Rock and Roll is Dead

Rock and roll is dead.

Hey, Lenny Kravitz said it, not me what… 10 years ago?

But can we accept that it may actually be coming true?

True in the sense of the glamour, the fame and the excessive fortune -that rockers may not be ‘gods’ any more. They are no longer entitled to super stardom multi mansion privileged living because of a few good songs.

Everybody is freaking out about the declining record, cd or whatever sales as music becomes ubiquitous as water. So what if sales are declining? What does it actually mean?

Well it means one thing- 10 million people are not going to go out and by the same record like they did in 1983. 10 million people may go out and buy 10 million records but there is now more of a chance it will be 10 million different records. The consequence? One guy is not going to get filthy crazy out of control rich. And create Neverland.

But what really is rock music? What is pop music? Pop is short for popular obviously. But isn’t rock and pop at its core, music of the people- music of the common folk? So what is the problem if the music of the common folk actually comes back into the hands of the common folk in the sense that more commoners actually make music and buy a wider more selective variety of it? Wasn’t that what punk was about?  A frustrated, belligerent rebellion against the god like virtuosity of Supertramp, Boston and ELO who held this god like status over the rest of the ‘little people’. A social middle finger to the music of the ‘gods’  which was unreachable, unattainable and unplayable.

Punk said, “Screw you- I know 3 chords, can barely sing but I have something to say that’s just as important as you ‘gods’. I don’t need to be a pompous virtuoso to resonate truth. To convey something real.”

And resonate it did. Punk brought music down from the unreachable pearly heights back into the gutter where most of the world lives and said, “Hey-we have something say down here.”

Now that technology has made it possible for virtually anyone to be a creator and to make their stuff available to the entire planet I ask this question –

Isn’t that the ultimate punk rock rebellion? Has not all of ‘popular’, ‘common’ music turned punk?!?!?

Is it all good music? Of course not. Will the good stuff be harder to find? Maybe. But will it be any harder to find then it was when “Top 40” traffic controllers suppressed and filtered what was out there? Isn’t it just a different type of sifting process now – a sift through an available 40,000 rather than a packaged 40?

To live as a rock pop god had its run for 40-50 years. Is it such a bad thing that a talented artist now may only be able to own a nice house rather than a nice…island?

Jeff Beck said he played guitar before it was cool -when you would face getting beaten for carrying a guitar on the way to school because you looked like such a geek. He carried his guitar long before Jimi Hendrix elevated the guitar into a testament to powerful male virility. He played it when it made you look like a goon that risked getting beaten in the back alley.

But he did it anyway because he loved it and didn’t care what people thought. And it was worth the risk.

As musicians and would be musicians see the stairway does not necessarily glitter with gold and therefore think a little more about the purchase, perhaps there will be less that are drawn to it for the wrong reasons.

Perhaps only the artists who love it enough to face a gauntlet of violent limey ridicule will persevere -and give us something really worth listening to.