A Quick Note on the Alleged Death of Rock n Roll

“There’s a very interesting book by Kevin J. Dettmar called Is Rock Dead?, and it’s a scholarly investigation of this very discourse of rock’n’roll’s decline and fall. One of his contentions is that, when critics declare that rock is over, what they’re really saying is that their passion for it has withered away. Basically, he argues that writers are projecting their own physical decrepitude onto the music!”

-Old man Simon Reynolds, discussing his book Retromania with Greil Marcus

Only in the myopic, winner-take-all, capitalist hyperbole of 2010s America could rock be declared “dead” for being the second or third most popular genre. In a world where extreme income inequality is somehow a story of economic success, anyone who is not in the 1% is considered a loser, a has-been, or a might-as-well-be-dead. 

Radiohead sold 2.5 million Ok Computers in ‘97-’98, and a little over half a million King of Limbs in 2011-12. Is a modest living death? 

If Ron Howard is to be believed, the Beatles were very popular in the 1960s. By pure reproductive math, they are loved by more people today than in their “commercial peak.” How can rock be dead when it is listened to, felt, and learned from in greater volume than when it was alive? 

And sure, these listens, whether heard on inherited vinyl or YouTube rip, might not make as much money for media companies. But again...is middling profitability death? There may not be many “rock” singles topping the charts, but commercial performance has always been a skewed metric of success. The industry those figures represent is controlled by a select few, and the industry’s products, distribution network and measurements of success prioritize the actions of people who look like those in power.

I’m not sure that radio plays and paid downloads can ever capture the life music lives between the ears of its adherents. If a song is enjoyed with magnified passion, I’d say it’s more alive than ever.

I want to divorce the idea of an art-form’s life force from its ability to generate profit. There is more rock music being made than ever before--just because Warner Bros. is making less money off this explosion does not mean the genre is unpopular, it means Warner Bros. are still the same idiots who could not monetize file sharing, got beat to streaming by Netflix back when they still owned all the original content, failed to realize that metal and gangsta rap were major revenue streams prior to soundscan etc.

If you want to find imaginative rock music you can find a wonderful new record every second of the day. If you are threatened by the fact that Billie Eilish sells more records than White Reaper…I can’t help you.

Frequently, coverage of emerging internet headphone products like podcasts or soundcloud rap condemns an overabundance of content. Why is too much so frightening? In a traditional media model, content scarcity was driven by limits in radio airplay, costs of physical distribution and even the finite amount of labor a company can devote to their total product output. But streaming eliminates barriers between production and distribution. I’m more on the side of Marnie Shure who writes “when articles fret about ‘podcast overload’, what they might actually be worried about is the lack of industry gatekeeping.” The reason there is so much content is that there are so many people with a worthwhile perspective to share. Try not to tremble.

Rock’s “death” is actually more the story of people who used to have a larger share of cultural hegemony feeling less powerful because there is now a greater diversity of genres and artists that get the chance to be popular. Ahem!

In 2018, all of the best rock groups are led by women: SOAK, Jay Som, Phoebe Bridgers, The Beths, Soccer Mommy, Lucy Dacus, Snail Mail, Waxahatchee, Marika Hackman, Mitski, Frankie Cosmos, Long Beard, Boy Scouts, Crumb, Jessica Pratt, Charly Bliss, Kacey Musgraves, Angel Olsen, etc. etc.

Instead of penning think piece obits, these artists picked up a guitar and blasted the genre into new and ever-more expressive heights.

Maybe rock isn’t dead, it’s just seeing (and being seen by) new people.

Love,

Anand

Jan, 2018