Rock n' Roll is Dead

And it's Not Coming Back

Let us look into a topic not touched on much these days: popular music. It's a subject not given much thought in recent times, but it is one we should think on more than we do. Whatever happened to pop music?

Before we begin, let's ask a larger question.

How long has history itself been around? Recorded history can be tracked, more or less, but I'm referring to the history of larger things, such as the universe or the human race itself. Regardless of your belief system, or what current science can explain, everyone agrees on one thing: 100 years is a drop in the bucket. It is barely even the lifespan of one human being living in modernity, never mind enough to cover the scores of ancestors that lived centuries before you even existed.

So why am I mentioning this? To give a sense of perspective.

Now roll that 100 years back half a century. Is 50 years a long time? In the overall arc of history, however long that might be, no. No, fifty years is not even the lifespan of your average Baby Boomer adult in the modern age. All things considered, it's barely considered middle-aged anymore since people live so much longer on average.

So it might come as a shock to anyone younger that 36 or so (anyone who can feasibly remember anything about the 20th century at all) that Rock n' Roll is dead, and it died at the relatively young age of fifty. I say this because the genre was the music of the 20th century, more or less its soundtrack for males, beginning in earnest around 1956 or so before it was dealt a deathblow in 1996, and rotted away in a hospital bed until it passed from this mortal coil around 2006, not even surrounded by loved ones. Rock n' Roll is dead, and no one has really noticed. 

And, oddly, no one really seems to care, either. It's just over.

Despite being such an important and integral part of western culture (Yes, all of it, not just American) throughout an entire century, no one really seems to notice that it is simply gone. If they notice, then they definitely do not seem to care.

Much like the habit of reading, a hobby obliterated in the late '90s from uncool librarian scolds and the fussy uncool aunts running OldPub, it just more or less vanished one day and people just forgot it was even a thing to begin with.

It's all gone now.

A bit of a sad fate for a genre (incorrectly) known to be about rebellion, but an obvious one for the grifters that willingly sold it as such. Thankfully, the music still does exist, and people do still make it, but Rock's relevancy as a wide cultural force is long over, much like many other mediums and artforms we took for granted in the 20th century.

And it's not coming back.

I linked the above video by professional Rick Beato because, as a musician involved with the music industry, he has had quite a lot of insight into the way things are, how they were once done, and how they are even done today. I would easily suggest his channel for anyone who wants to know anything about musical trends, past and present (mostly past, because musical trends are dead in Current Year), and those who maybe just want to know a little more about what made popular music what is was, and why it's so different now. That is because the 20th century, the trends that made it, and the institutions built to carry this stuff, are all gone themselves.

You know this very well with other industries. The main difference in this case is that the music industry, unlike, say, OldPub, itself admits that it's dead. Not only that, they have also accepted that the good old days are not coming back.

One of the events Mr. Beato has been tracking for years is the death of Rock music, what led to it, and where can it go from here now that we know it's dead. The video above gives a pretty open and shut case for those of us who were around for the Clear Channel nonsense back in the late '90s and how it fed into the wave of file sharing that eventually bottomed out with streaming. It's all connected, and it all contributed to where we are today.

Pandora's Box is not going to be closed anytime soon. But now that we know how we got here, we can start constructing ways to move forward from these mistakes.

It's over.

But the greater issue at hand is the conclusion reached near the end of the video. It isn't just memories of walking into record stores and meeting new people with similar musical tastes, or buying that new Smashing Pumpkins CD and hearing comments from the clerk on its overall feel. It's more of wide-encompassing collapse. The era of the rock star is over, but so also is a shared cultural musical identity that can be built on, reacted against, or even given a different spin.

As the video even mentions, the current most popular musical artist in the world doesn't mean the same thing in once meant decades ago, it merely means the most popular cult artist. This woman is a cult artist because there are millions upon millions of people who have never heard her music and never actually will, because they have no reason to. Her music is not played in movies, TV, or streaming, (if it is, no one watches those same services/programs anyway) nor does anyone listen to the radio anymore. In regards to the radio, you are more likely to hear an oldies station played in the mall or the supermarket than anything new. The last new thing I heard played on radio, oddly enough, was random synthwave music. For being the biggest musical star in the world, her music simply is not very important to the culture, regardless of its quality.

Contrast this with The Beatles, Michael Jackson, or Led Zeppelin, at their height back during the 20th century--they were inescapable. Everyone knew who they were, but they had also heard their songs everywhere. It was part of interacting with a wider culture and they were staples to the medium itself. You had to know who they were to navigate the scene and medium itself. You do not need to do that with anyone these days, and that's partially because the scene is dead.

This is a long way of saying that Rock music will not return, because it is a 20th century invention that is tied to an ecosystem that hasn't existed in decades and represents a class of average male that has their head in other spaces and occupied in other areas of life. The combination of factors that would have to exist to bring the genre back to its former fame requires a system the youth can trust and a sound a mass of people can agree to build off of. This isn't possible with the way things are today where alienation and atomization prevents people from coming together on just about any issue, big or small. Those days are gone.

Perhaps there will be a far off time when the cultural climate is different and a bunch of bored kids will get some cheap instruments together, and be able to have a career path to embark on by doing so, but that time is not soon. Today, pop music is over, as is the way things once were. Right now, the dying system has to be worked around.

It's not the worst thing in the world to have had a fifty year lifespan and affect so many lives in so many ways as Rock did. The pulp era lasted about as long, too. But just like that period, Rock n' Roll is not coming back, at least not in the same way it once was. It makes sense to miss that time, to prefer being able to have things in common with people you might otherwise not, but for now that is an impossible dream. You can't built on a demolished foundation.

But we still have the good times, and we still have the music. It's still there and easy to find, more than ever before. The era of having to scrap for CDs online and at used stores is also over. You can find anything out there, even bands you might have missed the first time around, just by looking around. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Regardless, we're in a better place now. The shallow era of High Fidelity and Almost Famous, and the era of music cultism over personality, is over. Now is the time for the medium to be put back where it belongs, as a significant piece of a greater whole, and one of the best things to come out of the 20th century. And that's more than enough.

Keep rockin' out, and I will see you next time!

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