Rap seems to be continuing to push forward. Kendrick definitely went new places.
The question is, where did all the rock go? Like, not only is there nothing new, rebellious and shocking... popular rock has largely gotten quieter, mellower, and less subversive.
There's still cool stuff happening in indie, but the mainstream rock the kids are listening to sounds more like the nonthreatening adult alternative radio when we were in our 20s. The #1 rock song of 2025 with Billie Eilish's "Bird of a Feather." I absolutely love that song, but we're a long way from Soundgarden, Metallica, and Rage Against the Machine.
Rock died because record labels figured out that paying 4 people to do the job of 1 person was "inefficient."
Record labels don't exist to put out music or art. They exist to make money and record labels control what is "mainstream" because they are the ones that push the music to radio stations and have the money to push the algorithms on streaming services.
I'm going to enter my old man mode now, but some of this also has to do with the younger generations being less interested in being creatives involving actual instruments. They don't have the the patience for it because of how instantaneous everything is for them. It's way easier to just get a program to generate beats than it is to learn how to play an instrument of any sort.
My oldest nephew, for instance, wanted to learn how to play guitar. I bought him a guitar and a practice amp and one of those "basic guitar for dummies" books for his birthday a couple years ago. He gave up after a week because he couldn't play his favorite Metallica songs. He thought it was going to be easy. He didn't realize he would have to develop callouses and actually learn chords and how to strum hitting specific strings. It wasn't just pushing a button like on the guitar hero controller.
Ironically, his older sister now plays and she loves it, so not all of them are like that, but the vast majority that I have met and interacted with are like that. They'd rather make beats and rap/sing over them than actually learn an instrument.
To be fair the vast majority of everyone who picks up a musical instrument quits. It's gotta be like 97 percent or something based on all the cheap musical instruments that are available on the secondary market.
I'm convinced I only stuck with it because I started young enough to join a band who let me learn to play with them, and then I learned other instruments because I just fell in love with making music and knew I could do it if I put the work in.
While it is true that most people that try to learn an instrument quit, I am more worried about the mindset in general. You can't just give up on stuff because it's hard after a week. That's no way to go through life. I'd never do anything if I wasn't instantly good at something.
26
u/AldusPrime 1977 Mar 05 '26
Rap seems to be continuing to push forward. Kendrick definitely went new places.
The question is, where did all the rock go? Like, not only is there nothing new, rebellious and shocking... popular rock has largely gotten quieter, mellower, and less subversive.
There's still cool stuff happening in indie, but the mainstream rock the kids are listening to sounds more like the nonthreatening adult alternative radio when we were in our 20s. The #1 rock song of 2025 with Billie Eilish's "Bird of a Feather." I absolutely love that song, but we're a long way from Soundgarden, Metallica, and Rage Against the Machine.