#ALTERNATIVE TO THINKING ROCK TV#
While the New Jersey band’s set was an intimate affair backdropped by a simple banner, Travis Scott’s set looked like Tokyo on Ecstasy-a multi-media party where the stage was decked out in flashing TV screens, fog machines, and lasers, while the shirtless Scott bounced off the monitors. Meanwhile, a couple hundred yards away, Travis Scott’s sea of barf teens was so massive that someone had to come on stage before his set to instruct the crowd to move back because the people up front were getting squished.Įven as a longtime Gaslight fan I could concede to being outmatched. Even The Gaslight Anthem, the rock darlings who came out of semi-retirement to play their entire fan-favorite album as the Saturday night headliner, looked out onto a sparsely filled field. Japandroids and The Menzingers, two reliable mid- to large club bands, played to half-empty fields while kids flocked to Halsey and Post Malone. And when presented with a variety of musical options, take a guess as to which the barf kids chose. Last weekend I walked across a bridge of vomiting teenagers to Governors Ball, an all-ages outdoor New York festival that encompasses a wide range of genres. I’m not sure how much time the “rock ain’t dead!” defenders spend among teenage music fans, but I’d recommend they give it a whirl. (Foo Fighters took home the award anyway, though, since the Grammys were dangerously close to recognizing a band that’s been around for less than two decades.)īut beyond sales figures and streaming numbers, rock’s death knell can be heard on the ground. Avenged Sevenfold, seemingly through some sort of unfortunate clerical error, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Rock Song” but had the good sense not to show up for the untelevised award presentation.
So irrelevant is rock in the music industry at large that the Grammys didn’t even bother to air its rock category awards at this year’s ceremony. Not even taking a literal shit on a microphone while donning the official hat of xenophobia could derail hip-hop’s momentum.
Hip-hop has such a tight stranglehold on new music right now that Kanye West, who made national news by aligning himself with the ideological scum of the earth, farted out a joke single of poopity scoop jibberish that racked up over seven million streams and came within an inch of cracking into the Billboard Hot 100 chart, while his album went to number one. I don’t know if there’s a more sobering indicator than the fact that The Guardians of the Galaxy 2 soundtrack dominated the rock charts for 22 weeks last year, even hitting number one. For the last few years, the Billboard rock charts have been an abysmal slog of new pop artists that occasionally hold guitars like fashion accessories (as of writing this, Imagine Dragons hold the top three slots on the rock songs list), older acts who’ve grandfathered their way into the system like Godsmack and Arctic Monkeys, and decades-old rock albums that are suddenly relevant due to its creator dying or becoming newsworthy. The writing has been on the wall for a while. How can rock be dead when your favorite band just played a sold-out show, or a groundbreaking new rock album got Best New Music at Pitchfork? The future looks promising on the surface, but these are but mere glimmers on ocean waves carrying off a floating corpse. It’s a hard pill to swallow, I know, especially for those who don’t often look outside the genre. And by those standards, yes, rock is dead. And while that is true and good, it’s not what people mean when they say “rock is dead.” They mean that from an industry perspective, the genre has been eclipsed in all measures of popularity and profitability by pop, hip-hop, and EDM. Other times, more in-touch writers will point out that rock isn’t dead, it’s just finally evolving to become more inclusive of women and people of color, while cheerleading for a few of their favorite examples.
Sometimes they’re written by old guard writers-the guitar-worshipping hangers-on of rock’s bygone heyday-whose kneejerk reactions come off like the meme of Principal Skinner asking himself if he’s so out of touch with youth culture before determining that no, it’s the children who are wrong. Most of the many, many Rock Ain’t Dead thinkpieces being published fall into a handful of predictable tropes. The subject is such trite internet bait that gallantly defending rock’s honor has become Rock Journalism 101. Whisper it in seclusion at the top of the Himalayas and 30 people in CBGB shirts will materialize to drop some well, actuallys… on you. The phrase “rock is dead” makes people angry.
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