i think i'm starting to get the backlash a bit more, but it's confusing culture and gender.

who are your idols, jess? but, it's the wrong question...

i know that mainstream culture has this weird fetish with idolizing people, and it hit a high point in the 80s and 00s, but i grew up in this weird point in the early 90s where the underground and the mainstream were difficult to distinguish from each other. the most popular rock band in the world was nirvana, who represented the opposite of this kind of thinking. i ended up fully rejecting that set of mainstream values as the underground slowly disentangled from the mainstream, without really subscribing fully to any new underground (what i ended up connecting with most was the sexless, genderless blur of post-rock and the cold mathematical abstraction of idm). you could argue there was no underground in the 90s and mostly be correct, but you'd be equally correct to point out that there was really no mainstream, either.

so, who are my idols? due to my formative moments existing in this weird moment in time, that's just not the culture i was raised in - even as it totally defines the values of people born even two or three years before and after me. i'm in a singularity. rather, the culture i was raised in taught me to reject that kind of thinking, and accept myself as who i am. now, you can get meta about that if you want. you can ask the question "who wrote 'do what you want to do, and start today'". that person must be my idol! but if your idols tell you they're worthless and not to listen to them, and you do, you're stuck in a loop.

it was a very brief moment. but people born into it and reared on it are distinct. i know, we're all special. but your models aren't going to work.

i had band posters on my walls. i still do. but this was the messaging i grew up with...

i wasn't alive at the time and stuff, but my understanding is that even the initial punk movement - in the sense that it existed on the fringes of the mainstream - never hit that point of saturation, or was as violent about it. so it didn't hit *kids* the same way. you can make valid arguments about alternative rock being the commercialization of punk, but to a 13 year-old kid that's not really what's going through their head - they're listening to the messaging, learning from it, being formed by it. the hypocrisy is at most an abstraction. it's what they're saying that's getting through more than what they're doing.

i think a corollary of it is that the people in this age group that were formed by this *also* watched the hypocrisy hit a saturation point, and learned lessons from it. but that's not going to reverse the messaging so much as it's going to produce lessons about corruption.

i'd be exaggerating if i were to suggest this is absolutely unique. i'd guess there's going to be a generation of kids that were shattered by obama, as there was a generation of kids that were shattered by jfk. but the political is a different level than the social and cultural.

pfft. she just stopped smoking pot...

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deathtokoalas
i think you're confusing popularity with youth culture, which is something the industry does, but it's important not to get too lost in it.

the decline of rock music has as much to do with industry decisions to phase rock music out as anything else. pop music is generally very pro-establishment, pushing the kind of consumerist messages that the status quo wants. rock musicians have historically tended to mess with that. the rock of the 90s ultimately failed, but it was on the cusp of getting people to think very differently about a lot of things.

even with that said, the truth is rock music has simply gone downhill. it's not hard to understand. if you're a creative person born after about 1980, you're naturally going to look more to technology as an outlet. that doesn't mean a demographic for new rock music doesn't exist, but it is leading it to a warping of the rock form. ultimately, stuff like st. vincent or even lorde is fundamentally still rock music.

the above list is a list of gen x music. it all still sells pretty well. but, it's mostly older people. understand this: tom petty just topped the billboard list, and his demographic is mostly in retirement age. he didn't get a 50 million hit video on youtube or massive radio play on the pop station, but he did sell more records that week than anybody else that did.

i think there's still some room for innovation in rock, and i don't think you've seen your last rock star. techno (like disco before it) seems unable or unwilling to address more complex subject matter. so long as that remains true, people are going to continue to default to the rock form.