Is Rock Really DEAD?!/Opinions are Opinions...

GENTLEMEN AND GENTLELADIES, THE ULTIMATE ANSWER IS SOMEWHERE IN THIS POST! Maybe.

Rock was less of a kind of music, as much as a musical movement. People used guitars and were inspired by blues because that's what was new, popular, and affordable at the time.

Basically, any type of music that has energy and fighting spirit in it, as well as politically charged/protest themed lyrics, is rock in spirit.

Here is a good example of what I think can be called modern "rock". Alternative bands of today are the rock bands of yesterday.

edited 18th Mar '14 5:48:35 PM by KlarkKentThe3rd

Interesting tune, I like it. Though I think the idea was always less that Rock is an easily defined genre (because really, genres are somewhat arbitrary anyways- y'know, the whole "a rose by any other name..." thing applies, eh?) and more an attitude anyways.

You're absolutely right, of course.

edited 18th Mar '14 5:51:28 PM by sharkcrap11

YESSSSSSS! I love being right!

Also, have some recent "traditional" rock. Was recorded and released in 2005; performed in 2012.

edited 18th Mar '14 5:58:07 PM by KlarkKentThe3rd

It's a nice feeling, eh?

There are quite a few good "traditional" Rock artists performing and recording in this day and age. Everything from Rockabilly (and Psychobilly!) and Surf to Blues Rock, Garage Rock and Psychedelic Rock. All still being made. Great tune btw. Good, solid groove, amusing lyrics, sweet 60s-sounding guitar tone. Nice'n bluesy...

I'm not sure if this has been said already but people were saying rock is dead since... well, since 1959, when Elvis joined the army and Buddy Holly died. And for a couple years, there were no really big rock hits - most of the hits of the early 60's were girl group or novelty songs - and then of course the Beatles came along and proved all those people wrong. Point is, popularity is cyclical. We might be saying rock is dead now, but a couple years from now we might have a whole bunch of rock songs at the top of the charts. Or maybe it'll turn into something completely different, but better, than what we've had in the past. You never know.

Rock actually didn't die during the early 60s; there was a surf rock trend at the time, of which the only bands I can name were the Beach Boys and the Trashmen.

Point is, though, the Beatles didn't bring back rock; it was still developing in the U.S.A.

Dick Dale Dick Dale Dick Dale Dick Dale Dick Dale...

Anway, I was told (by a guy who had a first pressing of Dick Dale's first album, so I assume he knows his stuff) that the first surf rock scene was a flash in the pan. An inordinately influential one, because it proved that kids were still into that rock music, and it served as the foothold that Beatlemania and the British Invasion used to climb to the top of the charts, but a short-lived thing all the same.

edited 18th Apr '14 7:25:45 PM by MetaFour

Dick Dale recorded "Misirlou" in 1961, didn't he?...

EDIT: A thought just came to me. In both jazz and rock histories there is a similar scenario for their history. It starts with a time when the music died (the stock market crash/the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly), a long period where supposedly bland pop ruled the world (the early 30s/60s), before the true music returns and is popularized to the public (Benny Goodman/The Beatles).

In both cases it's untrue. The music was still going at the time. Just not in the same way it was before.

edited 18th Apr '14 7:39:51 PM by Aldo930

Yeah, though I think he put out "Let's Go Tripping" before it.

I'm partial to the argument that Dick Dale's first single was the real starting point of surf rock, because he created that characteristic wet reverb. The Ventures' Walk, Don't Run may have come out the year before, but it lacked the reverb so it was just instrumental rock, not surf rock.

Thanks fer the confirmation.

I also think the huge fad for the Twist should explain that yes, rock was still around in some fashion. People were going for rhythmic music in any case.

Surf rock bands? You forgot about The Ventures.

And The Beach Boys were more surf pop than surf rock. The distinctive thing about surf rock is that it's supposed to be instrumental.

"Surfin' Bird" is surf rock and that has a vocal. Admittedly, it's all about how "the bird's the word" and "papa oom mow mow," but it still has a vocal.

I'm going by the definition my professors in the music department of my university used.

Then what would "Surfin' Bird" fit under, then?

Dick Dale's albums and singles were a roughly even mix of instrumentals and vocal songs. Well, at least at first—the only stuff I've heard from his later albums is off a Greatest Hits Album.

Just because a genre typically features or lacks something doesn't mean that something with or without it is automatically not that genre. Temple are black metal with death metal influences, yet atypically are an instrumental group; Throbbing Gristle were the literal archetype of industrial music, and prominently featured violin and vibraphone, both quite outside what one would consider typical industrial instruments; and so forth.

If anything, the people credited with kickstarting a genre or movement are usually more likely to break the "rules" of said genre than the people following in their footsteps. See: Unbuilt Trope.

True. Genre is descriptive, not prescriptive.

In my experience a lot of genre rules tend to be broken earlier on but then again that's when they're still being "written" and solidified and there's still quite a bit of wiggle room (ie. in death metal the big stylistic divide between Swedish and Floridian/NYC death metal, throwback bands like Master, Autopsy, and Cianide). However then you usually get an odd couple of experimental acts early (Demilich with their strange jumbled up melodies and Timeghoul with their epic darkly classical influenced take on death metal) that initially aren't too well known or immediately influential but become cult favourites later on as people rediscover a lot of forgotten artists. Around this time there's a second wave of experimentation wherein the planted by these bands once considered to be on the fringes of the style are now blooming into the norms of a kind of experimental/progressive movement that increasingly comes to be seen as a legitimate face of the genre.

edited 20th Apr '14 9:16:15 AM by StillbirthMachine

If I wanted to be caustic about it, I could say that genres tend to get boring the moment that they become rigid enough to lock out key outlier elements of the groups that pioneered them. Codification does tend to be the work of imitators drawing on specific aspects of innovators and originators, after all. But that gives short shrift to those who do interesting things within genres, or spur great change within them.

Honestly, in general I greatly prefer the kind of things that emerge from great explosions of genre-busting cultural productivity to those things that seek to perpetuate some tradition or other, even if I like that tradition. That's what made the post-punk era such an exciting one for music: Everyone had their own version of or response to the punk idea and ran with it in a different direction, and consequently underground and even popular music was incredibly exciting. Even far outside of punk, the ripples spread to metal, jazz, the first stirrings of hip-hop and electronic dance music. A reliance on historical narrative alone does not produce such wondrous proliferation.

The Post-Punk era had a lot of great music, in a lot of different idioms- many of them related to Punk only in attitude. It was the era when Metal, Alternative Rock, Electronic Dance Music, Hip Hop and probly a few others too all started to assume forms recognizable to modern ears, after all. A lot of very innovative music was created between 1977 and... well, shit.

When does the Post-Punk era end, exactly? It's hard to draw any kind of clear line, as it is with most other things to do with music...

Actually, that pretty much applies to life in general.

From Simon Reynolds' perspective, the Post-Punk era ended somewhere around 83/84, when New Pop (its phase two) withered away and the charts became conservative and too rigid, by putting traditional elements, sounds, compositions, melodies and so forth through electronic sounds. There are other factors, but I can't remember all of them now.

You summed it up quite well.

edited 20th Apr '14 6:57:35 AM by Quag15

People blaming genres for making things "dull" remind me of the same sort of people who blame scientists for taking the "wonder" and "joy" out of the natural world. Gee, sorry for helping to classify and track the diversity and growth of your favourite music so you have a much easier time identifying what you do and don't want to listen to and giving us a better understanding of a genre! While I don't think genre is a be-all-end-all when it comes to describing music (even the subgenres at best are more macroscopic than miscroscopic in their general capability for descriptive content), they're inevitable because it is in people's nature to try to understand and organize their art and a simple, efficient way of organizing. How efficiently people are able to use them is another matter altogether.

At the same time, I'm not sure how post-punk was supposed to have been that big of an influence on metal or how the "historical narrative" supposedly counteracts diversity in genres. As far as I'm concerned, the actual groundbreakers and innovators old and new don't really put a whole lot of thought or caring into whether or not they're living up to some narrative as much as they do into just making the music they love.

edited 20th Apr '14 7:46:27 PM by StillbirthMachine

Sarcasm aside, I agree to an extent with your first paragraph.

Again, to cite Simon Reynolds, to many Post-Punk musicians and fans, "Metal was the enemy", because Metal at that time, to them, harked back to the rock music spirit, which Post-Punk musicians wanted to avoid. They didn't want to hear about blues-derived Metal or the 'loud, male-centric (or perhaps phallocentric)', or the Prog-Rock association.

The only possible Post-Punk band that had some influence from Metal were The Killing Joke, and even then it was only a few elements.

So, the Post-Punk stuff and the Metal stuff of that time were very apart, in the same way that Hard Rock and Disco were (and keep in mind there were a lot of Post-Punk bands influenced by Funk and Disco, e.g. Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd., The Pop Group).

Hope I interpreted this part of your sentence well.

edited 20th Apr '14 7:58:51 PM by Quag15