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.

*

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.  

Old Songs, New Songs, Keep On Singing . . .

Ted Gioia, a music writer, recently caused a stir with his article in The Atlantic, "Is Old Music Killing New Music?" Gioia noted that most songs streamed on the Internet are old songs, with tracks 18 months old or newer accounting for only about 5 percent of all songs streamed.  Record stores - those that are still left - market classic rock and classic soul LPs over new releases, while radio stations stick with the tried and proven in their formats.

Gioia has even made a provocative statement regarding artists and repertoire agents at record companies - they're too afraid to sign new artists who might shake things up not just because they're too afraid to take chances but they're even afraid that any demos they send in could feature music sounding very similar to something that's already out there - and provoke copyright lawsuits. You can read the whole article here.

Gioia does point out that many new artists are out there, offering an alternative to the pop records on the radio today that young audiences supposedly crave, but that they're simply hard to find because they don't get promoted.  I agree with that.  I've heard several new artists on public music stations and on Sirius XM who ought to be more popular than they actually are.  And I've noted before how I've seen young people on the street walking around wearing T-shirts of bands that broke up long before they were born.  If more record companies signed bands and solo artists that made the same kind of music that fans of "classic" pop like - the sort of music that grabs you and sticks with you for a great guitar riff or maybe a cool lyrical phrase - the record business would be better off.

I'd go farther than Gioia, of course, in explaining the lack of interest in new music.  I'll come right out and say it - today's hit music, the music that actually gets on the charts, is mostly mass-produced, lightweight, auto-tuned pop and rap that is devoid of all melody and musical expertise . . . but we're not allowed to say so because of political correctness.  Rap, still popular after forty-odd years, remains a mostly black pop form, while mainstream pop is dominated by post-feminist divas who present an image of independence and strength, White males who don't like any of that crap won't call such performers out on their musical charlatanism because if they do, they'll be seen as racist or misogynistic.  Boy "bands" (they actually don't play their own instruments) were always good to finger as a reason for the decline and fall of popular music, but now the latest such act is from South Korea, so no one wants to be seen as having an anti-Asian bias.  Oh, for the days when we could pick on New Kids On the Block or the Backstreet Boys without fear of being accused of bigotry!

And even though I could cite several non-white and or female artists I like because they make substantial music that isn't merely meant to be a backdrop for offensive promotional videos or for dance clubs - in fact, I've done so here before - I won't, because I'll be accused of "rockism," that lame theory that any criticism of music made with synthesizers and autotuning with, say, six songwriters and eight producers (or vice versa) for a single or for a whole album by a pop idol is a form of musical elitism.  Heck, if the Backstreet Boys were around today and I bashed them, someone would still accuse me of being "rockist."

I don't know how we save popular music going forward.  The Internet is going to continue to allow new musical artists to put their work online without making much money, and no one is going to help promote them.  Perhaps record companies would take more chances looking for new music if they weren't so big.  Perhaps if they had more taste, they'd give us performers worthy of their signing bonuses rather than scam artists who put out any old bit of noise for a fast buck.  We need more George Martins and Clive Davises if we're going to get more Paul McCartneys and Janis Joplins. We need another Berry Gordy to find the next Smokey Robinson.  But then, the Beatles, Janis and Smokey are more profitable these days than new artists, as are numerous singer-songwriters of yore; why do you think Bob Dylan and Paul Simon sold their songwriting catalogs for spectacularly large sums? 

The most obvious sign that music fans don't care about what's current is the continuously declining viewership of the Grammy Awards.  The ratings have fallen so much over the past several years that when COVID delayed the 2022 Grammys to April, no one cared.  Which makes sense, considering the most memorable moments at the Grammys of the past decade.  When you tune in to the Grammys, you might see an obnoxious female rapper turned TV actress officiate a mass wedding.  You might see Kanye West walk onstage to protest when a white male artist wins an Album of the Year Grammy (assuming a white guy even gets nominated for Album of the Year Grammy anymore, never mind wins).  You might see Hillary Clinton make a cameo appearance on film to read a passage from a book about Donald Trump.  You might get the kind of obscene burlesque that Cardi B and that horse chick Megan performed together last year.  You certainly don't experience any moment having to do with . . . the music.

I hope good new music - what there is of it - will rise to the top like cream . . . or Cream.  Or Traffic.  But until then, I think I'll just entertain myself with repeated listenings of Sirius XM's Beatles Channel or my copy of Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, thank you very much.