Rock and roll is dead
“Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution, rock and roll ain’t gonna die,” AC/DC proudly proclaim on the final track of their classic 1980 album Back In Black. “Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution, rock and roll will survive.”
Just 38 years later, rock and roll isn’t looking so good, at least when it comes to new music and pop culture relevance. Good luck finding a rock song on the Billboard Hot 100, unless the listener considers Imagine Dragons, Twenty One Pilots, Foster The People and Beck rock.
Sure, there is lots of new hard rock and heavy metal out there, but it’s nowhere near the top of the charts or even top of mind, particularly among young people. Hip-hop and country are what the kids listen to now.
Rock has been proclaimed dead before but it always forged a comeback. Punk, new wave and grunge gave it a timely swift kick in the ass.
Except Kurt Cobain has been dead nearly 25 years and his successor still hasn’t appeared, although his soulmates Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl have done their best to keep the mantle warm over the years.
Meanwhile, the great guitar maker Gibson has filed for bankruptcy and Fender isn’t doing that great, either. For guitar people, Gibson and Fender are the equivalent of Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards. Gibson made the classic Les Paul, which everybody from Chuck Berry to Jimmy Page to Slash played and Angus Young played Rock And Roll Ain’t No Pollution (and everything else on Back In Black) on his classic Gibson SG. As for Fender and that classic Stratocaster, everybody else played that. It’s not hard to picture Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen with their Strat slung low.
Sales have been in free fall for more than a decade, according to industry reports, and the rock legends famous for strapping on a Gibson or Fender are slowly dying out. In his new book Twilight Of The Gods, Steven Hyden asks whether classic rock can survive the death of its biggest stars. There may be two answers to that question. The first was on the stage last Thursday night at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, when The Eagles played. Glenn Frey died in early 2016 and band co-founder Don Henley declared the band finished later that year.
Yet Henley and his bandmates were back on stage last Thursday in Vancouver, with Frey’s son Deacon, along with Vince Gill, filling the big shoes.
The other path forward for rock is well-worn and more rock and roll in attitude, because it rightly puts the focus on the songs, not on their elderly creators. That path is tribute acts.
Unfortunately, neither of these paths into the future for rock will save it from irrelevance. The genre brought about its cultural demise. Despite its claims to be the people’s music and the garage band ease and accessibility of any picking up a guitar to be a jukebox hero, it largely refused to open itself to new trends, especially as the years and decades wore on. Hiphop and country remain vibrant musical forms in touch with modern audiences, particularly today’s youth, because they borrow shamelessly from other genres, especially classic rock, to make something that sounds both familiar and fresh at the same time.
Meanwhile, the “that ain’t rock” mentality has taken over rock, just as other notions of genre purity from scholars and fans sidelined blues, jazz and classical music.
In other words, rock went deaf, just as so many of its legends have, from Huey Lewis to Brian Johnson, that 86-proof soaked voice that declared that rock and roll ain’t noise pollution. So long, rock. It was fun while it lasted.