Anti-Climacus

The Atlantic has a piece on the periodic death of rock and roll which is the sort of thing I would expect Slate to run, in that it comes off as willfully contrarian for no discernable reason. The article argues that rock music has been in perpetual crisis since the beginning, citing the horrifying fact that "Hey, Soul Sister" was the only rock-adjacent song to make it into the top 10 in 2010, and dragging in the revived-by-The Strokes-and-White-Stripes late 90s/early 00s, and Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, which was somehow responsible for turning rock music in a country direction (as though country music was not a foundational source of rock and roll. That's almost as crazy as arguing British rock music wasn't influenced by African and African-American sources (someone needs to go back to 1976 and tell Bowie to stop listening to Can and tell them to stop listening to African polyrhythms and guitar music)).

In the first place, one should never trust an argument about the periodic death of rock and roll that makes no reference to Nirvana, which is the equivalent of wanting to talk about early modern political theory and forgetting to mention Hobbes. The choice of John Wesley Harding as an inflection point also raises the question about whether this is an argument about artistic quality or popularity: terrible rock groups still sold millions of records after 1967, so it can't be an argument about the popularity of rock and roll as a genre. Moreover, if it's an argument about quality, that's actually different now: successful groups sell far fewer records because everybody sells far fewer records.

The standard indie-rock story will point out that there was quality, if unpopular, work being done from the Velvet Underground and the Stooges through punk, college radio in the 80s, and all those Sub Pop bands before Nirvana--and the list is replicable for the 90s and (to a somewhat lesser extent) the 00s. So it can't really be an argument about quality, either. The complaint of the article seems to be: it is rare that a band is both good and enormously popular, and these two elements tend to only coincide once a decade or so. Well, duh. Enormous popularity is rare, and excellence is rare, and it stands to reason the two together will be yet rarer, and if the appearance of both is cyclical, that's the opposite of surprising.

Also, let's not forget: musicians do not operate in a vacuum: the belief that their valued genre of music may be threatened is as important to the creation of their work as the reality that it might be threatened.