Gearhead wrote:
Ah well they still play Mozart as well. Not even as dead as you might assume.
I think it was put very nicely in one of the interviews in the second Crossroads DVD: good music needs a host, which is why we only learn about Hendrix at age thirteen when someone says: you oughta listen to this record, or this one.
Rock will be like Blues: millions of people will watch it / listen to it without the hype of the pop stuff of the day.
And that's a good thing?
Blues is terrible these days. Really. Technically the modern generation of blues players might be very good, but the music is cliched, lifeless... meh. 50 years ago the Blues was potent, scary, emotional, now it's the preserve of blow-dried frat boys and perhaps the odd mid-age-crisis bank manager who want to shake their ass on night club tables in New Orleans.
The trouble with the blues, modern blues, is that it's all about form and has no substance. It's just a cliche, usually a long one.
Which brings us to....
"At some fundamental level, the rock narrative is exhausted. Its musical palette has nothing new to offer, and, arguably, that has been the case for a decade or more. What is perhaps most remarkable is that rock has lasted so long, propelled by the visceral thrill of the electric guitar, the primal energy stirred up by three chords and the truth, and a parade of fantastic characters driven to wring every nuance from a multifarious genre."
Well it depends on your definitions. I see life in the old corpse yet, but the whole stadium rock thing.... big rock. Rock with a capital R. The Rock of VH-1 and MTV. I've been wondering for some time what it's about these days. It seems more like showbiz to me.
It's too much about the SHOW, not enough about the music.
We're half the problem (at least). We're looking at the wrong thing. We want to see a stadium full of people all punching the air. The right gestures. Guys hoisting their girlfriend up on their shoulders. Gee.... maybe she'll flash her titties. This is ROCKING. Assuming we pay attention to the stage, that we can even see that far, we want a guitar player (Slash is the model) who has that insolent stance, who has ATTITUDE, who is going to put a foot on the monitor when he takes a solo. A leader singer who does a cheer-leader imitation with the mic stand. Dude, how ROCKING is that!
It's amazing it's lasted as long as it has actually. But I think that people feel something now - that it's all a bit 2 dimensional and there's not a lot of substance to it. You can go along, have you moment of transcendence with the tribe, with the crowd you bonded with for the night. It's a thrill, for a while. Hard to keep people coming back for more, but there's always South America and the 3rd world where the whole thing is novel still. Plus if you hang on long enough your original fans will get their kids out the house and can go to a couple more shows without embarrassing their daughter.
It's also getting a bit ridiculous, especially with the bands who have been massive, huge whatever for years now. The LEGENDS. Bon Jovi singing "Living on a Prayer" is getting a bit implausible. The Stones singing "Let's Spend The Night Together" is downright worrying. Even if you start them up, what are they really going to do? The teenage rebellion thing isn't convincing once you're past 30. The whole tired, too much sex and cocaine thing gets creepy by the time you're 50.
As Singe Monkey said recently, AC/DC do a bit better on this regard because they've never been about much really (though if I'm hearing the lyrics correctly there's a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing with Hell at one end of the journey). So they do better, but Angus Young is getting a bit ridiculous now. Though if he stopped dressing like a school boy then attendances might drop off.
It's all about the gimmicks, the pose, the attitude, the things that Rock (capital R) is supposed to be about. It got itself trapped. And there's too much focus on the riffs, the solos, the speed of the solos, the TONE (I am so sick of hearing about the smegging TONE). We don't see music as a whole where, when it's really good, all the components come together to create something that is greater than the sum of the parts, we see the parts, and end up with something less. In fact the chase has been cut to... in some cases all that's on show is the parts, There's a monster riff, mind-boggling solos, omigod did you hear that chord progression.... not much actual music.
I don't think it's neccesarily game over. And it will "live" on in tribute bands and retro shows. "Buddy" was a West End stage show after all. It'll be like a zoo, a curiosity show. Only the animals will be ancient ones cloned from old DNA. Declawed. Kept at a safe distance.
