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Rock’s Not (Quite) Dead … and Why That Matters

Last September, KISS bassist, entrepreneur and reality TV star Gene Simmons became the latest in a long line of voices to loudly lament, “Rock is finally dead!”

In many ways, Simmons may very be correct. Rock music doesn’t enjoy the cultural omnipresence it wielded from the 1960s through the ’90s. And the industry as a whole seems to be just fine with that, much to Simmons’ horror. “There was an entire industry to help the next Beatles, Stones, Prince, Hendrix, to prop them up and support them every step of the way,” he told Esquire last fall. “There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters—the creators—for rock music, for soul, for the blues—it’s finally dead.”

That said, yesterday’s rock still casts a long, culturally influential shadow. And I can prove it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was researching albums as I considered what to review next here at Plugged In. One of the resources I always take into consideration is Apple’s iTunes album chart. And when I looked at the chart, I was fairly stunned at what I saw.

Not surprisingly, Taylor Swift’s latest album, 1989, was still sitting at No. 1, continuing a juggernaut run that made it the fastest-selling album to reach the five-million units mark since Usher’s Confessions back in 2004. (And given the state of music sales these days, some industry observers think it could very well be the last new album to ever eclipse that sales mark.)

It turns out Swift’s titular0731blogmiddle nod to a time albums still mattered is ironically appropriate. Of the remaining nine albums on the chart when I looked at it (iTunes sales charts update continuously), five were legacy albums spanning five decades. Clocking in at No. 2 was a remastered version of Bob Marley and the Wailer’s album Legend, itself a 1984 compilation of the late reggae great’s material from 1973 to 1983. No 3? Journey’s Greatest Hits. Meanwhile, The Beatles 1967-1970 (The Blue Album, another quasi greatest-hitsy compilation) checked in at No. 4. Rounding out the Top 5 was Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 opus Appetite for Destruction. And the Foo Fighters’ 2009 Greatest Hits effort landed at No. 9, another look back at these post-grunge stalwarts’ output in the 1990s and 2000s.

Scanning the balance of the Top 100, I noticed that it was peppered with many other icons from decades past, including the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, Bob Seger, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, Neil Diamond, Phil Collins, Nirvana, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Jimmy Buffett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimmy Hendrix, Billy Joel, Steve Miller, Queen, The Eagles and Pearl Jam, among others.

So what are we to make of this? And why does it possibly matter?

One could make the argument from chart results like these that rock definitely isn’t dead.

Then again, it could very well be that the iTunes album chart skews in favor of people who are actually still buying albums, which is most likely people who grew up listening to them in the first place. For many younger listeners, the idea of the “album experience” that music fans in earlier decades took for granted is increasingly foreign in today’s pick-and-choose-and-stream-and-watch-on-YouTube musical world. Apple’s album chart may very well reflect a much older audience, i.e., those who still know albums exist and are actually willing to pay for them.

Or to put it another way: Rock’s not quite dead yet … at least among those old enough to remember it.

The debate over whether rock has truly passed on or is merely on life support will likely continue among music industry influencers and aficionados. From a Plugged In perspective, however, I think there’s a bigger philosophical issue that needs to be addressed here as well.

In the Internet age, the entire history of popular music is contemporaneous. That is, it all exists simultaneously right now. Never has access to the world’s catalog of recorded tunes been easier.

And that makes it all the more important for parents to be modeling and talking about music discernment skills with their children. Because on any given day, our kids might randomly stumble onto a chart like this one and think, I’ve heard of Guns N’ Roses, but I’ve never heard them before. I wonder what they sound like.

And some of us might be tempted to hang up our discernment caps and bask in the warm nostalgia of the music of our youth. After all, who could pick a bone with a feel good hit like, say, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” right? But we’d be wise remember that many of the hit albums of yesteryear are rife with perspectives and worldview issues our children still need our help to sort through and to navigate wisely today.