The Old Revolution

Rock ‘n roll is dead. Punk rock was stillborn. Skrillex thrives. Long live whatever’s next.

A new report mined and ground the Billboard Top 100 from 1960-2010 and pegged the three, true revelatory years for music as 1964 (rock ‘n roll and Motown), 1983 (hip hop, new wave and disco’s death) and 1991 (grunge and thankfully the end of Whitesnake). The report, published in Royal Society Open Science (though I first came across it in The Economist), is limited by its base of songs in the popular canon. However, researchers do an incredible job in parsing trends and tunes – including an artful graphic that dissects Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” – and open a cool review of how music reinvents and eats itself.

Personally, I was left first to bemoan a small death I may have known all along: punk rock never really made any massive societal and stylistic changes, only personal ones. Musically, it put a dent in A.M. gold and ABBA, but relied on the same structure as existing popular records by The Stooges, The Zombies and Elvis Costello. The subgenres punk has spawned – from crust and noise rock, to Krishna-core and the ever-eloquent poop-grind – added and divided, but hardly multiplied.

If anything, the study pointed to the importance of the completely qualitative thread of attitude in music. Attitude tallied somewhat within the “stylistic” component of the report. But, as its measure was more music than society at large, the report proved no grand reveal of supreme importance from years celebrated internally by punks (i.e. ’77 for spiky haired folks; ’88 for youth crew ruffians; and probably ’98 or ’08 for today’s kids looking to their own past). For me, there was no chart heat seeker resulting from having first heard “Supertouch/Shitfit” by Bad Brains (10 years after their release) or the moronic freedom one gets from any song by Sockeye. The controlled insanity of The Locust and the wimpy joy of Bracket never mattered to Billboard or Columbia House or whatever company gauges sentiment via buys and plays. All of those punk bands, new and old, showed a way to carve your own space, based on talent, interest or loud celebration of a lack of either. But on the whole they remain as conduits carved from rock ‘n roll and pop, in which there is a second, glaring aspect from the report.

The musical revolutions of rock and pop are likely spent. These same instruments, melodies and structures eventually sound the same. Every guitar comes with essentially the same notes. Popular music rewards those who sing for their soup du jour.

This is a somewhat new plateau for pop-based guitar music. Rote is haute. Programs do a better job of singing and beats, apparently. Good feelings feel better than bad (even the emo kids came around on that change). Never radio-friendly, heavy metal is reaching its peak of human technical capability (though, seriously, those last 1349 and GridLink records are masterpieces of proficiency and brutality). Any other grand structural change and you’ve moved into jazz, which, frankly, reserves its salvation for the players. (Plus, Don Van Vliet mixed the two far better and that barely got him on Letterman) Electronic music remains the last remaining question mark – a promise from a few MTV late-night shows in the ‘90s but now an established juggernaut that allows such tools as Skrillex to even gain popularity.

I first heard rock’s existential emptiness about a decade ago from a friend – for the sake of argument, let’s call him by the name Brian Shepard, as that’s his birth name – during one a-many social gathering revelations. His analogy was to the shifts in classical music from another era. With audience nuttiness caused during their own sets, baroque and chamber music hit their respective walls, now detailed in a day’s lesson by your neighborhood high school music teacher (if they haven’t gone and replaced music education with, oh, straight-up jail where your kids go to school).

In the subsequent issue of The Economist (their second of maybe two ever forays into music, an industry not known for propping up too many angel investors of late), they briefly profiled Karim Wasfi, the conductor of Iraq’s lone symphony. After another explosion near his home, Wasfi played his cello near the smoldering wreckage. Solemnly, he played tribute to the dead inasmuch as he contributed to the importance of music – in movement, attitude and melody – to the living. Wasfi put his bomb-site playing or centuries-old strings music like this: “My concept is that life itself can be very improvisational.”


I have started this blog to share no established set of writing, topics or thoughts. I will attempt to keep up regular posts, though they may be many different things: a news report to a poem to an essay to a short story to a picture with an extensive caption. I appreciate your eyes and thoughts. And, as the great Bill Hicks said, I am available for children’s parties …

About Justin

Justin Kern pays the annual bill to own this domain that contains his name. What you see here is a sampling of how he chooses to use that online space. He lives in Milwaukee and still plays Sega Genesis.
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