Why Aren't There Big Rock Bands Anymore?

the argument that rock is dead has much to do with the fact that in the past decade or so there really haven't been any new rock bands that have blown up massively on a global scale the way bands like zeppelin guns and roses or nirvana did this isn't to suggest that there haven't been very successful rock bands but truth be told there hasn't been any one band that has reached the level of major mainstream success those gigantic bands of the past did i personally believe it can happen again but why hasn't it happened yet i asked this question to veteran radio broadcaster alan cross and i also asked him if nirvana had come out today would they have become as big as they did in the 90s this is what he had to say that's a really good question i think that they would be popular i think that they would get a lot of critical love i think that they would probably be able to sell out venues much like greta van fleet did but to change the world you know we just don't have world-changing artists anymore and the reason is we can't all agree on which artist should change the world back in the 90s when nirvana came out there was no internet there was no uh you had to sit in front of the tv to watch much music or mtv hoping that your favorite video would come on instead of going on to see you too who are going on to youtube um you had um if you wanted the music you had to go and purchase a piece of plastic for you know 15 or 20 or whatever it was and that's a lot of money and you would cherish that disc and you would listen to it over and over and over again to get your money's worth out of that disc and back then too you had four things that were basically running the music industry you had radio you had the record labels you had record stores and you had the video channels and every once in a while all four of them would come together in a consensus saying that this band is good everybody needs to like this band and we went oh okay and that's the way it had been for well since the beginning of the recorded music industry but by the time we get to the 2000s we don't need record stores anymore because we've got napster and audio galaxy and limewire and bear share and kazan all the other uh file sharing programs which allowed us to acquire all the music that we could never afford and we didn't have to buy the whole album either we could only buy the songs we wanted and once you got online you would find people who were just like you and you would plumb through their collection of online files and go okay well if this person likes this then they must like i i should check out some of the other music that they like and i might like it so it's a completely different the rules are completely changed nothing is the same as it used to be and we will never see that kind of mass consensus about what's good i mean even you know the the biggest mainstream stars like your beyonces and your lady gagas and your justin biebers and your one directions and even your bts's uh they when it comes to the amount of cultural penetration that they have versus what kind of cultural penetration music used to have back in the day before the internet apples and oranges we all want what we as individuals want we don't necessarily all group together and want the same thing at the same time in the numbers that we used to back in the day so um the economics of the music industry have changed and the attitudes of music consumers have changed so you put those two things together and you could actually make a real argument for saying that kurt cobain was the last pure rock star will ever have the internet is only going to become more and more prevalent in our lives so the idea of a centralized band is going to become even less and less um practical so do you think that like the band's pre-internet are going to have more of a longevity than let's say bands that come out now because they had that centralized focus well the heritage bands have a huge catalog of great music that's the reason they're heritage bands is because they were really good at writing and recording songs and those songs are going to exist forever so if you you know let me just back up a little bit back in the day things were very tribal so on one hand you had the classic rock or sorry the the rockers and on the other hand you had the alternative kids they were at war these tribes you as an alternative kid were not allowed by to like anything that the rockers like so no led zeppelin no beetles no rolling stones no littered skinner that was all dinosaur rock crap we were smarter we were more enlightened we were into you know much more music that was much more interesting than that crap and it worked the opposite way so if you wanted to move from the alternative tribe to the rocker tribe you'd be beaten up going in and then when you crawled home with your terrible two and your legs to your alternative friends they beat you up for being a traitor and vice versa today one of the things about the internet is that the silos these tribes are broken down and you talk to anybody who's 16 17 18 19 20 years old and you look at their playlist on their phone i mean you know they're listening to acdc and they're listening to ariana grande they're listening to led zeppelin and they're listening to drake and they're listening to billy holiday in some cases and they're listening to jeff buckley i mean they're extraordinarily ecumenical in their tastes what we're seeing is is today's music fans have no trouble mining different genres and mining different eras and they're going back to the first you know 50 years of rock and they're finding out that you know what there's some really good stuff here i mean an ac dc song from 1978 still sounds pretty damn good today you know you listen to you know good times bad times from from led zeppelin you can't believe that was that was recorded in 1969 and of course everybody's discovering the beatles and who doesn't you know you cannot not like the beatles it just doesn't i mean they're eternal so uh that's part of the problem too is is that now that the almost the entire expanse human musical creations is available with a few pokes at your phone that's what today's artists have to deal with that's what that's their competition it's not like if i was a kid in 19 i'm 20 years old i'm in 1991. uh the music that i hear the music that i'm into is what i hear on my radio station and what i can afford to buy maybe i have an older brother and sister who have some stuff but you know basically i want my music for my generation certainly don't want my parents music now i can listen if i'm 20 years old i can listen to anything and you know what my parents who grew up as generation x and some pretty cool rockers so i'm gonna listen to them that leaves a smaller and smaller slice for up-and-coming artists because they're competing with the greatest music of all time well we go back to this idea of uh the song economy nobody wants to invest long term in acts we just want to get as much money as we can out of individual songs that's it and the other thing too is that uh with the audience not wanting you know the the consensus is that you know i'm there's so much music out there i'm only going to give my love and attention to someone advanced that's back in the day you have to understand that the record labels create this artificial shortage they were the cultural filter they only let through what they thought was good that would then go to the record stores which would only stock the stuff that they thought was good was good and then the video channels would only play what they thought was good and then radio stations would only play what they thought was good so there were all these different filters that uh created you know a real finite amount of music that people could choose from now you can choose from 60 million songs on spotify all that is gone there is a site called forgotify that you can connect to your uh spotify account and it will spit out a series of songs that have never ever been played even once by anyone on spotify so if that's and there's it's an estimate it's estimated that 20 of the 60 million songs on spotify have never been played once wow and you know spotify is adding so what is it 12 million songs a year it's like who's got time for all this and the problem is it was created this situation where uh okay i'm listening to this okay i really like it okay but there's got to be something else out there so you you don't spend time with these songs anymore and this leads into a whole other discussion problem is that you know when you bought an album with 12 songs on it you listened to those 12 songs over and over and over again that became your world now you've got 60 million songs to choose from and you might be liking the song that you're listening to now but there's that nagging feeling that this is what everybody else is listening to is there something better than this is there something else that you know what i'm bored with that already let's just move on to something else

Channel: Daniel Sarkissian

Views: 305,682

Keywords: nirvana, nrvana, nervana, nirvna, nirvan, kurt, kurdt, cobane, covain, kobain, kovain, dav grohl, dave grhol, krist

Id: N5fE12zmqHs

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021