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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Moulin Rogue" data-source="post: 3991861" data-attributes="member: 1192">Well there IS still noisy music with "vocals and musical instruments" that does well on the charts of course, but there's not a strong overlap between fans of the "classic rock" sound and fans of today's "emo/pop-punk" sound. Not sure if you're lumping all that stuff together or not, but I guess either way, the answer as I see it is fragmentation.1991 is the great dividing line: grunge came along and blew up the "continuity" in the rock timeline. Prior to then your cool rock band could draw upon anything from the '60s, '70s, and '80s for inspiration, but suddenly that wasn't the case. If your cool new band didn't sound like Nirvana or Pearl Jam you were not going to get signed by a big label. Rock took it itself very, very seriously from then on: no more flashy clothes or lyrics about partying, no more singers hitting high notes or fret-burning guitar solos.The pre- and post-grunge division is reflected in the programming of mainstream American radio: "classic rock" stations don't play artists that came along AFTER then, and the alternative stations for the younger crowd play little to no music released BEFORE then. So a young new band that sounds like Van Halen or Led Zeppelin will have a very hard time breaking through to the mainstream because they don't have a natural place on the radio dial: classic rock stations won't play them because their roster of artists to play is set in stone, and the alternative station probably won't play them if they want to devote their very limited playlist slots over to a new band that is more emo or punk. So what can the kids listen to now if they want flashy clothes, celebrations of hedonism, and a spirit of showmanship? That's right.... Hip-hop has been the new rock n' roll ever since it took a big step up to the mainstream in the '90s. Throw in the rise of "new country" and whatever other genres you want to (rap-rock, etc.), and things are just way too fragmented for rock to ever again become the cultural force that it was for the baby boomers, who still account for a ton of music dollars by the way... I don't think it was teenagers who sent that Eagles record to #1 last year!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Teenagers do still listen to classic rock from years ago, of course: you can still hear a Led Zeppelin song from 1969 in a high school parking lot (how many teens were listening to '20s music in the '60s?). These songs are all over Guitar Hero as well. So rock will never die, in the same way that jazz and blues are not really dead. The standards will always be around getting played in clubs, at least.I hope these 4am ramblings made some sense <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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