Apocalypse when?

It was once written, in the Book of Ecclesiastes to be exact, that, "the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun" (1:9).\nAs the reviews editor of this magazine, I get to feel the full girth of this statement in all of its prophetic glory. In the past few weeks our writers have been flooding me with variations of sentences like, "_____ (some band) come on like a cross between Weezer and Blink-182" or "though this is nothing new, they add sincerity to a hackneyed genre." \nAs rock enters its seventh or eighth "comeback," is it true that the wind has gone out of the proverbial sails? Isn't this a question that was asked as far back as 1959? According to the reviewers of the IDS Weekend the apocalypse has fallen upon rock music, though no one is dropping to their knees to pray or has even offered to pick up a shovel to cover up the rotting corpses.\nWe can all think of excuses or an exception to the "Rock is Dead" theory, obviously it will never totally become extinct. After all, there are still bluegrass festivals and I'm told that somewhere among the flatlands of central Indiana one can still find bagpipe music being played with gritty earnestness. \nMy problem and skepticism arises when people who love music, such as our reviewers do, have problems feeling enthusiastic about modern music. \nPerhaps the burden falls on new bands because rock has been canonized so well over the past 50 years. They teach classes about it in college, there are a myriad of books, entire television stations dedicated to its mythology, etc. Elvis sounded vital in 1955 even though his schtick was almost completely borrowed. When the Beatles recorded "Roll Over Beethoven" in 1963, fans thought George Harrison had wrote it. So why can't Sum-41 get away with sounding like Green Day?\nThese are battles for someone else to fight, because I've been waiting to burn this thing down, torch in hand, all year long. Popular or mass culture hardly ever has personal sentiment in it, mainly because personal sentiment is anathema to mass sentiment. Whether we admit it or not, we like our music to be private. I've met a lot of people who relish in the amount of obscure band names and album titles they know (I may even be one of them). \nRock and roll has not only ceased to be a form of rebellion, but it has ceased to be a form of expression other than nihilism and indifference. A few weeks ago, I damned a local band for being apolitical and conservative. Out of the various letters I received damning me for my rhetoric, somebody wrote to me saying they thought it was OK for music to be mindless and fun. Though the good mindless rock always came out of some sort of insufferable circumstance, and it still hinted at a more serious and dire problem at hand. Today's kids are existentialists without even understanding why.\nNowadays when hip rock music is being commandeered by television commercials, the youth music has also become a prosaic expression of commerce. Like movies, which long ago became a ground in which the bourgeois ideology was not only supported but celebrated, music has stopped challenging the American (read: Capitalist) state of being. In a sense, rock music has been castrated and rather than trying to help repair its splitting seams, we ought to turn our attention to the more vital forms of musical youth expression such as hip-hop or techno music.\nSo, when rock enters it eighth or ninth comeback, I don't want to hear anyone saying they told me so, because I'm telling you so now. Like I believe I will wake up in the morning, I believe that rock and roll will come back, again and again. The situation isn't anywhere close to being too far gone, but the dogma behind it has become static. A good idea (directly or indirectly borrowed), a pretty melody and a spot-on lyric will always endure the test of time, but unchallenging and unflinchingly "normal" music will always sound synthetic, and hence hopelessly pathetic.