New rock music – the frozen relic (it shouldn’t be)

So you want new rock music that’s good. Well, you have probably noticed this: most of the new rock bands that are somewhat popular today – even ones with reasonably or truly young members – sound like previous acts from the 60s, 70s and/or the 80s. They haven’t really taken their influences to what we could consider calling a new level stylistically.

For some reason, it feels like there’s an ever growing gap in popular music from about the late 90s on, where the new bands and performers – instead of inventing new sounds and styles – rather just reach back to the well known and familiar of the past, and play it either unchanged or at best they sort of rearrange it a bit.

New rock music – the frozen relic

Why is that? Is there no creativity left in people anymore to be able to create new rock music that’s truly new? Nope. The answer is in front of our eyes, my friend. And this time, I mean it literally. Because the answer is the internet.

new rock musicThese generations that are responsible for today’s new rock music, well, they’ve got hit by the internet pretty hard, man. And I’m not talking about little spurts here and there; gobs and gobs of information punched these people in the stomach, and sometimes in the face as well. Real bad. Information about their favorite bands when they were kids, stuff about the gear those people used, the production techniques and the era in general; even bands that wouldn’t have influenced them near as much without that above mentioned amount of information. If you look back at those past decades, you can see how quickly the genre was moving; it’s mostly because people didn’t have much to react on, but at the same time, you had to react pretty fast, considering you only had radio, TV, magazines and most of all, records to learn music (and about music) from, and that was usually new music of the (then) present. It pretty much forced people to use their imagination way harder, and if those kids didn’t want to get bored with having to listen to the same ten albums they could afford, they had to come up with some new shit.

Today we have the internet, and with it, we get this (sometimes rather pathetic) vintage craze. New musical inventions are few and far between, and you are lucky if they don’t involve a smartphone or something similar along those lines. On the other hand, you can get virtually any period correct instrument of any big name hero of the past. Anything that’s vintage influenced is just no longer cutting it. Everything has to be dead on, so we can go out and live or relive the past, only much more accurately and in depth than when and how it truly happened.

New rock music – the frozen relic

Learning stuff is good, but learning takes time. It’s up to you whether you use that time to learn to mimic the past as accurately as possible, or mix all that information with your imagination to create something new. Something that hasn’t been heard before. That should be the future of new rock music.

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