Why did rock music suddenly disappear from Top 40 radio?

Grunge.

The same reason rag time, big band, bee-bop, Motown, disco etc. will never come back: it's done.

Do they still play "adult contemporary?" LOL. That was big on my Top 40 station in the '90s.

Does "adult contemporary" even exist as a genre?

^ Yes. I hear it on the radio at my bank. In the Bay Area, the station is KOIT.

Because all the rock music that could have been invented, had been invented.

Why did disco suddenly disappear?

Because rock tapped into the young male ID. Angst, horniness, aggression,sexuality,partying and misogyny are all themes that propelled a lot of 80s rock.

After the nihilism of grunge it was rap and urban that addressed many of the primal urges earlier rock music evoked(with a healthy dose of corporate materialism thrown in) and rock was no longer considered "cool".

As a person who grew up in the 70's and was in my twenties in the 80's I miss this music and it's now played on the golden oldies station. I remember watching MTV premiering while sitting in my friend christine's basement smoking weed. Keggers in someone's field with this music playing. Good times.

I don't like R&B or most current stuff, though I do like some stuff like the Butthole Surfers and the Toadies but I think they are gone now too.

Corporate radio's CIA overlords got bored with finding a way for racist whites to listen to black music without actually listening to black musicians. Now they wanted to find a new way to harm black people. Thus, gangsta rap was born. They fomented the feud between Biggie and Tupac.

My city just premiered an '80s oldies station. Hard to believe that '80s music is now considered oldies material.

Not as bad as my local "oldies" station now playing some '90s music.....

Rap crap took over

Tastes in music changed. On a side note Pop R & B is mostly Hip Hop produced & oriented. There are now available ldies Rap stations & oldies R&B (Luthersl V, Anita Baker) even Maxwell is considered old school

I miss rock and grunge music, todays music sucks!

The internet enabled people to find different sub genres of music and the monolithic rock category splintered beyond the point of making it profitable to promote big hype bands that could sell multi platinum albums with enough hits to carry radio stations and sell ads.

Also, rock musics biggest demographic - mainstream white people, are now more into corny EDM shit like Chainsmokers or non offensive teen targeted singers like Megan Trainor and Ed Sheeran

Tastes change. Ukuleles now outsell guitars.

Honestly I don't even know the difference between hip hop, rap and, to a lesser extent, r & b. I wish I did.

U2 is still doing great, but you're right. They're not on the radio much.

Rock was dying in the 80s. The interesting bands of that era were post-punk & new wave. Nirvana was more like the Clash than Van Halen. Hip hop, edm, etc after the 1990s.

Spinal tapped

RIP, electric guitars...

How many whites were into R&B and funk way back in the 1970's?

The end of the Eighties had all of the Hair Bands getting so much visibility. Poison and all the rest. Record Companies forced artists to change their images a little closer to that sound.

While they got Rock Radio airplay, it pushed them off of the Pop Radio stations unless they released the requisite Power Ballad as a single.

Grunge was never big on Top 40 Radio but it exploded on Rock Radio.

However, the Hair Lite Metal bands are what drove Rock off of Top 40 for good.

[quote] R&B, the new top 40 sound

Oh please..R&B? Firstly, there's NO term more 60s-70s than "R&B" I guess it's still a catch-all for anything black musicians create, even rockers like Doug Pinnick.

Isn't the modern term "urban contemporary"? Or just say rap or hip-hop, which is as far from most music black artists made in the decades before the 90s as it is from prog rock.

[quote] However, the Hair Lite Metal bands are what drove Rock off of Top 40 for good.

That's it in a nutshell, R23. It was a calculated over-saturation by the media megaliths. One should keep in mind, the "entertainment" industry isn't about entertainment, it's about controlling the masses.

Fans of 80s hard rock and "heartland" rock (Springsteen, Bob Segar, John Cougar) listen to Country music these days. It began in the 90s with Garth Brooks. Country music still has the big guitars and mysoginy.

What music blares from car speakers at tailgate parties? Country.

I'd take the question a step further and ask why melodies disappeared altogether from popular music. It seems like it's all bass, rhythm and "beats" so the composers really don't have to be musically talented to put a product out.

I miss all the Polka stations we used the have back in the 30's

R27 Enjoy It's Polka Time online!

Get satellite. I'm sure you'll find something. Spotify 'radio' is another alternative.

Anyway, grunge happened and Thank God. (I hated that music and those bands.) But the death of guitar-based music was quite slow. It's really only been in the last 5-10 years that the guitar has disappeared completely from the Village Voice top 40 and major festivals.

American Idol / the Voice type shows have to take some blame.

Never thought I'd see the day when rock stars, leaders of some of the most pampered and spoiled lives ever known to man, were considered tough because the braved sore fingers in between lines of coke and blow jobs rather than going all digital, but there you are.

I do miss the tone of the grunge times - less self- and selfie- obsessed.

This is an interesting piece from the Economist. Sorry if it's paywall for ya. Statistical analysis reveals 3 periods of massive change in the sound of the charts. 63-64: British Invasion, early 80s: I'm guessing synthesizers, etc. and 1991 - hiphop (and grunge).

Having said that check out some of the million Instagram accounts centered on Kurt Cobain. He is worshipped by nextgen as some kind of symbol of purity- which I guess he is, relatively, but it's sad that they don't have their own. The fixation on Frances as his rep on Earth is creepy. The grunge guys did tend to overdose or kill themselves (Hi Chris!) before they reached rock n roll levels of patheticness and degradation.

R31 = R29

"Music Theory" is now an "unknown language." The demise of music programs in public schools is to blame.

Rap is awful. Just illiterate guys talking to a beat. Not even sure what hip hop is but I'd probably dislike that too. Sad that AA's were responsible for jazz and blues and their legacy has been twisted into the crap on the radio now.

Is it all rap now? I really don't know. I'm way past my 'sell by' date so I'm very out of touch. I thought Katy Perry, Rihanna, etc. put out music, don't they? They're not rap.

Don't play Rihanna's "Work" for R35, the poor thing might plotz.

Well, alternative rock was still pretty popular up until the early 2000s.

I'm sick of what's played on the radio now. So many collaborations where the singers and musicians aren't even in the same studio. Everything sounds alike and manufactured. I think each singer has a team of 6 songwriters because they can't write their own stuff. They also get processed with autotune because they can't sing. Plus regular radio has fuck all because of all the subscription music services. The studios want to milk every penny out of the listeners, they would love to put a pay per listen in your car so you have to pay each time you play one.

Rock officially died when Madonna was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

[quote]Rock officially died when Madonna released "Everybody."

Fixed.

Melody died.

[quote] How many whites were into R&B and funk way back in the 1970's?

The Who's logo in the 60s was "Maximun R&B."

One of the reasons rock fizzled out was the lack of female artists. For every 10,000 males in rock and roll there was one Janis Joplin. One Grace Sluck. One Joni Mitchell.

By the 70s the record buying audience was mostly male. The girls who screamed for the Beatles had grown up and moved on. Not many of them were buying Deep Purple albums.

In the mid 80s, Madonna came along and showed that a woman could sell a lot of records. Sure, she had to dangle her tits to get famous, but music execs realized they were missing out on a shit ton of money by not promoting female singers. As time went on, female singers took more and more market share and they weren't singing rock; they were singing pop. Some females started singing rap in the 90s. Boy groups and girl groups proliferated. Young people no longer wanted to see some long haired guy in tights jamming a guitar up against an amplifier. They wanted to see Michael Jackson in sparkly clothes grabbing his crotch. They wanted Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, Destiny's Child.

Rap and pop doubled the amount of money music companies could make by allowing a lot of female artists onstage.

Kate Bush's first UK number 1 (Wuthering Heights) was the first self-penned UK chart topper by a woman. I was surprised to see that recently... but I guess it makes sense.

Jump back to stadium rock and you'll see the economic problem - if you could fill a stadium, you earned air time.

Add the Depression of 1980 and you see a vacuum created, with video players filling the void. It turned into image driven content.

Rock is schlock and rap is crap.

And country is cunty and funk is junk!

The splinterization of musical tastes catering to ever, more fracturing, musical identities thanks to media proliferation.

I have to admit, I was part of the fracturing being into punk, hardcore and grunge in the 90s.

But even then, the whole country got into the same alternative rock at the same time. But eventually that got old and Hip hop took over.

But hip hop might bee too narrow in its appeal and white listeners started dropping off. It's definitely bigoted, homophobic, sexist and violent.

I imagine lots of white listeners just dropped off. Some Millennials I know got into Folk Revival and Wilco, which is soft, boring and uninspiring, but at least it's not chock-full of hate.

r54 misses Lawrence Welk.

Excuse me, r45 misses Lawrence Welk.

I love rock music also. I know why it died. It got repetitive and boring. It wasn't progressing. This is the reason why hip hop and rap became popular along with the boy bands and teen pop tarts like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

I was a sucker for the soft rock that became popular starting in the mid '80s. I'm talking Foreigner's I Wanna Know What Love Is, Journey's Open Arms, Heart's These Dreams, Starship's We Built This City. That sound defines the time when I was in high school. I also loved Billy Squire, Pat Benatar, Joan Jett.

This was my favorite album cover from that era.... '

Rock is not really dead, although I agree you won't find much of it on top 40 stations. But there are other radio stations out there like AAA stations or alternative stations that will play rock along with all its hybrid cousins like blues, soul & folk.

The problem with Rock fans is the moment a band becomes popular they're then accused of selling out and immediately lose any cred they had. When you make popularity the enemy in the genre, it's hard to ever get a foot in.

For example, I've heard Fall Out Boys a lot on top 40. I consider them a rock band--they feature guitar , drums and percussions. Yet because they've achieved some level of popularity all of a sudden you hear people denigrating them as not really being rock enough.

There are several mainstream rock bands out there still like The Foo Fighters, Kings of Leon, Green Day, Imagine Dragons, Muse, The Black Keys, LInkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Muse , Coldplay etc. There's also a lot of cross pollination now--for instance there's a rumor on The Foo's new album that they'll be collaborating with a big pop star (possibly Adele) .

If you want to hear rock on the radio it's still being played but not on top 40 ( Clear channel took away a lot of diversity) but you can get bands like Queen of the Stone Age, Disturbed, Radiohead, Five Finger Death Punch, Weezer, Highly Suspect etc as well as the more alternative rock bands like Arctic Monkey, Cage the Elephant, HAIM, alt-j etc etc.

Today though, a lot of people are picking up their music from places other than the radio. There's also tons of indie rock bands out and more started every day. Don't think rock music is dead yet. Look at the popularity of rock music festivals. It's just music and music taste evolves that changes our definition of rock for the times.

Grunge soared and crushed with Cobain. He was the poster boy for indie culture. The 90s started with the feeling that independent artists were becoming successful and offered an alternative to big companies commercial music and movies.

The second half of the 90s saw the rise again of commercial pop acts, rock turned into emo bands and rap turned into Eminem.

Rock and "alternative" rock are still around, but there is nothing like Cobain right now and there is nothing to rebel against. Kids now don't hate old music the same way people in the 90s felt toward previous big hair rock bands. Everything is much more pleasant now all around. Pleasant auto tuned voices, pleasant beats, please videos.

I hope you didn't jerk off to that Loverboy album cover considering the model in the tight leather pants was a 13 year old girl. Pedo.

I must say I do miss those days

Bump

I have no idea what popular music is like now, and honestly I don't care. After a certain age adults should be listening primarily to classical.

Yeah ok R57. I grew up on Led Zeppelin, Yes, Jefferson Starship, Heart, Fleetwood Mac etc. But now that I'm middle aged I should throw those all away and only listen to classical music, even though I've never had an inclination to that music? Just because I'm getting older? Should I switch from coffee to Postum and from my protein shakes to All-Bran cereal too?

Rock lives on, in the form of The Struts, a hot new band from England.

New? The Struts have been around for a while. When PBS uses one of your songs in a promo, you're established mainstream

rock ended when the baby boomers' kids rejected it because their parents liked it - then came the boy bands, lipsynching no-talents like Britany Spears, and rappers

Baby Boomers' kids are Gen X who worshipped Zeppelin, Kiss, Journey, Guns N Roses, and Nirvana.

Gen-X are not the children of Baby Boomers. Most Gen-X are the children of "The Silent Generation" born between the WW2 group and the Boomers.

Rock music largely died in the early 2000s thanks to bands like Nickelback, Creed and Lifehouse. The cool factor which the genre earned during the 90s flamed out spectacularly. Coldplay has successfully morphed into a pop band leaving the genre to acts like Kings of Leon or pop hybrids like Lorde or Twenty One Pilots.

The worst genre of all has to be urban hipster indie and throw hipster hop into that. At least Rap and R'n'B come from somewhere real and had something to say and was an important part of so many people real lives and culture. The same could be said for early grunge.

But urban Hipster indie is just the most pointless, vapid, insincere cheap, smug, pretentious and toxic music being made. It sad to notice how it has become the default genre of music for Millennials and the selfie generation, i guess the soundtrack for the selfie generation had to be toxic and narcissistic and empty.

examples:

The woeful dreg of Bon Iver and James Blake

Oh, dear God, R65. Nothing could be worse than that.

ROCK will never die.

R66 is pretty shiteous, too.

R22 I WAS!!!

I went to a Parliament Funkadelic concert at the Sanger theater in N.O. with my boyfriend and we were the only white folks there. Actually I dragged him there.

It was great, and my boyfriend was converted on the spot. I have been a funkologist since birth, and I have no idea why. When my contemporaries were buying Monkees and Beatles albums in the late 60s, I was buying Otis Redding, Sly and James Brown,

Good fucking question. Today's music is garbage, monotonous garbage at that.

You can't blame the shitty bands. The only reason Nickelback and Coldplay are promoted by their labels and the industry is because there is a return on investment: people want to hear it and buy it. If no one bought that garbage, it would go away.

Blame your little sister for Beiber, not Canada.

It's not Beiber's fault or his fan's. He has some great pop songs and all decades had their own Beiber.

Different genres always coexisted and let's be honest here, much of 70-80s rock was pure garbage. Nirvana was an excellent hybrid of rock and pop which was part of why it was so successful.

By the way, I find it amusing that out of the 80s it's Rick Astley who all the young people know. The universe works in mysterious ways.

r33 a former New York DJ friend of mine and I have talked about this. When music programs left the schools it helped create the musically illiterate we have now. Most of these people that get on these shows to sing don't really understand how to sing. They just try to imitate other people they've heard without understanding what works or doesn't work and why. The result is maybe some decent voices who are boring to listen to.

An encounter with a recording studio engineer taught me that a lot of what engineers do now is clean up. This engineer, Jeff, told me that most musicians that he has worked with (this in in LA) have the basic knowledge of how to play their instrument but that's about it. He has often had to play over their drums or play their guitar part in order to get a good finished product. He even told me that he spent an entire weekend fixing vocals on a well known female singer (he wouldn't tell me who) because her vocals were so bad. He could barely look her in the face after that.

Rap started out as fun party music but there was also conscious rap that talked about Black culture and was positive. I don't know how true r9 words are but there was push for producers to phase out the more tame rap for gangster rap. They didn't even want to hear anyone that wasn't talking about drugs drug dealing and bitches. One of the things that made rap more profitable though was the fact that it included free advertising. Rappers talked about shoes, clothes, booze, cars etc. and the stuff they talked about would sell. Clothing lines sprung up out of rap culture. Rap was a money maker on all fronts and that was something rock didn't have. Then hip hop came in and it was back to party music again.

Mariah Carey. She had a voice that is versatile for power ballads and uptempo songs that topped the charts. Record execs followed the success trail and it wasn't rock. 💅🏾💅🏾💅🏼🌭🍦🖕🏼🖕🏽🖕🏿🖕🏾💅🏽🌈😳✌️

Mariah was just pop music. Pop music did not displace rock. It wasn't until later, after she was divorced that she moved into R&B flavored tracks.

Bieber sucks.

And his music isn't that good either.

Popular music has mostly sucked since 1979. The last good album was Tusk.

r75 hip hop used to refer to the whole culture, DJs, MCs, graffiti artists and b-boy dancers. Rap came out of the MCs who took over from the DJs as the princes of the culture (usually all men in those days). Since many MCs started as essentially hype men, the 'lifestyle' element was always there. It was only when the money came in that that turned into the bottle popping, bitches on my dick, gold chain, tech 9 waving bullshit that was pushed because it made money.

AFAIC, taking the crown away from the musically inclined DJs was the beginning of the end for hip hop, and I like real rap music.

Music was so much better in the '80s. All kinds of music and genres flourished. Top 40 played everyone from Van Halen to Michael Jackson to Run-DMC to Barbra Streisand to Billy Idol to Madonna. It felt like there were no rules back then on who could and could not be played on the radio.

I miss that openness.

I don't think young people listen to the radio for music anymore, unless it's online niche stations. I found most new songs in the past few years through suggestions on Youtube,

In the old days radio and TV had to cater to everybody.

R65 and R75 gets it. I see a lot of old asses on here coming for R&B and Hip-hop. Calling urban culture trash and crap. We all know who you voted for "Trump" Anyways. Hip-hop started out as conscious music that talked about real stuff that was going on in black life. It talked about the world the government as well as black issues. It was about fashion is was a out culture and it had rhythm and it was honest in terms of what it represented.I will absolutely agree that some of thaw fast food rappers we today really are garbage and plenty of legit talented rappers have said the same thing. But to say that rappers are just talking to a beat is not accurate at all. It takes talent and ability to come up with rhymes for entire song. And also to try and turn that into a hit. That work.I'm not going to go on and on. But I guess everyone has there taste in music.

Of course, R83. Hating rap = voting for Trump. I laugh at your stupidity.

I hope R83 is a parody.

r83 rap came out of Jamaican dancehall. It started out as party music, and the consciousness came afterward. Both came up at the same time. When it reached critical mass, i.e. white youth latched onto it as rebellion music, the money came in and it all went to shit.

DJ Shadow called it out in 1996, so it's been fucked up a long time.

In fairness, DL people reacting to rap are probably hearing the corporate, pop bullshit that's on every record now. Between the generic program beats, the auto-tune, and the IG posing, no wonder people who didn't hear it come up think it's shit.

r81, it was even more open in the 60's and 70's.

When was the last time that the Rolling Stones put out a new album or went on tour? It seems like a decade or more.

When Mick and Paul McCartney go, it will truly be the end of the classic rock era.

Today's high school kids don't differentiate between "rock" and "grunge" OP-- whether it's The Who. Def Leppard or Nirvana, it's all "Classic Rock" to them.

Pop music now is just glossy disco music without that popping bass line. So, we can say disco did come back and kicked rock out.

r90 disco just morphed into house, which beget all kinds of different genres that eventually made it back into the mainstream.

Radio has sucked since the music industry decided grunge was the new thing. After that, top 40 radio became a pile of homogenous bands of whatever the flavor of the month was. Alternative. Lillith Fair. Punk-pop. Boy bands. Etc, etc. Even if you didn't care for the music of the 80s, radio was incredibly varied. You could hear Whitney followed by Styx followed by REM followed by Prince.

Satellite sucks. It's the same 100-some songs over and over. Rarely a day goes by without hearing The Cure's "Heaven" or "Friday, I'm in Love" on the damn First Wave station. I guess The Cure never recorded anything else.

Whoever said rock fans moved to country is totally right. Not only because of the lyrics and "feel" but a bunch of the guys behind commercial hard rock in the 80s invaded Nashville in the 90s (Desmond Child, Dann Huff, Mutt Lange).

But, rock isn't dead. You just have to look for it. Many of the big bands are still putting out music/touring. Def Leppard just wrapped up a mostly sold-out arena tour. Last week, Styx put out their best record since the early 80s. And there are plenty of great new rock bands (Ghost, The Sword, The Struts, Graveyard, Spiders, etc), you just won't hear em on the radio.

Cleveland's up coming indie band

Yes, r91, and today, remixes are derigure, and what is a remix, but DISCO. So I guess disco doesn't suck after all.

As a kid I listened to all-music stations (Cousin Brucie!) that have changed to all-talk.

I don't get the attraction.

Hipsters have become too mainstream. The default makeover for a talent show contestant is the hipster look. And in a few years some kids with pick up a guitar and make proper indie rock again to rebel against the hipster parents, who sit around listening to Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Drake, Kayne West and Sufjan Stevens. The hipster parents will complain the music their kids are listening to is too loud and noisy and aggressive.

And kids will embrace it even more. and the lines of a new generation will be drawn and Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Drake, Kayne West and Sufjan Stevens' music will sounded dated and horrible, because they have become too anchored to the hipster scene , so when pop culture moves on from the scene it moves on from them.

The best piece of advice I was given, as a creator of any form of art, never allow yourself or what you make to become part of the zeitgeist, because as soon as time moves on what you have made will becomes nailed to a specific time and place and can never move beyond that. People may listen to it out nostalgia but it will never have the same urgency and relevant impact of people.

The trouble is for so many of today's hipster "artists" being labeled a genius and becoming part of the zeitgeist is the most important thing when making music. And that will have a really negative impact on the music and film and art created today in the future. Decades from now this particular time, maybe more any other, will be dismissed and bad and irrelevant art.

[quote]remixes are [bold]derigure[/bold]

Cousin to "jandra"?

I like Vampire Weekend.

The nails in the coffin for Rock was a combination of economics and technology. Ronald Reagan deregulated ownership of radio stations and large chains bought up the best stations in markets so local bands would never get airplay on stations like in Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco or Dallas. "Advances" in technology like auto-tune and computer-driven instrumentation made a lot of pop songs sound maddeningly similar.

Rap and Hip-hop are already in their death-spiral.

Was Queen considered rock music?

"We Will Rock you!"

Of course it wasn't rock!

Bump

I think it's so cool that a middle age mom can make indie rock that beats the shit out of 20 year old guys.

I forgot one of the other main contributors to the promotion of then the sustaining of thug rap culture. The mainstream promotions of and acceptance of strip clubs, strippers and porn stars. There was a time no one talked about that in mixed company. Then all of a sudden, and I believe the thanks goes to Howard Stern/Charlie Sheen, people were openly talking about the women involved, the clubs and the culture that went with it. All the clubs had to have music and rap culture celebrated and provided the soundtrack for the pole. The beats lend themselves to the grinding and hair whipping. It all fit together. You'd hear the music in the clubs, you'd hear the same tracks on the radio, you buy them for your iPod, the brand recognition in the lyrics meant money money money.

I love beats, I love dance music and real rap is an art from, but for the society in general this music has been a disaster, for the industry, for young females and the Black community which it helped stay stuck in an immature mindset. Never growing past the superficial of the club with the popping bottles and your whip and getting your dick sucked in the club, bitches dropping it low etc. For the vulnerable in the Black community, and that's a large segment, it keeps them focusing on all the wrong stuff and that is a disaster. And it has cemented the requirement that women need to look and act like ho's in order to feel and be considered attractive.

I'll shut up now and go start gumming on my dinner.

Boston - Don't Look Back [1978]

You know, it used to be generally well understood by adults that past "a certain age" one should listen to adult and classical music, and leave popular music, whatever that may be at the time, to the kiddos. Yes, I of course love the songs of my youth, but I generally listen to what is age-appropriate, rather than fretting about what 20-year olds happen to be listening to nowadays. How can it matter? There can be nothing more fruitless than trying to keep up with popular culture.

R30, They missed an entire era.

The theory I've always been good with is that when rap/hip-hop started making inroads into Top 40, the resurgence of Country on radio and in record sales was a reaction. Some say a racist one.

In any case, what also happened, perhaps not surprisingly, is that "country" music got a lot more pop, and even a lot more rock, than it was before.

You all can find more examples than I, if you buy these arguments.

Here's another question: Why did Modern Folk Music die, when as late as the Vietnam Era it served as a national conscience?

I've been micro-conducting "Allein! Weh, ganz allein! " at my desk every day for the past few weeks. It's an addiction :(

Maybe some Physical Graffiti tomorrow will help.

R108, Maybe racist, maybe not.

But for sure many people became tired of the aggressive misogyny of Rap and turned to more convivial lyrics (and melodies) about women and men's longing for them, aka Country.

And now we live in a time when everyone in the house, or even car, can have their own playlist so the chance of getting to appreciate your parents' or older siblings' music is fading.

I don't share my dad's taste in music, completely, but I got to know the Beach Boys and Dion and The Beatles from his records (8-track tapes on car trips) .From mom, more like Simon &Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and Broadway albums. I am thankful to both, even for their shared love of Neil Diamond.

[quote]Some say a racist one.

Some are always saying a "racist!" something.

Top 40 radio these days is nothing but repetitive juvenile auto-tuned crap with brainless lyrics (if you can even call them lyrics), with the obligatory "millenial whoop". Don't get me wrong, by the end of the 80's I was also completely sick of all the hair metal acts as well - but I could still tolerate that compared to the garbage that is considered pop music these days.

RIP Popular Music 1979

R114, what music should we listen to, so that we can align ourselves with your mature tastes?

What do you like, R116?

Well, classical, obviously. It should hardly need pointing out.

[quote] Excuse me, [R45] misses Lawrence Welk.

No, try Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Billie, Ella, Lena, Frank, Judy, Peggy, et, al. i.e. what rock pushed off the radio.

There was a time when this was a chart hit.

OK OP, Pat Benatar is not considered "Rock" by purists. Apparently, she's a "Power Ballad" singer. And Rock disappeared because the music industry decided to put other genres in the spotlight. What? You didn't know that the music industry controls what is put out there?

In fact, rock wasn't last in the top 40 regularly in the 70s and 80s but the 00s. I used to still listen to top 40 radio until like '06 or '07 and still heard rock songs. Maybe they didn't actually enter the literal top 40 everywhere, but at least in many places, they did.

It's only since like '08-present we're stuck in this 'all pop music is electronic music' wasteland.

When MTV was new and exposing me to artists that radio wasn't playing, at least at the beginning, I took to stuff like Joan Armatrading, The Jam and Adam and the Ants, etc. and only heard Top 40 and album rock radio in cars, pretty much. That new music was great, and I still enjoy it.

Looking back, some of the rock I disavowed for those few years was actually great. Even Journey, who I put down as crap in the '80s, sounds pretty good all these years later.

Times change. The problem is that people got lazy and expect to be spoon-fed instead of making the effort to look for it. It's like the good music is a TV remote control (or the mobile phone with the TV remote control app) and it's juuuuuust out of reach and they bemoan having to move their asses to get it.

For some nothing exists beyond things placed in popular charts. If it's not in any popular chart it simply can't be worth checking out. But you get the occasional "Why did rock music suddenly disappear from Top 40 radio?" but when it's suggested to make the effort to check out the rock that is still produced you get confused faces "I have to move? Why doesn't it come to me?".

People rely way too much on online recommendations of online sites and programs that lead to commercial representions of pop music social media "liked" by mainstream audiences.

R124 The question was why it disappeared from top 40 radio, not why does it no longer exist.

The question is what will come to take the place of "ubran" music. I think everyone my be out of ideas, the urban sound; robot/auto tuned vocal, hip hop beats, some rap, bad amateur guitar strumming, is everywhere but country. There is no difference between the music Justin Beiber makes and the music indie artists like Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens make.

The hipster scene should have imploded years ago, once it became so self aware it should have had the decency to be over, but it didn't. It just grew and grew into this big bloated ugly narcissistic smug blob of a scene all aimless and out of ideas.

[quote]The question was why it disappeared from top 40 radio, not why does it no longer exist.

Because sheep consume what they are being told to consume. They don't look for stuff when they are being spoon-fed. Sheep and the mainstream consume what they are being told is popular through bestseller lists, charts, marketing, promotion, etc.

Mainstream consumers outgrew rock and followed the so called tastemakers (record companies, advertising industry, etc.) to new grounds to make the tastemakers, who create the demand and supply it, a shit ton of money.

The rock genre had become stagnant anyway. For half a century popular music was totally dominated by bands of four white guys playing guitar music. The world has moved on.

I wonder if rock music's disappearance from Top40 radio coincided with the decline of pub bands. Maybe as pubs stopped hiring live rock bands, and played more pre-recorded music, people became more used to the highly produced sound, and less exposed to the sounds of raw, live guitar based rock, and without pub gigs, new rock bands had even less exposure, developed fewer followers, and didn't get signed to record. Up and coming musos see this, and get into anything else but basic rock.

Everyone thinks their high school years were the best for music and culture, and that every generation after them is spoiled and has bad taste. It's called aging.

In the late 70's I'm gonna give credit (or blame) to Van Halen for helping to launch the whole CA hair band movement. Flashy guitar solos', intensely sexual (asexual?) look, banal lyrics. It seems by the mid 80's Bon Jovi, who still happens to be a big world wide concert draw, came along and the sound stared to change. Then Guns and Roses changed the game again towards the end of the decade and before you knew it the whole Seattle sound took over at the start of the 90's. 80's hair band rock will remain locked away in nostalgia along with all the rest of the movements that saw their day and went.

I gave up on top 40—top 20, actually—back in 1968 or thereabouts. I didn't know 45s existed after that point until I read about it on the internet, sometime during the '00s.

well, smell Mr. "I'm too sophisticated for Top 40 music" at r133

Oh, hon. Most people are too sophisticated for top 40 music. They just don't happen to be posting in this thread. Are you the singles queen?

Are there any mainstream stations broadcasting anymore that mix things up and surprise listeners? It all seems programmed by computer from far away.

R136 Go back and think about your question. "Mainstream" is the very essence of "programmed by computer from far away."

Don't you wish you could go back to summers as a kid listening to REO Speedwagon, Supertramp, and the J. Geils Band on the radio? MTV was just starting and the world had endless possibilities in store for each of us.

Yes, I think we'd all like to go back to that time.

[quote]Don't you wish you could go back to summers as a kid listening to REO Speedwagon, Supertramp, and the J. Geils Band on the radio?

No.

[quote]Yes, I think we'd all like to go back to that time.

Not even a little.

I'm not r138, but I agree in a way. I was no great fan of REO or J Geils, but some of those songs did make it fun to listen to pop and rock radio. Supertramp I did love, and the fact that they scored several big hit singles and we're all over the radio was big.

Two of those three bands I saw live in the 80s when they toured arenas, without dancers, choreographers, auto tune or prerecorded vocals. I went because all my friends in school went.

Projected background video, sometimes, and maybe some rudimentary pyrotechnics, were about all that bands in that era had for big shows (except the Stones and Pink Floyd, who took things to a different level, but they were playing stadiums). Also, ticket prices were reasonable and standing in line for hours to buy six tickets at ticketron vendor was a ritual we rotated. Shows didn't sell out in minutes and scalping was technically still illegal.

Who listens to "Top 40" anymore? Don't most people listen to their own music collection? I don't need more than the thousands of songs I have on my flash drive. I wouldn't even know where to find Top 40 if I wanted to.

I was just thinking about this topic last night while watching a block of horrifically bad hair metal videos on VH1 last night.

[quote]Today's music is garbage, monotonous garbage at that.

Music has been monotonous garbage since 1975.

Music has been monotonous garbage since Parsifal.

Music has been monotonous garbage since Tusk. And this McGuinn, Clark, and Hillman album.

The person who mentioned Mariah upthread in on point. Mariah and Whitney mixed gospel and R&B with pop.

R&B has kinda disappeared to. Its all EMD, trap r&b, and adult contemporary.

I really wish you all would stop with the music sucks now talk. There are probably a hundreds of songs made in the US alone every year. So many bands and artists that have a lot of interesting things to say and sounds to share. Go on a Spotify playlist for new music and you can usually find something interesting after an hour. That leads me to the artist's page for other songs.

Music is likely on par if not better than in the past only because we can learn from the greats and the genres have expanded. This isn't to say that we didn't have a golden age of Rock but we have so much content today that people calling music in 2021 terrible must have simply given up on trying to expand their horizon.

You need to leave the Billboard Top 40 and 100 lists, those are for people looking for average music. The next time your doing some mindless work, throw on a playlist, come in with an open mind, and see what musical journey you end up on. There is good to great music made every year, you just might not have heard it yet, but it's waiting for you, if you have the curiosity to find out.

[QUOTE] There is good to great music made every year, you just might not have heard it yet, but it's waiting for you, if you have the curiosity to find out.

No there isn't. Fuck off!

Pop music is cathy and make 16 year old all happy and bubbly. Rock music sometimes are depressing and a lot of them is just about drugs.

It was replaced by grunge/alternative in the early 90s. Then that was replaced by hip-hop, which is now long overdue to be replaced.

Oh god I gotta take a dump! 💩 💩 💩

That cunt Tipper Gore.

Rock used to be the music of youth, counter-culture and rebellion, but by the 80s it became corporate and commoditized. I'm probably the same age as OP and the artists he mentioned are mostly the dying gasps of mainstream rock. It's telling that he fails to recognize grunge or alternative rock which sprang directly from the 80s, or rap/hip hop either. The latter is what replaced rock as music genre for youthful rebellion, as we all well know.

There was an enormous amount of homophobia, racism and misogyny in rock culture. It's telling too that Prince is also forgotten by OP, and that so many rock fans here cite rap as their most hated music genre. Someone even diminishes R&B, one of the many musical styles that birthed rock, most of them innovated by black artists originally.

Not surprised by the nostalgic rock fans here on DL. It's the exact same rock demographic; older, male, white, conservative.

Pretty much r154. There are many reasons why Rap music and culture started but one of them is black youth were effectively wiped out of rock culture in the 70s and early 80s. Black and Hispanic youth wanted something for themselves in the most DIY way. All Rap does is super amplify what's already going on in society. And that it's coming from young black males makes it super scary.

better question: why did we have hairmetal grunge or hiphop when we could’ve based all our popular music choices on love shack

‘80s happened, the icons of deception started to happen. And then glam rock sort of started to lose the allure of "We could all be beautiful, sparkly, diamond children." And then it became something much, much darker with the advent of Black Sabbath and Metallica and Slayer and Megadeth, KISS. There was something much more violent, much more aggressive in tone. Also films changed and stopped being the really interesting films of the 1970s and became the wham-bam films of the early 1980s. It all changed as Wall Street started making money and people started selling mortgage bankruptcies and lost more money and everything was bigger, bigger, bigger, more. Instead of being adventurous...

By the way, all these kids that were glam rocking out to David Bowie in the 1970s are the same people that were the elites in the 1980s. So you know, there is that certain element that the glam rock audience are to blame for a lot of the bullshit that went on in the ‘80s.

And others became different, but of course economic downturn is certainly economic downturn. In England it was a real mess in the 1980s. Conservative power came in. Maggie Thatcher came it. They started closing down the mines in Wales and in the north of England. That's why, in the late 1970s in England particularly—now when I was talking about the darkness of how rock got, I was specifically speaking about America. In England, it was different. It England, it was much more revolutionary than the United States was. The United States revolutionary was leading toward something more aggressive, but financially very successful. In England, it was the fucking Sex Pistols. It was that pure aggression. Pure aggression. No money. The Clash are the perfect example of what happened bringing in to the 1980s. The Sandinistas, the Iran Contra, everything political that happens in the world, it goes into music and becomes part of the music that people are into because it's what they're attached to at the time.

Because rock isn't conducive to aerobics.

I think the early to mid 90's anti-Kardashian, materialism message was so interesting and creative. You just don't get Courtney Love's anymore.

Radio itself is disappearing. I havent used a radio to listen to music for decades. I've been using first MP3's and then streamed music off my phone the last two decades

And I see plenty of references upthread to Spotify and other means of access music, all of them superior to radio (choice, versatility, quality, lack of ads) - R141 summed it up perfectly

[quote]Who listens to "Top 40" anymore? Don't most people listen to their own music collection? I don't need more than the thousands of songs I have on my flash drive. I wouldn't even know where to find Top 40 if I wanted to.

Does "Top 40 radio" have any meaning any more? Why would anyone listen to radio when so many better alternatives exist

As posted up-thread, rock became no longer "cool." And I believe this occurred when all documentaries and reality shows began utilizing rock guitar playing as background musical scores in the '90s through the 2000s, ad nauseum.

Grunge in the early 90s, then alternative in the late 90s, then hip hop kinda swallowed everything.

Grunge *was* rock music, a form of it, at least. If I had known that grunge was the last era of rock, I would have appreciated it more at the time.

I quit listening to radio in 1984.

I have NEVER gone back to listening to radio.

Rock (and Rock and Roll) NEVER died for me.

I have over 500 albums on my mp3 player. (and 300 vinyl records, plus about 50 cassette tapes)

65% to 70% of that falls into the category of Rock, or, Rock and Roll.

30% falls into the categories of Chicago Blues or Traditional Country.

The remaining 5% is miscellaneous genres.

Simple. There never was a "died thing" for me.

I distinctly remember when the European androgynous bands became all the rage in the mid-80s on MTV and radio, like Human League, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Flock of Seagulls, Wham, ABC.

Looking back on it now, music was super gay during that time. It only lasted for a few years though.

Human League's Don't You Want Me felt like a huge cultural moment when the video started playing on MTV. You could feel the shift happening.

Agreed, it was radio that died, not rock.

Rock music didn't die because music programs were removed from school. (My schools never taught electric guitar, not even acoustic guitar, or piano, but they did teach band and orchestra.)

The reason rock music died is because so few young people are bothering to learn to play guitar or piano. They'd rather play with their phones.

[quote]I think the early to mid 90's anti-Kardashian, materialism message was so interesting and creative. You just don't get Courtney Love's anymore.

Agreed. I think it was definitely a more positive time to be a teenage girl. You had these independent women who wrote about stuff other than boys and clothes and parties, Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Hope Sandoval, Shirley Manson, TLC, Lauryn Hill, even early Destiny's Child performed songs celebrating self-determining women.

There was a big dance music and cheesy pop scene internationally. Almost immediately concurrently with Alanis came The Spice Girls (out of Britain) and The Backstreet Boys (pretty much manufactured in Sweden) and in 1998 in charged Britney and it was all over.

Even though Kim and Kris get the the Kardashianising verb, she (and her mother) really just cashed in. Sure, during the era there were minimalist hipsters, R&B glamazons and pop-rock howlers, but the musical pop cultural view of feminity arced between Southern Belle child-woman-sex-kitten Britney and Southern Belle child-woman-princess Taylor Swift.

Britney and Taylor portrayed a limited scope of female representation, where going berserk about teenage boys, rocking cowboy boots with tiaras, always being pretty, celebrating freedom in the form of red lipstick and - this is key - your public image isn't controlled by you as an artistic depiction of your innermost self but as a marketable commodity calibrated to draw money from specific then widening demographics - set the social standard for what being a young woman was. Putting it in light of the 1980s Britney and Taylor girls marked to girls like with the power and incision that grown-ass Madonna was marketed to general audiences.

And is there any wonder why girls now, as opposed to girls in the 90s, who don't fit this mould are encouraged to identify as non-female?

The "anti-materialism" message of the 90s, while not entirely bull, was pretty much a joke. I watched Twister for the first time in decades last week and Bill Paxton denounced wealthy, slick, rival storm-chaser Cary Elwes as a "corporate sellout". (Who exactually was funding the research of Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck and the rest of their merry band of misfits? They did bake sales? Had a jam band that performed weekends in college bars?.) It was funny af.

Rock music is simply an evolution of rhythm and blues which was an evolution of Negro spirituals. Rockabilly was a mix of rhythm and blues and country music. Rock replaced Jazz as the most popular form of music in the 1960s.

80s and 90s R&B used guitars, drums, trumpets and saxophones. It also combined with gospel type of singing. Neo-soul was a more pointed revival of socially conscious music called soul and combined elements of jazz and old school rhythm and blues. R&B actually was on par with rock music as highest selling and charting around this time. Whitney, Mariah, TLC, Toni Braxton, D'Angelo, Janet, and Boyz II Men were huge.

Hip hop used instruments too whether it was from studio recordings or from samples of disco, blues and rock music. Early hip-hop was just an evolution of funk music combined with spoken word. House music which also came from Afro American culture was an evolution of disco music.

Now, music production moved to a very digital sound and autotune, Pro Tools and Audacity.

Modern rap which has become heavily digitized now has replaced rock and R&B which have grown to be more underground. Alternative R&B is gaining ground. I think rock will come back too if it can evolve into something distinctive.

Backstreet Boys, NSYNC and Britney Spears late 90s sound was Swedish-produced Europop mixed with a lot of R&B and New Jack Swing elements and some heavy metal and disco too. Max Martin was a metalhead who also loved R&B music and combined the two.

Mainstream "rock" died with Led Zeppelin. They took every rock cliché and turned it up 1000%. No one could ever top the decadence, pomposity, and grandiosity of Led Zeppelin. Then came punk and New Wave in the late 70s and early 80s. The mid to late 80s was dominated by terrible hair metal. The last good version of "rock" was in the 90s with Nirvana, Radiohead, and The Smashing Pumpkins. In the 2000s emo was popular. Tastes change and people move on.

The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs were part of the early 2000s NY punk scene and enjoyed success.

Indie/psychedelic rock was popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Like Father John Misty, MGMT, Peter Bjorn and John and Bon Iver.

There is plenty of modern rock still being made to this day, and some of it is outstanding. Just dont look for it on top 40 radio. Dont look for anything good on top 40 radio - is top 40 radio even a thing any more?

Then give us some suggestions, v8

It never completely disappeared. It's still around.

Black Label Society (sounds like Black Sabbath) is still putting out music. Not sure how great their newer music is.

You want proof that rock is at best niche now? We are 30 years from Nirvana's Nevermind. The same distance before that was 1961. The bestselling songs of 1961 were by Stand By Me by Ben E. King, Del Shanon, Let's Twist Again by Chubby Checker, Blue Hawaii by Elvis Presley and Blue Moon by The Marcels. Rock then was basically still rhythm and blues and country.

The best selling rock songs of 2020 were Mood by 24kGoldn Featuring iann dior, Come & Go by Juice WRLD x Marshmello, High Hopes by Panic! At The Disco, Bang! by AJR and Death Bed by Powfu Featuring beabadoobee.

Yeah.

Rock has been disappearing from Top 40 radio since the late 1990s.

Jazz works for me, timeless and fabulous.

R174

Black Label Society as suggested by R176

Wolfmother, Australian hard rock band with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath influences

Left Lane Cruiser, American blues rock band with some country influences

Blackberry Smoke, Southern rock band with definite Lynyrd Skynyrd influences

Black Pistol Fire, another Southern Rock influenced band

Southern Culture on the Skids, alt-rock, known for "songs about sex, dancing and fried chicken"

Supersuckers, American rock band with influences from Foghat, AC/DC and ZZ Top

Hammerlock, alt-metal/ Southern rock hybrid "described as a raucous, forceful, in-your-face blend of Motörhead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws, and Black Flag "

Hogjaw, another Southern Rock /metal band

Delta Bombers, rock and roll band

Reverend Horton Heat, psychobilly/rock

Five Horse Johnson, stoner rock/blues

Drive By Truckers, Southern rock influenced

All of these are currently active to the best of my knowledge

If you want specific sub genres I can do a deeper dive into those for you, I have a lot of Southern rock, alt country and blues along with metal

Linked is the title track from Hammerlock's first album American Asshole