The Sphinx Must Be Dyin': What's Killing Rock and Roll? (Part II)

Part of the reason rock concerts died was because the band as a format of music creation died. 

With bands, there was an immense amount of give and take involved in the recording process for even the most lackadaisical of single b-sides. Putting five guys in a room together and telling them all to agree on something was very often a recipe for disaster, but those disasters gave us some of the best damn music ever to be heard.

If The Kinks weren’t constantly caught up in their own infighting for such a prolonged amount of time, I doubt that they would’ve been able to make so much good music. If everyone had constantly sat back and said “OK, Ray, whatever you say,” to every bad idea that was beamed into Ray Davie’s head, then they wouldn’t have garnered nearly as good of a reputation as they did in the sixties. If Fleetwood Mac hadn’t been stuck with so much trouble in the first seven years of their careers, then they never would’ve been in the place they were at when they finally made Rumors. 

Apart from the wonderful consequences that come with sticking stubborn people in rooms together and seeing what happens, a part of the thing that made concerts so successful was you got to witness first-hand the dynamic of whichever band you chose, got to watch the group play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses, got to watch them mess around and have a gas up on stage–the more fun the band was having, the more fun you’d be having.

No matter how far away you actually were from these people, the sense of camaraderie was an intensely powerful force. That’s why people still love bands they got to see live in their teenage years–some type of bond formed, and that bond isn’t ever going to break. The Faces probably wouldn’t have earned such a fan base if they weren’t an entertaining watch, and I guy I know might’ve never walked out on a Journey concert in the late ‘70s because they stood there doing nothing if they hadn’t booked Thin Lizzy as the opener. 

Teenage supporters at Disco Demolition Night, 1979. Source: https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/06/13/why-are-the-chicago-white-sox-commemorating-disco-demolition-night

But at some point at or near the turn of the century, being in a band must’ve become too much of a hassle for people to want to put up with it anymore. The last time I remember hearing an actual band on Top Forty radio was when they constantly played a Paramore song in the early 2010s. Apart from that, I could not reliably name you any band that has had a top ten hit record since the 1980s.

I don’t know how or why, but somewhere along the line every up-and-coming creative in the business unanimously agreed that it was less inconvenient to be a singer-songwriter. There would be less hurtles to jump through if you worked by yourself, less opinions and ideas to have to consider, less egos to clash with so you could focus solely on your own, which was growing rather bloated; less competition for who would be the in the forefront, as you would be having to deal with enough of that going up against every other copy-and-paste singer on the market.

At some point music fans fell for this: the audience decided that bands were too complicated, too confusing, too unreliable and too unrelatable to be worth the investment. In the words of a fellow student in my journalism class when I breached the concept of doing a review of The Band’s 1975 album Northern Lights–Southern Cross in honor of Garth Hudson: “Who the hell still listens to bands?” 

What variety we have here. Source: https://www.dailymusicroll.com/entertainment/top-10-best-pop-female-singers-of-2023.html

Everyone is allowed to do what they want without any criticism, input or push back, and they all want to make the same thing. And for some reason, they all want to be god’s gift to the eight year olds, writing the same old recycled and worn out tales of empowering breakups and sexcapades backed by the same expired electronic, overproduced drivel that

somehow passes as quality instrumentation, which only serves to further the big business desire to glorify those whose artistry would’ve accumulated to dimes and nickels back in the seventies. 

In the early seventies there was also an influx of singer-songwriters, and though the market might’ve been over-saturated, there was still one amazing selling point: those singer-songwriters were good. 

People like Peter Frampton, writing joyous songs of triumph and fragile songs of pure emotion and soul-baring, or Neil Young, consistently churning out records designed to break into your psyche and crawl into the darkest, most loneliest corners of it, or even Rod Stewart, who favored tales of sympathetic prostitutes, trouble with women and the occasional “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out of Me)” along with dozens of others who worked their asses off to give us music that will last a lifetime. That was what being a singer-songwriter was about in the seventies.

Now, all we have are soulless cash-grabs of ‘musicians’ who can’t be bothered to pick a persona that hasn’t been completely worn out, an image that hasn’t been seen a dozen times, a sound that hasn’t been produced to death. 

Everything has been streamlined. Everything about the music industry in the twenty-first century has been designed to be as easily consumed as a piece of candy, gone just as quickly as it was there. Popularity is upheld solely by the fact that the market has become so limited that you don’t have any other choice then to take what they’re feeding you. 

the Alice Cooper band on the back cover of their 1971 album, Killer. You won't see something like this in new, young groups.

You won’t hear anything like tales of a deaf, blind and mute boy becoming a Jesus-like figure through pinball like when “Tommy” was released in 1969, won’t hear things like Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to my Nightmare”, no tales of mice named Gerald or of existential scarecrows like on Pink Floyd’s debut, no character studies of made-up men like in Traffic or Lou Reed songs. Why would you want off-colour lyrics when homogenization is what sells? 

The further and further we get from 1979, the more and more I realize how much I don’t want “Video Killed the Radio Star” to be accurate. 

People like to pin a lot of their appreciation for music on to MTV, and why shouldn’t they? It was a revolution in the way music was discovered and presented to the public for over a decade. It gave us such classics as Styx’s “Mr. Roboto”, Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” and Genesis’ “Illegal Alien”. 

MTV was the first step in this streamlining process that brought us to the dead landscape that the industry is. All of a sudden the medium mattered more then the message.

the MTV moon man bumper, 1981.

Sure, you couldn’t go on singing songs that were overtly critical of any popular institution, but why would you trouble yourself with fussing over how detailed and meaningful your lyrics were when you were too busy thinking about what was going to make your next video shine above all the rest? Why did it matter what words meant and how good your instruments sounded when all you needed to do was get a few pretty guys in your band, mug for the camera for a couple of hours, and have someone edit that into a solid mini-movie? 

“Video Killed the Radio Star” isn’t the only song critical of what was going on in the eighties. While The Buggles were a little early to the trend, MTV and the gradual rate of decay in the quality of music as a broader concept was discussed in songs like Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” and The Police’s “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da”, which was written particularly with how lackadaisical people could be in their songwriting in mind. 

A ticket from the 1st MTV Music Video Awards, 1984

MTV was the reason bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who struggled to maintain their drive in the 1980s. No self-respecting teenage boy or girl wanted to turn the television on to see a bunch of guys who were pushing forty or fifty try and fail to have their already shaky relevance remain in up-keep. They wanted people who were still attractive, still youthful–basically, people who didn’t look like their parents.

This idea has carried over into this century–not once have I seen a picture of a pop songwriter who could not be construed as attractive in some way to their audience. And that’s a damn shame, because music was a lot better when ugly people were allowed to make it. 

MTV is the biggest generation gap I’ve ever seen. It didn’t help that the seventies were already losing some of their own by the time it rolled around. 

By 1980, classic rock had already lost a good deal of its pioneers. Brian Jones, Tommy Bolin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, Les Harvey, Tim Buckley–not to mention the people who we would lose in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Many of the best bands of the MTV era couldn’t even be bothered to last, either. The Police broke up in 1984, The Cars in 1988 as well as Dire Straits (who reformed in the 90s, but only lasted five more years). Ever since then we’ve been on a perpetual decline, with no one coming in to fill the gaps that threaten to get wider and wider with every passing year. 

Charlie Watts in 1965. Photo by George Wilkes

I can point to a major event that first signified the death of classic rock for me: the death of Charlie Watts in 2021. His death told me that even people who seemed as untouchable as The Rolling Stones, people that ingrained in the cultural typeface, had a limited amount of time. Every time I hear someone on the radio talk about Mick Jagger, all I can think about is how old he’s getting, permanently prepared for the day I turn it on to hear that he’s gone. 

Rock fans have been worshiping the bands and artists they loved like living gods since the inception of Beatlemania in the 1960s, whether we’ve been conscious of it or not. I can only imagine how many times I’ve tried to sing the praises of Queen, Pink Floyd, The Who, Peter Frampton or dozens of others to people my age who just didn’t want to hear it like an evangelist at a potluck. How desperately I wanted to keep these people’s music and their stories alive, trying to recruit people to a religion that rarely gets new members. And it’s looking like it never will. 

Since the 70s, musicians have felt the need to tell you that rock and roll isn’t actually dying, that it never will. That hasn’t been true for a long, long time. Nothing is going to bring back the days when albums ruled over singles, when people toured so they could make albums instead of making albums so they can tour, when people sang with true rasp and emotion in their voices, when the music you listened to actually told someone who you were. Nothing is going to bring back people like John Bonham, Alan Wilson, David Bowie or Marc Bolan. And nothing is going to save any of them from being forgotten.