Rock is Dead. Long Live Rock!

It is likely the most evergreen of all tropes about rock and roll. I swear I read something about it once a year, once a month, maybe once a week and have done so for my entire life as a fan of music. And that's the "rock is dead" proclamations (and its counter-genre, which includes this post, the "rock is not dead" rejoinder.) But news of rock's death is always premature.

Look, no matter what your particular preferences, the best time to be a fan of rock music (or for that matter hip hop or soul or anything else -- let's just subsume it all under the category of "pop" and not be too snobbish about it, eh?) is right now. Right this very minute. And if you are reading this tomorrow at 12:52, then the answer is "right this very minute." And the answer is so not because the music coming out now is better than the music coming out at any other time, but because that music does not disappear and there is always something worthwhile now. There is more moment at this instant than at any point in human history until the next moment, which will supplant this one.

Don't look at the charts. The best stuff rarely makes the top 40 or top 100 or this or that countdown. In fact, what tops the charts often sucks, is insipid pap that makes you lament the very state of the republic, indeed the planet. But the charts not only don't tell the whole story, they tell very little of the story at all. So ignore the cottage industry pronouncing "rock is dead" and the folks telling you that this band, this album, this movement, is going to save rock.

Appetite For Destruction at Twenty

Can it really be that Guns 'N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction is twenty years old? The realization first hit me a couple of months ago when I pulled that seminal album out of my collection for the first time in a couple of years. It sounded as groundbreaking, as brilliant, as age-defining as ever, and then I realized that it was released in the summer of 1987, and for a brief, meteoric period they were the biggest, most exciting, most unpredictable, most rock and roll band in rock and roll.



It collapsed so quickly, and we've spent well more than a decade waiting for Axl Rose to release Chinese Democracy under the GNR name. Rolling Stone has a great cover piece on Appetite, which they excerpt here. It's almost impossible to believe that album could be twenty years old. It seems like just yesterday. And when the first vertiginous sounds of "Welcome to the Jungle" come directly at me from my speakers, it's the late 1980s, Axl & Slash rule the world, and the world is still ahead of me.

Of Hipsters and Hypernovas

The New York Times has the scoop on an Iranian rock band, Hypernova, just tryin' to make it big with all of the cross-cultural issues that raises. They've got the look -- think of the Strokes but, you know, Iranian. They've got the studied coolness. The question that remains is whether they have the songs. Welcome to the jungle, fellas.

Actually, it's easy to be cynical or snide about this sort of thing, especially when it is pretty clear that the guys in Hypernova have had more access to the United States than most Iranians and when they have adopted the too cool for school pose of every other unsigned rock band that is able to score a gig on the Lower East Side. But the reality is that we certainly want to see a lot more Iranian guys picking up guitars or sitting at word processors (what, you think writers sit down by candlelight with a quill and ink?) or jonesing for Starbucks while dreaming about becoming rock stars or writers than the alternatives. Say what you want about cultural imperialism. Give every potential suicide bomber in Tehran's suburbs a week in New York and every kid in new York a week in Tehran's suburbs and we're converting a lot more of theirs than they ever could of ours. And I say this as someone who has traveled this globe of ours a lot and is deeply committed to cultural immersion, to not seeming like another American abroad.

Hat Tip to Keelin McDonell at The Plank.