What happened to rock music?

I admit that my musings may apply more to movies than music.

But 2010-2011 is pretty much when social media started to become the dominant platform for attention spans. A couple years later is 2013...



Correlation isn't causation, but this is clearly not the same era as the 70s and 80s. People seem to be wired differently now and the various tech platforms seem to be steering attention spans and trends in certain directions that may not be conducive to certain types of music. People spend the vast majority of their time now wired into some kind of media or social media via computational devices... these devices also easily give people access to instant music, as opposed to the 70s and 80s (and even 90s) where one had to step out of their bubble of distraction in order to purchase and listen to music. It was a wholly different attitude toward the musical art form and consuming it, and I feel like this instant access destroys attention spans and (likely) drives certain trends in what sells and what doesn't. Couple this with the rise of teenagers who are growing up in this technological vortex and you have a recipe to totally alter the musical landscape.

Nothing I can prove, but the correlations are not easily dismissed.

 

I think it is equally the instant access and the depth of information/data mining that conglomerates use to drive what we see and hear. Yes data mining can be beneficial, but I think it also drives everything to sameness... whether that is music, TV, or movies.

 

God knows I tried to listen to rock past the 1990s. At the end of the day, the synergy created by great lyrics ( thank you Beatles), awesome instrument playing (thank you all the guitar gods) and recording geniuses ( thank you George Martin, Alan Parsons) keeps me comfortably numb.

 

Generations of kids got exposed to this through Grand Theft Auto V. And judging by the general number of comments from people saying that's how they found it, they liked it! Good music is timeless.

 

A lot.

The album oriented rock radio format was so good that we all begrudgingly listened to the same music our parents did. The switch to classic rock killed it off pretty quick though.

 

I'd say a lot of rock bands/artists have retreated to places like Bandcamp. Considering the major labels and pop radio's almost banishment of rock artists from their charts and label lineups.

I think there are some gems still out there. Just alot harder to find. (I see a few ppl before me have given some good suggestions to start.)

 

There's just as much great rock music as there's ever been (if not more), it's just moved back into the underground a bit so it's harder to find. And, in my experience, a lot of the best stuff within the larger rock sphere right now trends more toward the various metal and punk genres; the level of passion, and of both technical skill and theoretical knowledge of music and composition is sky-high among the best. So if you're not a fan of stuff with a bit more of an aggressive edge, it's even harder to find good stuff.

Other bands are finding different ways to play around with core rock ideas. Thank You Scientist comes to mind as one band that always seems to be pushing the envelope musically. They take a rock sound and blend in elements from a lot of other related genres. A bit progressive rock, a bit jazz fusion (even some salsa), some shades of post hardcore. The end result may not sound traditionally "rock," but it's damn good and scratches that itch for me, at least.

Don't be thrown off by the first minute:

 

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard kicks ass and does it all. They even do metal well.

 

Parsons needs no introduction but his handiwork can also be found in more modern rock albums like Steven Wilson's The Raven that Refused to Sing.

He also gave us my favorite quote about audiophiles:

 

Hey hey, my my.

 

Probably just how we consume media. When is the last time you've just listened to the radio? For me it's been awhile since I don't drive. When I take the bus I use a media player which doesn't expose me to new music. New exposure to music tends to come from soundtracks and electronic ambient music tends to be a far better fit for movies/video games than rock music with lyrics.

I can't tell you how many videos I've seen on youtube where the top comment is "I'm here because of GTA6" or something similar

edit: @crazychile kinda made the point for me.

I will add that this is why it's important for me to have physical media. I remember my exposure to music was just grabbing CDs from my parents rack and playing them on the HiFi my dad built. I have quite a bit of music, but how exactly are my kids supposed to access it on a hard drive? They need to turn on the computer, get me to type my password, open my music player to see the list of stuff I have. It's a lot of steps to see what I listen to. A media streamer would be great, but still not super intuitive.

It's just not the same as walking past a shelf of albums every day, looking at the artwork and going "I wonder what this sounds like? What is Devo?".

 

Social media can be done to encourage sharing music though. I remember before there was a 'newsfeed' that you visited a friend's page that was curated with likes and dislikes. Myspace would play a song someone picked out when you visited their page. I heard a lot of new music from friends just by seeing their playlist. It reminded me of raiding my friend's CDs whenever I visited

 

I actually wonder if it might be due to the rise of the indie music labels in about 2000 when the trend of tons of good music took off at the same time. And maybe something has happened to diminish whatever freedom or inspiration the rise of indie labels have to musicians. I can’t help but think that corporate Amaerica is to blame because they are always trying to monetize movements, control them, commonitize them. Have they managed to get their Sticky Fingers on the music market again? Has streaming had a negative effect? I don’t see how it could.

But periods of good artwork tend to come from bigger societal trends than just the artists themselves.

yes there are more good rock bands than The War on Drugs but the list for me Is pretty small and a lot of it veers into metal or weird sub genre as if they have to to something completely different to exist. They can’t just write good songs. That’s really what it comes down to. Good songs. I’m not hearing it.

I just went through my Tidal library and purged it of tons of artists I was “waiting” to like. I realized they just sucked.

 

You mean there isn't any music one can have a decent, honest, bad trip to?

<wonders> Hmmm... Did I ever listen to We're only in it for the money tripping? Probably not. I was reckless, but not that reckless.

 

This thread is the other side of the same coin from @yotacowboy 's what's your musical foundation one. Our best-regarded musical era is whatever music we were listening to at the time(s) we were most serious about it (which is not always, but very often, the music being produced at that time). I'd personally substitute 1979 - c. 1998 (post-punk and college-radio rock eras, maybe with a break in the middle somewhere) for rhythmdevils' 2000-2013, and he'd no doubt think me tasteless for it.

I remember there were some experiments on the effects of different kinds of music in the car on driving behavior. I don't recall all the results, but two that stuck were that the drivers listening to metal were the most aggressive and the ones listening to country had the slowest reaction times.

And proud of it, sir.

 

Ok here’s a good example of what almost all the rock from the last 7 years I’ve found sounds like. Jangly upbeat, happy, super well produced, well polished, sticks exactly to song structure standards like they wrote the songs using a template.

 

And it’s exactly 3 minutes long. That’s one of the worst written songs I’ve heard. I started to nod off about a minute in. I’m not even sure I’d call it rock. @Thad E Ginathom would never be able to have a bad trip listening to that!

 

Dude, are you kidding? This is nightmare-ego-death-level bad trip material!

 

Rock is tough these days for me. Even as a kid in the 90s the only new stuff I could get into was more metal. Rock is totally a 1960's to maybe 1989 for me. Then metal takes over almost entirely for me. Kadavar, Earthless, Allegaeon are some of the only newer bands I dig as much as the old stuff. There's a few 90's bands that have stayed in rotation until now because they continue to release good stuff. Russian Circles and Pelican are pretty good. Even if you find a decent rock/metal act today the albums are so digital and brickwalled it kind of kills it a bit for me.

 

The internet, meme culture, and streaming killed what piracy, Congress, the conglomerate owned major labels, and the RIAA couldn’t.

Most current music uses the same shitty plugins and equipment too and is hyper limited and quantized. Popular Rock has been at absolute rock bottom forever. Manufactured late 90s and early 2000s radio rock like Lifehouse, The Strokes, Nickleback, Bush, Silverchair, Wolfmother were just as bad as Greta Van Fleet.

these guys all sucked and had zero creativity compared to old rock bands who wrote great songs and were various degrees of sloppy as hell.

even 80s rock pretty much sucked when the 60s70s impetus died and hardcore punk softened. All the sounds people want and all the cool distorted gear they desire is from or copies the 60s to 80s and some from the early 90s but a lot of the coolest stuff from that period, much you can easily get now, was not used on the memiest 90s records that you see teenagers wear t shirts of.






the stuff the labels and mainstream critics wanted to push back them sucked ass too. Who still sells and is listened to in 2020? Zeppelin, Kiss, King Crimson, Thin Lizzy etc