Is that from The Commitments?
And everybody knows that rock peaked precisely 2:27PM MST April 19, 1973.
Dayton, OH, 1987 - 19 something 5
I literally thought this was about the actor.
Rock was at it’s best when Tool came onto the scene, and as long as they are working on material, will remain plateaued there.
Rock was probably at its best during the 70s. It’s hard for me to judge, since I wasn’t around and listening to music back then. But decades later, I’m still discovering wonderful 70s rock tunes. I also have a bias towards the 80s since that’s when I started listening to music, and there was a lot of great experimental stuff still going on then.
This is the correct answer. Rock hit it’s peak popularity in the 80s with hair bands, then started to die in the 90s. But from a pure creativity and quality standpoint, the 70s were the peak years of rock. Most of the music I listen to on Spotify was written before I was born.
60s, followed closely by the 90s
“The nineties were better than the eighties, and one key reason was that there was less originality. Originality is unmusical. The urge to do music is an admiring emulation of music one loves; the urge toward orginality happens under threat that the music that sounds good to you somehow isn’t good enough. In the nineties, bands pretty much all had a single thought: we want to be the next Nirvana. Bands had the least fear in years that following their hearts and doing straight fuzz-guitar pop-rock was somehow old-fashioned. There were a lot of good songs. Life was simple.” -Scott Miller
Scott Miller just explained why rock died.
Incubus is a fairly original rock band that got their start in the 90s, although they get compared to RHCP. I’d also hazard to say Live, though tastes may vary, and their lead singer was kind of an epic jerk. The same can be literally said for Smashing Pumpkins.
Siamese Dream (yes, I said it right, this is superior to Melancholy) is a fantastic album that holds up well today.
Rock was the best in my generation. My kids’ generation is crap/not rock/too loud/get off my lawn. My parents’ stuff is too out of touch.
Clip n’ save, give to every generation.
Nah, my generation’s stuff wasn’t as good as my parent’s.
Narrator: “It probably was.”
At the risk of parroting the standard line, I think rock was at its best in the '60s and '70s. To choose between those decades would be hard, but the confluence of Beatles/Stones/Dylan/Kinks/Animals/Aretha/Beach Boys/Doors/Byrds/Hendrix/Joplin/Cream/Creedence etc. etc. etc. probably gives the edge to the 60s.
I must inevitably stipulate that more good music has come out in subsequent decades than I have time to listen to.
I dunno, man. I feel like reverence for the '60s and '70s was pretty common in my generation, which grew up in the heyday of New Wave transitioning to Hair Metal and then Grunge. Maybe I just hung out with a bunch of proto hipsters, though.
Siamese Dream is fantastic. Everything else after that from them, not so much. Melon Collie was a bloated mess of a double album that could haven been pared down to 12 songs and been a more than worthy successor (it was Smashing Pumpkins’ Tales From Topographic Oceans).
And Rock will never die. Rock continues to morph and change itself every few years but its DNA is still evident in many of its subgenres.
But really, what does death mean in music? Not being on the “charts”? Not being the most popular? Rock isn’t going anywhere.
70s Prog Rock floats my boat. But every decade since has produced some great stuff. A lot of it never played on radio.
Name 10 new rock bands from the last 5 years that have achieved some measure of mainstream success. I’ll define mainstream success as showing up on Billboard’s charts, winning a music award, racking up a couple of million video views on YouTube. Note I’m not saying that these are any indication of quality, but they do indicate mainstream success, something many rock bands had before 5 years ago and that almost zero do now. The cultural zeitgeist around rock has also passed by–rock feels like a genre for my generation (Gen X) and older.
I think @ArmandoPenblade’s comments about the fragmentation of the genre are pretty accurate, and it’s certainly possible to dive underground and find really good stuff made by kids scraping by doing tours for $30+free drinks. But every boy my age wanted to be a rock star. Now that seems like wanting to be a famous stage actor: still impressive, but more niche, a bit outdated, folded into certain cultural sensibilities the way country and western is.
To be honest, I don’t care. I think that online streaming and genre fragmentation has rendered ‘mainstream’ irrelevant.
Plus I don’t listen to mainstream so have no god damn clue what hits top 40.
What I will say is there is a lot of bands that find success and have long careers at the mid level. The ‘I’m not going to go platinum but I will sell between 100-500k albums and be able to launch a 30 city tour that draws 500-1000 people in every venue’.
I mean Dream Theater and Iron Maiden still draw 25k+ crowds. The outdoor concert venue by my house seats 28k, and they sold it out.
This year.
And the breadth of what is there is spectacular. Plus there are still bands that sell million plus in that space, they just don’t get on mainstream radio. Do I care if Iron Maiden doesn’t get air play yet still get sales over 500k?