Is rock'n'roll finally dead?
Only three guitar-band songs in the top 100 – and one of them was Journey. With pop and urban music teaming up, does rock stand a chance?
11.01.2011
Foto - Chart maulers ... Cher Lloyd and Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am on The X Factor. Photograph: Ken McKay/TalkbackThames/Rex Features
What will tomorrow evening's Brit awards launch tell us about 2010's music? That it was all amazing, obviously; but often, Brits launches also tell us about what the music industry wants to happen next year. Three years ago, pop was "back"; a few years before that, the Brits wished to make it known that guitar music was in rude health, which on awards night prompted the retina-scorching image of a fishnets-and-top-hat clad Cat Deeley rising from the stage straddling a 7ft champagne bottle and shouting "Rock is back!"
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Though this rock resurgence seemed to hinge on the success of the Darkness – and we should perhaps not dwell too much on how that all panned out – it might be time for the Brits to give rock another nudge. Earlier this week, it was announced that the UK's top 100 best-selling songs of 2010 featured only three rock acts. Pop represented 40% of the chart, dance had 10%, and hip-hop and R&B 47% – though when almost half of all top 40 songs seem to feature Rihanna, David Guetta or Black Eyed Peas, it's hard to know where one genre ends and another begins.Rock's biggest-selling tune in 2010 was Journey's Don't Stop Believin', propelled back into the national consciousness in the winter of the previous year by a deft Glee/X Factor pincer movement. And while album and live ticket sales show rock in a more healthy light, it still declined. Despite the best efforts of an industry obsessed with guitar music, it was pop singer Jessie J – and not one of the diverting new guitar bands such as the Vaccines or Mona – who won both the Brits' Critics Choice award and the BBC Sound of 2011 poll. Her single Do It Like a Dude is already at No 5 in a top 10 whose only showing for guitar music is The X Factor winner Matt Cardle's cover of a Biffy Clyro song so anodyne that it might as well have been a Westlife tune.
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Perhaps the renewed lease of life for BBC 6 Music, which doubled its weekly audience last year, will help rock? Well, exciting as a playlist of Mumford & Sons and Supergrass B-sides might be to some, 6 Music will struggle to be heard above the high-octane racket of London's self-proclaimed "hit music station", Capital, going nationwide, as it did last week. Some of Capital's output is tailored regionally, but its playlist – the Saturdays, Tinie Tempah, the Saturdays, Rihanna and the Saturdays – is countrywide. Kiss 100, not exactly shy of chart-mauling sounds from the likes of Black Eyed Peas, is also going national.
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Given your average rock act's incessant bleating about how their art has nothing to do with record sales, you might not think they were worried about this, but it's interesting how many guitar acts, from Editors to Kele from Bloc Party, have "gone electro" in the last 18 months. The latest is Gossip's Beth Ditto, whose (rather listenable) Simian Mobile Disco-produced solo EP is out in a few weeks.
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It must seem to some guitar acts as if all the other genres have ganged up on rock. Take the British urban scene. As Dizzee Rascal continues to play credibility chicken via a succession of increasingly ludicrous mainstream endeavours, Example, Professor Green and Tinie Tempah have spent the last 12 months knocking out hip but hook-heavy pop tunes, and have conquered the top 10 as a result. Don't be fooled by an X Factor winner releasing a Biffy Clyro song: it was little more than a shrewd exercise in positioning Cardle as a credible, "anti-pop" X Factor winner. (It's a shtick that may win over less picky listeners, but it won't stand up to scrutiny – the concept of manufactured indie is a million times more offensive than manufactured pop.)
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In fact, Simon Cowell's most significant signing to his Syco label last year was Tinie Tempah's producer Labrinth. This shift is even felt at Radio 1, which in the past has clung to guitar bands for dear life but is now getting its dose of credibility from the world of dubstep. So while Zane Lowe's cross-genre passion for music remains, the station's most influential tastemakers are now the dubstep champion Annie Mac and the mainstream pop DJ Scott Mills. Last week, in a blogpost titled Has Radio 1 Turned its Back on Bands?, Radio 1's head of music, George Ergatoudis, told NME, "It's also important to understand that there is an undeniable music cycle in the UK, and right now most of our target audience have a pretty limited interest in indie/alternative guitar music". Don't worry, he added, in time the cycle will shift again.
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Many people regard these cycles as if they represent some sort of otherworldly, mystical power, when really they just come down to market forces: popular products are imitated, leading to market saturation, leading to a devalued product, leading to a hunger for something new. Rock's current slump in the singles chart comes a decade after the British guitar music scene was last decimated. Back then, the lumpen output of Catatonia and Space killed indie; this time, the beige revolution of acts such as the View and Pigeon Detectives threw the doors wide open for a Lady Gaga-shaped superhero. Now the charts are full of boybands such as JLS and the Wanted, pop singers such as Pixie Lott and international acts such as Rihanna.
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There are more to come. Then there will be too many. Then guitar music will storm back. Retro-influenced acts the Strokes and the White Stripes saved guitar music 10 years ago. Rest assured, when rock returns it will sound as reassuringly, tediously familiar as it always has.
