The Slow Death of Rock

Has anyone else noticed a trend in music lately?

No band sticks around longer than a few months. This month's cock-of-the-walk is next month's feather duster; no musical act seems to be able to acquire the dependable longevity of their ancestors. I asked myself; where is this generation's Bruce Springsteen? Who's going to take up the "we're gonna do this forever" banner once the Rolling Stones finally kick the bucket? Nobody, if the music industry continues as it has been. Especially with the rise of the Internet.

Now, I am the first person to champion living in a more connected world. Heck, I'm communicating to my readership with it. But being able to send a message to every computer-equipped person in the human sphere has caused one problem; it no longer takes any time at all for a musical group to get discovered.

Think about this for a minute. Back in rock's early days, bands had to suffer the painful vetting process of the live club circut. To get discovered they had to get out and play, in front of rude drunks; if they sucked, people knew it, and they either got better or got the hell out of music.

To put this in perspective, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi's response as to what was the biggest factor in his band's success: "We had a job as the house band in this little blues club in Switzerland...we played five and six hour sets, three nights a week. That really tightened us up."

Now, with the advent of the Internet all that isn't necessary, and in skipping that step bands skip the vital maturation process of playing live on the road for small stakes. Now, the first catchy ditty that any group churns out is flung out into the world market, without regard for things like artistic merit. As soon as a band fails to make another one, they are shed from a label's roster without regard to artistic growth. If they manage to make several good songs (never mind albums, a single's good enough), but their career starts to show any kind of irregularity, the artist releases a "Greatest Hits" album and fades into obscurity.

And people wonder why dependable hitmakers are no longer showing up.

In another perspective-making example, consider Aerosmith. These days everyone knows who they are, but when they began their musical careers, their first single failed to chart. Instead of being dropped, the band toured live for a few months and kept on the label's roster. The song was released again, whereupon it became a hit.

The song in question? The ballad "Dream On". Interesting that a staple of classic rock radio tanked its first time around.

The music industry has caused its own troubles by turning the entire music scene into a production line; make the hit, that's all that counts. Artistic merit and maturity has gone by the wayside, and labels no longer nurture artists who just need a little seasoning. (Another interesting note: Bruce Springsteen took three albums to attain anything like the mega-fame he possesses now.) The industry also doesn't want to take a chance on anything that doesn't sell well, no matter how interesting or potentially influencing it might be. The prog-metal group Queensryche is a good example; their album sales hardly cracked the million-mark until late in their career, but their album Operation: Mindcrime is cited as an important influence by many current bands. In today's music industry, they simply wouldn't have been given a chance.

What's the solution? I'm not really sure. We can't take music off the internet, we can't make the record labels sign bands that don't sell many albums but make damn good music. But I wanted to call attention to the seriousness of the situation before rock-n-roll simply collapses under its own bloated weight. Don't laugh, without some kind of change, it'll happen in our lifetime.

And a world without meaningful music is not a world I want to live in.