I've been kicking around why we don't have a lot of great rock bands coming up these days (to me anyway) after having seen the
Billboard 100 top rock songs of the decade. That is, of course, a god awful list, but worse off, they aren't even rock bands for the most part.
Last night I ended up at a Local H show, who you really should see live, and who never half-ass a performance. At any rate, I got to thinking about how Grunge, which seemed to be comprised of bands that loved Classic Rock, without stealing their style outright. Meanwhile, all the bands I loved in college, The Strokes, The White Stripes, etc. seemed to lift directly from the 60/70s and sound like bands of that time.
Grunge seemed to be reflective of the moment, while everything after 2001...really didn't? Maybe the moment was to replicate, but that seems like a cop-out. On a similar topic, I was watching an interview with Noel Gallagher he mentioned that part of the art of song writing was "Tip-toeing around other people's copyrights."
Am I giving the years 2001-2015 a bum wrap? Is that decade no different than anything else? Maybe will say "Well Nirvana stole the SLTS riff from Boston." Ok, but SLTS doesn't sound like "More than a feeling." Last Night sounds like a Tom Petty track.
The last great album of that 2001-2015 period, to me, was the Arctic Monkeys "A.M." which is mildly ironic because they attempted to rip off the strokes, and worked with Josh Homme to craft their bigger style on A.M. So to me, the band that should have sounded most derivative didn't.
To be fair, other bands like Hold Steady, My Morning Jacket, TV on the Radio, all managed to not sound like a total lift. Still, I wonder if we can't mash up old sounds with the modern culture and create anything new anymore. Not one band out there is dominating the "rock" space?
Which new rock album sounded like a revolution or a party? I'm leaning on guys who are slightly older than me and it's sad. Anyway, I thought I'd ruminate out-loud and see what comes of it.