The Rock Band Is Dead

Allow me to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement: The guitar-bass-drums style "rock band" is dead.

Dead. Dead as a fuckin' doornail. Dead as a politician's career after using the "N" word in public. Just plain dead.

It no longer has anything new to offer. It is an outmoded template. People are squeezing the lemon so dry that by now it's just a pulpy piece of useless goo. "Rock bands" are now a simulacra of rock bands: they used to mean something to someone some time ago, but no one quite remembers what, exactly, they meant.

All these bands: the Strokes, the Killers, the Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, etc., etc. You name them. They all sound the same to me. I feel like I should like them, but in the back of my brain I know somehow that I just don't. What's the problem? Why do they fail to register in any meaningful way?

I think there are several answers to this question, and they all lead back to the same place: the "rock band" is motherfuckin' dead.

Let me try to edify my own feelings by attempting to nail, for my own personal pleasure, just why I really haven't been impressed by any of these bands:

1. The times they have a'changed

Musicians can no longer act like it's 1965 - or even 1995 for that matter. What worked like a charm then is simply way too familiar by now. The rock bands of the 60s weren't great because they were "rock bands," they were great because the idea of the "rock band" was fresh and exciting. There was a reason why the musicians were using that format. They could not afford anything else. They wanted to make the biggest variety of sounds (and get the biggest amount of noise) with as few instruments as possible, and guitar-bass-drums was pretty much the sure-fire way to do it. I get the feeling that the current rock bands are only being rock bands because they think they're "supposed" to be rock bands. The nature of recorded music-making has drastically changed. The best acts of the last decade or so have acknowledged this change, and I think their music will hold up better as a result. But a lot of people are still stuck on the "rock band" - and this includes rock critics.

Because these bands are following the familiar format of the past, rock critics are going apeshit over this stuff. But music is as its best when it's unfamiliar. Yes, it's hard to praise stuff when it's unfamiliar, but that doesn't make the familiar stuff any better.

Also, keep in mind that in the 60s the musical scene was basically concentrated in a few key places (mostly by accident). If you wanted music you had to buy a record. If you couldn't afford a record you had to listen to the radio. If you wanted to see your favorite band you had to go to the concert. If you couldn't afford a concert you had to watch the TV show performance. But the end result was that everybody was on the same page. Now everything's too diffuse. Nobody's paying attention to the same scene. All we've got is just a bunch of subgroups of subgroups. And yet these bands and these rock critics are still acting like there's one big scene. The byproduct is that bands keep getting hyped as "the next big thing" when they really have no way of evolving into anything truly exciting - because there is no organic "scene." Instead it's just a lot of rock critics wishing there was a scene.

Also, popular music was something that was much more rare back then, because it was actually expensive to make. The sounds of a professional recording studio were not easy to reproduce on the cheap. When people bought a record, they were actually paying for something that cost something. Therefore popular music had a mystique that it simply doesn't have today. So you know what else is dead besides the rock band? Mystique. Mystique is also motherfuckin' dead.

2. They're trying too hard

The first great rock bands didn't know there was such a thing as a great rock band. They became great rock bands by accident. The Beatles weren't sitting around trying to be the "next great rock band"; they were just making it up as they went along. As a result, the music of the first great rock bands was much more organic and spontaneous. They weren't trying, they were just...being.

It's like taking a crap. The Beatles just sat down on the toilet and it just flowed out with a graceful ease. These other bands that are out right now, they're squeezing and pushing and bending over in desperation, trying to will the great music out of themselves. They're constipated. They're fucking constipated.

Now before you brand me a musical nihilist, or a hopeless nostalgic, let me just say that I do think that it is still quite possible for musicians to make really enjoyable popular music. But they have to come to the table with a fresh approach. In some ways, the best that people could really aim for right now is something along the lines of "great throwaway music." Because you could not "blow people's minds with an amazing new sound" right now. The system is simply not set up that way anymore. What the best bands of the past ten years have done is work on a smaller scale, with smaller ambitions. Oh, they've still pitched their music to a potentially broader audience, but the key is that they haven't been too concerned with finding that audience in a hurry. They've understood that word-of-mouth was their friend. They've also completely deconstructed the idea of the "guitar-bass-drums rock band." As a result, I feel that their music will hold up with the best of the 60s and 70s music, and will still be worthwhile twenty years from now. I will now describe, in brief, the nature of my five favorite musical acts of the last ten years. They are as follows:

Belle & Sebastian: A band so secretive that the exact number of members (or the band members' names, even) wasn't even clear to the public until about five years after they'd been famous. A band consisting of a full-time trumpet and cello player, among other multi-instrumentalists. A band whose first album was recorded for a school project and released only on LP in a pressing of 1,000 copies. A band that has released about half of its best songs on EP. A band that always gives me the impression of a bunch of smart, friendly people simply hanging out and recording music almost on the side.

Air: Two French guys who sing in weirdly feminized vocoder-robot voices (if they even sing at all) while concocting their sound from cheap 70s synthesizers and almost nothing else.

The White Stripes: A guitarist and a drummer and that's fuckin' it. They never bothered, for the longest time, to make clear whether they were married or siblings or what exactly. There's some mystique for you, people.

The Magnetic Fields: Basically one guy who writes everything and occasionally lets other people sing his songs. Their best album is essentially a highly diverse and highly rewarding three-disc running gag. But in a good way.

Elliott Smith: A musician so intense and so troubled that he spent three years subsisting solely on ice cream and heroin, ran through bushes in order to hide from the record company that, in his paranoid state, he was absolutely convinced was stalking him, and most likely committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest, although it's also possible that he might have been stabbed by his girlfriend (they're not sure).

So there you go. Few and far between, but it can still be done. Elliott Smith, actually, is the most traditionally-minded artist of the five. But, to me at least, he injected his 60s-based style with such life-or-death intensity that he reinvigorated the format. I never got the sense that Elliott Smith ever sat around and thought about his music. It seemed like for him, songwriting was basically an act of survival. So what am I saying? Am I saying that if you want to be a great musician in this day and age, you better become a suicidal junkie who hides in bushes? Maybe so. Maybe fuckin' so.

I don't have too many suggestions for people. I just wish the rock press would stop going gaga over the latest piece of insta-classic. Hey, I understand why these groups are popular: most people don't ask as much of rock music as I do. Most people just want something that's energetic and smart and reminiscent of a sound they already know they like. They do not ask popular music to carry the weight of religion. They are also not concerned with how the music will sound in twenty years, or how it will hold up in the context of rock history. I am.

Does that make me a fool? Then I'm a fool. You know, all the great bloggers of the world have been fools.