Whenever a study of popular culture is done, it is unavoidable to include a discussion of popular music. Since the 1950s, rock and roll has been one of the major driving forces of pop music and pop culture in America. Since its second creative peak in the late sixties, however, the creative quality of rock has been suffering a steady decline, particularly in recent years. Where there once was diverse, creative, and influential acts such as The Doors, The Beach Boys, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Otis Redding, and countless others filling the slots on mainstream Top 40 radio, there now exists an empty void where these artists' timeless music once stood. Rock and roll in today's society is a mere shell of what it once was, a pathetic and tired skeleton that limps through pop culture and does little to alter its course. Rock and roll music made clear progressions in creative quality from its inception in the fifties through the late sixties, splintered and stagnated during the seventies, has has generally declined since the late seventies. This is due partly to the popularity of music videos, the integration of rock music into mainstream culture and its subsequent over commercialization, and the lack of cultural unification in modern-day rock.

Most rock music scholars agree that rock and roll as a genre began in the mid fifties and peaked somewhere in the late sixties. After the sixties, rock has continued to exist, but its importance as a vital force in society has greatly diminished. This progression is charted in Don J. Hibbard and Carol Keleialoha's book The Role of Rock:

Rock may be traced through four major stages:

1955-1959: inception
1959-1965: formulation
1965-1969: maturity
1969-present: stylization (4).

These writers tagged the fourth stage "stylization," but this may also be termed "fragmentation"; since the early seventies, rock music has lacked the cohesive qualities that made it an important element in pop culture during the fifties and sixties. In Flowers in the Dustbin, James Miller recognizes the different stages of rock's development and addresses them in a more personal way. He recounts how affected he was when he first heard rock music in 1956: "These records touched me in ways that I'd never been touched before." (16). As time went on, he matured along with rock music.

Time passed. What had once seemed exotic grew familiar. Inspired by the Beatles, a new generation of performers from Bob Dylan to Jim Morrsion and The Doors, helped choreograph a cultural revolution that turned rock and roll from a disparaged music for kids into a widely watched, frequently praised mode of serious cultural expression. By the end of the sixties, rock had turned into a multibillion-dollar industry. (16).

Miller became a rock critic and saw the rock world from the inside; he was there to witness and report its incredible development and eventual demise. "...The rock world as I came to know it ... seems to me ever more stale, ever more predictable, ever more boring." (17). Miller, as a historian, comes to terms with the death of rock and roll: "I believe that the genre's era of explosive growth has been over for nearly a quarter century... rock now belongs to the past as much as to the future." (19). Miller is just one of the many observers who recognize that rock and roll's vitality is weighed unevenly towards its first golden era.

The popularity of MTV and music videos is the most obvious target for blame on rock's continuing digression. While rock culture has always been preoccupied with imagery, never before MTV has an artist's image been as important to their success as it is now. A major recording artist releasing a single without a video clip is almost unheard of. MTV works like a national radio station with almost complete control over who makes it and who doesn't.

The influence of MTV on the North American music industry during the 1980s -- and therefore, by association, globally -- was enormous. By 1991, 80 percent of the songs on Billboard's Hot 100 were represented by a video. MTV became the most effective way to 'break' a new artist, and to take an emerging artist into star status. (Understanding Popular Music, Shuker 195).

It's easy to single out music video because the sounds work so closely with, and in some cases becomes secondary to, the images shown. This unique medium is more akin to movies and television, both of which involve music, than it is to music itself. Take, for example, seventies rock band Aerosmith's resurgence in popularity in the mid nineties. They released a series of videos ("Crying," "Crazy," etc.) which starred young actresses Alicia Silvertsone and Liv Tyler, and reflected youth interests as opposed to adult themes. These songs became popular with a young audience (even though the sound was more in the vein of classic rock), and thus received heavy radio support, based on the popularity of the video clips. So it is possible for a song to become a hit based more on the way the music plays to the images in the video than the quality of the music itself. Rock music has always invited the listener to create their own images and fantasies, and to relate the music to their own lives. In this MTV dominated society, however, the listener/viewer is now shown exactly what to think when they hear a song. In a way, music video relegates rock's status to something which has threatened it's relevancy since the early days: just another form of entertainment. It is incredibly prophetic that the first video that MTV aired was The Boggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." Many successful rock groups of the late seventies and early eighties fell from popular grace when the record buying public decided that the images they projected were less than desirable, and this trend continues through the present era.

Since the early nineties, music video has been a major source of study for music scholars. Music videos have become synonymous with successful musical artists, and there have been few instances of a major artist's rejection of the music video medium. One prominent exception to the rule is the band Pearl Jam who, at the height of their popularity in the mid nineties, refused to make any more videos after three hugely successful clips ("Alive," "Even Flow," and "Jeremy"). MTV compensated by showing live performances of their recent singles, and the band received only modest success with subsequent releases. It can easily be argued that Pearl Jam's regression from popularity is directly associated with their lack of MTV exposure.

The integration of rock music into mainstream culture is perhaps the most important reason for its demise. In the fifties, rock was on the cutting edge of acceptable norms in society. Parents and leaders objected to the rock movement and did everything in their power to stop it. "... Rock and roll burst upon American life as a totally new, and to many a disconcerting, sensation. It was energetic, raucous, and sexual, the antithesis of what passed a life in fifties' America." (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 4). Elvis Presley was at the forefront of this movement, and was considered by many elders to be "obscene." When rock music became more tame, it found its way into the mainstream society and lost its burst of vitality and strength for the first time. During the late fifties and early sixties, crooners like Pat Boone helped to homogenize rock and turn it into something parents could more easily digest. After America's youth had had enough of this lightweight version of rock, the counter-culture emerged. This group of musicians and fans went against the established grain again; the hippie movement bore striking similarities to the original rock movement. Unfortunately, with the minor exceptions of punk in the seventies and the alternative breakthrough in the nineties, this would be the last time that a major movement changed the face of rock. After the hippies grew up and found "real jobs," their ideals and music became a part of every day society. "Getting down to reality was a disillusioning experience for many, and as acid went flaccid, the simple, soft rock sound of the early 1970s aptly reflected the rock audiences mood. The lyrics turned nostalgic and the music became much mellower..." (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 101). This trend continued until the mid seventies when the youth became restless once more, this time with disastrous results.

The punk movement cemented the death of rock and roll and stands as its last gasp to date. It is fitting that the year of the Sex Pistols' breakthrough, 1977, was also the year that the "King of Rock and Roll," Elvis Presley, died. The original movement was based on going against everything that rock had become: stale, repetitive, boring, and meaningless at its core. Punks rejected hippie values, but again, it was similar to the hippie movement as well as the original rock and roll movement. The same game was played again: rock becomes tired and a new movement comes in to wake it up. Punk was a desperate attempt to alert rock's audiences that it had become anything but vital. It had become just another form of entertainment. Then punk became part of the very industry that it rejected.

If it was unruliness and noise that kids wanted, the record companies were happy to oblige them... the trick was to snap up bands so new they could hardly play; make sure the musicians had a look that was stylishly repulsive; and never forget the paradoxical formulas that Andrew Loog Oldham had perfected ten years earlier with The Rolling Stones: in the kingdom of cutting edge rock and roll, bad is good, ugly is beautiful. (Miller 335).

It had all been done before, and with the same outcome: when a movement gains attention and
notoriety, it then becomes established and accepted, and through this process it loses its strength. Enter the second, and arguably more authentic, punk movement, this time aware of the "mistakes" of groups like the Sex Pistols, who became pop culture icons, and The Clash, who eventually integrated themselves into the pop charts. This new philosophy is exemplified with a quote form Guy Piccianado of the band Fugazi, in Michael Azzerad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life:

People are living in things that have happened, the sixties have happened, your parents have taken all the drugs they can take, you've had the seventies, you had heavy metal -- get with it, it's over with, wake up. Kids are living re-runs ... The same political crap, the radio is dead. I think the whole thing is gonna fall down to the lower level, cause I know the kids are getting into it, they don't have anything else... We don't have access to all the things people in the sixties had, we have to do it all ourselves. (376).

This new movement didn't have the numbers to become important enough to affect pop culture on a widespread basis until it morphed into an underground influenced style dubbed "alternative" when it became popular in the early nineties with bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins. Of course, history again repeated itself and this sub genre has now become a stale version of what it once was.

The failure of the punk and alternative movements show that no matter how hard the musicians and audiences try, the cannot rescue rock music from the trappings of fragmentation. The lack of cultural unification in rock music is a prominent reason for its demise. In the fifties, the rock world was united by one force -- youth. Young people of all races and backgrounds came together to celebrate their enthusiasm for this new genre. "The concept of youth culture developed in the 1950s. It assumed that all teenagers shared similar leisure interests and pursuits and are involved in some form of pursuit against their elders." (Shuker 195). By the sixties, this "youth culture" had grown and diversified somewhat, but still retained a certain "us against them" mentality, particularly in reference to America's involvement in the Vietnam war. "The 1960s saw the growth of a youth counterculture, with youth protests in the universities and on the streets against the Establishment and the war in Vietnam." (Shuker 196). Since rock's stylization phase, however, the once united youth culture has divided into as many sub cultures as their are sub genres of rock music. This fragmentation has contributed significantly to rock's stagnation; in other words, rock has spread itself too thin to have any major impact on a broad level.

By the 1970s, this view of a homogenous youth culture, offering a radical challenge to the established social order, was obviously untendable. The radicalism of the 1960s protest movement had become defused through its commercialization, including the marketing of 'alternative rock' by major recording companies, and the counterculture's continued identification with middle-class rather than working-class youth. (Shuker 196).

It seems unlikely at this point that the youth culture will unite in ideals to any major degree again, but it is always a possibility. The recent popularity of the integration of rap music into rock, and the use of more rock oriented instruments in hip-hop, gives some hint of a potential change in the future.

Rock and roll music has been an important element of pop culture in America throughout the past fifty years. While rock in the present era still exists, it lost its vitality long ago. That doesn't mean that good rock music isn't being made, or that there won't be teenagers picking up guitars for generations to come. It just means, as James Miller so eloquently and simply put it, that rock belongs to "the past as much as the future". The rock and rollers of the future will continue to look back for inspiration and guidance, and there is still a chance for a major re-birth of rock. There are many obstacles to overcome, however; getting rock back onto the periphery of mainstream society certainly won't be easy. Then there's the nagging issue of MTV and the preoccupation with images to go along with music. Of course, let's not forget about about the divided youth who seem unable to come together in the way the kids of the sixties did. Even though it seems unlikely that rock will take a drastic turn for the better, stranger things have happened. It's even possible that somehow, somewhere, Elvis is still alive.

Original text Copyright 2002 by Donald Lang.

Azzerad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2001.

Frith, Simon, and Goodwin, Andrew, ed. On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.

Hibbard, Don J., and Kaleialoha, Carol. The Role of Rock. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1983.

Miller, James. Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-1977. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Shuker, Roy. Understanding Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2001.