There was a time, after Sinatra and before Beyonce, after wooden radios and before iPods, when rock stars ruled American culture. It was a time when rock stars were bigger than their music, and when popular music drove the culture -- Elvis, James Brown, The Beatles, The Stones, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead.
This is not to diss today's musicians, says David Shumway, Professor of Cultural Studies and English at Carnegie Mellon University, who's just written an article titled "Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?" in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Hats off to Jay Z and Coldplay and Arcade Fire, he says, but the way now is niche music and the world-straddling star is all but history.
Listen to an On Point discussion with Shumway and other pop music watchers about the new role of popular music in American culture.
Do you agree that the great age of the rock star is behind us? Are we all lost in our own, personal earbud concerts now, with 50-cent and White Stripes, Coldplay and Amy Winehouse? What’s changed with the role of popular music?
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Comments: 7
There are still greats in music, if not in ability then in popularity. Despite the fact that I don't like her, Madonna was an icon for over a decade, Metallica has rocked steady for a long length of time, Korn is one of the few newer artists credited with creating a new sound, Sean, (Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy or whatever he's going by nowadays!), Combs is a figure which looms larger than life, and, another, "yuk," Brittany Spears was also at the top of the heap for way too long. (Thank God for Brittany's doomed marriage, it allowed Christina Aguilara and her enormous talent to finally get some airplay!)
So there will continue to be larger than life icons in the biz. One thing I've learned about life is that it travels in huge circles, (wished I had learned that lesson way earlier, it could've saved me tons of money on clothes!), and there are artists out there, unknown to us right now, who will move us and become our heros.
The Rock-Star was killed by the 80's. The mega-stars of the 60's and 70's were grand and extravagant, mainly because they -could- be. They were of sufficient talent to warrant the adoration of millions, so they basked in the warm glow of stardom. There were slight backlashes against them (remember the singer-songwriter fad?), but nothing that stuck. Acts such as Ozzy Osbourne and KISS used the stage to put on bizarre shows and made the most of an eternal spotlight.
Enter the 80's.
In the 80's, music groups and performers began to see stardom as a Right, rather than an earned Privilege. So they aped the stars that they had seen, they put on the facade of riches, wore extravagant clothes, and teased their hair as high as possible; all in an effort to be "outrageous" draw attention to themselves.
Eventually, outrageousness itself became utterly banal. The wry androgyny of Alice Cooper had been replaced by clownish drag-queens. Real talent got lost in this. Anyone who hasn't mentally blocked the KISS music video for "Uhh, all night" will recall the horrifying sight of Gene Simmons, the Demon himself, clad in a hideous blue sequined outfit.
And when a music-culture, like any organism, eats and eats of something until it can no longer stomach another spoonful, it does what comes naturally. It vomits. This was grunge metal. Not to disparage grunge-metal, which I loved personally, but the world was aching for something different, anything Different. Grunge was the signpost along the way.
Unlike a lot of folks, I don't consider Curt Cobain to be a musical genius, nor do I feel that Nirvana ranks among the greatest bands of all time. But they certainly rank among the most influential. Nirvana just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video was the match that lit the powder-keg of Anti-Glam.
Here then, was something truly different. The music was different, the costumes non-existent, and the subject matter was far from the previous "get drunk and party" lyrics of the glam age. The bands were composed of people the listeners could actually identify with. Groups such as Soundgarden and Tool sang about subjects which had been ignored or stereotyped during the 80's, such as mental illness and loneliness. This atmosphere was conducive to a small revival of Beat culture, as evidenced by the vast numbers of coffeehouses that began to spring up. Slowly but surely, music began to have a meaning again.
The record companies however, were in a quandary. Where as glam had been a relatively conservative, even formulaic genre; new hit singles had nothing in common other than the fact that they were an alernative to the norm. Not ones to argue, the record companies began promoting anything that seemed 'different'.
Eventually, diversity itself became the norm.
There were fads of course, each genre had it's time in the spotlight. The Industrial, Ska, Electronica, and Rap Metal genres careened by as the music culture kept searching for the "New".
It was in this environment that the internet music industry arrived on the scene. Perfectly suited to provide Diversity, the internet had an alternative to every alternative. And it was free. Technological advances such as MP3's and i-Pods cemented the internet as a new and infinite venue for music to develop on. And so, the weight of the national attention has been spread amongst an constantly expanding plane of music. Bands don't really even need recording contracts to gather exposure for themselves. So it's wide open.
Don't worry about the Rock Star though. Ultimately, it is a symbol around which people gather. An idea can never be truly killed. In a few years, we'll be seeing a pop fad of neo-Luddites in response to America's current immersion in the Internet. People will likely begin to hold large face-to-face gatherings as a way of throwing off feelings of isolation. I'm sure the Star will be coming along eventually. It's only a matter of time.
Rock Stars are not dead...they have just been quiet for a while...and are coming back...THANK GOD!
These and other propositions, predicated on huge generalities, are presented as self-evident realities. The practices of tens of millions are summarized and categorized in the stroke of a pen. There is no presentation of evidence. No demographic data. No statistical surveys. No statement of a scientific method. No application of data to an analytic method. Nothing.
If this sort of thing is any indication of the state of research within the humanities in U.S. colleges and universities, then it's no wonder "young people" would rather plug in their earbuds then tune into their teachers.
I guess tenure means never having to say you're sorry.
That is things like Paris Hilton's "Simple Life", MTV's "Real World" and "Road Rules" are examples how to gain fame without really doing anything, but be yourself and get a camera pointed at you.
You no longer need to know how to act or play a guitar to gain fame, or more important --- access to fans.