Japandroids thrash against the supposed death of Rock ’n’ Roll.

THE DEATH OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL HAS BEEN SOMEWHAT EXAGGERATED

If you ever want to feel anonymous in a crowd, I recommend being a bearded 30-yearold white guy in a plaid shirt at a Japandroids concert. The Vancouver/Toronto rock duo makes music specifically for guys like me — fist-pumping distortion anthems about long-ago crushes, barely remembered punk shows, and the ambivalent fear of the impending responsibility that made you grow beyond them.

In other words, Japandroids are a Rock Band. With a new record Near To The Wild Heart of Life that sands off the rough edges and veers them closer to Bryan Adams than Hüsker Dü, they’d once have been guaranteed the stages of arenas across the world. Nowadays, though, they’re a rare breed — a band that cares deeply about things like guitar tone, side-a/side-b track-sequencing, and manages to eke out a living playing midsized venues (as long as they stay on the road).

For the few remaining rock critics, Japandroids have become a self-contained answer to the question people haven’t stopped asking since the ’60s: Is rock dead?

The answer, naturally, is no. People don’t write thinkpieces about things that are already dead. They just kind of die. Just ask chillwave or New Jack Swing. The better question is where is rock alive, and why does it appear dead enough for music writers to keep checking its pulse?

While rap, R& B and pop live at the top of the general Billboard Hot 100, rock is mostly relegated to the rock charts, where barely-qualifying acts like Lana Del Rey are also found. Yet, people are still buying rock albums. According to Nielsen’s 2016 year-end report, rock is, and has always been, the dominant genre for album sales. It accounted for 69 per cent of all vinyl sold in 2016, and also took the majority of digital sales.

But when it comes to recorded music, the majority of music listeners no longer vote with their dollar (at least not on individual albums). Digital album sales are declining rapidly while streaming goes through the roof, and the artists getting streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music are overwhelming hip-hop and pop acts like Drake, Migos, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber.

It’d be easy enough to attribute that to rock acts’ stubborn clinging to the album as their primary format, but those Capital-A Albums are also underrepresented on year-end lists where the consensus top albums of this past year came from acts like Beyoncé, Solange, A Tribe Called Quest, and Chance The Rapper. Where Beyoncé was once considered a guilty pleasure by many music critics, you now feel guilty if you don’t like Beyoncé. The main exceptions, David Bowie and Radiohead, were grandfathered in as already-huge rock acts of the past.

The highest grossing rock event of the last decade, fittingly, was Desert Trip, or “Oldchella,” the once-in-a-lifetime lineup of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Paul McCartney. If these are the last remaining rock stars, they sadly won’t be around for much longer. This aligns quite nicely with the fact that much of the increased vinyl record sales last year came from back catalogue releases, led by artists like Prince, Bowie and Leonard Cohen, all of whom are recently deceased. So is rock dying with its rock stars?

“Rock star” itself feels like an antiquated term, but if we stick to its original definition — a larger than life performer inspiring mass adulation — then who do you picture? Is it someone like the leather-jacketed Brian King of Japandroids indulging in a guitar solo on top of a giant amp while a wind machine tousles his hair just so or the aforementioned sexagenarians? Or is it Kanye West perched atop of a giant floating stage while fans eagerly reach out to make contact? The youthful vitality and rebellion that once denoted rock hasn’t disappeared, it’s just not found in garages anymore.

While rock music was invented and pioneered by people of colour, it became, through years of appropriation and overrepresentation, the domain of white guys with guitars. Years of rock domination, from the Rolling Stones through Nirvana, made it seem like the default, but that’s no longer the case. What were once considered “fringe” (read: non-white) genres are now controlling the pop culture conversation, and the result has been a reflexive nostalgia streak within rock as a genre. Suddenly any and all guitar rock sounds old-fashioned. Even the rare chart-topping 21st century poprock bands, Twenty One Pilots and The 1975, feed their young listeners a diet of nostalgia. (The former’s Stressed Out pines for “the good old days,” while the latter is literally named The 1975.)

For every “rock is dead” story that’s been written there’s been an equal and opposite “it’s not dead, you just don’t know where to look” response. And the place where those writers are looking is at Japandroids and their brethren in bands like Cloud Nothings, Car Seat Headrest, The Menzingers, Arkells and Sorority Noise — all bands who lionize a punk-informed sense of the rock show as a sanctuary, a home for the outcasts and misfits who didn’t feel they fit within the norms of mainstream society. This was the victory of indie rock, whose DIY ethos replaced the dream of rock stardom with a Springsteen-informed heartof-the-earth work ethic. Those echoes are found in today’s local scenes, where rock remains alive away from the spotlight — a guitar-driven middle class where bands can make a living playing shows in venues between 300 and 1,500 people.

For a genre so built on blue collar modesty, though, it’s been really good at ignoring issues of race and gender. That’s beginning to change as music communities start to look inward and institute safer space policies, gender-neutral bathrooms, sexual assault hotlines and town halls about exclusion and privilege. That’s been led overwhelmingly by people of colour, women, LGBTQ and gender-non-conforming artists who may have once felt pushed out by the bro atmosphere of violent mosh pits and solipsistic white hetero perspectives hidden in the scene’s “us vs. them” mentality.

A band like G.L.O.S.S. (now broken up) can take a strident form like ’80s hardcore and infuse it with the vitality and rage of transfeminism. So to can a singer/songwriter like Mitski bring new life to indie rock by singing from her own perspective as a biracial child of an immigrant contending with the American dream. Bands like PWR BTTM, Against Me! and Speedy Ortiz have all managed to subvert a nostalgic sounding set of conventions by letting in new voices.

The revolution is more content than form, but maybe it’s not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater just yet. At a certain point you have to wonder, though, how long a genre can subsist on catalogue sales and radio playlists that end in 1995.

Maybe a better question than “is rock dead” is “is all rock classic rock?”

ROCK IS, AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN, THE DOMINANT GENRE FOR ALBUM SALES.