Rock's in a hard place

Last year, only three of the top 100 songs were by rock bands. Neil McCormick salutes the end of an era .

Is rock dead? The claim has been made before, usually prematurely. But evidence is mounting that we are witnessing the last gasps of the guitar-based genre that has towered over the popular music world since the 1950s.
As I pointed out last week in a blog – “How rock died (and nobody noticed)” – rock music, in any of its varied forms, has almost completely disappeared from the charts. This excited some controversy, with stories appearing elsewhere both issuing death certificates and defending rock’s survival skills.
Jim Morrison was probably the first to coin the phrase as far back as 1969, repeating, “Rock is dead” over and over in a widely bootlegged jam. In fact, the genre outlived the singer.
There were plenty who said rock was a spent force during the age of Seventies disco before punk brought distorted guitars back with a vengeance. Despite the rise of new wave, indie and stadium rock in the Eighties, the creative credibility of guitar music was seriously challenged by the pop, hip hop, electro and techno movements of that decade.

Yet power chords rang out again for grunge and Britpop in the Nineties, and rock seemed to be the music genre that would not die. Fifty years after its rebellious birth, rock somehow rattled on as the sound of the counterculture in the 21st century by going back to garage basics, with the Strokes and the rebirth of indie. As recently as 2009, unreconstructed hairy rockers the Kings of Leon had the eighth-bestselling album in the world with Only By Night and a UK number one hit single with Sex on Fire.
But a year is a long time in pop music. In 2010, there were only three songs even loosely identifiable as rock in the whole of the UK’s top 100 bestselling tracks. To add insult to injury, the highest placed of these (at number 25) was a 30-year-old re-release from American AOR band Journey, Don’t Stop Believin’, which has taken on the status of a camp karaoke showtune following its adoption by The X Factor and US teen TV drama Glee.
Rock’s pathetic three per cent of the charts was down from an already rather sickly 13 per cent in 2009, and 27 per cent in 2008. Turn that into a hospital graph and the prognosis would be terminal.
Rock fared a little better in the album charts, accounting for 27 per cent of the UK’s top 100. But, before you get too excited and start jiving around the room to Danny & the Juniors’ Rock and Roll is Here to Stay, the figures bear closer examination.
Album sales are themselves falling dramatically, declining seven per cent (that’s physical and digital), while single sales actually increased by 5.9 per cent. Young consumers, in particular, interact with music culture through single downloads (or at least that part of the younger generation willing to pay for music at all). The crucible in which tastes are being formed is club-based, hip-hop inflected urban electronic music and the karaoke MOR culture of TV talent shows (witnessed in Glee club hits and the retro-styled success of artists such as Michael Buble and X Factor contestants).
What the young listen to now will shape the music of the future. And this is where questions of rock’s continued relevance really strike home.
The biggest-selling guitar-based band in Britain last year (at number 10), and, indeed, in the whole world (number 16 in the United World Chart), was Mumford & Sons, a young folk ensemble featuring mandolins, accordions and string bass. I suspect even they don’t see themselves as the saviours of rock. Yet they connected to listeners of all ages, perhaps because their rustic approach offered something genuinely fresh, even novel.
Clearly there is still a lively rock culture flourishing in clubs and bars, popular with students and finding its focus at mass summer festival events.
But when was the last time a rock band rose to dominate that audience with something simultaneously accessible enough for the mainstream market and bold enough to restake rock’s claim to be music of innovation and adventure? Arguably it was Radiohead, before they retreated inward, leaving the more commercial aspects of the music to be exploited by anthemic bands such as Coldplay and Keane.
Last week’s NME featured two young rock bands on its cover, the Vaccines and Brother, both proclaiming themselves ready to take on the world. Yet everything about their retro styling suggests rock knows it is in retreat.
The Vaccines play garage rock that doesn’t employ a chord sequence or sound effect that post-dates 1965, while Brother have modelled themselves on Oasis and appear to be pinning their hopes on a Britpop revival. Sales of NME magazine itself are at an all-time low (below 35,000 copies per week). I’d say their chances of making a game-changing impact are about as good as NME’s last candidates for rock saviours, the Drums. And there was no sign of them at all among 2010’s biggest sellers.
There were, in fact, no rock bands in the top 15 bestselling albums in the world last year. Not one. The big successes (which, despite apocalyptic claims of collapsing trade in the music business, still each notched up more than five million sales) were pop diva Lady Gaga, rap superstar Eminem and teen dream Justin Bieber. The Kings of Leon’s latest album, Come Around Sundown, came in at number 17 (with 1.7 million sales).
Still, a couple of million sales are not to be sniffed at. Any proclamations of the death of rock have to contend with the sight of tens of thousands of people regularly waving phones aloft in arenas to the hits of their youth.
Bon Jovi were the highest-earning live act last year, bringing in £130.07 million in ticket sales, ahead of AC/DC, U2 and Metallica, with Lady Gaga the sole representative of the new pop culture.
Yet the veteran nature of the big concert draws is indicative of a dividing line. Jon Bon Jovi is 48, and the majority of his audience is not much younger. Concert tickets for big entertainment events are expensive, which tends to favour the spending power of an older generation. According to a recent report on the live music industry by Deloitte, a full 40 per cent of the frontmen of the top 20 highest grossing live acts in the US will be 60 or over next year. As retirement beckons, who will replace the veterans on the front line? And what kind of music will they be playing?
We are, I suspect, witnessing a transition akin to the last days of jazz or swing, albeit scaled up to account for rock’s stadium-sized reach over 50 years of mass entertainment. If it is a death, it will be a long and slow one, with occasional remissions when a genuinely talented young artist harnesses the genre in an original or invigorating way.
There are great rock bands around now, and a lot of amazing music continues to be made. But the same could be said if you are a jazz fan, yet it is impossible to argue jazz has had any significant influence on pop culture since the Fifties.
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.
Even as pop, urban and electronic music supplant rock in the tastes of the young, future stars have their work cut out matching the cultural, social, spiritual and creative impact rock has made on the world.

from http://www.telegraph.co.uk