The Kids Are The Rock'n'Roll Preservation Society

god save riffs and jams, in all the different varieties! 

It's that sentence that has made everyone mad since Buddy and Ritchie and the other bloke passed on and Elvis joined the army: rock is dead. At the risk of completely embarrassing myself I think it's true this time. Genres only really get five or six decades to be truly Relevant before they become heritage concerns to be maintained and not innovated within. The blues went from the delta c. 1900 to Chicago clubs in the Fifties before it entered its preservation era in the 60s. "How can you say that when people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix considered themselves bluesmen?" A of all, you cannot ask artists where they would place themselves critically, because assuming they don't get it wildly wrong like Clapton or Hendrix they will all uniformly say "A bit of everything, really. We just make music, man." Even I, normally the exact kind of nerd you can count on to delineate things properly, fall into these exact same platitudes the moment someone asks me about my own music. Artists are morons. Leave the cataloguing to us nerds. "Didn't you just say you ca-" shut the UP. Secondly, all the British bands you're thinking of - Stones, Yardbirds, Animals, Mayall's Bluesbreakers, the fuckin Graham Bond Organisation - started off as preservationists, reverently recreating the Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy singles that made their way across the pond, and, crucially, the moment they stopped doing that it became a different thing. You can hear the influence of the blues on these lot, obviously, but you'd never mistake "Ruby Tuesday" or "Tales Of Brave Ulysses" for Piedmont fingerpicking or amped up Bronzeville jump blues.

The same is true of jazz; it was codified by 1920 as the New Orleans party music you hear perfected by Louis Armstrong on his earliest recordings, continued to be a hotbed of innovation through the big band, bebop, free jazz, and fusion eras, before hitting the wall sometime in the 80s. All I am saying is rock has reached that point. The key to this, that I think throws people off, is when a genre dies like this it doesn't mean no one stops playing it. I can hear you all howling "There's plenty of good rock, you just have to go out searching for it!" and I'll explain why that's completely misguided below, but it's true and the same is certainly true of blues, jazz, and any other dead genre you care to name. What happens is the biggest names in the space are all singularly devoted to 'keeping the genre alive'. This is a lot easier to exemplify than explain, so: SRV. Stevie Ray Vaughan, for the uninitiated, was a guitar player who dealt in the sort of unreconstructed Texas blues that I imagine was played in every bar across the state in the postwar era, except he didn't release his first album until 1983. He was an incredible guitarist, don't get me wrong, but, like: he wasn't doing anything new with the blues. He was just doing The Blues(TM), really really well. He preserved the style, did not fuck with the formula, and it worked great. Robert Cray did much the same in the 80s to similarly good-but-not-innovative effect. People like Pat Metheny and especially Wynton Marsalis would do a similar job for the legacy of jazz: Wynton took things a step further by quite vocally dismissing any of the latter-day innovations within the jazz canon, and now he holds the title Director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in NY.

This is the dividing line for me: when the biggest names in the scene are essentially museum curators for the genre, you're done out here, and if rock isn't at that point now it will be by 2030. It's the difference between, say, a head gardener at a country house, and Capability Brown; yeah, you're in charge of what gets pruned when and which things get attention (c.f. Wynton's preference for "straight-ahead" New Orleans early jazz over free/fusion stuff), but Capability Brown designed the fucking garden. Every year without fail, some random teenager from Alabama with no mates their own age will come up on YouTube or something playing excellent blues and every 60 year old (and failing guitar company, Gibson you're not slick) will point to them as proof that The Kids Are Alright and Rock/Blues Ain't Dead Just Yet. They're all just tiny Wynton Marsalises though, fully paid up members of The Rock'n'Roll Preservation Society to varyingly militant degrees, and only recieve popularity among old people and, for some reason, every single member of the Recording Academy come Grammy season. I mean, really, what the fuck is Jon Batiste doing with Album Of The Year apart from holding things down for the R&B Preservation Society (I am arguing R&B was only relevant from the late 50s until hip-hop completely superseded it in the late 2000s)? He's literally from the same Louisiana suburb as Wynton, people! Wake up, sheeple!

damn, i've been raving about this messi bloke for years, i can't believe he really, finally won the superbowl

What I could see happening in the next couple years is one of those sort of kids drawing liberally from 70s/80s rock and having a Texas Flood-style crossover record that completely wins over the wrong generation kids, but has enough juice to impress people outside of the preservation circle. John Mayer is a big 80s guy, literally preserving the Grateful Dead right now, and surprisingly influential among younger guitarists especially, but he's pushing 40 and if he was gonna manage a crossover it would've been Sob Rock from last year. Greta van Fleet are just too baitly Zep ripoffs to ever achieve any sort of relevance or respectability in my - and I think most people's - mind, though if they ever get past that, watch out. Jack Antonoff's work in Bleachers (and for every other fucker on the planet) comes closest to this, seeing as he's always gunning for Springsteen-circa-"Dancing In The Dark", but his continued presence behind the boards for actually relevant artists stymies that somewhat. Machine Gun Kelly's last couple of albums are reviving the pop punk of the early 2000s, so I will cover that when I talk about punk in a few weeks, but that's also a certain take on the reverent recreation of one of rock's bygone eras that seems to connect with the children. That's the other thing that consigns rock to the dumpster, anyway - you wouldn't go straight to describing a lot of the genre's offspring (the various strains of punk, metal, and indie) because, much like just describing Hendrix as playing "the blues", you'd be missing a lot of nuance and a lot of evolution.

I do struggle with the idea, and it's absolutely not a bulletproof take, because counting out rock'n'roll feels as foolhardy as counting out Touchdown Tom, but my belief doesn't really come from the music so much as it does technology. All great "music" shifts have come as a direct result of or direct collaboration with technological advances. AM radio makes highly produced pop - think Motown, or its contemporary countrypolitan - sound amazing, then FM radio comes along and makes longer-form music - prog rock, quiet storm - suddenly viable. Disco coincides with the beginning of synthesisers in popular music, and as soon as drum machines are capable of bashing out a four-on-the-floor they're in. Snap music takes the sound of crunk and makes it as skeletal and minimal as possible at the exact time that mobile phone speakers became capable of playing skeletal, minimal electronic music. I can't think of anything going on now technologically that suits rock. 

Shortform video content rules social media, prioritising ruthlessly efficient chorus-verse-chorus-out pop rap songs that sound good from your phone speaker (just like with snap music - often straight up called "ringtone rap" - in the mid 2000s). The sorts of hitmaking machinery that once supported rock groups - a brazen and inflammatory music press, especially in the UK; the aforementioned FM radio; mid-sized venues in mid-sized towns; record labels worth a damn - are all in sharp decline for one reason or another. I'm increasingly less of the opinion that bands are making worse music, or "less radio-friendly" music, because how would I fucking know. Where am I supposedly hearing all these deliberately unlistenable beat combos, exactly, my own Spotify? Sounds like a me problem! 

I got into an argument with a boomer on Twitter a few months back that elucidated the problem for me. At the time, I was arguing for rock's continued survival, but the more I thought about it the more I realised I was deadly wrong. Dude's conceit was that since Nirvana (the original catalyst for the thread; I was drafted in later by my comrade Graham), he never saw good new rock acts on late night television or the radio, and his teenage daughters only listened to stupid ephemeral TikTok music, and this meant rock was no more. I began by trying to suggest that what he missed was the methods of music popularisation common before the Communications Act of 1996 and then the internet, and then I began to feel he was being willlfully uncurious if he couldn't even be arsed to check out festival headliners like Tame Impala, completely uninterested in finding and sustaining rock music, but then I realised that's exactly the issue.

People have tried to define rock ever since it first began to drop the "n'roll" but I now think the most efficient definition is just "music with guitars that people like". Obviously you're missing some nuance, but there's not really a better way to connect Aerosmith with Del Amitri or the Hollies with Soundgarden. These are all musics, from Elvis through the Strokes, defined by their use of guitar-bass-drums, and their ubiquity. Once you take away that ubiquity things begin to fall apart. Having to go out and search really hard for rock music is an oxymoron. It should be as inescapable as any pop you care to mention. Think about when you used to go to HMV or whatever. There are the specialties: the "world" music; the blues, maybe country, folk, often packaged together in some grouping or another; 500 years of art music collapsed into "classical"; a dingy corner for punk and/or metal, also often together; and then, with pride of place, the "pop AND ROCK" section. The popularity is the point. This is not true of punk, metal, or "indie" - which, as I say, I'll get to over the rest of winter - because they have always defined themselves as non-mainstream in some way or another. Now, yeah, obviously you can dig deep to find indie pop that sounds just as good as Doja Cat or Ed Sheeran but has 2000 Spotify plays, but there's also Doja Cat and Ed Sheeran. There is no such provision for the less discerning rock fan. 

As much as rock bands have always benefitted from local scenes, random pockets of rabid fandom, and working their niches, it's the one genre along with pop most reliant on people that mostly don't give that many shits about music. Tom Ewing writes incredibly eloquently about this idea over the course of his reviews of all fourteen Westlife #1s - "Swear it Again" for example here - but what made Simon Cowell so disgustingly effective between, I don't know, 1995 and 2014 or whenever 1D broke up, was his ability to mobilise a group of record buyers that didn't buy other records. Mums and their daughters that would show up at Woolworths without fail to send those Irish lads straight to #1, vote for them in any capacity presented to them (you suspect the phone-in success described in Ewing's article is where he got the idea for Pop Idol and the X Factor), ask for them to be on the radio whenever possible, but not care about literally any other artist on the planet. Rock functioned maybe one level beyond that. My boomer interlocutor would tune into rock radio, just 'cause that was available in the car, and hear Bruce Springsteen. Turn on Letterman, just 'cause it was funny anyway, and catch a performance from Dinosaur Jr (above). Turn up at Walmart, just 'cause you need groceries anyway, and pick up the newest Tom Petty CD. The moment any effort is introduced - something as simple as "Google Tame Impala or Mac deMarco, for fuck's sake" - it stops serving its purpose, stops being enticing. In punk or metal, this sort of attitude is unthinkable, it is expected you put SOME kinda work into maintaining the genre yourself (you will note that this should make them perpetual Preservation Societies, but basically a) you eventually tend to age out, if not of the genre, then of the maintenance, so there's always new blood, and b) there are preservation societies within each faction but because it's for obscure music very few people have fond memories of they are mostly ignored), but for rock it was kind of the point. This, along with its age, is why it's at death's door now while its progeny continue to grow in strength.

Think about it like this. If you just wanna get a train somewhere you get whatever the first train that shows up is. If you specifically want to get a steam train or an early diesel or the 1972 Picadilly Line stock or whatever the fuck you need to go out of your way and locate a specific heritage railway that caters to your brand of nonsense. If you want catchy riffs and twin guitar leads, you're gonna need to go out of your way to find a heritage radio station. Rock is but a Conservation Area, as vital and relevant as Mitcham Cricket Green (the painting at the top!). "We're [maybe] the oldest cricket pitch to be continually in use in the world!" Write a drill tune and get back to me, sweetcheeks.