is rock dead?

      That thumping soundtrack of our lives, the guitar-based music most of us grew up with, the music of Elvis and the Fab 4 and the Stones and the Boss, the music we listened to as kids on our transistors and some of us still listen to on our Spotify, is it gone? Has it left the building?

      I got to thinking about this recently, when someone pointed out that the Super Bowl halftime show, the prototypical gauge of American sensibilities, which this year featured the Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny, hadn’t featured an out-and-out rock act since … 2016. (Incidentally, the rock act was Coldplay; yeah, I’m not sure I could identify their music either.)

      I also got to thinking about it when my friend Mitch mentioned that his 11-year-old middle-class white grandson listens to rap. When I was 11, I listened to Jerry Lee Lewis and there was a whole lotta shaking going on.

      Rock ‘n’ roll, of course, was foremost the music. It was music that could encompass Jerry Lee’s pounding piano, the breathless screeches of Little Richard and the refined harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas or the Eagles. It was doo-wop and soul and bubble gum and punk. It was the Four Tops and Simon and Garfunkel. It was Jimi Hendrix’s thrashing the national anthem and Pete Townsend thrashing his own guitar.  

      But rock also has always been much more than the music, more than just a heavy back beat and a twanging bass line. It has been a culture. That culture signified a spirit of rebellion, an angry, almost physical energy that bound us together. And for 40 or 50 years, that culture of rock shaped fashion, politics, attitudes and, really, our generational identity.

      Obviously, it’s not that way anymore.

      People mostly get their music from streaming platforms today, meaning that everyone lives in their own algorithm. While we all watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, and we all listened to the same radio stations, audiences are now splintered.

      So, some people, like Mitch’s grandson, listen to rap. And some listen to country. And some follow K-pop and others are into electronic music or Latin music, like Bad Bunny’s reggaeton.

      The biggest stars in the world today aren’t rock bands or guitar heroes, not The Beatles, Nirvana or Green Day. They are Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift, who is mostly pop and a little bit country. Rock music and rock bands rarely top the charts, if there are still charts. The center of the musical universe has shifted and no single genre owns the musical conversation the way rock did in 1967 or 1991.

      Nor is rock at the center of the cultural universe anymore, no longer the dominant force affecting behavior, dress, speech and attitude. Culture works differently today; it is fragmented, each of us heading in our own digital direction, surrounded by our own identifiable tribes. If anything, rock culture dominance has been largely replaced by the aesthetics of hip-hop and pop. To many young people who love hip-hop, rock is now “your parents’ music.”

      Of course, there are still rock bands and singers around. There may still be small clubs that feature rock and I know there are stadiums filled with legacy acts like Paul McCartney and Foo Fighters and I just heard that Springsteen and the E-Street Band are re-forming for a tour this spring.

      But rock music, as the dominant force in music and popular culture, is dead. And for reasons that I can’t quite pinpoint, that makes me infeffably sad.