[Davey]

Fortuntely, it's just Rolling Stone that died. But that was a long time ago. Lots of great, imaginative, passionate music being made today by lots of talented artists. More personal than 20 years ago, with most of the best music traded among friends, and passed by word of mouth, or through blogs, instead of being delivered by the mass media, but plenty to keep me happy.

 

[eric5469]

Spice Girls are reuniting! There's something to get excited about. LOL

 

[analog'd]

No music lasts forever. Ragtime? Jazz? Crooners of standards? They're still around in some form but hardly vital or still developing, mainly subsisting as a nostalgia trip in some cultural backwater.
QUOTE]

that "jazz" is a misprint, right?

you can't have intended to state that jazz is "hardly vital or still developing, mainly subsisting as a nostalgia trip in some cultural backwater".

 

[Rock&Roll Ninja]

Rock isn't dead, it has splintered into 10,000 genres however. Blues-fusion, post-blues, neo-blues, doom metal, death metal, scandanavian sweater metal of doomy death, etc etc etc. Rolling Stone, and magazines like it, simply do not have the resources to follow every music trend (no single group does) so they report on strictly middle-of-the-road in hopes of attracting the most readers (the exact same formula used by Mtv and VH1 when they actually had music content 15 years ago).

The internet is going to be rock's (well, all of pop music really) saving grace. Every garage band in every garage in the world now has unlimited (if illegal) access to every piece of music ever written. Joe Schmoe can now get inspiration from a 1943 Hungarian Oompa-Band recording before he makes his own music... 10 years ago your "music library" was limited to the shelf at FYE. This, along with reasonably affordable studio equipment, has led to the current super-saturation of every concievable subgenre of music.

The serious problem in any such market is advertising (the internet also solves the distribution problem handily... just ask the RIAA). The greatest sound in the world is justa click away, but most people can't/won't/dont want to spend 16 hours a day looking for it.

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markl /img/forum/go_quote.gif As the main focus of pop music, the center of the musical universe, yes, rock's been dead for 12 years now (died when Kurt blew his brains out).

I'm not much of a Nirvana fetishist (Love the band. The mystique?...not so much) but I think Mark hits it right on the head. For the baby boomers, rock truly was the music of a generation. Now it's a niche in an increasingly fractured market.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot of good, new rock music around; it just ain't on the radio. The jam band circuit offers some amazing bands among the noodling GDead wannabes, and local scenes continue to thrive all over the world.

Boris is a fantastic hard rock/hardcore/metal/prog (depending on their mood) band, and the neo-prog movement is showing a lot of promise. Here in NYC, amid a sea of mediocrity, we nevertheless have Asobi Seksu and the Flesh, either of whom can blow away a live audience without breaking a sweat.

What does disturb me is the "mix and match" approach to creating a sound. Most new bands, in my opinion, can be summed up by listing the styles or influences that they glue together in some pedestrian way to come up with something that is new without being original. Influences are fine -- Asobi Seksu clearly worships at the altar of My Bloody Valentine -- but to be truly new, a band has to come up with an individual signature by doing something original with their sources.

Asobi Seksu does just that. The relentless MyBloodVal comparisons are ultimately silly, because a)it's an obvious point, b) it's a point that's been made OVER and OVER, and c) in the end AS do have their own, original sound.

Ummmm...did I mention that I really like Asobi Seksu?

 

[analog'd]

rock dead? nah. its taken over. so it is mainstream in the supermarkets. but there are always new bands doing great things. kurt rocked but did not define or redefine all vital rock. he'd a puked to hear you say so. **** like that that made him pull the trigger.

 

[zotjen]

Every few years for the past 40 years, someone has been claiming that rock is dead. It's not dead and has never been. It may change and evolve into something different or may subside in popularity for a while, but dead it's not.

 

[goldenratiophi]

Rolling Stone magazine isn't really the place to look for good music. Same with TV, the majority of radio, etc. Rock's not dead. It (probably) never will be. It's just a bit harder to find.

You can find a lot of really great new music just by looking around this forum. <indie fanboy>Of course, just perusing pitchforkmedia.com or metacritic.com will quickly uncover a whole lot of amazing music.</indie fanboy>

Even if rock were to suddenly drop dead tomorrow (which it won't), I'm not quite sure I'll really miss it, with all the evolution in hip-hop and electronic music.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eric5469 /img/forum/go_quote.gif I agree. Is the future of rock with groups like Modest Mouse [...]?

Don't diss Modest Mouse until you've heard The Moon and Antarctica. They haven't exactly been doing great work after that, but that album is amazing.

 

[blinx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zotjen /img/forum/go_quote.gif Every few years for the past 40 years, someone has been claiming that rock is dead. It's not dead and has never been. It may change and evolve into something different or may subside in popularity for a while, but dead it's not.

haha yeah, the only thing that hasnt changed in mainstream hip hop and gangster rap

 

[judas391]

Indie is apparently the latest manifestation of rock, and I'm not liking it

 

[DrBenway]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zotjen /img/forum/go_quote.gif Every few years for the past 40 years, someone has been claiming that rock is dead. It's not dead and has never been. It may change and evolve into something different or may subside in popularity for a while, but dead it's not.

Absolutely. And just to illustrate the point, consider the song "Rock & Roll is Dead" by the Rubinoos. They were labelmates of Jonathan Richman when he was on the pioneering indie label, Beserklee.

The tag line of the song was "Rock & Roll is dead/And we don't care." Of course it's a pounding rocker, and it came out in, wait for it...1977

Yep, 1977. Just around the same time the Ramones, The Pistols, and the whole CBGBs contingent were dragging rock, kicking and screaming, into the present.

It's not the mainstream anymore, but rock ain't going anywhere as long as there are cheap guitars, bored kids, and garages.

 

[Rock&Roll Ninja]

Quote:

Originally Posted by judas391 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Indie is apparently the latest manifestation of rock, and I'm not liking it

No, indie is the latest manifestation of 'Pop'.

 

[barrycro]

i really like a lot of music that is coming out now. most of what i listen to is indie pop stuff like the shins, national, polyphonic spree. most of that stuff is definitely derivative of older beach boys and beatles POP music.
i do think rock and roll is getting stale. i also believe hip hop and rap replaced it for a generation as a vital musical expression for the youth, the fact that most of the old timers here dont agree proves my point.
now it is musical pioneers doing hard to define psuedo rock that i really respect even if i dont always love what they are doing, tv on the radio being a good example.

 

[ssportclay]

In the old days rock was driven and marketed by radio.Now that all of radio is just 2 companies,radio just basically sucks and is no longer a medium for launching new music of any quality.Rock is not dead but radio is doing damage to the music sort of like the big record labels damaged the first Rock N Roll movement that was produced by small labels.

 

[Jeff Guidry]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markl /img/forum/go_quote.gif We're starting to see this in rock, too, with all these big shows like the "Australian Pink Floyd" show where anonymous look and sound-alikes "re-create" the experience of defunct mega-bands. Phony Beatlemania (to quote Joe Strummer, soon to be replaced by his own doppleganger in some tawdry Clash review) far from "biting the dust" may in fact be the "future" of rock.

Funny that you mention this, it reminded me of an event I was contemplating the other day. Melvins (the godfathers of grunge as the media put it) have been staging concerts lately that consist of them playing their classic CD "Houdini" in it's entirety. Is this a tacit admission by one of the heaviest and interesting rock bands of the 90's that they had run out of good ideas? And that even the "alternative" scene had nowhere to go but to picking on the bones of past successes?