Oh, yes it is.

Discuss.

No.

Rock 'n' Roll died when the Beatles pretended to be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for an entire album, thus birthing the Concept Album and supplanting Rock 'n' Roll with "rock music." Today, rock 'n' roll is a nostalgic form, like ragtime, the exclusive province of preservationists like Dave Alvin of The Blasters.

Maximum Rock and Roll, the anti-establishment Punk rag, is alive and well. Still looks like it's being printed in someone's basement, too.

Punk these days is about as rock and roll as the hair on my ass.

That said, Rock and Roll is seriously in trouble. It seems like its been battered and beaten so much that it's not the man we once knew. All he can do is repeat the same things over and over again, although once and a while he'll say something new and interesting.

I'm just waiting for some of the old rockers to get together and release a real rock album to let everyone know they rocked back then, and they can still kick the snot out of anyone to this day (I'm looking at you E.C.)

Rock and roll isn't dead, nor will it ever be, regardless of how crappy the stewardship of it may seem to be at any given time.

As usual, disagreeing with me simply indicates that you're totally wrong, and it would behoove you to realize that.

I'm sure it'll never go away, but it could merely be background noise to whatever becomes the flavour of the month. Jazz isn't the cultural phenomenon it once was, but it's still there, just not everyone listens to it all that much anymore.

I'm not worried. Metal is a form of music in its own right. When rock dies, metal will live on.

What is this "rock and roll" I keep hearing about?

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When rock dies, metal will live on.

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I learned that playing Pokemon.

I learned that durimg masturbation. Just like math!

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Maximum Rock and Roll, the anti-establishment Punk rag, is alive and well. Still looks like it's being printed in someone's basement, too.

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Punk these days is about as rock and roll as the hair on my ass.

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I'm not worried. Metal is a form of music in its own right. When rock dies, metal will live on.

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Amen.

They say the heart of rock & roll is still beatin', and from what I see, I believe 'em.

As long as we can keep guys like Huey Lewis from dicking it up.

The biggest problem with rock and roll these days: powerchords.

I have nothing against them if used properly, but when every fucking band uses them exclusivley it gets really fucking boring. There's only so many variations you can do with them. Go learn an F chord you fucking hacks.

I agree with the weasel.

Never thought I'd be saying "I agree with a rabid weasel", but...

Yeah.

That stuff is old.

I think the best song that shows how much rock bands today suck is that one Chad Kroeger (from Nickleback aka Biggest Piece of Shit In The History of Shit) did with Carlos Santana. There's a section in the song that has Santana soloing his ass off, while Kroeger just sits there and plays his usuall two chord crap sack. The song just says everything that needs to be said.

Irony: it's what's for dinner.

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They say the heart of rock & roll is still beatin', and from what I see, I believe 'em.

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You know, your lame-assed-yet-cute-in-a-puppy-pissing-on-a-newspaper-way attempts to make me look old and feeble would be a lot funnier if you actually knew the words to the old-assed song you were using to do it with.

It's "barely breathing", you goofbag.

Love,

-bunner

As long as LYNYRD SKYNYRD keeps touring, Rock has a pulse. ;)

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You know, your lame-assed-yet-cute-in-a-puppy-pissing-on-a-newspaper-way attempts to make me look old and feeble would be a lot funnier if you actually knew the words to the old-assed song you were using to do it with.

It's "barely breathing", you goofbag.

Love,

-bunner

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Rock 'n' roll is drive-ins, jukeboxes, greasers, dances with names, and cars with fins. What lives today is this amorphous blob called "rock music." Lester Bangs wrote rock 'n' roll's definitive obituary in the 70s. Astute Hollywood profiteers helped America grieve its loss with American Graffitti and Happy Days. And in the 80s, just about everyone from Bob Seger to Joan Jett paved over rock 'n' roll's grave with hit songs that were 99% nostalgia.

The Huey Lewis song (op. cit.) was a spasm of comforting denial aimed at his aging MOR soft-rock audience. Same goes for Billy Joel. Neil Young's was about the only credible voice declaring that "rock 'n' roll can never die," and he was talking about something far more subtle than a musical genre, something that survived even on the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps.

Yes, punk's flagship newsrag still flies under the banner "Maximum Rock 'n' Roll," but let's not overlook the sneer behind the title-- and practically every word that emanates from a movement whose stated purpose has been to deconstruct everything it can get its hands on.

If that old-fashioned rock 'n' roll is alive and well anywhere, it's in what we now call "country music." So said Wolfman Jack, God rest him.

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I wasn't aware I was trying to make you look old and feeble. I thought I was poking some fun at you, because you seemed to have a sense of humor. You seem to be doing an awful good job of that yourself, though.

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I know, you silly old goat.

That's why I did that gay kiddie disclaimer ";)" thing at the end, to show that I'm just a goofbag young'un with a heart of gold and pants full of bullets.

You get the picture.

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You get the picture.

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The problem with rock and roll, like most forms of music, is that the industry caught up with it and learned how to homogenize it and sell it to the lowest common denominator. Like all forms of radical art or culture, it starts with a great bang of creativity and exhuberance, then becomes watered down by every imitator looking to ride the slipstream into the mainstream and that half-assed version is pushed by the industry as a safe, easily controllable and disposable version of the nuclear intensity of the original, and purchased by the great unwashed, who look to MTV, radio as the ultimate arbitors of "cool."

The same thing has happened with every great musical movement of the past century... ragtime, jazz, blues, rock and roll, psychedelia, country-rock, metal, punk, new wave, rap, techno, alternative, etc. There will always be the true "artistes" existing well below the cultural zeitgeist (and a lucky few who can exist within the system), but the bland will always triumph in the end.

That said, the new Costello is fab. So's the rerecorded "Smile."

Well said, and the fact that you even know who Greil Marcus is warms me.

Bangs did lay it out on the coroner's table more than once, but Lester was a bit of a Nihilist, aside from being great writer. Get a copy of "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" if you doubt his skills.

Yeah, LCD marketing is where the rub lies between art and commerce, and rock music is one form where neither of those two, dichotomous forces will ever be able to kick the other out of bed.

As the form convolutes and re-invents itself, tho, I keep seeing a larger hand from all sort of market channels scooping in to twiddle the product and wag the dog just a bit harder, and it saddens me.

From the bloated posturing of rap tothe Ashlee Simpson debacle, more and more of the emporer's clothes are falling to the ground, even for the ostensbily impressionable, targeted age group that the market portends to cater to.

I wonder, though...

Isn't rock and roll a personal thing?

If it's alive and well on your internal 16 track, doesn't it's presence on the cultural radar screen, mainstream and otherwise, meet with recognition from the poeple who actually still celebrate it's intent form?

I dunno...

I don't think it's a museum piece, yet, despite it having it's own museum, now.. (about 120 blocks from my house...) but I think it's time to stop trying to deconstruct it chronologically by genre. None of it's incarnations are dead, to my mind, via having lost the chart space of the day. It keeps coming around. It's perhaps a bit aged and avuncular, now.. but it's still enjoyable.. and saying that "rock is dead" is like saying "and everything that came after it went down with the ship", IMHO.

Perhaps, at this juncture of convolution in American popular music, it is truly, as the kids say "all good."

The only thing obvious about this ramble is that I need sleep.

Sorry.

- bunner

Shit...

"Ostensibly"

"Intent and form"

*sigh*

Would it be so much to have editing privs for your own posts folded into the .php, here?

It's like.. a few lines of code.

I think the real problem with rock 'n' roll is that its possibilities were exhausted somewhere during the summer of 1966. I can't blame bands for turning to high concept as a result. Wait, yes I can.

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From the bloated posturing of rap

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I personally consider Guns 'N' Roses to be rock 'n' roll. But I'm sure I also consider some older bands that fogeys like boorite and bunner consider rock 'n' roll to be, in fact, rock and/or roll.

So what the fuck do I know?

So, rock and roll was Chuck Berry "chunka chunk chunka chunka", blues guitar riffs with rhythm added and used only the 1-5-7 , 12 bar turnaround structure, and everything after it was rock?

I think Aerosmith did a lot of rock and roll songs. I dunno...

I get the idea of it being relegated to a specific period, and that everything thereafter has simply been a convolution of the form, but.. I'm not sure I completely agree.

As far as there being "popular music", of course there is. It's just not all that popular with people over 14, these days. Perhaps that is as it should be. Some of it's brilliant, most of it's dreck. Perhaps the ratio has changed a bit, but I think that that mix of the two may be as it has always been. Everything on the radio is dope until you start to grow into adolescence and form opinions about what's good and what isn't, and why.

Farming those into markets may be what has helped to create the fragmentation so prevalant in music culture, today.

Popular music as a cultural touchstone came of age in that era between Chuck Berry and the crap that the seventies brought us, politically, remember.

Yes, perhaps the dream is over, and perhaps the likes of our generation's adherance to rock music as an expression of our collective cultural stance and values was a blip on the radar screen, fomented by sheer numbers... but... just maybe... we created something greater than the sum of the parts that will carry forth the message of a time and a place where there was a commonality of goals and ideologies whose nexus was a very expressive and ... happy, yeah.. form of music.

I can only hope.

A little bit more of the heart of rock and roll has stopped beating today (rest in peace, John Peel).

The Mendoza Line, however, are proof that the bastard's still got life in 'im.

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I think Aerosmith did a lot of rock and roll songs. I dunno...

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Nah bunner, I wouldn't define rock 'n' roll strictly according to musical structure. Therein lies madness. In fact, I think rock 'n' roll peaked in 1966. Imagine the AM radio playlists in the summer of '66.

Now I'm not saying I have a bright line, after which everything was "rock music." But I can say for sure that if you could take Physical Graffitti back to 1957, neither Dion nor his Belmonts would know what to make of "Kashmir." Something happened in between.

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Something happened in between.

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Imagine the AM radio playlists in the summer of '66

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Rock and Roll is totally alive. Look at all the boy bands.

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Is that a mess, or what? How could all of those different kinds of songs have been popular in one year, and all been played on the same station?

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That's a playlist? It looks more like the Hot 100.

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Something happened in between.

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Dope fueled navel gazing?

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Yeah, here's what becomes of you devil-may-care rock 'n' rollers with your tattoos and your Chevy convertibles:

Repent!

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I have another hypothesis: "The Wanderer" aged and became "Aqualung." A cautionary tale, kids, and not a comforting one.

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Bjork has a couple of kick-ass songs.

Yeah, I didn't know we weren't supposed to like Bjork. What do you know that we don't, bunner?

Bjork is a djork.

R U nutz? It's only because of Bjork that tuneless Icelandic art pop is blowing up stupid huge right now.