Sean O'Hagan is finishing his occasional series on rock'n'roll icons. The reason? There's no one today worth celebrating.

Oasis are calling their forthcoming album 'Standing on the Shoulder of Giants', a title that manages to be both self-deprecating and self-indicting. If the sound of Oasis represents the full roar of rock'n' roll at the beginning of the new century, the album might more accurately be called Standing in the Shadow of Giants, since the Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, continue to exercise an obsessive hold on the Gallagher brothers' creative psyches.

Four albums into their stride, it will be interesting to hear if Liam and Noel have cast off the cloak of homage-cum-pastiche that still characterises their often excellent, but essentially traditional, pop-rock bluster.

Oasis are only the loudest and most visible example of rock's protracted post-mid-life crisis, and at least Liam has a punk swagger about him that runs counter to the middle-class artiness of the group's nearest rivals. But the fact remains that nearly 50 years on from the shock of the new that was Presley, Little Richard and the rest, rock music has struggled and generally failed to transcend its core influences, to such a degree that pastiche has been elevated to the ultimate pop art form.

Beck, the great white hope of American rock, has just made the best Prince album in recent years, and already seems defeated by the weight of expectation he has had to carry since his startling debut. It is unlikely that pop culture will ever again produce anyone with the iconic resonance of a Dylan or a Lennon or a Lou Reed. It may well produce songwriters of an equal or even better calibre, but the social context that threw up the giants of pop is long gone - replaced by mass entertainment, by vulgar hype and the hard sell, by self-congratulatory awards ceremonies.

Right now, ironically, we have greater access to rock history than ever before. In the past few years every overlooked genius, from Gram Parsons to Nick Drake, from Gene Clarke to Arthur Lee, from Sun Ra to Lee Perry, has been excavated and re-appraised - and most of the time the present has been found wanting in relation to the richness, and indeed the strangeness, of the past. To listen to the Dylan Bootlegs series, to the exhaustive Byrds, Velvet Underground and Marvin Gaye box sets that have arrived over the past decade is not just to hear pop history but also, in places, to approach the realm of myth.

Rock'n'roll at its most potent is, like cinema or photography (the other two great pop art forms of the 20th century) essentially mythic. That is why Greil Marcus's book, Mystery Train, which places its extended musical portraits in the context of a fast-fading mythical America, remains the best study of the subject. Dylan circa 1966 - like Scorsese in the early 70s - was a myth-maker. As the first modernist rocker, he created his own self-mythology and wrapped it up in the bigger myth of a modern, self-defining America.

Like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones when they were young and curious, like countless pioneering blues and soul and country singers who influenced him, Dylan challenged then demolished the very idea of the pop song. He dealt in speed and confusion, in the momentum of ideas. In today's rock, as in contemporary art, there simply is no new any more, only endless cross-reference and self-reverence.

Today, if you want to take the temperature of the times, you must look beyond the mainstream to the margins of pop. It was probably always thus, except that these days the margins are more distant and undefined. But there remain some outposts of independence; voices that speak of the anxiety and the uncertainty that lurk just beneath the surface of our self-devouring culture. For every carefully programmed pop sensation peddling pitch-perfect emptiness, there is an eternally off-key Will Oldham perfecting a music of quiet and often startlingly naked melancholy. Or a group like Pavement crafting strange, offbeat songs about the dislocation of contemporary life and love. Asked about his favourite pieces of fiction, the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante answered: "Fragments, any sort of fragments." When I listen to Oldham or Pavement or Tricky, I am often reminded of that quote.

As we enter the age of total information access, I am drawn more and more to the intimate, the mysterious, the fragmented. I don't think I am alone. I find myself, too, increasingly drawn, as an agnostic, to music with a spiritual import. In the lyrics and delivery of songs like Nick Cave's hymnal Into My Arms or The Louvin Brothers' Satan's Jewelled Crown or Aretha Franklin's reworking of Bridge Over Troubled Water, I hear a depth and a sense of urgency that seem missing elsewhere. Rock'n'roll may have lost touch with its own mythology, but the simple pop song can still be a repository of our hopes and longings. It can still, in its small, dislocated way, mirror our own dislocation, our confusion and anxieties, and speak to us of our fragmented selves. That, for now, is more than enough.

• The Guardian & The Observer Articles - index

c 2000 Andrew Turner

aturner@interalpha.co.uk

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