ROCK & ROLL AUTOPSY
“Rock ‘n roll don’t come from your brain. It comes from your crotch.”
-James Franco
Rock music is dead. Rap took its money and is fucking its girl.
How did that happen?
In the 50s, you’d find guys like Elvis whose writers poached music from styles of music that could only be found in black music halls. I’m talking about terrifying shit about murdering your girlfriend for leaving you and decapitated people in the woods. Those writers passed it off to a white guy and he humped the air like a goddamn savage and it freaked people the fuck out. Link Wray’s track Rumble was banned from radio for promoting gang violence, a song that doesn’t even have any lyrics.
Then in the 60s you got Jefferson Airplane singing about using a vibrator and comparing LSD to a children’s story. Boy band The Beatles sang songs about overthrowing the entire social order and installing a psychedelic-induced fantasy of planetary utopia while Russia was a real threat. Rolling Stones put out pop-friendly rhythms on songs about straight-up abuse and raping slaves. Jimmy Hendrix performed Voodoo rites and murdered the national anthem with spine-twisting speaker feedback.
70s you got Ozzy singing about Satanism and murdering live animals with his teeth live on stage. You got Zeppelin stuffing potatoes in their pants before performances to look like they had enormous cocks. You got punk music where music took a backseat to kicking ass and being a goddamn maniac, and leaving the show covered in three people’s blood was mandatory. Even disco was unashamed about fucking strangers and melting their septums with Columbian booger sugar.
80s is where we see the decline in New Wave. You thought I was gonna say glam and hair metal, didn’t you? Glam bands were dressing like goofy space neon girls but still, somehow, radiated machismo like it’s a superpower. Dee Snider could dress like a 8-year-old girl experimenting with her mom’s clothes and makeup, and Alice Cooper could dress like a biker’s girlfriend, but they could still pull it off. I’m no scientist of fashion, but it seems to me gender-bending reached a crescendo and peaked at this moment in human history, when Ru Paul was still scary to normies and Judas Priest was wearing full leather-daddy regalia. Freddie Mercury could snap the spine of every member of Pet Shop Boys without putting a bead of sweat on his mustache. The straights were musically bi-curious; A little anxious, not saying yes exactly, but not telling anyone to stop either.
New Wave invited the devil into their house with bands like The Cure, Duran Duran, and Tears For Fears. Bands like Nirvana reinvented rock as a literal suicide cult. The 90s was was the pillow on the face of rock. Rock-and-roll lost its huevos and descended into narcissistic, pussified sad bastard music. Lyrics became abstract to the point of pure gibberish. Any message or narrative was smeared into Rorschach inkblot tests, personal words that mean something specific to the singer but lets every listener interpret them as something else totally personal to them. It’s post-modernism fused with the therapy culture of that decade, when we told kids to swallow prozac but never told to do a deadlift.
While rock was busy sobbing, rap’s balls had just dropped and those balls were huge. Walking off a two decade career of positivity and self-esteem and black empowerment, rap said, “fuck it.” You think rock was scary? Rap groups started writing songs about murdering cops with AK-47s, fucking women while giving them zero respect, and making money every way that wasn’t legal. Rap’s huevos were on a scale unlike we’ve seen since 18th century. I mean those old Irish folk songs and sea shanties, good and wholesome peasant music about getting the clap from whores and murdering your neighbor for stealing your sheep, music that repulses aristocracy and clergy. Once again, music was scaring the shit out of mothers, and therefor Congress, as it should be.
Let’s compare some lyrics. Look at this.
I’m never alone, I’m alone all the time
Are you at one? Or do you lie?
We live in a wheel where everyone steals
But when we rise, it’s like strawberry fields
-Bush, Glycerine (1994)
Those are whiney nonsense lyrics. I presume it’s about a girl who doesn’t like him anymore because that’s every damn song. Not to be complete without a string instrument to let you know that Gavin Rossdale was really, really sad that he wouldn’t be getting laid.
Compare that to this.
I got blood on my hands and there’s no remorse
And got blood on my dick ‘cause I fucked a corpse
I’m a nasty nigga
-DMX, Bring Your Whole Crew (1998)
This man got teenagers bobbing their heads to descriptions of Khmer Rouge war crimes. Nothing has scared the shit out of suburban mothers like that since Cannibal Corpse cover art. Meanwhile, the band Bush is slashing their wrists to cello music and using petroleum skin products as a metaphor for… who-gives-a-fuck.
Rock stopped telling stories or being interesting. It became Gen X crybaby bullshit, using tears as jerkoff lube while the rappers were fucking mouths and doing drive-bys. Even punk withered in the form of Blink 182 and Green Day. That’s not punk. Punk is the song John Wayne Was a Nazi, by a group actually called Millions Of Dead Cops. Green Day wrote songs about doing bong rips and lying around being a pathetic coomer. Compare a picture of Henry Rollins to a picture of Billie Joe Armstrong and mentally interpret that as a before and after picture of what 10 years of heroin did to rock music. If you listen closely, you can actually hear the last grotesque gurgling breath of rock give up the ghost and it sounds exactly like Fallout Boy.
If punk couldn’t survive this, what chance did metal have? Metal got swallowed up into this whiney bitch bog just the same. You got Linkin Park shrieking about how badass they are while crying like Ichi The Killer. Screamo and NuMetal is worse than sad bastard music. It’s sad bastard music pretending to be dangerous, angry bastard music. To anyone who can bench over 80, nothing about that music is threatening. You can’t put a Punisher skull sticker on the rear window of a Dodge Grand Caravan and think anyone will respect you for it. The Insane Clown Posse’s degenerate and utterly harmless fan club, the juggalos, are considered a gang by the FBI. That’s right. The people who love a clown-painted pair of Michigan trailer-park rappers - who have been clandestinely rapping about Jesus for decades - are a threat to America. You think the FBI fears Slipknot?
Fuck, man. Even country music has more balls than rock. Yeah, you read that right the first time. Hank Williams’ grandson sings about crushing oxies and fucking married women, Wheeler Walker Jr smashes your face with songs like Eating Pussy and Kicking Ass, and Billy Joe Shaver, and 80-year-old man, sweats the secret ingredient in Alex Jones’ Super Male Vitality supplements.
Let’s get to the point. The gas in the tank of youth music is testosterone and its magnetic effect on women. That’s the whole fucking thing. End of discussion. No movement, let alone genre of music, can survive the crushing weight of a decade of self-absorption, emotional solipsism, and anti-aspirational nihilism. If music isn’t constantly trying to have sex and test its own physical tolerance for pharmaceuticals, it will be abandoned by the young.
The 90s was a lost decade. Music on a methadone drip is the theme music for checked-out sad bastards, slouching into a couch and making nonsense observations about society and life, always bitching about it and never doing anything about it. Nobody gives a fuck about the movie Reality Bites but everyone remembers Scarface.
Will rock ever make a comeback? No. It’s grandpa music now. It’s shit your dad listens to while he hangs a pegboard shelving system in the garage. It’s what your foreman puts on because he has seniority and the 20-somethings don’t get any say. Rock is what advertisers put into commercials sell Jeeps to dudes in their 50s.
Here is the inevitable life cycle of all great cultural products:
1. young misfits with no respect and nothing to lose make something great
2. it catches on
3. rich people try to make it marketable
4. it becomes mainstream
5. The Man™ produces poor imitations at industrial speed
6. it loses what made it great
7. it withers and dies
8. Go to step 1.
Everything good gets captured and twisted up by the bourgeois post-modern aesthetic preferences of wealthy know-nothing taste-makers because those are the ones who put money into the hands of artists. In their vapid, conflict-free world they crave anything that feels “real” but they never find it because what’s real is terrifying to them. Every cultural movement must be tranquilized and placed in zoo so they can enjoy the thing, safely assured that it won’t get out and act wild.
There is an elephant graveyard for culture and it’s called middle-aged white women. It’s a place where all slang and youth culture limps off to die alone.
Make no mistake: Rap will find extinction, too. Every empire has it’s decline and every music style is eventually abandoned by all but niche loyals. It’s already begun flirting with it. Mumble rap is a pejorative for a style that takes itself so unseriously that they can’t even be bothered to say actual words at all. Rappers deliberately give themselves vodka-DXM-induced speech impediments and repeat 3-word sentences over and over. People see that and have the same reaction as when they see expensive modern abstract art: “Anyone could make this. My infant child, who can’t talk, could make this.” It’s already gazing into the abyss of a post-modern death spiral of category annihilation and flirting with an overdose of something DanceSafe didn’t test.
Just remember that the good shit is the shit that rich people haven’t found yet. If you’re quicker at finding art before the people with money are, you’ll always be swimming in the good stuff.