Has anyone else noticed that rock has been getting a lot softer lately?
In this environment of do-it-yourself musical production where musical acts crop up seemingly daily, there aren’t any direct descendants of the Rage Against the Machines of the world.
Of course, there are always bands willing to keep any musical style alive, but I’m more interested in emerging trends than bastions of what has already been done.
When I listen to the rock music out now, I sometimes hear some country or folk influence or maybe some post-rock, but none of the distorted, riff-driven anger most of us broke out to in high school. What happened to heavy? Did we just grow up and get less angry? Is the clever and artistic, but soft, indie rock of today all we need?
Maybe heaviness isn’t contained in the snarling vocals, the viciously crunching bass or the thundering drums that force you into head-nodding submission.
Maybe what we meant by heavy was a certain role the music played rather than elements of the music itself.
Whether or not this is true, one thing I can say is that the music we called “heavy” played a cathartic role; it was the sound that accompanied our rocking out, sweating, dancing and yelling.
And since cathartic rock music doesn’t seem to be around, at least not in a way that complements the ruminations of indie rockers, I feel that something else has to take its role. After all, I doubt the need to go crazy has somehow faded.
I find that electronic and dance music is the new heavy. The rock we listen to moves emotions, but I think it’s all up to electronic music to move bodies.
Digital textures swirling through the air and programmed bass insistently thumping out the heartbeat of the party seems ““ to me ““ to have taken the place of head-banging rock.
Think about the functions; we turn to rock for inspiration or deep thought, but dance is for the catharsis.
I’m sure this pairing of indie rock and electronic dance could be caused by a few different things.
We live in a time where irony is everywhere culturally. We watch mock kung-fu movies, and Wes Anderson gives us tongue-in-cheek portraits of dysfunctional families and relationships. For all the things hard rock had going for it, one thing it didn’t have was a sense of its own futility.
In a way, seriousness is implicit in music that screams and thrashes out its emotions ““ the sounds are the product of some visceral energy that is hard to fake.
I feel that hard rock of that variety may just be too serious for the cultural milieu, and that the separateness of electronic music from rock provides a safe place to move bodies without lyrical gravity.
Maybe it’s less the seriousness and more the excessiveness of hard rock that mediated this shift. As the current rock tones down and advances its art and complexity, maybe a parallel change is occurring in the shift from heavy to electronic.
Lines of computer programming don’t have egos, and therefore electronic music will have an outside, compositional perspective almost automatically.
The guitarist won’t fight for solos because he’s just a line in a computer program anyway.
And really, as Daft Punk has shown us, the only way to really incorporate a guitar solo into the 2000s is to program one on your computer.
If you think LaRue is getting soft, e-mail him at alarue@media.ucla.edu.