Whatever Happened To My Rock And Roll?
Commonplace Newsletter #018
After a certain amount of time spent living the flaneur life- walking the streets and alleys, people-watching outside the cafe, hanging out, mooching- you start to see patterns.
You no longer need fashion magazines and lifestyle columns to know what’s what as you instead see fads filter down from the mavens to the hipsters to the normies to the out of touch, month by month and year by year.
The strangeness of it becomes fascinating when viewed from a sufficient level of detachment. What fools these mortals be.
But it goes the other way too. You start to notice the absence of things, things that were once prevalent that have slowly died an unsung death. One that instantly springs to mind, which we are going to talk about today is the demise of the scruffy young boy (or indeed girl) with the guitar case in hand.
I think this is telling. But you don’t hear much talk of it.
Shall we?
Nostalgia Critic
This essay is going to be one long exercise in me showing my age (34 in a few months). Which is fine. However if it degenerates into a long nostalgic lament then I will have failed.
All nostalgia, as I have said before, is nostalgia for past optimism. And if you allow your optimism to erode away you are done for. See, the past wasn’t better or worse than today, it was just different. Some things were obviously and demonstrably superior to now, other things were simply not. You can cherrypick either way.
That being said I don’t think it is unreasonable to point out that the phenomenon of kids playing in awful garage bands has died off and that something important has been lost in the process. Something that stretches beyond the mere three chord racket itself.
Times change. Tastes change. This is all as it should be. But the death of rock and roll as a bottom-up youth activity feels emblematic of something. Of a certain retreat, a certain defeat.
Rock and roll- being the artform that requires the least objective talent or effort- is a bellweather. Rock is the canary down the mineshaft labelled culture. And the bird is not looking too healthy.
The Invisible Band of The Market
When the absence of kids carrying guitar cases first dawned on me, I began to do a little informal research. I windowshopped in my city’s music stores, I looked in on record shops (this was between lockdowns), I asked around.
One thing that instantly struck me was how expensive gear is now. Fenders and Gibson’s- even non-US ones- seem to be way more expensive than when I was a teenager. Even taking inflation into account. Amps too. And pedals.
Rock and roll inflation has priced working class kids out of the market. To get the dead-simple Johnny Ramone Strat and Marshall set up will now set you back a few grand. Let alone the fancier rawk set-up of an SG, a cabinet and a few overdrive pedals. Hell, even Fender Jags- which grungy bands like Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth used purely because they were so cheap and out of vogue- have become four figure commodities with retro cache.
Like the Stones once said: what can a poor boy do?
Well, the answer is simple. For less money than guitars costs (let alone the fact that you also need friends who have microphones and drum kits and a van and so on) you can buy a laptop and some software and some nice headphones.
You can produce.
And this is exactly what has happened.
There is a ton of great music being made today. Personally, I discover new music through Bandcamp and YouTube and to a lesser extent Soundcloud. But it is all electronic. It is all introverted Zoomer bedroom DJs making ethereal synth-laden soundscapes or 90’s inflected neo-boom bap hip hop beats.
Which is great, but again it’s kind of a shame also. Aside from the fact that none of this music contains the angry, righteous, anthemic, raw, zeitgeist-defining energy of a four-piece in a room raising hell, it also signals a shift in culture generally.
Which, as I say, is that vast swathes of people have been priced out of participation. This is why culture seems so moribund. If only those who can afford to spend thousands on gear or who have parents who are wealthy enough to bankroll them through acting school or film school or whatever can participate then culture is going to eventually reflect the exclusive worldview of that one particular group.
If only those whose parents are able to pay their rent can participate (as this enables the kids to perfect their craft via unpaying gigs at dive bars or comedy clubs or small theatres) then you are going to find that the artists of more humbler means are going to either retreat to cheaper forms of expression or else give in entirely and simply live a 9-5 life instead.
And over time this (perhaps) inadvertently top down culture will alienate and ignore the working classes more and more and so vast swathes of talent and cultural energy will go untapped. This, I feel, is where we are at the moment.
Our Band Could (Have) Be(en) Your Life
Because I have essentially limitless space within which to lay out nuance and caveats, I am going to go on a tangent regarding how rock and roll helps kids to socialise before I wrap this up with some hopefully rousing (or at least none-defeatist) closing remarks...
I was born and raised in an interesting cultural moment. Web 2.0 really kicked off when I was 18, so I was able to enjoyed an entirely analogue childhood before it took hold. Yet the timing means it has held sway over the entirety of my adult life. I am something of a daywalker in this sense, not fully immersed in either world.
It is fascinating to me how different the adolescence of people even five years younger than me was. I played in bands, I collected CDs and records, I read the music press. I lugged amps and cymbal bags into and out of cheap vans. I never got a record deal, never released anything beside a few bootleg CDrs, but in retrospect that doesn’t matter. What matters is what I learned along the way.
Which was essentially how to communicate. Both onstage in a creative context and also by dealing with promoters and venue owners and talking to girls backstage afterwards. Learning how to be around people and exist outside of my own head or at least my own small school-bound circle.
(Admittedly this was all mediated by what now seem to be unfeasibly vast quantities of rider beer, Jack and cokes and soft-pack Marlboro Reds but the point still stands)
This is what rock and roll is for. To be able to build some dreams with hometown friends. To get into a little trouble and banter and flirt and make something that attempts in its own inarticulate way to say something about the life you live and the things you think.
And that seems to have gone because the bottom has fallen out of the infrastructure. Music for most is now an infinite collection of pleasantly meaningless background sounds, rendered essentially valueless by the infinite Borgesian library of tunes that is only a few screen touches away.
This is the only world that those even a handful of years younger than me have ever known. They are both blessed and cursed with infinite and free access to all of the recorded music that has ever existed. This world is as vast and as wide as an ocean but experientially it is only as deep as a puddle. The monkey-paw wish always has a drawback.
And this is what I lament when I ponder the lack of guitarcase kids. It’s the worry that collaboration and controlled risk and unsupervised fun and learning to deal with public embarrassment and failure and so on have all been digitalised out of existence by a world that is simultaneously safer and more frightening.
I worry- perhaps without grounds- that kids are becoming mere spectators in their own lives rather than being active participants and creators and collaborators. I worry that teens are stifled, bemused, anxiety-riddled, consumers-in-waiting rather than the rebellious wide-eyes cultural saviours that they have traditionally served the world by being.
Reprise/Outro
But, as I say, this could all be without grounds. I could just be an aging man who is out of touch with what the Zoomers are up to.
In fact this whole piece could well be a simple Seinfeldian observation (‘Have you noticed how you don’t see so many greasy haired kids with guitar cases any more?’) that has been allowed to grow monstrous and terrifying by a man with an overactive imagination and time on his hands.
Maybe. But I don’t know.
I like to think that teens spirit springs eternal. I like to think that Covid will prove to have a galvanising, perspective-bringing effect which will in turn lead to a renaissance of live music and fuzz-pedal bands with bad names and OK riffs and great outfits.
I desperately want to be proven wrong on this hunch that rock is dead, for the sake of the Zoomers much more than for myself as a listener.
And if the future music doesn’t feature guitars and stompboxes and things that are familiar to me, then that is fine too. Change is the only certainty. I just hope that the music of the future will still be made by kids in a rehearsal space laughing, arguing, nodding theirs heads, pulling faces, trying, reaching, dreaming.
Because if you can’t have fun being creative with your friends then what’s the point of being young?
Hey Tom,
An intimate newsletter this time, I can see. It's funny I had the same tought a while ago. See, when I was younger (currently 31), many of my friends were playing some form of garage rock; some because they liked music and had "the itch" to give it a try; others less good looking to boost their luck with the girls. But it wasn't rare to see guys walking with guitar cases in my high school or in the streets of my hometown. See, this was the era of punk (Blink 182, Sum 41, etc.) and many young lads were joining the ranks of the more "traditional" rock bands. Nowadays, as you said, this is mostly electronic music (everyone wants to be a DJ or, more likely, a "producer").
And I have a few issues with that (obviously). First, there is a dimension of mercantilism right from the start: you produce not for yourself but for an artist; so your tracks must be tailored to a market. Then, you bypass of the socialization/coming of age education aspect of the garage band era, since you work mostly from your little bedroom, in contact with people often far away from you that you'll have trouble visiting (remember, you're a broke 15YO). Many of my high school friends learned how to talk to people, negociate and act around girls through their music practice. This is not impossible with DJing from your room, but much more complicated.
When I find myself wondering how it happened, I think of a few explanations; first, as you said, the price of the gear (no doubt abt that). But also the decrease in popularity of rock music and the rise of electronic music/rap beats. There was still plenty of rock and punk music on MTV in the early 2000's. But you don't see that much of it nowadays on Youtube; music genres have shifted and with them, the interest of the young men (don't forget many are getting into music to have access to girls, so when the rock/punk genres don't draw that much girls to the scenes anymore, don't expect our testosterone driven teenager to sacrifice himself).
Another idea; my history teacher once told me that in the time of Montaigne, all the known knowledge of the world could fit on a 512mo usb key. So the literate of that time felt the urge to create themselves since once they'd read the ~100 books available, there was nothing else to do. When I was young, everything was analog. So you'd discover artists through your parents' music library, the CDs and audio cassettes your friends (relunctantly) lent you, and the word-to-mouth around you. An album CD was ~20€ so you couldn't buy that many of them. Thus, you felt more the urge to create yourself; you could spend 1 month listening the same two albums back to back and "impregnate" yourself enough to copy them, and eventually, give it a try yourself. Now there's just too much choice, too much music to listen to, and too many influences to absorb. You can't be a creator if you consume too much. You don't know anymore what to do and you get paralyzed, in a way: Spotify gives you access to 50 million songs for a third of an album's price.
When we were young, we "knew" that someone else probably tried to cover that song we were in love with; but we (and the people arounf us) couldn't know for sure, so we'd just try by ourselves and be the man with our friends and the girls. Nowadays, you can find 100s of people who did it in just 2 clicks on Youtube. Some will say it's fuel for emulation, but I can see how it can suck some of the joy out of it and just leave you with a "Why bother" attitude.
And if we throw in the mix the abundance of high-grade entertainement available for cheap (video games today are far more complex and addictive than my Nintendo 64/PS1 era), our average young man simply has too much fences to jump over.
My 2cts anyway
You're right, it seems to miss a lot of the organic, human messiness that made awful angsty garage rock so fun.
It's not all hopeless, though. Did you hear about Dave Grohl and his online drum battle with Nandi Bushell? The old guard is ready for the new members to take over. We may lament the endless drone of new rock bands that sound the same as the last one, but where are these bands coming from in the first place before being plucked and processed by the industry? I suspect there are a lot more that just never get noticed, or who try to make it work in online and in person venues that aren't as conducive to what rock and related music need to survive.
(I disagree that it's a class thing that only those with resources can break into, though. eBay, Amazon, garage sales, uncles and cousins who need the wall or storage space - there are guitars to be had, and other supplies too. But when learning to play takes time, and you can be joining your peers in creating the latest TikTok video and get instant adulation, why bother learning chords?)
I suspect it's less that the guitarcase kids are a dying breed, and more that we need to stop feeding it the chemical killer of social media and trying to prune it in ways the machine will accept. Leave it alone, let it go wild, be willing to accept something not quite like the rock we grew up with, and I suspect it will be just fine.