Rock music is not lifeless, nevertheless it’s barely hanging on.
This is true in not less than two senses.
Though standard music gross sales usually have plummeted since their peak across the flip of the millennium, sure genres proceed to generate business pleasure: pop, rap, hip-hop, nation. But rock — amplified and sometimes distorted electrical guitars, bass, drums, melodic if ceaselessly abrasive lead vocals, with songs normally penned completely by the members of the band — barely registers on the charts. There are nonetheless necessary rock musicians making music in a spread of types — Canada’s Big Wreck excels at refined progressive exhausting rock, for instance, whereas the extra subdued American band Dawes artfully expands on the soulful songwriting that thrived in California in the course of the 1970s. But these teams usually toil in relative obscurity, promoting a number of thousand data at a time, performing to modest-sized crowds in golf equipment and theaters.
But there’s one other sense through which rock may be very practically lifeless: Just about every rock legend you may suppose of goes to die inside the subsequent decade or so.
Yes, we have misplaced some already. On high of the icons who died horribly younger a long time in the past — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there’s the litany of legends felled by sickness, medication, and just plain previous age in newer years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty.