Wrote this shitpost a few years ago about the "post punk revival resurrection"... well the new Strokes album came out recently, and they're a post punk revival band... so let's talk about the post punk revival... resurrection I guess...
Hey everyone, I'm not sure if you guys read the Pitchfork article the other day, but if you haven't heard the news we're entering a new era of rock music.
If you guys haven't noticed, the emo revival has been slowly fading into the background these past couple years. It was a good run. The era spawned a good handful of bands that really had something to offer. Of course, there was a mountain of complete shit in the revival as well, probably some of the worst music I've ever heard in my life. Sometimes I would listen to some of these bands, or maybe I should say band wagoners, heh... and I would just think to myself, this guy sounds like he's literally sobbing into the mic, and Jesus, it sounds fucking terrible. But I'll try my best to remember the emo revival not for the confusion and frustration it brought me, but for all the good feelings it brought me over the years.
But, as usual, I digress.
I believe it was Sunday morning when I found out about it. I was doing my normal Sunday routine, having some coffee, and listening to some music of the emo variety, fully aware that it was on the chopping block when it came to hip music trends. Like usual I opened up Pitchfork to check what was both new and acceptable to listen to and I gasped as I saw a headline proclaiming what we'd all been waiting for. A new era of rock music. At the time of writing this I don't have internet access, but the title was somewhere along the lines of “the late 2010s are looking to be exciting – enter the post punk revival resurrection.”
And upon reading that, it suddenly became crystal clear that Pitchfork had to be right about this. The article prophesied that there would be a new wave of rock bands heavily influenced by the post punk revival of the late 90's and early 2000's. We're talking bands like The Strokes, Interpol, The White Stripes, and Franz Ferdinand, to name a few. It couldn't have been a coincidence that just a few days before, I woke up to the insidious sound of an Interpol song in my head. I hadn't heard that song in over ten years, there surely had to be something going on and my musical intuition was simply kicking in. Everything happens for a reason. Especially when music pops into your head.
But the idea of this progression makes perfect sense. We've been in the second generation of rock meta for a good 15 years now. Admittedly this was short lived compared to the introduction of rock music into the mainstream, but we have to be reasonable about how we think about this. Squeeze a lemon once, and if you squeeze it a second time, not as much is going to come out. But there's always a chance that we'll get a slightly refreshing flavor that we might not have caught the first time. Let's take the grunge timeline, for example. Nirvana completely redefined how we looked at rock music and left the tail end of the first rock meta generation on a blazing high note. Not too long afterward, there was the now infamous era of post-grunge, overlapping slightly with the post punk revival. Softer bands like Death Cab For Cutie were deemed the “saviors” of this time that in hindsight we label dark, lending a helping hand in the form of an acoustic guitar to rescue listeners from the likes of Chevelle, Nickelback, and Hoobastank. But very few people give credit to the likes of Low*, for example, who attempted the very same thing ten years prior – to provide a counterbalance to the obnoxiously loud and often inscrutable world of grunge. Nobody beyond a small cult following noticed, though, because Kurt Cobain's delivery was just too captivating. We missed some spots the first time around, and this gives purpose to an act of music recycling that on the surface seems both lazy and pointless.
Here's reason number two on why this is a reasonable direction in the sequencing of rock music. You and I both know that our children's children are going to be listening to music so obscure sounding that it won't even sound like music to us. Our kids already listen to what we think is total garbage (both of mine are in a One Direction phase, and all the convincing in the world won't make them see that if they want to listen to that, they should just listen to 98 Degrees, because they were objectively superior), there's no way around it, and this contrast in taste only gets more and more dramatic as the generation gap grows wider. Don't believe me?
Do you realize why, in all the alien movies (take the original Independence Day, for example), the music that the aliens listen to doesn't even sound like music at all? It just sounds like sequences of beeps here and boops there, in a time signature that probably doesn't even currently exist in the real world. You'd attribute it to a toddler escaping out of his crib and discovering his mom's synthesizer, and him just randomly banging on it. But the film makers aren't just being lazy. Like all pieces of art there's an intention behind it. The aliens are so advanced that “traditional” sounding music has become obsolete and irrelevant. Out of touch. All the filmmakers are doing is observing the trends that music is following and making a deduction. In a certain number of years, music as we know it will cease to exist. If we were to time travel 200 years in the future, music would be completely incomprehensible to us. And if us time travelers were to try to show this future generation “modern rock,” it would be the equivalent of cavemen trying to show us how hitting sticks and stones together and yelling is musical.
But by the time music gets to that point, our generation will probably already be dead. But that “probably” doesn't mean that we should just ignore that threat. Our priority should be to make damn sure that it doesn't happen while we are still alive.
Don't get me wrong. Experimental music has its place in society. Without a handful of artists thinking outside the box, we would still quite literally be banging pots and pans together. Joy Division wouldn't have made their incredible genre defining “Unknown Pleasures.” I could go on and on about what amazing records we wouldn't have without experimentation. But you have to understand that there is a finite number of musical notes that we as humans can hear, and if we're not careful about how fast we progress, we're going to have run out of possible routes to advance. Genre by genre, music will die. And starting around the turn of this century, guess what's been on the chopping block? That's right, rock music. If we're not careful, rock music will be dead.
This is why, from decade to decade, we need one or more anchors. We can prolong the death of rock as long as we keep tweaking past takes on the genre ever so slightly, turning down the “risk” factor a couple notches, and keeping our population content until it inevitably goes out of style. Then repeat. “Accessible” music like this is our anchor and without it the genre of rock will fall into the abyss of incomprehensibility and obscurity.
Let's think of the ridiculous cycle of eras as a series of shields protecting us from progressing into something that is objectively undesirable to us as humans in this particular millennium. You can call it lack of courage and lack of creativity, and you'd probably be right. And I understand that in the culture we live in we just want more, and more, and more. But I'm telling you right now that if you ask for too much, you might just end up with nothing.**
We all need to start listening to these bands again so we can analyze how these new bands are interpreting and adding to the genre. We're in a, relatively speaking, pretty exciting time. We should cherish it, because in another five years there's likely going to be a period of either a complete lack of identity for how we label rock where everything's in disarray and no one knows what the fuck is going on, or even worse, a post-grunge revival. That lemon dried out ten years ago, and we might just die of thirst. Let's not take the post punk revival resurrection for granted. Instead, let's embrace it. I don't know about you, but right after this I'm going to pop in The Strokes' “Is This It?” and get myself ready for what's to come.