“Rock and Roll is dead!” is a line most of us have heard for most of our lives. From the anthemic screams of punk rockers to the classic rockers suggesting, “Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” everyone has enjoyed repeating this line a time or two. For most of our lives, however, this has been nothing more than snarky cynicism. For some of us, this has been based on the idea that our favorite strain of rock is no longer prominent, that we didn’t appreciate the direction rock was headed in, or that we simply aged out of it. Looking at it from a rational perspective, rock and roll has always been able to survive based on young individuals developing creative derivatives of what came before them, and those derivatives have developed movements that led to greater sales and continued power, for rock in the music industry. On both planes, it does appear as if rock is either in a severe and prolonged downtrend, or it may, in fact, be dead.
“For generations, rock music was always there, and it always felt like it would come back, no matter what the current trend happened to be,” Eddie Van Halen informed Chuck Klosterman in a 2015 interview. “For whatever reason, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming back this time.”
As Klosterman writes, in his book But What if We’re Wrong, Eddie Van Halen said this at sixty-years-old:
“So some might discount (Eddie Van Halen’s) sentiments as the pessimistic opinion of someone who’s given up on music. His view, however, is shared by rock musicians who were still chewing on pacifiers when Van Halen was already famous.”
Thirty-seven-year-old singer of the band Muse, Matt Bellamy, echoes Eddie’s statement saying:
“We live in a time where intelligent people –or creative, clever people– have actually chosen computers to make music. They’ve chosen to work in tech. There’s an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.”
Chuck Klosterman then adds:
“We’ve run out of teenagers with the desire (and potential) to become Eddie Van Halen. As far as the mass culture is concerned that time is over.”
If the reader is as shocked as I was to read a high profile hard rock performer, coupled with a more modern artist, and a rock enthusiast on par with Chuck Klosterman discuss the end of an era in such a rational, and persuasive manner, you’re not alone. Reading through these quotes, and all the perspectives on the topic, it appears that the authors of these statements were not intending to be provocative. They are suggesting that it now appears that those of us that proclaimed that “Rock and Roll will never die!” were wrong, and that rock and roll may be viewed as nothing more than a prolonged, influential, and cultural trend. That trend may have been such a prolonged trend that it’s been around longer than most of us have been alive, but if we remove the emotion we have vested in the art form and examine it from the perspective of creativity and album sales, it is more than likely that hundreds of years from now historians will view rock and roll as a trend that began in the mid-to-late fifties and ended somewhere around 2010.
The Creative Power
The one aspect of Bob Dylan’s memoir Chronicles that an interested reader will learn about the man, more than any other aspect of his life, is how much depth went into Bob Dylan’s artistic creations. Dylan writes about the more obvious, influential artists that impacted him, such as Woody Guthrie, but he also writes about the obscure musicians he encountered on his path, that affected him in ways large and small. He also writes about the manner in which reading literature informed his artistic persona, reading everyone from prominent poets and fiction writers, to the Ancient Greek philosophers, and he finally informs us of how experiences in his life informed him. The reader will close the book with the idea that the young Dylan wasn’t seeking a roadmap to stardom so much as he was learning the art of craftsmanship.
On this subject of craft, as it pertains to the death of rock and roll, the bassist from Kiss, Gene Simmons, informed Esquire:
“The craft is gone, and that is what technology, in part, has brought us. What is the next Dark Side of the Moon? Now that the record industry barely exists, they wouldn’t have a chance to make something like that. There is a reason that, along with the usual top-40 juggernauts, some of the biggest touring bands are half old people, like me.”
On the subject of craft and being derivative, it could be argued that Dark Side of the Moon was derivative, it could be argued that Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin were all derivative. It could be argued that rock and roll, itself, was derived from rhythm and blues, which was derived from the blues, jazz, and swing music. There is no sin in being derivative, in other words, as most of what an artist does is derived from influence, but the question of how derivative an artist is has often haunted most artists that derived their craft from other, more obscure artists. The question most artists have had to ask, internally and otherwise, is how much personal innovation did they add to their influences? And perhaps more important to this discussion, how much room was left in the zeitgeist for variation on the theme their influence created? To quote the cliché, a time will arrive in any art form, when a future artist is attempting to squeeze blood out of a turnip, and while the room for derivatives and variations on the broad theme of rock and roll seemed so vast at one time, every art form eventually runs into a wall. ![]()
