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if given the choice between interviewing a hip, up-and-coming musician and interviewing a past-his-prime has-been, take the has-been every single time.
Has-beens have nothing to lose, whereas younger, hipper artists must think politically, as being candid can hurt you in the long run.
Styx is part of what I call the “underclass” of classic rock that also includes Journey, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, Chicago, Boston, and Supertramp.
Back in the late seventies and early eighties, these underclass bands were dismissed by critics and hipsters of the time as “corporate rock,”
Corporate rock bands even adopted the iconography of actual corporations—instead of putting the band members’ faces on their album covers, Chicago, Boston, Kansas, and Styx all had distinctive logos that became highly recognized brands.
Styx’s music might have been more palatable to more people, but it also mattered less to its audience. However, corporate rock bands were relatively easy to manage, package, and promote. They worked hard, they were generally wholesome, and they didn’t ask questions about how their songs got on the radio.
Record labels paid these promoters, and the promoters leveraged their relationships with local radio stations to prioritize certain songs for airplay.
Two things can be true at the same time: Those dorky corporate rock bands got on the radio because the system was rigged in their favor. But they stayed on the radio because millions of normal people heard something in that music that they could relate to.
Hi Infidelity is probably best remembered for helping to usher in the era of the power ballad.
These power ballads are about damaged people trying to make a go of love despite trying circumstances—and that subject was eminently relatable to millions of recent divorcees like my mom.
the members of “classic era” Fleetwood Mac emit a powerful erotic charisma.
Rumours offered the actual skinny on what it was like to be in way over your head in a grown-up relationship.
It’s a familiar game with Republican politicians in an election year—a conservative partisan will try to use a classic-rock song at a rally
prompting the artist and the media to immediately call out the politician for misappropriation.
The story of classic rock as told by decades of radio airplay, magazine profiles, and rock books is a saga about white guys, because all other kinds of people have typically been rerouted to other genres, even when they were making rock music.
“Neither sexist, ageist, nor racist on principle, the metal subculture is exclusivist, insistent upon upholding the codes of its core membership.”
Let’s conduct a thought experiment: is it possible to write a history of rock using only black artists?
there’s nothing intrinsic about genre. It’s a system created by humans who want to make sense of what they’re hearing. Ultimately, it’s as much about the perception of the listener as it is about the work of the artist.
In the aftermath of Disco Demolition Night, two opposing narratives emerged. In the first, the event was viewed as a sign that disco had reached peak saturation, inspiring a backlash.
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.
What’s not disputed in either narrative is the suggestion that loving rock ’n’ roll derives from a reactionary, conservative impulse—you’re
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.
For so long, rock music operated on a “white males or bust” policy. It never dawned on the gatekeepers of rock purity that the public might eventually choose “bust.”
In the end, indie rockers got their wish: today, corporate rock as it once existed is no more. But there’s a catch: The destruction of corporate rock did not also mean a victory for indie rock. It’s just that rock is no longer considered part of pop music.
“Rock is dead” declarations date back to the late sixties.
“Rock is dead” was a generational rite of passage—every age group wanted to have its own “Rock is dead” moment, because witnessing the death of a culture is almost as good as witnessing the birth of a culture.
I’m an optimistic person, so I would say, “No, rock isn’t dead, it just doesn’t have an easily identifiable cultural identity.” Nobody knows how to define rock music anymore.
rock has a mainstream identity, it’s that faded Nirvana/GNR “outsider” archetype. But not only is this definition old-fashioned, it keeps out a lot of actual rock bands.
he had a reputation for being smarter than you might expect. Really though, Marilyn Manson is smart if you expect him to be kind of dumb, and kind of dumb if you expect him to be smart.
In the popular consciousness, rock ’n’ roll is a tribute concert played by leathery men hoisting one last toast to dead drinking buddies. It
In the twenty-first century, rock mythology has been inverted. Now it’s up to listeners to go on a hero’s journey to seek out what they’re looking for. The music no longer finds you. You must find the music.
Critics and commentators mounted a coordinated strike against “guilty pleasure,” arguing that implanting shame onto cultural preferences was at best prudish and at worst prejudicial to various demographic groups.
Phish proves that it’s possible to be well-known without being famous;
Phish is a classic-rock band that just happened to be mistakenly born about twenty years too late.
That’s the real reason why music critics and cool kids hate Phish so much—they operate as if punk never happened.
In terms of dad rock, the modifier “dad” is meant to weaken the word “rock,” divorcing it from any sense of power, danger, or sexual excitement.
Dad-rock bands view rock history as a tapestry that connects present-day bands to the icons of the past—it’s an argument in favor of young people empathizing with their parents, which is always going to be a hard sell for some people.
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.” “Nostalgic” is code for “out-of-touch and conservative,”
Our ability to easily deconstruct anything “new” has made everything seem like a retread. If Presley existed today, he would be dismissed as derivative, because the sources of inspiration for superstars are more readily available.
highlights something important about my relationship with the rock bands from the nineties that I love, which is different from my relationship with the classic-rock bands from the sixties and seventies that I love, even though I was listening to all of those bands at the same time when I was growing up. The difference is that I grew up with the nineties bands—when I was young, they were also young.
When I listen to Zeppelin, I feel basically the same way as I did when I was a kid.
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.
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.
seemed like Eddie Vedder has not-so-secretly wished to be a classic rocker. In the nineties, Vedder disdained ephemeral celebrity, but he revered historical icons.
Vedder could’ve been a major pop star. But he instead acted like a man who really wanted to be a fifty-year-old journeyman. I think that’s why, when you see Pearl Jam now, Eddie Vedder seems so much happier and more relaxed than he was in the nineties.
Grumpy cultural critics who question the validity of public displays of grief for rock stars don’t understand that rock stars function as flesh-and-blood metaphors for the human experience.
When a rock star dies, what people are mourning is their own mortality.
For the Clash, the demolition of classic rock was simply part of a widespread cultural evisceration.
Once all of the rock gods are dead, they will cease to be people and become only myths.
The Dead established alternative methods of distributing music outside of the corporate record industry decades before that industry imploded, so the cultivation of their replacement talent could be chalked up as another instance of prescient thinking.
