Rock and rollers disprove genre’s demise

Pete Townsend told us way back in 1972, “Rock is dead … Long live rock.”

So often during its 60 years of official existence, rock music — make that pure rock music — has found itself listed among music critics’ obituaries. Certainly with the ascension of rap, hip-hip, hip-pop and faux-hop — yeah, we hear you Taylor — to its place as the popular music of the past two or three generations, and with country music having absorbed some of rock’s once unique excesses — Is that Brad Paisley playing that blistering guitar solo? Luke Bryan doing Metallica at his concerts? Florida Georgia Line dueting with Nelly? Colt Ford creating a country/rap hybrid he calls hick-hop? — a great many music fans have relegated rock to that classic juke box in the sky.

After all, popular music has always been — and always will be — a young person’s game. Rock, for today’s whippersnapper music fans, is something their dads and granddads listened to. They don’t get the irony that their biggest, most “innovative” hit of the year, ” Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” with it’s “sha-ooh-wha-wha, that booty-booty” backing vocals, comes directly from the rock girl groups of the ’50s and ’60s. And, “What I Like About You,” that brand-new hit by 5 Seconds of Summer? Dads might recognize it from its original release by The Romantics back in 1979.

You want to gauge the musical maturity of today’s pop music fans, look no further than Sunday’s American Music Awards. The award for hip-hop album of the year came down to three finalists: Eminem, Drake and Iggy Azalea. I know, that’s a tough choice between one of hip-hop’s pioneers, Eminem, and one of the genre’s most innovative current artists, Drake. Proving the voting strength — and taste — of 12-year-olds the world over, it wasn’t even close. It was Iggy in a landslide, leaving Gwen Stefani to fret that while she was off having babies with Gavin Rossdale, this talent-challenged Australian, whose biggest asset is her voluminous backside, stole her career.

We mentioned in this space a couple of weeks ago how “dad rock” was the talk of the holiday season, with new releases by classic rockers Pink Floyd, Dylan, Bowie, Neil Young, Queen, Robert Plant, The Who, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Tom Petty, the Doobie Brothers (with help from some of their modern country friends) and reissues by Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin coming out in the late October-to-December primetime shopping period. That’s reason enough for rock music fans to celebrate.

But before we give the season completely over to the graybeards of rock and roll, let’s not overlook some exciting new music by rockers who are still in their prime. U2 — who are kind of the missing link between classic and modern rock — got a lot of the wrong kind of publicity when they released their wonderful “Songs of Innocence” and sent digital copies of it free to tens of millions of Apple customers. Hard though it may be to believe, a lot of these ungrateful Apple owners, rather than just delete the damned album, chose to cry and complain about receiving something they hadn’t asked for. (I mean, please, there’s not even an app for that!)

Their whining detracted from the fact that Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. had created another masterwork that fits nicely alongside their classic albums of the last 35 years.

Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, probably popular music’s biggest still-standing rock and rollers, contributed a shot of adrenalin to rock with the release of their “Sonic Highways,” the musical part of a multimedia project Grohl dreamed up and the Foos brought to life. With contributions from several of Grohl’s musical friends and heroes, the album offers some of the band’s freshest, liveliest work while adhering to a concept only the Foo Fighters’ frontman could have conjured.

Oh, and “Highways” also offers one of the best songs of the year, “Something From Nothing.”

Certainly not as anticipated as works by the Foos and U2, but by no means less impressive, is the surprising gem released by ’90s stalwarts Bush. Out of nowhere, Rossdale and his mates quietly unleashed “Man on the Run” on the music public Oct. 29, and while the single “The Only Way Out” is getting plenty of airplay, it is by no means the standout track on the LP.

In fact, there are easily seven or eight songs on “Man” that surpass the single in musical quality, and “The Only Way Out” is actually a good song. “Loneliness Is a Killer” may be the best Bush song ever, and tunes like “Just Like My Other Sins,” “This House Is on Fire,” “Surrender” and “The Golden Age” help put “Man on the Run” in the same wheelhouse as Bush’s “16 Stone,” long considered a modern classic.

Add scary, mask-wearing hard rockers Slipknot to the current long-live-rock revolution, their “.5: The Gray Chapter” having already debuted at the No. 1 slot on the Billboard Hot 200, while Linkin Park (“The Hunting Party”), The Flaming Lips (the awfully titled “With a Little Help From My Fwends,” a Beatles twibute), Damien Rice (“My Favourite Faded Fantasy”). alt-J (“This is All Yours”), Ozzy (“Memoirs of a Madman”), Rancid (“Home Is All We Know”), Live (“The Turn”), Monster Magnet (“Milking the Stars”), Nickelback (“No Fixed Address”), TV on the Radio (“Seeds”) and Smashing Pumpkins (“Monuments to an Elegy”) have added works of their own to the holiday rock bonanza.

With this much new rock music — and this much very good new rock music — now or soon to be in the dwindling number of retail outlets that still actually sell music in a format that isn’t digital, we can put off that rock is dead thing for a while longer … at least until Iggy Azalea and Taylor Swift team up with their latest derivitive project that will drive all the 12-year-olds into paroxysms of ecstasy and relegate those hairy men (and women, I’m with you Saint Vincent) with their guitars back to the caves where they belong.