The Future of Rock Music

Mandrakeroot wrote: What future for the Classic Rock (and thus the Prog)? Hard to say. I can not give an answer!   Certainly, for the masses, Classic Rock and Prog today are not popular!

Yeah, except for maybe a handful of bands I think modern progressive rock will continue being a somewhat underground genre and probably slide even further below the radar.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing. It could be a good thing because in terms of the people making up the scene (both fans, reviewers and musicians) it could sort the wheat from the chaff, the rams from the sheep. Basically, attract only people who are dedicated enough to really understand the music, which will in turn result in new music in the genre being of higher quality.

It could, however, also be a bad thing if progressive rock becomes so obscurantist that it might die out as a... well, progressing genre and only have a negligible influence on the rest of the culture so we'll never again have the equivalent of when Pink Floyd made movie soundtracks, for example. To be fair, though, that's a worst case scenario.

As for classic rock? Well, there is a retro-rock fad going on right now and has been so for quite some time, but it's quite a mixed back and most of the better retro rock bands are a bit underground, or at least not as big as White Stripes or Wolfmother or their ilk. I'm nowhere as negative towards it as I used to be, since there is a lot of good old-fashioned rock music being written and recorded these days. The style is not the substance, so  you can still do interesting and fresh things with an old genre... isn't that what they call "reconstruction"? However, there's the stuff I mentioned: A lot of the "damage" seems to already have been done, and most of the better retro-rock bands around now are on small labels. The good ones who have a major following - Monster Magnet, Hellacopters, etc. - started in the nineties.

First off: This thread will not be exclusively about progressive rock but since it will be relevant to it and indeed in large amounts also about it I have decided it to post it here. 

Anyway. When thinking about where rock music is going, there are two things that I remember the most vividly above all:

• The days of truly interesting rock appealing to a large audience are either over or coming to an end. This is, incidentally, not a new development at all. If you wanna get pedantic this might have started already back in the 1960s and the 1970s, when it was a bit of a problem for counter-cultural rock artists that the independent label infrastucture did not exist yet because this made it very hard for them to truly operate outside the dominant modern culture and the associated political/economic structures... you know, the stuff they were opposed to. The Beatles tried to do this with Apple, but they had lots of problems with EMI when they wanted to run Apple too differently. However, for the most part there was not that many problems because the big labels mostly kept artists on a long leash creatively, so things like Frank Zappa's Straight Records were still anomalies and most small labels did not attract that many creative powerhouses. The sea change began in the late 1970s, when the big labels begun signing punk bands in large amounts and eventually found their wild behaviour spiralling way out of their control. You've gotta wonder why the music industry didn't consider themselves warned in advance, but anyway this made the people running the music industry more paranoid and created a vicious circle in which the relationship between artist and publisher became increasingly hostile. A lot of bands, not just punk but also metal and progressive acts also felt their movements' popularity was a case of pearls before swine (witness the asininity of the retarded "prog versus punk" meme which I've ranted about often on these forums) and that it was becoming increasingly clear they had to circumvent the established music industry in order to be truly avant-garde. The new generation of rock's vanguard that emerged in the eighties knew of this situation as the norm and reacted in two ways: First, artists adopted a do-it-yourself attitude, especially the punk and metal scenes which now concentrated themselves around small specialist labels; second, in style they begun leaving the casual fans behind and moved towards music written by and for members of subcultures with any mainstream-crossover appeal strictly accidental. The popular music charts became increasingly dominated by stuff that was, with fringe genres represented mostly by watered-down forms of the real thing. Now, Rome was neither built nor destroyed in one day and good, interesting rock music did find large audiences through the eighties and early nineties. However, the amount of good new rock bands with mainstream appeal became lower and lower. In my opinion, the last gasps of great rock'n'roll becoming really popular came in the nineties. Even that begins to look like a case of, yes, pearls before swine if you compare the sheer inventiveness of e. g. Soundgarden with the bland tedium of the "post-grunge" that they (among others) inspired.

• Electronic music is replacing guitar-based rock as the stuff most people listen to. This is not something that came out of the blue, either. There was disco in the 1970s and new wave in the 1980s, genres that may now only be acceptable to like out of nostalgia but electronica had already proven itself unstoppable by the 1990s with the rise of rave, techno, house etc. Today, at most parties I go to there's mostly electronic music played, and a great deal of mainstream/semi-mainstream critics not only consider synth-pop a valid artform but often prefer it to guitar music. Notice also things like Radiohead going electronic (though not a fan of their music, I won't deny that they're the major art rock group of our time), the fact that this decade has yet to produce a good guitar band to become as popular as Floyd or Zeppelin was in the 1970s and the growing amount of people who mosten listly electronic but don't care about rock-derived forms. This is, by the way, not meant as a knock against electronica as a low-brow genre catering only to the lowest common denominator. I know that I come across as a bit snobbish in favour of underground rock'n'roll, and to be honest I am , but I have listened to and enjoyed quite a bit of electronic music. It should also be mentioned that electronica does have its avant-garde and esoteric side too: The vast bulk of industrial, noise and power electronics. That entire corner is basically to electronica what metal is to rock. A lot of rave too, perhaps, because that has an associated subculture. However, in the case of rave and to a lesser extent industrial it still draws in casual fans too, even if they're not the intended audience.

So, what do I think the future holds for rock'n'roll? Very simply plut, I believe that all of rock will soon be a mostly underground genre, not just prog/metal/punk/goth/noise. I don't mean that rock period will cease being popular, there will still be "classic" bands going on tour, the occasional succesful retro band like White Stripes or Kings of Leon and the occasional fad style. All the really interesting and groundbreaking stuff happening is just going to be too esoteric (term used in a broad metaphorical sense here) to appeal to a mainstream audience, because rock has slowly gravitated back towards the underground sub-cultures since the eighties. Now, the good stuff is not be going to be completely obscure and might get covered in prominent magazines because the internet has resulted in a blurring of the border between the mainstream and the underground by making marketing and distribution much easier for small labels and self-distributing bands. However, the future trailblazers of rock will likely not reach recognition beyond the "bands lots of people know about but very few listen to" level, today occupied by for example Godspeed You Black Emperor or the Melvins... and I'm sure even that will be exceptional. Their "casual fans" will be people who might be outside the target audience but still have tastes outside the mainstream.