Reason To Rock-It's All About The Music
on radio and television -- that it has been hard to get enough distance from it, to really step back from it long enough to appreciate it fully.
Second, because of all the other interesting information associated with the music -- stories of colorful personalities, associated changes in our culture, commercial success, artists being cheated by their managers, drug use and abuse, untimely deaths, and all the rest -- it has been difficult just to focus on the artistic elements, without all these other distractions getting in the way.
Third, and perhaps most important, there has been a sort of roots backlash that we have never recovered from. If you go back and read the earliest writing about rock, you find people talking about it as if it were something completely new and astounding. Then listeners became a bit more sophisticated, and some of the artists started talking about their influences, and people began to see that rock music didn't just spring up out of nowhere, that there was a lot of great blues, and folk, and jazz music that most young white people had never heard before, and that rock music had built upon these foundations.
The truth, I think, is that rock music was a powerful convergence of many different influences, combined with some really new elements, and that this combination was strong and different enough to be worth consideration on its own, as a form with its own aesthetic. However, conventional wisdom today seems to be that rock music is just one small chapter in the big book of popular music, and people are more interested in seeing how all the pieces fit together than in looking at rock as something distinct from what came before and after. So "Reason to Rock" is an attempt to rectify this situation.
3. What do you think of today's music, like Britney Spears & her skimpily dressed cohorts, rap-rock like Limp Bizkit, or punk-pop bands like Green Day? Do you think some of their songs will stand the test of time, commercially and in an historic sense? After disco faded, people dismissed it as trash, but now it's going through a revival, and articles have even been written about the historic significance and meaning of songs people once thought were innocuous and downright dumb.
I think critics have to be very careful talking about what they don't like. There are many things that can get in the
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