that's worked for the Democrats in the past! - who will in turn lose to a Republican. Without a sense of purpose or principle visible to the voter, Democrats will wither away and die as a party. Such changes happen in extremely contentious times, as the 1850s - the decade leading up to the Civil War - had been.

So here's what I propose to the liberal wing of the Democratic party. Mrs. Pelosi? Jerry Brown? Dick Blumenthal, Joe Sestak, Dick Durbin, the entire Congressional Black Caucus (except for those incoming Tea Partiers Tim Scott and Allen West, of course)? Leave the Democratic party! Form a new party! Coalesce with the Greens, MoveOn.org, any progressive group who shares your values! Call yourself the New Progressive party or something like that! Name Ed Schultz your party chairman! Let the remaining Democrats - the Lincoln Democrats, as in Blanche Lincoln, the corporate Democrats - go the way of the Whigs!

How do you think the Republican party got started? Northern Whigs, angered by their party's lack of commitment to ending or least containing slavery and promoting factory owners and free-soil farmers and industrialists, coalesced with the antislavery Free-Soil party and northern Democrats who despised their party's pro-Southern agenda, met in 1854 to form a new party devoted to their own socioeconomic interests, which included support for tariffs, improved infrastructure, and industrial manufacturing as well as stopping the spread of slavery. That party was the Republican party. It was formed in recognition of the fact that the Whigs were through. The Democrats are through today. It's time to start over and form a new liberal party to offer a choice against, not an echo of, the Grand Old Party - a party that will stand up for workers, the middle class, women, and racial and ethnic populations.

You lost the House, you're going to lose the Senate in 2012, you lost numerous governorships, and you're unlikely to get back any of that later in the decade. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. Think it over. Let me know what you decide. I'll probably be taking a nap.