• The days of truly interesting rock appealing to a large audience are either over or coming to an end. This is, incidentally, not a new development at all. If you wanna get pedantic this might have started already back in the 1960s and the 1970s, when it was a bit of a problem for counter-cultural rock artists that the independent label infrastucture did not exist yet because this made it very hard for them to truly operate outside the dominant modern culture and the associated political/economic structures... you know, the stuff they were opposed to. The Beatles tried to do this with Apple, but they had lots of problems with EMI when they wanted to run Apple too differently. However, for the most part there was not that many problems because the big labels mostly kept artists on a long leash creatively, so things like Frank Zappa's Straight Records were still anomalies and most small labels did not attract that many creative powerhouses. The sea change began in the late 1970s, when the big labels begun signing punk bands in large amounts and eventually found their wild behaviour spiralling way out of their control. You've gotta wonder why the music industry didn't consider themselves warned in advance, but anyway this made the people running the music industry more paranoid and created a vicious circle in which the relationship between artist and publisher became increasingly hostile. A lot of bands, not just punk but also metal and progressive acts also felt their movements' popularity was a case of pearls before swine (witness the asininity of the retarded "prog versus punk" meme which I've ranted about often on these forums) and that it was becoming increasingly clear they had to circumvent the established music industry in order to be truly avant-garde. The new generation of rock's vanguard that emerged in the eighties knew of this situation as the norm and reacted in two ways: First, artists adopted a do-it-yourself attitude, especially the punk and metal scenes which now concentrated themselves around small specialist labels; second, in style they begun leaving the casual fans behind and moved towards music written by and for members of subcultures with any mainstream-crossover appeal strictly accidental. The popular music charts became increasingly dominated by stuff that was, with fringe genres represented mostly by watered-down forms of the real thing. Now, Rome was neither built nor destroyed in one day and good, interesting rock music did find large audiences through the eighties and early nineties. However, the amount of good new rock bands with mainstream appeal became lower and lower. In my opinion, the last gasps of great rock'n'roll becoming really popular came in the nineties. Even that begins to look like a case of, yes, pearls before swine if you compare the sheer inventiveness of e. g. Soundgarden with the bland tedium of the "post-grunge" that they (among others) inspired.

• Electronic music is replacing guitar-based rock as the stuff most people listen to. This is not something that came out of the blue, either. There was disco in the 1970s and new wave in the 1980s, genres that may now only be acceptable to like out of nostalgia but electronica had already proven itself unstoppable by the 1990s with the rise of rave, techno, house etc. Today, at most parties I go to there's mostly electronic music played, and a great deal of mainstream/semi-mainstream critics not only consider synth-pop a valid artform but often prefer it to guitar music. Notice also things like Radiohead going electronic (though not a fan of their music, I won't deny that they're the major art rock group of our time), the fact that this decade has yet to produce a good guitar band to become as popular as Floyd or Zeppelin was in the 1970s and the growing amount of people who mosten listly electronic but don't care about rock-derived forms. This is, by the way, not meant as a knock against electronica as a low-brow genre catering only to the lowest common denominator. I know that I come across as a bit snobbish in favour of underground rock'n'roll, and to be honest I am , but I have listened to and enjoyed quite a bit of electronic music. It should also be mentioned that electronica does have its avant-garde and esoteric side too: The vast bulk of industrial, noise and power electronics. That entire corner is basically to electronica what metal is to rock. A lot of rave too, perhaps, because that has an associated subculture. However, in the case of rave and to a lesser extent industrial it still draws in casual fans too, even if they're not the intended audience.

We need to wait for about 20-30 years to be able to see whether this is right, as its only now that we are realizing that some bands from the 70s and 80s are still popular.

The death of rock n' roll has been yelled from the rooftops for decades now. But most of "Rock Music" is only related to rock n' roll in its forebearers, and it's been that way for awhile.

Henry,

I wasn't going by popularity though, lots of other music was much more popular than metal in the 70s and 80s. I think you're right, indie/post-rock is coming to a peak now, even though they started in the 90s and the revered classics are from them. Incidentally, have you ever heard of Guided by Voices? They were #1 on Amazon's list of Best Indie Albums, and after getting over the shock of something beating In the Aeroplane on an indie list, I looked them up. They're pretty terrible, but they're popular enough I'm surprised I've never heard of them.

I think that's been going on a long time (Thrash from SF, Punk in NYC, Black Metal in Norway, Math in Chicago), but with a global fanbases and online selling, you can really narrow down and still stay afloat. You may be right that good artists won't bother catering to the mainstream, that would actually be good for music in general. I'd rather have artists staying afloat but not too big. 

Well that was the case, at first. But now it's usually associated with certain sounds. You have indie related terms like Indie Folk and Indie Pop which don't have anything to do with what kind of label you're on. Lo Fi, Noise Rock, Math Rock, Post Rock, Twee Pop, Dance Punk are also labeled as indie genres. I'm not saying they are all sub-genres to a greater genre, because they're quite different from another. But the point is that Indie is specifically associated with certain kinds of music.

So you frown upon guitar hero because it has a diverse setlist?

I love music.As for the ingegrity of the music itself...well, it is the listener's interaction with the music....

/admin  edit - spam removed

I've read this thread in detail from start to finish this morning (okay the Mrs is threatening to leave me again and this time I guess she means it so I wanted something to take my mind off things). What stands out to me is that with what is essentially a speculative topic nobody can be right or wrong. 90 per cent of these posts here just prove that all of us CARE enough to have an opinion.

Mind you, I thought my musical life was over when The Clash split