I was reading this piece - "Ten Years After the White Stripes 'Saved It,' Rock is Again in Crisis" - on the White Stripes today and this part struck me:

 

But, of course, rock’s so-called resurrection was short-lived. Once again the genre has supposedly flat-lined. Only one rock song cracked the top 10 of Billboard's Hot 100 Songs of 2010, and it was barely “rock”: Train’s treacly “Hey, Soul Sister,” which The Village Voice rightfully named the worst tune of 2010 and “the whitest song to ever have the word ‘soul’ in it.”

 

“It is the end of the rock era,” Paul Gambaccini, the BBC’s “professor of pop,” recently told the Guardian. “It's over, in the same way the jazz era is over … That doesn't mean there will be no more good rock musicians, but rock as a prevailing style is part of music history.” And in February, right after the White Stripes announced that they had officially disbanded, citing their main reason as an effort to “preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way,” The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick questioned whether their departure was the exit of the “last of the great rock groups.”

 

So what do you think? Is the genre on the way to becoming something like jazz - you can find good music and artists but they are almost non-existent as part of the national, popular scene? Will it make a comeback? Who will lead it?

I am on tangent here but in my experience young people today think good music is music that contains a lot of profanity and racist comments.

I think it's done. But of course I'm one of those folks that a lot of "music people" hate- I just enjoy what's on the radio and don't go in search of any indie bands.

I am on tangent here but in my experience young people today think good music is music that contains a lot of profanity and racist comments.

 

And older rock has a lot of drug references in it. Not too big of a difference if you ask me.

Music in general is dead IMO.

 

I am just 23 years old, but I will tell you over and over again that today's music is horrible. I probably couldn't name 10 bands who have came out in the last 5-10 years that I truly like. Everything is just sell out commercial garbage. No musical integrity left out there, its rare to find it nowadays. Compared to all the great stuff that came out mid to late 60's-early 80's, then once again in the early to mid 90's, todays generation is deprived of good quality music. I am not sure if it will ever fully recover, but until it starts being just about the music again and less about how much money you can make with the music, the whole music scene will continue to nose dive.

I am on tangent here but in my experience young people today think good music is music that contains a lot of profanity and racist comments.

So true.

I am on tangent here but in my experience young people today think good music is music that contains a lot of profanity and racist comments.

Add to that most of the music young people listen to today doesn't have actual musicians unless you listen to country or blues.

While there can be no doubt that most mass marketing of music is designed to appeal to 13-year-old girls, I think you'll find that there's good music out there, just as there always has been. Maybe the author's right and that the future will consist of those who love rock music having delve a little deeper to find it, but that's the way it goes. I, for one, first really delved into indie music when I was about 16 or 17 and now, more than 10 years down the road, I find it's too exhausting to try and keep up with new music when I have to constantly try and dig for it. Perhaps my late 20s is too early to feel like an old man with regard to music and rest on the library from my high school and college days... but it's probably what I'll stick with from here on out.

 

In the end, however, I believe now as a have for years: music is a matter of taste and there's no accounting for taste. Just this week I told my girlfriend how terrible Aerosmith is, to which she responded by telling me how wrong I was. The week before, I was touting the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan only to be informed about how awful they are. C'est la vie. So, if music marketing really is targeted at 13-year-old girls, then we're not supposed to like it anyway.

 

BTW, I love the old guy vein in this thread. It might as well be the initial post and then five posts of "Those darn kids and their loud, lousy music! In my day we had real music, and we had to walk five miles in the snow just to listen to it!" :lol:

If you ask for my observation, I'd have to say that rock music has effectively pushed rock music into obscurity. It isn't gone, though. I would have to say that it is something more along the lines of jazz, as Habib suggested in his second question. It's turned into more of an acquired taste for those who care to pay attention and learn enough about music to find the select groups of musicians performing "rock music" as is was understood in the past 50 years.

 

If you look at the creators of rock music, you have this generation of people with backgrounds in various other genres - particularly "classically" trained musicians, blues musicians, and jazz musicians - coming together with each other and trying to form a sound based upon all of their backgrounds. Somewhere around the late 1950's and early 1960's, that mix of the various styles turned into its own style: rock and roll.

 

Since then, however, the gen-X and the gen-Y musicians have been brought up knowing less and less about the classical, blues, and jazz training, and more about rock. The style that they are brought up hearing, playing and learning emulates the Jimmy Hendrixes, the John Bonhams, and the Jon Lords of music instead of the Jelly Roll Mortons, Robert Johnsons, Gene Krupas, and Bud Freemans that Hendrix, Bonham and Lord drew their styles from.

 

Still, there are rock bands out there. There are numerous bands out there like Wilco, The National, Band Of Horses, The Morning Benders, The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Rogue Wave that dabble in rock, wandering at times from genre to genre. And then there are other bands like Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit (one of my absolute favorites) who go ahead and jump into rock with both feet. If you don't believe me, go check out one of their shows.

I appreciate the article's sentiment, but it sounds as though, as someone else noted, the author is longing for the days when "rock star" and "pop star" meant the same thing. The breaking up of music into various different genres so as to streamline radio formats (and subsequently narrow them) contributes to this. If anything, a "rock" song that becomes popular on the top 40 charts does so either in spite of itself (White Stripes) or because of massive promotional push from record companies (Creed, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and whatever their current progeny is).

I think there are some good bands that get play today on WEBN. I think the following rock bands all have good songs - Godsmack, Avenged Sevenfold, Sick Puppies, Nickelback, Trapt, Disturbed ... there is good rock music out there. Actually, I think it is better now than it has been in recent years.

I think there are some good bands that get play today on WEBN. I think the following rock bands all have good songs - Godsmack, Avenged Sevenfold, Sick Puppies, Nickelback, Trapt, Disturbed ... there is good rock music out there. Actually, I think it is better now than it has been in recent years.

 

I would argue that each of these falls into my aforementioned group of bands such as Creed, Korn, etc. — bands that are popular more for their respective record companies' marketing efforts than actual real talent. The fact that WEBN plays them regularly ain't exactly a ringing endorsement of quality.

Look at the two posts above...

 

Like I said, there's no accounting for taste.

BTW, I love the old guy vein in this thread. It might as well be the initial post and then five posts of "Those darn kids and their loud, lousy music! In my day we had real music, and we had to walk five miles in the snow just to listen to it!" :lol:

I'll give you that.

 

However, other than Jack White, name some great guitarists today. Tell me the rock bands that will stand the test of time like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, GFR, The Who and on and on... There is some validity to our archaic rant. :lol:

I'll give you that.

 

However, other than Jack White, name some great guitarists today. Tell me the rock bands that will stand the test of time like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, GFR, The Who and on and on... There is some validity to our archaic rant. :lol:

 

There are plenty of them out there. Just from my post above, Wilco, The National, and Jason Isbell all have great guitarists. If you doubt me, then just give this a watch:

 

 

 

As to your "rock bands that will stand the test of time" statement, one of the problems with saying something like that is the fact that, by and large, the good rock bands aren't the folks getting exposure and radio play to give them the ability to make a serious stab at having the lasting impact that Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Who did. Those bands were big, and since rock and roll was big at that time, they got radio play and there impact on music was widely spread. In today's culture, rock and roll is NOT the big music scene, so it is not what the radios want to play. They want to play the American Idol singers, the MTV Video Music Award winners and the corporately produced stars that are so regretfully popular with the masses. Being a true "rock band" is not what makes you popular any more. It's not an easy road and whether you're great or not, chances are, being in a rock band won't get you written down in the annals of rock music with the likes of Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards any more.