Don't Look Here, I'm Practising

Rock Is Dead (Boring)

JUST A BIG MIND-DUMP ON READING THE MADE-UP ‘NEWS’ THAT ROCK BANDS AREN’T HAVING HIT SINGLES NOWADAYS…

First, why does anyone think this is a state of affairs which requires action? Why is it bad that rock bands aren’t having hit singles? Rock bands have never had that many hit singles. Hit singles are not the life-blood of the rock band. Albums, tickets and merch, that’s how your rock band pays for their private jet.

Secondly, harking back to the glory days of the Beatles, Stones etc is all well and good, but when those bands were having their hit singles, the music they were making was called pop. It may have featured guitars, but so what? Guitars aren’t a genre, or a hallmark of quality, they’re an instrument, a means to an end.

Rock didn’t even really arrive as a term until the late ’60s, when albums became favoured over singles. A state of affairs which lasted for 10 years, and which meant that glam rock - which at least has ‘rock’ in its name - was derided as silly pop music by the proper rock acts of the day, because it largely existed as a string of hit singles. And you could tell who the proper rock acts were, because they never had any hit singles…because they never RELEASED any singles.

As with a lot of things to do with music, the real headache around this issue seems to be a hangover from punk, which is the moment at which rock ‘n’ roll first became properly conscious of its own (gah!) legacy.

Hit singles suited the brattiness of the punk bands, some of whom only had one brilliant song in them anyway. But being a rock-based phenomenon, they were treated with the reverence that had previously been the exclusive terrain of the rock establishment.

This meant you had to be able to sift importance (rock) from frivolity (pop) on a song-by-song basis. And the net result of that train of thought was a lot of bickering over whether acts like Adam and the Ants or Spandau Ballet, with their hit singles, were part of the solution or part of the problem. A very punk sort of riddle, that. Especially as there were still a lot of guitars around. It was a confusing time.

As the ’80s rumbled on, underground and overground wombled free of each other for years, only meeting for rare indie hits by the Smiths or the Jesus and Mary Chain, or metal hits by Iron Maiden or Motorhead. Hip hop - another singles-based musical form - managed the twin feat of straddling this divide and creating a generation gap around itself at the same time, and suddenly pop was at one and the same time lionised as a perfect thing from the past (by indie bands like the Primitives) and derided as a useless thing from nowadays (by anyone not massively into Bros). Sound familiar?

Eventually, in the middle of an acid house panic, Madchester suddenly raised expectations that you could still take a guitar to Top of the Pops, then Nirvana raised them further, then there was a brief lull, and then Britpop happened. Guitars were back in the charts, where they belonged. Things could only get better.

It’s that self-righteousness that still comes off when reading news reports about the death of rock. The subtext seems to be a wringing of hands, that we’ve left our nation’s youth to the tender mercies of N-Dubz when they could be being educated into enjoying their parents record collection. Y’know, the proper, healthy songs with all of the guitars on them.

Well stuff it. Rock is fine, pop is fine. They’ll probably butt heads again in the future, and when they do, it’ll be fun. That’s it. That’s your news story.