Rock Music Isn't What It Used To Be

Content Guide

Am I the only one who feels like rock music has got tame. Rock music used to feel dangerous. It used to feel like something your parents genuinely did not want you listening to. Now it sometimes feels like wallpaper, the super safe stuff you get from B and M. (For readers outside the UK, B and M is a discount retailer).

Walk into any mid-sized venue on a Friday night and you will hear the same thing you heard last Friday, and the Friday before that. Four guys, two guitars, a bass, a drum kit, and a vocalist who has clearly spent a lot of time listening to Arctic Monkeys. The songs are competent. The production is clean. Everything is perfectly in its place, and that is exactly the problem.

Competence is not enough. It never was.

The Problem With Playing It Safe (Rock Music Isn’t What It Used To Be)

The bands that made rock music worth caring about were not competent. They were reckless. They were weird and not actually that good technically. They were chasing something that did not quite exist yet, which meant they sometimes fell flat on their faces, but when they connected, they connected in a way that changed how you heard everything else. That feeling is harder to find now than it should be.

What is happening instead is a kind of comfort-seeking. Bands are forming around influences rather than ideas. The references are worn proudly, almost as a substitute for a personality. You can clock within about thirty seconds who a band grew up listening to, and that information tells you almost everything you need to know about where the next forty minutes are going to go. Nothing surprises you. Nothing unsettles you. You leave the gig thinking it was fine and forgetting about it before you have even reached the car park.

It Is Not About Genre Purity (Rock Music Isn’t What It Used To Be)

This is not about genre purity or some argument that rock peaked in a specific decade. It is about energy. It is about bands actually having something to say and finding a sound that could only have come from them. The best rock music has always carried a sense of friction, like the people making it are slightly at war with themselves and each other, and that tension is what gives it heat. A lot of what is coming out right now has no heat at all.

The Tools Are All There (Rock Music Isn’t What It Used To Be)

The frustrating thing is that the tools are all there. Noise, texture, dynamics, space, the full weight of everything that came before to either build on or tear apart. Some bands are doing extraordinary things with all of it, pushing into territory that feels genuinely new, pulling from places that have no obvious connection to rock and making it work. But they are exceptions. The mainstream of the genre has settled into a groove so worn down it barely registers as a groove anymore.

Rock Needs to Sound Wrong Before It Sounds Right (Rock Music Isn’t What It Used To Be)

Rock music needs bands who are willing to sound wrong before they sound right. It needs people who are more interested in creating something uncomfortable than something likeable. It needs the kind of restless, almost irrational commitment to a vision that makes you feel, even before the first chorus, that something is actually at stake.

That hunger used to be everywhere in this music. It needs to come back.