Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

by Steven Hyden

The second narrative posited that the meaning of Disco Demolition Night was only tangentially related to music, having more to do with the racism and homophobia of the participants. This view was forwarded most prominently by music critic Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, who observed at the end of 1979 that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and [Latinos], and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.” You can see the parallels to Trump—at both Disco Demolition Night and the Republican National Convention, rock music represented the conservative status quo, a view propagated by an overwhelmingly white majority openly (in some cases violently) opposed to cultural integration.

The most compelling interviewee is Vince Lawrence, an early pioneer of Chicago house music who worked at Comiskey that night as an usher. As a young black man surrounded by crazed white people intent on burning records by mostly black artists—even records that weren’t actually disco—Lawrence could only see Disco Demolition Night as thinly veiled racism. He convincingly connects the riot to a racially motivated beating he once received not far from the stadium. “Steve Dahl from my perspective was the same sort of person resisting the same sort of change,” Lawrence concludes.

“I’m worn out from defending myself [from accusations of being] a racist homophobe for fronting Disco Demolition,” Dahl concluded. “This event was not racist, not antigay. It is important to me that this is viewed from the lens of 1979. We were just kids pissing on a musical genre.” I don’t know which narrative is correct. I suspect that they’re both true—people

probably hated disco because it inflamed something dark inside of them that they might not have known was there, and they also probably hated disco because disco (like a lot of pop music) was getting pretty fucking ridiculous and played out in 1979.

What’s not disputed in either narrative is the suggestion that loving rock ’n’ roll derives from a reactionary, conservative impulse—you’re either ripping up a ballpark because you hate that rock is being overshadowed by disco, or because you’re secretly fearful that white men ...

If you can think like the Stones, you’ll see there is no beginning and no end to music, only grooves that you can lock into and ride until you find another groove. It’s all rock ’n’ roll if you want it to be. The point is that the continuum keeps on going regardless of how you process, classify, contextualize, or divide it into myriad subcategories. Instead of trying to bend the groove to your personal whim, it might be better to just plug in and accept wherever it takes you. Put another way: you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.

The short-term result of all this as it pertains to classic rock is that a lot of great artists were pushed away—they never got the respect or the money they deserved. In the long term, however, the script has been flipped. When the white male rock star, the protagonist of the classic-rock mythos, came to be viewed as passé in mainstream pop by the end of the nineties, there was no alternative to take his place.

“It was an insult term by people who didn’t like this sort of traditional, backward-looking band and were vaguely disturbed by the erasure of the generation gap,” Reynolds told me. The biggest British band of the era, Oasis, epitomized the “sort of traditional, backward-looking band” that dad-rock critics despised, Reynolds wrote.

When Pitchfork was founded in 1996, its mission was to cover all the bands that never got mentioned in Rolling Stone. The site represented a stand by Gen Xers against the boomers, but also a strike against mainstream rock by the underground, foreshadowing the impending end of the classic-rock era.

“It’s music for squares,” Billboard declared of dad rock in 2014. “The younger, more multicultural world views it as not just passive, but patriarchal, because its values exclude almost all people of color, anyone who uses a turntable or a sampler and a wide range of female artists, from Taylor Swift to Azealia Banks. A vote against dad rock is a vote for inclusiveness.”

As a professional culture critic, I’ve been sworn to protect these trade secrets. However, circumstances have compelled me to be the Edward Snowden of pop criticism. At the risk of imprisonment in music-critic jail, I must be a whistleblower and leak this highly effective and oft-used three-point plan. Invent a genre that only critics care about or even know how to define. (This applies to dad rock, but also chillwave, seapunk, backpack rap, hipster metal, alt-country, or anything attached to the suffix “-core.”) Construct the criteria for the made-up genre in such a way that it applies to artists you personally cannot stand. Turn that made-up genre against the artists and blame them for not being “inclusive,” even though critics were the ones who decided which artists belong in said genre.

Anybody who has ever read a record review knows that “nostalgic” is the worst thing an album can be, next to “problematic” and “by the Dave Matthews Band.”

The point is that all music derives from what came before, not just rock. Inside every genre lurks a whole lot of dads.

The irony of rock critics inventing dad rock in order to criticize neo-classic-rock bands for eliminating the generation gap is that the generation gap was a by-product of classic-rock mythology invented by baby boomers.

that was broadly defined as rock ’n’ roll. The mythology of Elvis Presley was that he “invented” a new style of music by synthesizing many styles that were largely unfamiliar to white fifties teenagers. But the contradiction of the myth is plain to see—it’s not really “new” if you are combining elements of music that already exists. Actually, I would argue that it is new, because if you don’t accept that synthesis plays a part in pretty much every great rock record ever made, then nothing is ever truly original.

When David Bowie invented Ziggy Stardust, he was jacking Marc Bolan’s act and Lou Reed’s songwriting style. The first Ramones record sounded like the Beach Boys if the Beach Boys were from Queens and sniffed glue. Bruce Springsteen stole from Dylan and Phil Spector, U2 stole from Springsteen, and Arcade Fire stole from U2 (and Springsteen).

The truth is that all music has elements of borrowing and invention. Elvis Presley became a legend because he combined different kinds of music and culture in new and exciting ways. But Elvis was also clearly indebted to many artists who came before him. He was a revolutionary, and a dad rocker.

I was a kid. In my mind, Zeppelin will always equal “Zeppelin circa 1971 or ’72.” It’s like a stationary monument that lies along the path of my life. Listening to Pearl Jam, however, makes me feel older than listening to Zeppelin does. That’s because that band is traveling down the path with me. Led Zeppelin will always exist outside of time, whereas Pearl Jam will always exist in my time.

When people say, “Rock is dead,” they’re really making a statement about themselves—they’re saying, “This thing that once mattered to me is now dead to me.” The flip side is that every year there is a new group of teenagers for whom the world is being created just as they’re discovering it for the first time. Anything that existed before them might as well have been around forever.