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| Pearl Jam in the video shoot for "Alive" in 1991. |
Addressing the Elephant in the Room
In recent years, or decades even, we've seen a big shift in how we find and consume music, as well as what gets recognised in mainstream media. In some ways, it's become easier to find new music, but harder at the same time, with a lesser variety of music in the mainstream media.
New Formats Dictate How We Listen to Music
The age of CDs and Music Television
Getting invested in music in the late '90s and early 2000s, I found plenty of new interesting rock bands on tv. Here in Sweden, we had the UK version of MTV which was a little different from the US version. We also had ZTV, which was sort of a Swedish version on MTV.
I'm still alive, sings Eddie Vedder at the height of the grunge era. The subgenre that renewed and brought new life to the rock genre. But as a fellow contemporary; the late Chris Cornell puts it in Black Hole Sun: No one sings like you anymore.
MTV had rock-centric shows like Superock, Headbangers Ball and Alternative Nation. US viewers also had 120 Minutes, where a lot of cool bands would come to play live. And then there were of course Beavis and Butt-head. While I watched mainly for laughs, I also got to hear the two knuckleheads mock with rock and metal bands as they sat on their arses laughing at music videos. A lot of up and coming bands would also perform on shows like Top of the Pops on BBC, as well as Letterman and other talk shows, so rock was always present even in an era when teenyboppers like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears got most of the airtime.
Way back before streaming, you bought albums and really sunk into them. You looked at the artwork, read the lyrics in the booklet, and got to know the CD - front to back. You knew the exact song sequence by memory and what tune would play next.
Enter MP3 Players and Streaming
In the early 2000s, portable music players were the new big thing. I remember the early ones having very limited storage, so you had to be very selective when it came to what songs you wanted to take with you on the go. This of course led to people downloading tunes they liked off some shady file-sharing network and just had the music player shuffling the songs around.
Still alive. The typical sound of the early 2000s, when rock (or metal) started blending with rap/hip-hop. It still sounded like rock music in its core, though. (P.O.D. - "Alive" from 2001)
Music No Longer Getting the Appreciation it Used to?
Around the same time, MTV became a reality tv outlet more than an actual music channel. Here in Sweden, pretty much all late-night talk shows also got off the air and Top of the Pops on BBC got cancelled, back in 2006. At this point, we were deep into the Internet age. All of a sudden, everything was about streaming. Since most music was now just a click away on Spotify and other services, CDs were pretty much dead, as no one felt the need of buying music anymore. And as a result, people didn't seem to be that invested in what music they listened to. It's just a matter of starting a playlist and letting it throw random music at you. It became a mindless mass consumption of sorts. Music had become fast food, and didn't get the appreciation that it used to.
Internet Killed the Rock Star is the title of rapper-turning-rocker MOD SUN's new album. And he pretty much nails it. The era where rock bands can behave like self-obsessed divas are long gone, and at least that is a good side-effect from it all. This change already started with the grunge movement, really, where bands were starting to look and act more like normal, everyday people. While that honesty and relatability were refreshing at the time, perhaps it took the fun and appeal out of the genre in the long run. After all, it's in hip-hop videos all the babes and fancy cars are these days. And the appeal of that sort of lifestyle can't be entirely dismissed.
As I watched the below video by a fairly big guitar YouTuber called Art of Guitar, it further established how people's investment in music, in general, has declined in the Internet age. Back in the late 90s, kids knew darn well what bands and songs they loved and were eager to learn on the guitar. Today they have to swipe through their playlists to come up with anything they kinda... sorta like.
Have Influencers Become the New Rock Stars?
Back when I was a kid, the type of music you were into was a big part of your identity. And I would assume it was the same with the generations before mine. Looking at kids in the '80s it was clear as day who were the headbangers and who were the synth fans, for instance. It united like-minded people and created a sense of belonging between them. Music doesn't seem to play that sort of role these days. I would instead guess that perhaps influencers on YouTube and other social media play a larger role in that regard, being the new role models.
Last Bands Attempting to Stay Mainstream
Bands like Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons are the epitome of modern music. They are often labelled as rock bands, and perhaps they are by today's standards. To me, they are just a mishmash of contemporary music. It's like artificial intelligence has taken literally ALL music that is currently on the hit lists and produced new songs out of it to gain mass appeal and maximise profit. It's come to a point where a band no longer plays a specific genre of music or has its own unique style or sound palette. Instead, the music they make is a mixed plate of leftovers other successful artists have cooked. Listening to these bland modern bands is like going to a buffet mixing 21 dishes on the same plate. That's actually a good name if they decide to ditch the pilot thing; Twenty One Dishes. As I already have a good idea what I like and look for in music, I just find it odd that bands just blends more and more trendy flavours into their mix, hoping it will appeal to more people that way. To me that logic just seems backwards. If one person wants a hot dog and another wants ice cream, hot dog-flavoured ice cream will appeal to neither of them.
Apart from the aforementioned groups, one of the biggest bands of recent years is of course Greta van Fleet; a '70s throwback that sounds like a Led Zeppelin tribute band. I guess the stuff that shaped my musical ears in the late 90s and early 00s - bands like the Foo Fighters, Green Day, Manics and Garbage is now considered "dad rock" by some. I guess what the kids today are into would be grandpa rock, then. Trends come and go of course, and Greta van Fleet does pretty much what Wolfmother did, some 15 years ago. And it felt passé already at that point.
Faith No More's Mike Patton has a hard time hiding his disdain for new bands that just rehash old music.
Is Rock Too Demanding?
Going back to what I was rambling about earlier, how kids aren't very passionate about what genres they like, what album is their favourite, or how they don't even know the names of the artists/bands they kinda like. These are the symptoms of popular music as a whole.
That means, a lot of newcomers who want to get into the music industry, tend to go for whatever music requires the least amount of effort to get started with. Rather than investing a lot of money on instruments and then spend several years of their lives trying to master them, they look up how to mix beats and samples on the computer. And rather than practising singing, and perhaps even taking singing lessons to perfect their pitch and technique, they start rapping and again, fix their pitch on the computer with autotune.
And can you blame them, really? No one really buys music anymore, so most of the market is in streams, which is hard to make a living on. Hence it's only natural for people to take the most risk-free route and not make huge investments in it that likely won't pay off. If you can start making music right away on your computer without even leaving the house, that is of course appealing to a lot of people.
To get a rock band going, on the other hand, takes a whole lot of dedication, time and money. Learning to play, not only as individual musicians but also to make it work as a band and to find your own kind of sound. You're also highly dependant on other people, you need to rent a practice space, find a schedule that works for everyone, and so on. A lot of rock dudes just stay home with their guitars hooked to their computers, jamming about, trying to sound like their favourite bands instead of being creative with other people. I'm certainly guilty of this.
Obviously, things are a lot easier to arrange when you work alone, especially in a pandemic. And I think that is a strong win for electronic music.
Diluting the Rock Sound for Cross-Genre Appeal
A genre needs to constantly renew itself to stay healthy and relevant. Since rock, as we know it, is hugely based on analogue instruments; guitar, bass and drums, the ways you can reinvent the genre aren't exactly infinite. Around the millennial shift, nu-metal was the new thing, where rock took a step towards rap and hip-hop. In the late '00s and early '10s, we instead saw a low of rock bands going more towards electronic music. It still somewhat resembled rock, though.
Now we have bands that just try to make top-10 music to please mainstream radio regardless of genre, resulting in watered-down versions of whatever's trending at the moment, be it pop, rock or hip-hop. Groups like Twenty One Pilots and Imagine Dragons have detached themself from the rock genre so much that they are just bland "musical groups", not rock bands.
Mainstream "rock" as of 2017. Supposedly Imagine Dragons is labelled as a rock band, but what little rock elements they may have had is no longer found here. I can't honestly tell what genre this is.New Movement From Rap, Back to Rock
There is hope, though. Much like rock bands started incorporating hip-hop elements in the heydays of nu-metal, we now see the opposite as a new generation starting out in rap and hip-hop now moving towards rock and punk, like Machine Gun Kelly, MOD SUN and KennyHoopla. We even got to see Ice-T going full-on metal with his band Body Count. Who would've thought?
Higher Diversity
We also see the genre getting a lot more diverse in terms of appearance and ethnicity, and that is a good thing. Traditionally rock bands have mostly consisted of white dudes, but it's now harder than ever to judge the book from its cover. Rockers today might as well look like gangsta rappers or fashion hipsters, while long-haired dudes looking like metalheads could just as well be into electronic music or video games. Musical preference and stylistic appearance just don't seem to be as closely associated with one another as they used to.
Mainstream Scene Is Dead - But Does it Matter?
There are older bands like Foo Fighters, Weezer and Garbage that almost keep the mainstream rock scene on life support at this point. But otherwise, the mainstream rock scene as we know it is more or less dead. Then comes the question; is there even a mainstream music scene to begin with? These days, everyone listens to their own niche thing anyway, not what radio stations tell them to listen to. So the thing we all have to ask ourselves is perhaps not is rock music relevant, but is being "mainstream" relevant?
For the main part, rock is more of a grassroots movement these days. And maybe that's a good thing since it offers bands to experiment and bring much needed new flavours to the genre. Who knows what the future looks like for the genre, but the lack of rock in mainstream media makes it more of a sport to find interesting new stuff, but in a way that makes it more rewarding when you do.
And that is one of the major reasons I created this blog, as my craving for new music has never been greater. And with this site, I want to shed light on new interesting bands worth taking a look at and help spread the word. Hope you all find it useful!
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