Yesterday when I was at Rockstar Mayhem, one of the guys announced that these bands that hadn't released an album in 20 years were going to concerts and outselling bands that are making good music.
So the question is: Is good rock music dead? I'd say no. It's changing but not in the way most people think. Let's look at these bands. A lot of them were very talented (the Scorpions, Judas Priest, etc.) but when rock was in the mainstream more than it was, there was practically no access to foreign music unless you had an import store and a very fat bank account. The reality is that over 95% of people didn't have access to anything and the songs were so beat into our system by DJ's and the RIAA that we now "have to love these songs" or else somehow you don't like rock.
When the '90s came about, you had some acts that tried to return to the gutsier side of rock like Pantera and Helmet, but you also had bands with attitude like Alice In Chains and White Zombie. But they were given a different moniker. Hair metal had died out and the moniker was "grunge". A lot of these bands though had roots in metal and the bands that survived after grunge died in the mid 1990s were rock or hard rock in format.
In the early 2000s, bands like Godsmack and Disturbed were given the moniker of "nu-metal" even though they really were hard rock bands. Bands like Sevendust and Killswitch Engage were given monikers like "Metalcore", but they were really hard rock or heavy metal.
Now you got so many genres for metal and rock that it's difficult and confusing to try to keep up with all of them. In addition, many metalheads snub bands that are too commercial for the exact reason I stated. Even if the bands have metal in their names, a lot of metalheads dismiss them. A lot of people in metal have gone as far as to create dozens of sub-genres. Many of these people become "Genre Nazis" that if you don't get the exact genre that the song is, you don't know your music. Most people don't want to spend their entire lives being a human encyclopedia of genres when they'd rather just listen to something good. And this doesn't happen with most other styles of music.
But something else has happened to music in general. The accessibility of the internet and sites like YouTube, allow people who are willing to experiment the ability to listen to music from all over the world. Yet most people won't take a chance and experiment to find good new bands, sticking instead to the technology of decades past and listening to the radio. I often wonder why this is. I don't know why people are stupid enough to think that because a record company E-mailed an MP3 for a radio station to play 5,000,000 times that it's instantly a good song.
I've held for years that good music can be found in every era. Now you just have to dig through a pile of crap to find it.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by TheNewNeko
