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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

For me the question is can Rock continue to claim to be intrinsically rebellious and new, as opposed to say, Blues. The Rock of the 50s and 60s ossified into Arena Rock in the 70s, which provoked Punk, which was gradually co-opted, until there was a resurgence of sorts in the 90s. At this point, however, I am skeptical there can be any radically original combination of elements in the genre. Which is fine, obviously people continue to make satisfying Blues records, but they also aren't claiming to be doing something bold and new... EDM (in all its many subgenres) does seem to still be developing, as do Jazz and Western Art music (aka Classical), but none of them make quite the same claims about rebellion, either.

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What I like about rock songs is that you can put arbitrary content in them. Like good books, they have no blind spots. And indeed there's all kinds of bands with all kinds of messages.

Other music like Blues is more like narrow genre books, like detective fiction. You know what you'll find in a detective book and where the borders are. Challenge these borders and you're on post-modernist grounds, outside the genre.

Of course, rock used to be rooted in some things, just like sf&f used to be rooted in some things. But it turned out that using the method you can uproot it and tell about anything you want.

I consider jazz as largely a dead art form, and have for thirty years. It's more an artifact of its habitat - it doesn't much exist outside of the academy. It got a shot in the arm when it was fused with hip hop but that's pretty hard to do. I made the mistake of pursuing "fusion" and there was just no point in that at all.

It's not like it's being organically and spontaneously created at the Five Spot any more. If it is, it's because somebody decided that's what the "Five Spot" does, and makes that happen by force of will. I suppose a "farmed" version of jazz is what we have, not "free range" jazz. But bebop wasn't sustainable. And people don't drink three-martini lunches any more...

Classical is surprisingly healthy. Well, the performance part is struggling for funding.

There will probably always be something we call "rock" or "rock and roll" but it's probably in its 8th or fifteenth iteration now - these things last about five years, a canon forms for it and that branch solidifies.

I'm old, and I only learned actual rock-and-roll in the 1980s when I played with guys born in the '40s who still knew how. You can hear it in Keef and Charlie of the Stones. There's a hell of a lot of overlap between rock-and-roll and country music for the last 50 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/08/is-jazz-enteri...

I have most of the Funkadelic records up to a point. Find me something that is not on those Funkadelic records and I might get back to you. And that was a hell of a lot less funky than those Funkadelic records.

"Mirror of Youth" was nice but ...Brubeck much? Damn nice, though. Thanks for the reference.

It is one thing for ... JJ Cale to lead with a drum machine riff because he was being lazy, broke or cheap but trying to present the stuff at that link as somehow the saving of jazz merely serves to reinforce my point.

I am talking about an art form as a living, breathing entity. I didn't kill the [ expletive deleted} thing but something did, and I'm just as disgusted as you are. Miles is to jazz as Eastwood is to the Western. It is going to take real leadership to get it out of the rut.

It seems to me like most of the progress in rock is happening at the fringes, particularly in metal. The folk-metal (both european "celtic/viking" and particularly "southern sludge"), jazz-influenced progressive metal, and hybrid instrumental/electronic djent genres are all breaking significant new ground.

Has rock ever been rebellious, really? It always seems to turn into another genre when it's clear cut rebellion.

I don't really know what you mean by rock. I would classify punk, metal, and all their angry friends as rock subgenres.

Putting those aside for a minute, the earliest forms of rock were quite rebellious. Rumble by Link Wray, the 1954 instrumental hit that pioneered the distortion and power chord combo, ended up getting banned in many markets because it was thought to incite delinquency. Today, the tune is bland at best.

At this point, I think it's quite hard to rebel culturally. So many different genres have pushed their definition of rebellion so far at this point that it has become exceptionally hard to push the envelope of what is culturally acceptable.

"Rumble" still sounds dangerous to my ear. It's that bass line. boom, boom, boom <rest> . Yeah.

The whole idea of rebellion has become a ... set of inane lifestyle choices. It was, frankly, pretty stupid back in the day, too. But I remember Bob Hope talking about how Kiss' mothers told them to "kiss and make up" on TV.

Ace Frehley - guitar teacher to America.

In a media-friendly way, sure. But the end of "Mad Men " was an allegory of the "The Hill" ad for Coke. It's rather like Hunter S. Thompson talking about the watermark the counterculture left before the flood rolled back.

I read "Been Down So Long.." by Richard Farina when I was like 12 , and it had the observation that the counterculture was just as venal and self-interested ad the Establishment. This is almost without a doubt the most useful idea I've ever been given. And it's from like 1964.

The "rebellious" part became marketing fodder some time in the '70s. This is when music teachers decided to include the "rock" beat in things like jazz programs and choral music in junior high school.

"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don't kid yourself." - Frank Zappa.

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