I’m aware that it’s easy to sound like a negative, grumpy old bloke when talking about the state of rock. Though we think the modern rock sound is tiringly over compressed and every band you hear, usually sounds the same, one guitarist or drummer similar to the next. The fact is a new generation likes it. It’s all they’ve ever known and it’d be weird if they only wanted to hear 50 years-old albums by Mountain, like me. So I am sensitive to that. Yet some things are more objectively true.
The state of lyric writing, not always rock’s strongest suit, has hit a nadir. It was always inconsistent of course, the debut Bad Company album will tell you that, but complex lyrics like Bob Dylan on Bringing it All Back Home or Blood On The Tracks, Pink Floyd’s epics like on Animals or poetic excursions, though often puzzling, like Yes, isn’t something you hear much of. Even songs with not so much a double entendre, as a single entendre like Whitesnakes’ Slide It In, seemed to concern themselves with the most powerful drivers of life and not just songs about your phone.
On top of that, records definitely sounded better 50 years ago. Warmer, more nuanced, richer. The compressed version today, I think, is designed for single track listening in a car. It exhausts your ears quickly.
And perhaps more than anything, the very concept of communal record listening has all but disappeared. The very thing we all clung to through many years, carrying records to school like holy relics. Going around a friend's house to ‘listen to records’. A simple communal pleasure, but which has been purged from young people’s lives by the culture of individualism. That delight in the art of a record is a feeling that has also been lost. Remember how great it was to just hold a record like Yessongs. I know records come out on vinyl (often with Photoshopped covers that don’t look organic or individual), but it’s a niche area of life.
And I’m tempted by the notion that all the best songs have been written. I don’t discount something good coming out today but so many obscure rock songs from the past would be hailed as classics if they came out now. For example Robin Trower’s Long Misty Days wasn’t thought exceptional at the time compared to Bridge Of Sighs or Twice Removed From Yesterday, but listening to it now, it sounds so lush and textured. Check out the Jimmy Dewar soulful vocals on Caledonia, and this was just a typical release in the mid 70s. No one would think Pat Travers' debut was a massive classic, but you’d be unlikely to hear an imaginative song like Makes No Difference today..
Perhaps there’s just 12 notes on a guitar and the period 1965 - 1975 was so intense, deep and wide, 75% of all the good arrangements of those notes were written and have just been recycled ever since. And some things just can’t be copied, like Ritchie Blackmore’s soloing on Made In Japan and Made In Europe.
This might be portrayed as living in the past, but appreciation of art and literature from the last 300 years isn’t thought about that way, so why should appreciation of music from the last 60 years? We have lived through an extraordinary time in terms of music and it’s understandable that younger people might be cynical of us. But when you know about rock music in all its forms, it’s unchallengeable on any aesthetic level to generalize and say it reached heights of expression and creativity that today’s bands can’t easily compete to match.
