The Future of Rock Music

Never fear, Prog is seeing a rebirth and that will kill music. 

Well assuming it follows the consistent pattern, the generic and poppy music keeps filling in, and the actual interesting music keeps getting pushed out to the margins.  Margins which are becoming smaller and smaller.  While I like some modern "art" bands and feel snobbish saying this, I have yet to discover one that truly compares to the 70's prog bands.  Well the ones I like, I don't really like Yes, so I'd take the Flower Kings over Yes any day.)  People always rave about Dream Theater being so amazing....just sounds like generic prog metal to me.

himtroy wrote: FusionKing wrote: The reason why I feel rock is losing its hold over the youth of today is because now, thier whole life and personality is marketed to them. One can only discover new and unusual music on the internet if they have the incentive to do so. These kids don't, they are sheep for the most part. And this is very true...I see my peers in highschool all the time.  If a new rap song comes out promoting clothing or a product, they will be sporting it in a matter of days.  Their talk, clothes, money...all of it goes towards things directly media influenced.

It's troubling to hear, but expected I'm afraid.  Gets worse all the time.

jplanet wrote: 1. The days of  interesting forms of ANY kind of music appealing to a wide audience are over. Everyone has so many choices, there is no way to corral people who like interesting music into any one thing, it's all very personalized. People are able to be extremely persnickety about every characteristic of the music they listen to.2. Electronic music the most predominant - yes, R&B has been outselling rock for a decade at least, so that is already done...

The extreme personalization of music thanks to the Internet may be bad for a mainstream return of interesting music, but allows people like us who listen to fairly underground music like prog these days to access it. I'm listening to Beardfish now, I would never have found them without the Internet.

And the focus of the mainstream can shift, though slowly. There's at least a strain of more interesting/intelligent music at the edge of the mainstream, from Coldplay to more interesting stuff like Radiohead and Muse.

I know it may seem strange to say this, in an age of what many see as internet supremacy, but from what I can see is that most young people still seem to have television as thier guiding force regarding trends both in fashion and music. If a new wave of progressive, psychedelic or even traditional hard rock is to take place on a large scale, it must use the medium of television for the 'movement' to become successful. This is primarily because, as I have stated earlier, that in order to discover something different using the internet, one must have some personal incentive to do so. Also, even today there is still a reasonable proportion of people without internet access, be it through financial circumstances or personal choice. The television even has the power to tell our youth what to use thier computer for!, thus myspace, facebook, etc., and what to search, X factor and Big Brother etc. We cannot underestimate the supposed dying power of the TV...remember the words of Roger Waters' Amused To Death album? He's not far off saying that television is the true god of the people, and how right he was...

Kashmir75 wrote: FusionKing wrote: The reason why I feel rock is losing its hold over the youth of today is because now, thier whole life and personality is marketed to them. One can only discover new and unusual music on the internet if they have the incentive to do so. These kids don't, they are sheep for the most part.   So true. Most kids just accept whatever the media feeds to them as gospel. Just switch off the TV or radio and discover your own musical taste, don't let the trendy media decide what to listen to, act like, dress in, etc.

Here in New York, as I'm sure elsewhere, there were slick ads and billboards all over the sidewalks leading up to the Grammys, that pageant of anything but music.  The tag line on all these ads was "WE'RE ALL FANS".  Walking by one of these with my wife as our eyes were offended by it, I said allowed, "hardly".  My wife laughed because she was thinking the same thing.

That's the soul crushing sense this INDUSTRY wants to perpetuate: no alternative, and who would want one.  Well we do buddy!

I agree with the original post that the days of (good) rock music being heard and appreciated by a lot of people are coming to an end. A lot of the stuff I listen to does not get radio airplay. Whereas you used to have Crimson, Yes, Floyd, Zeppelin, etc. in the mainstream; these days bands like Spocks Beard, Dream Theater, Transatlantic, Porcupine Tree, Rush are largely ignored by the mainstream.

I think there is a lot of interesting rock with large audiences today, even though it's not necessarily experimental or progressive. I have grown out of my "progger" phase, which is great.

7 Pages of responses. I have looked over a few posts at random to get a flavour, and my take on what has happened in rock music is that most bands/artists dont set out to make music that is either interesting or uninteresting. They aim to make music that is going to grab peoples attention quickly, using tried and tested formulas.

I believe everything that can be done with an electric guitar has now been done. The guitar has been plucked, strummed, picked, played backwards, through every type of effect available. People have played it with their teeth, behind their back, set light to the f***ing things. They've been made to sound like pianos, synths, put through vocoders etc etc etc. There is nothing else a guitarist can do, other than come up with memorable melodies and riffs. This should be enough for your average music lover, but in a prog fans endless quest to discover new ways of doing things, this will never suffice. In this respect the glory days of innovation in rock music are over in my humble opinion.

It doesn't mean that people cant write good songs within establisehd frameworks, but artists who do so in the mainstream are becomg few and far between. Look at the big players of the day; Kings of Leon, Coldplay, The killers, Muse, Radiohead. Not a bad bunch, but lest be brutally honest, there's nothing much really clever going on here; in terms of how they are writing or performing songs. Yes, it's great when Matt Belamy of Muse breaks into Rachmaninov, but it;s only really great because few other modern rock musicians have either the skill or the inclination to do so. There's nothing original or groundbreaking about it. Keith Emerson used to churn out that stuff on a Steinway grand, hanging upside down. It's all relative.

The future of rock? Bland. The future of prog rock? Probably ok, but dont expect too many surprises. They've been and gone.

Blacksword wrote: 7 Pages of responses. I have looked over a few posts at random to get a flavour, and my take on what has happened in rock music is that most bands/artists dont set out to make music that is either interesting or uninteresting. They aim to make music that is going to grab peoples attention quickly, using tried and tested formulas. I believe everything that can be done with an electric guitar has now been done. The guitar has been plucked, strummed, picked, played backwards, through every type of effect available. People have played it with their teeth, behind their back, set light to the f***ing things. They've been made to sound like pianos, synths, put through vocoders etc etc etc. There is nothing else a guitarist can do, other than come up with memorable melodies and riffs. This should be enough for your average music lover, but in a prog fans endless quest to discover new ways of doing things, this will never suffice. In this respect the glory days of innovation in rock music are over in my humble opinion. It doesn't mean that people cant write good songs within establisehd frameworks, but artists who do so in the mainstream are becomg few and far between. Look at the big players of the day; Kings of Leon, Coldplay, The killers, Muse, Radiohead. Not a bad bunch, but lest be brutally honest, there's nothing much really clever going on here; in terms of how they are writing or performing songs. Yes, it's great when Matt Belamy of Muse breaks into Rachmaninov, but it;s only really great because few other modern rock musicians have either the skill or the inclination to do so. There's nothing original or groundbreaking about it. Keith Emerson used to churn out that stuff on a Steinway grand, hanging upside down. It's all relative. The future of rock? Bland. The future of prog rock? Probably ok, but dont expect too many surprises. They've been and gone.

I agree more or less that nothing really clever is happening in those acts named above, and I fail to hear a prevailing amount of interesting new stuff by anyone.  My standards are to the sky thanks to the masters of the past.  I just want good music, if it can't be new, oh well then, death will bring its sweet release probably long before I could get totally bored by actual greatness in music I've by that point already heard.