The Death of Rebellion, part two

On this blog some time ago, I wrote "The Death of Rebellion." I was fairly new at this blogging business -- not that I'm exactly a Ph.D. now. I expected it to get next to no views, and compared to our features on, say, the Dogs or the Pretty Things it hasn't. But I notice every week a few more people have read it.

Most likely, they're all mental health professionals evaluating its possible use as a case study. If so, I'm sure I've given them plenty to chew on.

But I also think that there are a lot of people who, like myself, see what has happened to rock and roll -- at least the mainstream of rock -- and see a kind of music once full of passion and power become, on the whole, defanged, distilled and degraded. The danger is gone, replaced with a sterile vapidity custom-made to the tastes of the most stick-in-the-butt fuddy-duddies on the planet.

To be sure, there's still a lot of great rock and roll out there, which is why this blog exists in the first place. But -- this is a point I've made before -- you have to find some off-the-wall blog or some internet radio station with 100 listeners to actually hear it or hear about it.

The norm today is digitally-produced slickness, looking nice on the outside but is the equivalent of feeding candy to your soul. It keeps you from being hungry, but the nutritional value is zero. This process has been going on for a long time, going back to the beginnings of rock.

The change for the worse really solidified in the '90s, which to me was a terrible decade for rock and roll and one from which it still hasn't recovered from.

Don't get me wrong -- there was quite a lot of great rock in that decade, and I remember at the beginning of that ten-year stretch, I thought it was going to be one of rock's best. Grunge, to me, was little more than punk updated with a dash of metal. Metal, meanwhile, was well-represented by Guns 'n Roses and Metallica, both of whom, to me anyway, also bordered on punk with their no-holds barred passion. Rap was just emerging as a musical force, and I was blown away by the lyrical genius of Public Enemy and KRS-One. And there were the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More and a host of other bands melding those genres and others and making them sound like they were meant to be together the whole time.


But before long, that all all fell apart. Radio owner consolidation led to a stultifying sameness on stations that traditionally hadn't sounded much like each other. In turn, artists started sounding an awful lot like each other. And there was a huge erosion in the audience of rock. Hip hop started to take a giant bite of the rock audience, but it wasn't good or creative hip hop -- it was just blather that had little to do with the beat, a feature that still pervades mainstream rap.



Country also sunk its teeth in, and like hip hop, forgot what made people like it in the first place.  Garth Brooks was hell-bent on making country sound like arena rock and by the end of the decade, that's exactly what country sounded like. Give mainstream country a listen right now, and it's mostly paint-by-numbers tunes by jocks and cheerleaders in cowboy hats.  It's long been accepted that Hank Williams or Johnny Cash would never be allowed anywhere near the country radio of today.

Starting in the mid-80s, older listeners, in the meantime, gravitated to music they already heard a gazillion times, making "classic rock" hugely popular -- and cutting off another chunk of the rock and roll audience.

In the opinion of this humble blogger, the death of rebellion is not the actions of a lone gunman, but a not-so-shadowy, vampiric conspiracy interested in sucking out every last molecule of profit, even if it means sucking the life out of the music in the long run. As I said before, there has always been an uneasy balance between commerce and art -- both of which are essential to the success of rock and roll. But, somewhere along the way, emotion and artistry became considered luxury rather than necessity, music became a product instead of art.

The first thing that comes to mind is radio, which has always been the mother's milk for rock and roll. In my mind it has become close to listenable. And why is that? I have a couple of theories.

It's partly due to consolidation, at least here in the United States, where a few corporations own most of the radio stations. Their main goal, like the majority of the rest of the corporate world, appears to be maximizing their profits, which in and of itself isn't evil. But, in that quest to pleasure their shareholders, radio has gotten risk adverse in the extreme. And listenership keeps falling, particularly with audiences under 50. And the radio conglomerates answer? Play music that sucks even more, play music that sounds like everything else that also sucks. And never mind that nobody listens to your stations anymore.

But the conclusion I'm really coming to is that the title of this post is all wrong. More and more, it looks like rebellion isn't really dead -- it has shrunk down to a size to a where it can be drowned in a bathtub -- and kept to a point where rock just doesn't get shaken up anymore.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you this, but younger listeners -- that is, rock's core audience -- is embracing internet-based outlets more and more. They figured out, as have a lot of us, that they're not prisoner to the FM band anymore. Streaming services such as Pandora have become the new way to hear new music. Internet radio -- of which I admit to being a huge fan -- has also become increasingly popular. For me, the best alternative is satellite radio, which actually sounds like real radio. But, given the competition from internet options, I wonder how long it'll be around.

All these alternatives make up a good news/bad news proposition.

The good news is that there will always be a place for cool music. No matter how out there, or how tame, an artist's music is, it will always have a home, and probably have an audience.

The bad news, though, is that it will further fragment and ghettoize rock (and all other kinds of popular music). On demand is great. But, human beings are creatures of habit. There's always going to be a few people who really do want to take in all the different kinds of music that's available to them, but many others are creatures of habit. If AC/DC is their thing, its unlikely they'll take much trouble to check out the Kaiser Chiefs, or Hank III, or Gary Clarke Jr.

And since the audience is so fragmented, what will the upside be of taking chances? Sure, a few artists will -- there's always a few who will. But for the most part, artists will figure out who's buttering their bread and cater to that audience.

What's lost with this? I think it's safe to say there will never be another Elvis or another Beatles -- acts whose popularity gave them command of the music, artists whose sheer power, genius and most of all, rebelliousness inspired disaffected kids to grab the best guitar they could, hole up with a few buddies in the garage, and create music that people would enjoy for the next 50 years and beyond. We will probably never see artists like these who transcended music to demand a place in the overall culture as well.

Heck, with the landscape as it is now, I don't think we'll even be artists the next tier of popularity down -- Michael Jackson, Prince, the Bee Gees --who help form the musical landscape for others even outside their domain.

It should be noted that another reason for this is that television has also become very fragmented, at least in the United States, so there's no longer an Ed Sullivan. Is the answer to go back to four channels on the TV? Probably not.


The tone of this post is somewhat lamentory, but I'm not sure it need be. The idea that four working-class brits or a sharecropper's son from Mississippi could become the cultural juggernauts they did is appealing, and more importantly, it's hard to imagine garage rock -- or so many other genres -- without what these guys did. But, even in the pre-digital world, those particular kinds of forces rarely happened.

So what do we do? My answer -- just enjoy being part of this bubble that thinks rock and roll should actually mean something. Just enjoy the great music that still, truth be told, abounds. Let commercial radio continue to marginalize itself.

Being a blues dj in the early '80s, blues was an almost dead genre. It picked up life, and at times I think it's actually been fairly popular. That's good for the survival of the music, but it also led me to hear a lot of bad blues. too. With some exceptions, that's how it works -- the more popular a music becomes, the more garbage that genre produces. So maybe being a cult has its perks.