Rock is dead, in the sense that its “aliveness” is a subjective assertion based on whatever criteria the listener happens to care about. When someone argued rock was “dead” in 1968 or 1977 or 1994 or 2005, that individual was making an aesthetic argument, grounded in whatever that person assumed to be the compromised motives of the artists of the time (customarily built on the conviction that the current generation of musicians were more careerist in nature, thus detracting from the amount of raw emotion they were allegedly injecting into the music). The popularity of the rock genre is
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