The Future of Rock
 

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I would really like to know what some of the members of this site think...

Here's a question to consider: do you think that rock music still has room to continue to create new/innovative music, or... do you think it is beginning to reach its limits?

I mean... look at jazz and blues. While they both continue to have a profound influence on music today, they both have sort of reached their limit in terms of new and unique musical output... (or am I wrong?)

Share your predictions and feel free to participate in the discussion. :)

I think rock has pretty much reached the place that jazz has been for the past three decades: there continues to be interesting stuff created by the experimentalists of the genre but mostly it's become backward looking and somewhat bland.

Here's a quote by the late, great, Don Van Vliet...

"If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing."

That might be the problem with the state of rock today. (Or, perhaps, any other style of music.)

Too many musicians over-thinking the music they're playing, instead of just letting go and letting it rip like there's no tomorrow.

Somewhat. Jazz is an accumulative genre so anything it fuses with becomes, and expands it making it theoretically infinite. Blues, however, is intentionally limited but moreso as a basis for the rhythmic elements that make rock, jazz, funk, and r&b.

I think rock is dead, and rightfully so. Then again, I'm hoping with the internet's eye openings of the worlds of music as a whole, that concept genre itself will be someday.

http://starling.rinet.ru/music/essay1.htm

For those who are interested this essay here by George Starosin has a good look at the idea that Rock is reached it's "limits".

Personally I think Rock has stagnated yes, but there are still a number of good albums coming out these days.

i think rock will die and be replaced by hip-hop

serious

I would cry if that happened...

It's already happened.

The future of rock is a hard thing to predict, if not completely impossible in my opinion. We will have to see what happens in another 20 or 30 years from now. I do know that different individual music styles seem to revolve in cycles with time through previous musical influences, and just seem to keep splintering off into other newly formed sub-genres. But no one can actually say with 100% accuracy what will happen to rock (or any other genre) as far as predicting the future of any particular genre.

I personally think that the Rap genre is a lot more vulnerable (in the future) with the possibility to decline in popularity than the Rock/Metal genres are. Which brings the only possible insight and prediction that I could make with any validity. Which is..that certain genres may recede in popularity to a more underground audience and just simply become less popular. But I in no way expect any genre of music (rock for example) to be wiped completely off the map. Just a decline in popularity (maybe).

Progressive Metal is currently more popular than ever before and still on the rise here in the U.S. if that tells us anything?

Yea... this guy sort of lost most of his credibility with me when he said The Beatles and their contemporaries (i.e. The Who, Beach Boys, etc) were the first to fuse "true" artistic expression/musicianship with popular music and that their (The British Invasion's) work was the most important musical "revolution" in the 20th Century. In doing this, he almost completely dismisses jazz and starts off on a short and negatively-opinionated tangent about jazz listeners. His obsession with these bands also resulted in him leaving out other important figures in 60s rock music, such as: Captain Beefheart, The Monks, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, The Red Krayola, and The Velvet Underground.

Other than all of that bullshit, however, I feel he makes a few decent points about the future (in other words... the end) of rock music...