There is an interesting parallel article about the general fall of the guitar as a musical instrument, as well
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/
I’m listening to Band Maid whilst reading this thread so the subject is lost on me.
Thank you for sharing this God Emperor Penblade! I never heard of them before but I am off looking into these to buy ALLTHETHINGS if the sound keeps up!
This is a band called Greta Van Fleet from Michigan. Might need to define what kind of Rock you mean. I watched an interview with RODRIGO Y GABRIELA today. They do instrumental guitar music but came out of the metal scene. One of the things they said is no matter where they go there is always some place they can go and see a metal show.
God Royal Thunder is so damned good. Saw em on their headlining tour last month and it was just awe inspiring. Mlny Parsons just ran herself ragged onstage belting out track after track. One of the best shows I’ve been to in ages… And I go to a lot of concerts.
I want to challenge you on this one… I don’t think there was ever a “singular choice” in music for people. But I believe in the last century you could practically map each decade with an explosion of a new music genre that dominated that time, evolved from the previous, but still very new and unique in sound and style…and you can consider each of those decades the Golden Age of that genre, all the way from the 20’s up through the 90’s with Rap.
I feel with the new Millennium this has not occurred in the past two decades. I think we as a collective global culture and society are in a lull in musical discovery. Sure there are some unique acts out there, but are there truly unique sounds? That have a large global group attracted to it?
In another life I worked on a cruise ship that would do lunch cruises, and we would get a lot of sight seeing retirement groups with some package sold. The music they would play was stuff like Chatanooga Choo Choo and Benny Goodman tunes. They would literally rock to it. I can recall watching this scene and wondering if this is how years later things like Rush and the Rolling Stones would be enjoyed…last weekend at the super bowl the crowd anticipated a VR performance/tribute to Prince, who made hit songs 40 years ago. I can hear him in the elevator as well. I happened to drive by the stadium just as the AC DC concert was letting out and saw the crowd…I think we have arrived in that future.
But my challenge is not about mid life crisis and your favorite music…I would challenge you to map what the last two big music genre’s are…sure there are a handful of acts that play establish genres well, but I think the new music genre volcano is now dormant and would love to be proven wrong on that.
My personal feeling is some of this is due to the migration away from true live performance for musical acts. Improvisation and ad-lib are gone and so is creativity. Milli Vanilli were ahead of their time.
Music died in the 90s. Limp Bizkit and their kin were the death knell. Napster was the karmic retribution for the music world siding with them over Rage Against the Machine.
I bounce around on terminology a bit, but this point is similar to others I’ve made in this thread: up through “the death” of radio/the rise of internet music, there was a sense of a singular musical mass culture to the Western world. . . pretty much what you’re describing. When avenues for discovering and hearing music were more limited and more centrally organized, your “paths” to success as a musician were more limited and it was fairly easy for a newly ascendant genre/subgenre to reach that societal critical mass where, yeah, everyone of age X can probably nod along to song Y because they just couldn’t avoid it. So in that sense, I don’t necessarily thing we disagree.
However,
I don’t think this is entirely correct. Now, depending on your definition of “large,” we can have some argument here, but I’d say several electronic genres have risen to significant prominence in the last 20 (or even 10!) years, like Dubstep and Synthwave. While both certainly show clear evolutionary paths from previous work (e.g., 2-step garage beat or “80s film soundtracks”), they’re also new and unique enough to qualify as their own thing and to have spawned their own host of child genres.
I’d also argue over in the the rock/guitar-based world, things like symphonic metal, screamo, and nu-metal/rap-metal represented more or less new genres that had large followings, multiple bands developing a unique new style across years and countries, and spawned subsequent developments of their own.
The splintering of the music scene in the last 20 years means that, no, I don’t think everyone born in 1985-90 would immediately recognize “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” while hanging out in the lounge of their future retirement cruise ship, I’d argue that not-insignificant portion of them would.
Then you get something like synthwave, tied inextricably to the cultural touchstone Stranger Things by the excellent soundtrack produced by Survive, which I think will thus create a strong memory of that musical “moment” for a lot of people, even if they’re not actively meming A E S T H E T I C A L L Y with the dank crowd on twitter about Simpsonswave.
Nu-Metal barely squeezes into the timeline by reaching critical mass about 20 years back on the back of albums like KoRn’s Follow the Leader and Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, and again, I think presents songs that folks of a certain age will largely recall, even if they never quite reached Beatles-esque mass hysteria.
Screamo certainly emerges from both emo and post-hardcore scenes in the 90s, but didn’t really crack into the mainstream and become a “thing” (spawning dozens of imitator bands and overtaking the Warped Tour skatepunk circuit almost entirely for a couple of years) until the 2000s.
And “symphonic metal? What the fuck is that shit!” you might cry, but Nightwish are literally the most successful Finnish band of all time, selling 9 million records across their 20-year career. While orchestral music was showing up in metal long before this subgenre broke out in the early 00s, the absolute fusion achieved in symphonic metal was definitely novel.
I think musical acts today are also a lot more fluid. Take one of my favorite young bands: Wolf Alice. They’re all in their early 20s, and they were nominated for a best rock performance Grammy a couple of years ago. They do stuff like this
Visions of a Life, which brings to mind Zeppelin
Or Giant Peach
But then they turnaround and do stuff like this without skipping a beat
Don’t Delete the Kisses, which could be a Taylor Swift song
Spoon?
The future is listening to The Cure at whole foods, and realizing I’ve aged into the target audience for that 2pm weekday shopping trip.
Hey dudes, let me interrupt your poking-at-the-still-twitching-corpse-of-rock fest to say, did you know today is International Clash Day? Well it is!
Now throw on an old vinyl copy of London Calling and go burn something!
Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution
Rock and roll ain’t gonna die
Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution
Rock and roll, it will survive…
Rock and Roll 1960 - ?. Rest in Peace and bring on the EDM.
Nope.
…and because I think this will be one of the best rock albums of 2018…
God how I love Turbowolf.
Rock and roll will never die because “Mr. Bright Side,” a 14-year-old-song, was still charting in the UK in 2017.
OK that was a really long article to have to pick through to reach a conclusion of “LOL I dunno!”
It is a hella good song though.
Leave me alone, don’t want your promises no more,
Because rock & roll is my religion and my law.
Won’t ever change, may think it’s strange,
You can’t kill rock & roll, it’s here to stay.
As a Corollary to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”), we can definitively state that any New Internet “Journalism” article that asks a non-Yes-or-No question its headline will not reach a meaningful conclusion by the article’s end.
Freaking confirmed, Mr. Brightside is #98 in the Feb 2018 UK charts, right now, today. Wow.
Here’s who I mentioned earlier, I’m not even sure the video was out then though.