Bob Dylan Lays Down What Really Killed Rock ’n’ Roll
8th May 2021
From its fused inception, rock ‘n’ roll was already a racially integrated American invention being blasted in teenage bedrooms as early as 1955, but as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum going into 1960, the genre was being commercially segregated, on the sly, into white (British Invasion) and black (soul) music by the (WASPy) establishment.
I still remember being pissed off by the way the British Invasion groups, like the Beatles and the Stones, yanked all of the attention away from the native American rock, like the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean.
If rock & roll is dead, it’s a very healthy corpse. I was getting my hair cut the other day and the radio they were playing in the shop, in addition to the modern WOE-OH WOE-OH nonsense, played Styx and Journey — songs from fifty years ago, yet apparently intended to be familiar (and pleasing) to modern young people. What would people my age have thought, in the ’70s, of a modern music station playing something that was popular from the ’20s? The question answers itself.
May 9th, 2021 at 12:00
According to the late Frank Zappa, the demise of Rock happened when recording studios put people in charge who thought they knew what the public wanted to hear. In the early days, studios were run by old guys who had no idea what this new music was all about. All they could see was that it was generating money. So you had this amazing wide variety of music – from Bob Dylan to Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix to Roy Orbison, etc. Then studios decided they could make more money by getting rid of those old guys and hiring young experts. Disco was a craze, so suddenly everything else got dropped for disco. Then rap, then hip-hop, and now whatever crap is the latest. In effect, they hired lemmings and ignored the creative musicians.
May 9th, 2021 at 15:59
But, with the Internet, such people have a way to go around the gatekeepers like studios and record labels and sell directly to the public and the streaming services. So the problem is how to find the interesting stuff, which is why people are haunting blogs and Instagram.