C’Mon C’Mon C’mon… rock is dead.
Rock is dead. Cynics would say that it’s been dead since the late seventees. Disco arrived, and although it went away nearly as quickly as it appeared , was replaced with a poor replica of Rock&Roll. I disagree. Sure post-disco era rock was filled with a lot of cheese and hair-metal, but relevant music was still made. There is a long list of bands that made the 1980’s bareable; The Clash, AC/DC, U2, Metallica… to name a few. The later half of the decade gave birth to grunge, which certainly proved that rock was alive and well. Jump ahead to present time and look around at the barren landscape.
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Foo Fighters are going on lengthy hiatus’, while Pearl Jam seems content re-releasing material with remixes and unreleased singles. Is there a band out there right now that’s relevant? some might point to bands like The Kings of Leon who are dominating the world with their new album, but I remain unconvinced that they are the ’saviour’ of rock&roll. As I’d pointed yesterday in my blog, they have released 4 albums, 3 of which were only moderate hits in North America. The latest release is a product of them giving the audience what they want. Not the audience discovering their brilliance. There are no artists out there making music that they truly want to make, that are having an impact.
Look closely at the musical landscape today. There are bands like Nickelback who have no musical soul, that are running around winning awards and selling out stadiums. Then there are bands like U2, AC/DC and the Rolling Stones who have lost their relevance long ago and are purely cashing in with the nostalgia card. Where is the happy medium? where is the band that makes relevant music, that is also commercially successful? I defy you to name one.
Rock & Roll and all it’s subsidiary offshoots, Metal, Punk, Ska, have bitten the dust. Nobody is making the myths, and nobody is taking the world by storm. Where is our generation’s Jimmy Page? the 1970’s was filled with guitar gods of the highest caliber; Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Alvin Lee the list goes on. I refuse to believe that guitar heroes just up and dissapeared. In fact, I blame the record industry and the likes of Lars Ulrich for the extinction of guitar gods. In the film “Some Kind of Monster” Lars Ulrich, the drummer for Metallica, came to the conclusion that “solo’s are out” and recomended to the band that they not have any guitar solo’s on the St. Anger album. Metallica, a band that still boasts a guitar god (albeit rooted in the 1980’s).. wasting his talents. That has since been rectified on their new album, but the fact that Lars was so heavily influenced by that school of thought speaks volumes. The record industry has been strangling rock and roll to death for years with their fear of the unknown and sticking to the formula.
Did Nickelback make it big because they made the best music? absolutely not. Nickelback made it big because Chad Kroeger understands the ins and outs of the record industry. He understands the musical formula that sells, and he sells the shit out of it. My hat goes off to Kroeger, although I can’t stand his music I respect how he has played the game. In a way if you look closely enough at the formula you can see how he himself has exposed the predictable unoriginal nature of record companies through his success.
The larger question that plagues us, is how long can the public consume the “MacDonalds” of Rock before it realizes that it’s a poor facsimile?
