The History of Rock Music

The History of Rock Music: 2000-

Genres and musicians of the 2000s

History of Rock Music | 1955-66 | 1966-69 | 1970-76 | 1976-89 | The 1990s | 2000 | Alpha index

Musicians of 1955-66 | 1967-69 | 1970-76 | 1977-89 | 1990s in the US | 1990s outside the US | 2000s

Popular music for a new millennium
Popular music at the turn of the millennium was characterized by the confluence of two revolutionary trends. The first one was world music. The 1990s had been the decade of world music, when western musicians pillaged the rhythms, melodies and timbres of other ethnic cultures. In reality, western musicians had only scratched the surface of the vast repertoire of sounds created over the centuries by the rest of the world. The exploration and integration had just begun. The second trend was electronic/digital music. New instruments had always determined musical revolutions, because, tautologically, they allowed for new forms of music. The electronic/digital music was bound to have an even bigger impact because the new forms of music that it enabled were virtually infinite. It also released the musician from the obligations of finding a "band" and a "producer" before being able to deliver her music to the audience. Yet another definition of Rock Music
Rock'n'roll may (may) have been a well-defined genre, but starting with Buddy Holly the term "rock music" became fuzzier and fuzzier. The Beach Boys played surf music, and the Beatles' music was Mersey-beat, a variant of pop music. Dylan was a folksinger. Somehow they all got lumped into "rock music". The truth is that there was no definition of rock music to start with. In the following decades there was less and less of an agreement on what constituted rock music, as its purveyors swung wildly from jazz to world-music. By the end of the century, rock music included artists who played mainly electronic and digital instruments.
The problem is that "rock music" was never a definition of the music, but a definition of the audience. Rock music was music for young white rebels. As those young rebels grew up, it lost its "young-only" quality. As times changed and people accepted the Establishment (maybe because they had fewer reasons to attack it), the "rebellious" quality was reduced to a mere search for originality. Thus rock music evolved into music for white originals. The music itself changed dramatically, but the audience that rock music had created basically continued to exist, mutatis mutandis, across generations. Thus an identity could be find in the audience, not in the stylistic attributes of the music.
The media were largely responsible for determining what that audience listened to, and therefore what rock music was. The media's defining power was already evident in the 1960s. Hendrix happened to be classified as a rock musician mainly because his records were reviewed in rock magazines and therefore sold to a rock audience. He might as well have been classified as a blues musician, or even a jazz musician: had his records been reviewed mainly by blues magazines, his audience would have been the blues audience, and therefore he would have been part of the history of blues music, not rock music.
Ultimately, the reason some musicians were considered "rock" is that rock critics and rock historians (such as me) wrote about them. The only consistent definition of rock music is, in a sense, that rock music is what i am writing about.
The only viable definition is a "use-based" definition: rock music is the set of all musicians that the rock community writes about. Thus Klaus Schulze (an electronic musician) makes rock music, but an electronic musician raised in the classical community does not make rock music, even if their styles are very similar: the difference between the two is that the rock press writes at length about Schulze.
It is not the listener who defines what is rock music, it is the reader. The Age of Mediocrity

The boom of independent music at the turn of the millennium had changed the dynamics of the music industry. At about the same time, the CD (cheap to manufacture) replaced the vinyl album (expensive to manufacture). Shortly thereafter, the Internet allowed musicians to directly distribute their music, thus bypassing the selection of the old-fashioned "record label".

Unfortunately, the combined effect of these phenomena resulted in a boom of mediocrity. Among independent/avantgarde musicians, it became commonplace to release just about anything they recorded or just thought of recording. Needless to say, only a few minutes of the hours of recording that they released were truly indispensable.

Among mainstream musicians, it became commonplace to release an album that contained only one or two songs worthy of being released. The rest was filler, but was filler that increased the price of the release, i.e. the profits of the label and of the artist.

Both sides shamelessly took advantage of technology that allowed to print and distributed albums very easily. The cost of printing compact discs kept going down, and the Internet allowed to bypass the traditional, cumbersome marketing and distribution processes. The net result was a flood of poor-quality recordings.

The music press soon revealed itself to be part of the problem, not of the solution. Instead of helping screen and select the few outstanding recordings, countless magazines, fanzines and webzines promoted just about every recording as a masterpiece, no matter how trivial, derivative and amateurish it was. Basically, anyone could make a CD and count on at least ten critics writing a good review of it; which was enough to sell enough copies to break even. The free marketing provided by the music press increased the motivation of musicians to release as much as possible. It was one of the few infallible business plans of the age. The music press was in turn rewarded with free promo CDs: Darwinian competition forced critics to compete for access to promos (no reviews, no advertisers). Thus the musician (not the music critic) held the reins of power and could "blackmail" the music critic into writing positive reviews.

The whole scene was the ultimate in capitalism and consumerism. The idealism of the hippie age and of the punk age had been buried for good.

Mediocre artists were soon releasing their eight or 12th album, with worldwide distribution. But then the very meaning of music-making had changed. More and more artists came to view music-making as simply an endless refinement for one simple idea. De facto, their music was wallpaper. Their first album introduced a mood, a tone, a style, and usually did so without having enough experience, skills or simply help from the producer. The following albums refined that very same trademark sound. The songs were mostly faceless. Each album was simply a repeat of the previous one with slightly different melodies, lyrics and arrangements. The listener could purchase any of their albums and find the same product, except that more recent "releases" of that product were likely to be more refined. The motivation to innovate became inversely proportional to the low cost of making albums.

The Disappearing Album

On the other hand, it was unfair to compare the quality of the "albums" released during the vinyl era (when making and distributing an album was an expensive process) with the quality of the "albums" released during the CD era released during the vinyl era (when making and distributing an album was a cheap process). No wonder that the average quality of albums in the 1960s was so much higher than in the late 1990s: in the 1960s record labels could not afford to release an artist's album until it contained the best music that the artist could produce. The "album" of the 1990s, instead, was merely a snapshot of the artist at the time it s/he made that album.

Ultimately, the "album" was rapidly becoming an obsolete concept.

The 1990s saw the apex and the downfall of the music industry. In 1979 Sony and Philips had invented the compact disc (CD), a digital storage for music, and the same year Sony had launched the "Walkman" portable stereo. In 1981 MTV debuted on cable tv. During the 1980s these innovations spread and redesigned the way music was marketed and sold. As the new paradigm took hold, the music industry seemed to enjoy its best time ever. In 1996 Mariah Carey's One Sweet Day topped the U.S. charts for an unprecedented 16 weeks, breaking all the Presley and Beatles records. In 1997 Elton John's Candle in the Wind became the best-selling song of all times, passing Bing Crosby's White Christmas. In 1999 'N Sync set the new record of sales in the first week of a new release (2.4 million copies)

In 1999 the music world was ruled by five majors:
1. Seagram/Polygram/Universal,
2. Warner/Elektra/Sire/Atlantic,
3. Sony/Columbia/Epic,
4. EMI/Virgin/Capitol/Chrysalis,
5. BMG/Jive/Private/American/Windham Hill. The world's music market was worth 38 billion dollars. The five "majors" controlled 95% of all albums sold in the world, and 84% of the 755 million albums sold in the USA:
1. Universal with 27% (26.3% in the USA),
2. Warner with 20% (15.7%),
3. Sony with 18% (16.2%),
4. EMI with 16% (9.4%),
5. BMG with 14% (16%).

The USA accounted for 37% of world sales, Japan for 16.7%, Britain for 7.6%, Germany for 7.4%, France for 5.2%, Canada for 2.3%, Australia for 1.7%, Brazil for 1.6%, Holland for 1.5%, Italy for 1.4%. Basically, the compact disc had helped the music industry to multiply its revenues. But the record companies missed the real "enemy". In 1999 Shawn Fanning founded the Napster on-line music service that allowed anyone with a computer and a modem to share music files with others over the Internet. They could be played on the PC itself or on the portable MP3 devices (that had been introduced in 1998). Millions of Internet users did not need to pay outrageous prices for their favorite music: in fact, they didn't need to pay anything. Even after the "file sharing" phenomenon was reined in by a series of lawsuits, life was much improved for consumers: Apple introduces the on-line music service "iTunes", which legally sold 25 million songs just the first year. For a long time record labels had ripped off the consumer by forcing the consumer to purchase CDs, regardless of how many songs of that CD a consumer wanted to hear. A completely new dynamic was created by iTunes: consumers were finally allowed to purchase just the song they desired.

In 2001 sales for the record industry slipped 5% (their first decline in ages), a fact that was widely blamed on the on-line sharing services. The same year, Napster was found guilty of breaching copyright law and forced to suspend its service, but others took its place.

In 2000 French media giant Vivendi purchased Seagram: Warner remained the only USA "major", as Universal had become French, Sony was Japanese, EMI was British, and BMG was German. Clearly, the USA was becoming less and less interested in the business of selling CDs.

The downfall of the record industry was long overdue and welcomed by just about everybody. But it was not the only anachronism still in place. As consumers became even more song-oriented, it became even more important to pinpoint a song heard on the radio. Alas, disc-jockeys continued the old habit of not announcing the title of a song and the name of the musician. Consumers remained powerless to actually know what song they just listened to. In the 2000s it remained easier to read a review of an album that one had never heard than to discover the title of a song just heard on the radio. Millions of potential sales were still hindered by the chronic stupidity of disc-jockeys worldwide, probably in cahoots with record labels that wanted consumers to buy CDs based on the marketing campaign and not on the basis of what the songs actually sounded like.

Superficial Listening

The 1990s had introduced technological innovations that changed both the way music was manufactured and the way music was consumed. Unlike the "record", that required a well-funded record label to manufacture and distribute, the compact disc had become cheaper and cheaper to manufacture, and the Internet had allowed an ever larger number of musicians to bypass the traditional distribution channels. Thus musicians were, de facto, in a position to record and release compact discs ad libitum. At the same time, a specular revolution had taken place on the consumer's front. The Internet had introduced means to "download" music, as opposed to purchase it from a store or a catalog. The consumer was no longer a captive in the logic of the record labels. The first dogma to collapse was the dogma of the "album": why purchase an album (most of whose songs are filler) when one can download just the one or two good songs? On one hand musicians enjoyed much more flexibility on what to produce, on the other hand consumers enjoyed much more flexibility on what to consume. The market of independent recordings was flooded with compact discs of mediocre quality (both artistic and technical). In a sense, the very concept of what a recording is underwent a dramatic evolution: instead of being the summa of a period (the best pieces composed during that period), it became merely a sample of the period's sound. Musicians paid less and less attention to crafting impeccable songs. They contented themselves with documenting their current sound with a one-hour long recording of it. In a sense, there was a trend towards releasing the "demo" and never reaching the point of the finished product. The consumer, faced with dozens of recordings by an independent musician, none of them expected to be a milestone, was, in turn, sampling them in the same superficial manner. Thus the cardinal process of the 20th century (the process away from the melody and towards the sound) became also a process of moving from deep listening to superficial listening (just the opposite of what some musicians advertised). Lo-fi Music
A trend towards hi-fi equipment was dramatically reversed at the turn of the century with the widespread diffusion of lo-fi equipment. Whether the laptop or an MP3 player or a iPod, the device of choise to listen to music became a relatively low-quality device. If psychelic music, cosmic music and even new-age music were basically the consequence of more and more sophisticated stereo equipment, the consequence of less and less sophisticated audio equipment was a lower degree of instrumental prowess (no matter how many layers of instruments were used to arrange a piece of music). The motivation to produce chromatically beautiful music was greatly reduced. Where to, Chuck?
Chuck Berry invented the paradigm of rock music: three minute melodic songs, mainly driven by the electric guitar over a rhythm section of bass and drums, and sometimes arranged with other instruments. Fifty years later the world audience of rock music had been served more than 100,000 collections of songs, for a grand total of more than one million songs. Every time a musician of the 2000s released an album that was a collection of three-minute songs, that musician had basically answered "yes" to the question "Does the world really need ten/fifteen more of these three-minute songs, so that the grand total goes from one million to one million and ten?"

No matter how much the magazines hailed the new album by this or that "next big thing" or "alternative artist" (obviously convinced of having a unique voice, a unique message and a unique set of refrains never heard before in the history of music), there was something terribly obsolete and (ultimately) tedious about listening to yet another batch of three-minute songs. The magazines hailed them as masterpieces, one after the other, but over a decade the same magazines would remember only two or three of the songs contained in all the "masterpieces" of an artist. This huge library of more than one million songs was fundamentally a junkyard. These boatloads of new songs were moving straight from the store to the junkyard after a brief stop in the CD player of a hapless consumer. Something was fundamentally wrong about an art whose main effect was to create the biggest garbage dump of all times.

Last but not least, the lyrics of a three-minute song are neither William Shakespeare verses nor Henry James novels, despite what most songwriters and most of their reviewers may think. Listening to a new three-minute song invariably meant listening to yet another bad example of storytelling or bad example of poetry oversold by reviewers as meaningful, poignant, touching, thrilling, whatever lyrics. Bottom line: more junk for the junkyard.

This was the mother of all crises facing rock music at the beginning of the 21st century.

The Great Divide

Surprisingly, by the end of the century the white-black divide had not been erased at all. The world of popular music was still largely divided into white and black music. White music was mostly rock and its variations (whether heavy-metal or punk-rock). Black music was definitely not rock (hardly any black musician in heavy-metal or punk-rock bands) and mostly dance-oriented. Forty years after the peak of the civil-rights movement, there were virtually no white bands fronted by a black singer anywhere in the world. The majority of black musicians were still playing in all-black bands, and the majority of white musicians were still playing in all-white bands (or, better, bands with no black musician, because the number of Latin American and Far Eastern musicians in white bands had dramatically increased). White music was still largely "mind" music, while black music was still largely "body" music, although the corporeal music of the blacks often carried a more meaningful message than the intellectual music of the whites. Even when white musicians played black music (as it has been the case since the 1950s), they tended to do it with other white musicians rather than with black musicians. Black musicians, on the other hand, rarely bothered to play white music at all.

If one does not count the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Prince and the Revolution (neither of which was truly a band, as their titles imply), rock music had to wait until 1994 for a white band fronted by a black vocalist, Hootie & The Blowfish, to attain mainstream success. For all its widely advertised rebelliousness, unconformity and liberal lifestyles, rock music remained the most racially segregated art/industry of all.
On the other hand, this racial barrier continued to provide an invaluable creative source. After all, rock'n'roll, ironically, originated from the segregated society of the 1950s. Rock music originated from the wall that the Establishment had erected between white and black communities. Had they coexisted as equals, white teenagers may have never been so morbidly attracted to the music of black teenagers. And probably black teenagers would have been so integrated in the USA lifestyle that soul and rhythm'n'blues and hip-hop would have never happened. Ironically, it was, to some extent, the very racial nature of these genres that kept them in a permanent state of evolution/revolution.

What is Rock Music/ Park Two

As the number of subgenres multiplied and their styles diverged ever more wildly from the original canon of the 1950s, the term "rock music" became less and less meaningful. At the turn of the century, it was difficult to classify Pansonic or Vibracathedral Orchestra as rock music, but their albums were mainly reviewed by rock critics for rock publications. Even garage-rock or heavy-metal bands were becoming so experimental that they hardly related to the classics anymore. The world of the avantgarde had moved closer and closer to the world of rock music. It was not clear who was what anymore. "Rock" had become a federation of genres rather than a well-defined genre.
This schizophreny was already there in the 1960s, when rock music encompassed everything from Dylan's folk-rock to King Crimson's progressive-rock, and every decade added new sub-genres. Eventually, rock music had become a genealogical tree of genres, each one owing its existence to some predecessor going back all the way to the generation of Chuck Berry. Rock music was never a uniform, monolithic style, but simply a historical chain of events: Chuck Berry begat the Stones who begat the Velvet Underground who begat Brian Eno who begat the new wave... etc. As the genealogical tree unfolds, one gets to musicians who play a music wildly different from Chuck Berry's, but owe their existence to a socio-musical revolution that started in the 1950s with rockers such as Berry. Thus it is "rock". But not quite.
"Rock" was born as a music of synthesis (of white and black music), and continued to remain essentially a synthesis of styles, from electronica to grindcore. Fundamentally, there was a need for a new term but nobody came up with one. Jazz also had evolved over the decades, but there had always been a prevailing jazz style (swing, bebop, free-jazz, ...) that played the role of center of mass for all the other jazz subgenres. Rock was a looser term because, at any point in time, no subgenre prevailed.
Rock music was born a music of and for young people (or, at least, young people thought so, not realizing how much their choices were being manipulated by the managers of the major recording labels). Rock music used to be a music for young people only because young musicians were the only ones willing to experiment, and young listeners were the only ones willing to listen to their experiments. This fact remained true to an extent through the following decades (each generation being reluctant to accept the styles in vogue among the new generations), but not as much as it used to be in the 1960s. The adults of the turn of the century were much more willing to listen to something "weird" than their parents had been, although there remained psychological resistance to accepting a style different from the styles one had grown up with. The gap between young people and adults was mainly due to the amount of new music that they listened to. Younger people enjoyed the huge advantage of having a lot more time to listen to music than older people. That, ultimately, was the factor that still created a gap between the generations. Despite this inevitable gap (due more to time constrains than to ideological differences), "rock" music was more "adult" than it had ever been. Both the average age of the musicians and the average age of the audience had increased dramatically from the 1960s. Thus rock music could not even be simplistically termed "teenage music". Death of the Hero
Among the many social transformations of the new century one stood out: the death of the hero. The generation growing up after the advent of cable news television did not experience had a fundamentally different kind of exposure to world news. Previous generations were fed readio or television news at a specific time of the evening, and shared that event with the entire nation. The entire nation was exposed to the same range of emotions. Not surprisingly, the response to a world event was relatively uniform across the entire nation. The fact that the news was limited to a narrow time window increased its emotional impact. As MacLuhan said, the media created the message. Because the news were delivered in this fashion, they facilitated the emergence of hero figures. Bob Dylan was a product of that age. In the age of 24-hour live news that uniform collective response was lost forever. People absorbed the news at different times in different ways. The Internet further diluted the emotional impact, as people could get the news when they wanted (not when the media delivered them). Inevitably, becoming a national hero became a lot more difficult. The demise of the national hero had a profound effect on all the arts. The Death of the Icon

Each decade in the history of rock music (the ultimate international koine) was marked by an international icon (a koine within the koine).
The 1950s had Elvis Presley (best selling artist for 40 years).
The 1960s had the Beatles (still the best selling band of all times).
The 1970s had Pink Floyd (still the best selling album-oriented band of all times).
The 1980s had U2 and Madonna, and already one could see the Atlantic divide getting wider, and a non-rock artist (Michael Jackson) surpassing all rock artists in generating worldwide hysteria.
The 1990s had very pale icons compared with their predecessors. No rock artist managed to get even close to the sales of non-rock artists such as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, Britney Spear, Boyz II Men, etc. The best selling rock albums were one-shot deals from artists such as Alanis Morissette and Hootie & the Blowfish whose popularity lasted only a few years. Radiohead were darlings of the mainstream press, but hardly recognized by the masses or identified with a social trend.
Eminem opened the 2000s with a bang, but faded rapidly in the background as the decade progressed.

Bottom line: the new century continued a trend towards disposing of the "hero", a trend that probably started with the end of the Cold War.

The Digital Era

For the first three decades rock music evolved in a rather turbulent manner. Every ten years or so a major socio-musical revolution caused a complete realignment of its aesthetic paradigm and induced a similar change in habits and values of young western people. Those revolutions work as generational dividing lines. The first one took place in 1955, when Chuck Berry and the other black rockers introduced a paradigm of rebellion to the American lifestyle and a paradigm of bodily music (something similar took place in rhythm'n'blues music at about the same time).

A second dividing line was represented by 1966, when musicians such as Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa introduced a much more complex view of rock music. That led to the "psychedelic" and "progressive" sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This time the music was openly political (not just rebellious) or spiritual (not just anti-conformist). It was therefore a music for the mind, not the body, and that was, in retrospective, its major innovation: rock music became a more conceptual and more adult form of art than it had been in the 1950s and early 1960s. (Something similar took place in soul music).

The third obvious dividing line is 1976, the "new wave", when musicians such as Pere Ubu, the Residents, Suicide, the Pop Group and Throbbing Gristle reinvented rock music as a rather depressing form of music, a music inspired by the violent and nihilistic "punk" aesthetic. It was a music of anarchy instead of order, and it marked a return to the body, away from the mind. (A parallel trend could be detected in funk/disco music and in hip-hop).

The fourth dividing line was a bit less obvious, as the 1980s witnessed an unprecedented multiplication of styles and a proliferation of musicians, but 1987 can be conveniently used as the year in which independent/alternative rock music took a different shape: the Pixies, Fugazi, Royal Trux, Guns N'Roses, My Bloody Valentine, Godflesh, Jane's Addiction (as well as Public Enemy in hip-hop) continued the "bodily" regression and largely returned to a simpler form of rock music. The key difference was the "emotional" impact, which eventually led to grunge and emo-core.

The fifth revolution came with the mass adoption of electronic and especially digital devices. If electronic keyboards had simply expanded the spectrum of sounds, digital devices allowed musicians to conceive of new ways of organizing those sounds. Digital music had an extra degree of freedom. This revolution was prepared by the likes of Autechre, Oval and Pansonic, but came into its own in 1999/2000 with the generation of Four Tet, Solex, DJ Logic, the Books, the Animal Collective, etc. And something similar happened in black music with "digital" producers and soundsculptors such as Dalek.

Each age was not so much a negation of the previous ages as a re-interpretation of the styles of previous ages. Thus the many "revivals" that took place in each decade.

The watershed years are not difficult to recognize: they are epitomized by a general attitude to innovate as opposed to emulate. Trivially, one could say that at some point people (mainly kids) start behaving in a different way, and it comes natural to them. Later, people/kids will behave the way they are "supposed" to behave. It is the difference between just doing something and doing what one presumes s/he is supposed to do. Hippies did not take pictures of themselves: they were just what they felt like being (the media labeled it "hippy"). But kids who traveled to San Francisco ten years later would take pictures of themselves dressed up like hippies. There are a few years when behavior changes driven by an invisible social force. And then a longer period in which it becomes fashionable to behave the new way.

The transition from one age to the next age was often accompanied by the advent of a new instrument. First came the electric guitar, then the keyboards, then electronic instruments, then a return to the electric guitar, then the laptop.

Each age absorbed elements from other styles of music, but usually one prevailed in each age (as an influence). Thus rhythm'n'blues was the main influence on early rock music, then jazz took over in the second half of the 1960s, then the avantgarde inspired the new wave, classic rock inspired indie-rock, and the soundsculptors inspired the digital era.

And each age had a movement of reaction to this trend (Presley and the Beatles at the beginning, glam-pop in the 1960s, synth-pop during the new wave, pop-metal during the 1990s, and probably some form of digital-pop in the digital era).

But, mostly, each age challenged the dogmas of the previous one. So much so that very few "fans" migrated from one generation to the next one, each generation remaining convinced that only mediocre imitation or noise was being produced by the following one. The mediocre imitations were indeed such (musicians who kept playing the same old music). But the "noise" was the new exciting music that only some in the new generation were capable of identifying with. Long-term, that "noise" was what mattered.

That "noise" was the history of rock music.
In a sense, this was the main link between each ages of "rock" music: it was meant to be incomprehensible to the previous generations.

Criticism in the age of Download

The availability of music on the Internet, and particularly of recent releases, had a healthy effect on one vital aspect of the music industry: rock critics. It freed thousands of rock critics (both professionals and amateurs) from the psychological deference towards the labels that sent them promos for review. For decades the rock critics and the radio stations had to rely on friendly labels to send them free promos of new music. This created a master-slave relationship that never boded too well for the objectivity of the opinions expressed by the slaves (rock critics and radio stations). Indirectly, the fact that a new release could be downloaded anonymously, without fear of reprisal by the source, allowed the rock critic to become truly independent (for the first time ever). The traditional rock critics, who depended on the labels, had to face the competition of truly independent rock critics, who did not depend on those labels. The only advantage that the traditional rock critic still had was the timely delivery of new music. The masses, though, were so overwhelmed by the amount of music that they quickly learned the value of waiting for objective reviews. Hip-hop and the digital producer
Hip-hop dominated the charts in the first decade of the 21st century. That represented a dramatic change from 50 years earlier, when black music was segregated in "race" charts. The reason that rap artists appealed to such a broad audience was probably that they boasted, on average, the best producers. Music (whether popular or classical) in the second half of the 20th century had been increasingly focusing on the soundscape, on sculpting the atmosphere, rather than on the melody. Hip-hop music completed that trend by mostly disposing of the melody and setting the lyrics in a purely atmospheric context. The producer (the sound director and sculptor) was clearly more important in hip-hop music than rock music. Competition among producers in turn led to generations of more and more sophisticated producers. Very few rock producers could compete with hip-hop producers in terms of instrumental creativity. Black producers of the 2000s were the real pupils of the white producers (Joe Meek, Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Wilson) who coined the concept of the studio as an instrument. Another appeal of hip-hop music rested in the fact that the lyrics of rappers tended to be less pompous and indulgent than the lyrics of rockers. It made sense to listen to the raps in a way that did not make sense in rock music. Rockers were largely speaking to an older audience that was still interested in personal existential journeys (the same way that country singers had been speaking to an older audience when rockers were speaking to a younger audience). However, the younger generation (especially in the middle class) was often more attracted to the down-to-earth lyrics of black rappers. The commodization of atmosphere
Two macroscopic trends emerged. One was typical of the pop crowd, that veered towards more and more sophisticated arrangements, longer songs, complex stories. The other one was typical of the avantgarde crowd, that veered towards ever more abstract soundscapes, whether of colossal post-psychedelic drones or of futuristic electronic cacophony, with a direction that was clearly towards an ever greater reliance on computers. The age of chamber pop and of digital soundscapes was basically the same age. Both deemphasized the central power of the melody and decentralized sound so that peripheric elements (whether acoustic timbres or artificial sounds) became more and more relevant. The aesthetic principle was the same of so much "atmospheric" music of the past, except that now it didn't require an orchestra and a sophisticated producer. In the new century, crafting atmospheres had become as commonplace as writing software.

The loser was the punk generation. That momentum had clearly drained away. What was left of punk aesthetic was the sloppiness not the fury. Both singer-songwriters, one-man bands, regular bands and avantgarde combos often displayed a preference for a casual, careless attitude in delivering music (even though sometimes it had been painstakingly composed). That was punk's true legacy: another nail in the coffin of the Western musical tradition of aiming for the perfect combination of sounds.

The history of music as a remix

The remix became a pervasive concept during the 2000s. The concept had originally served a dj to turn favorites of the old generation into favorites of the new generation. The concept implied that the creation of music was a process of remixing the past. If the concept of rock music as it emerged during the 1960s was fundamentally a "revolution", the concept of rock music (whatever "rock" still meant) was one of remixing the revolution. It no longer aimed at being a revolution of any kind, but simply a reinterpretation. At the same time it was not simply a "cover" song of an old song. A cover song duplicates the original note by note. The remix simply udpates a song to new instruments and new styles, to the point that (thanks to the power of electronic and digital devices) the original song does not exist anymore for any practical purpose. The result of a remix may be even more dramatic than the result of a "revolution", but the spirit is different: it acknowledges a debt to the past, to the previous generation. The "revolution" hated the past and the previous generation, and, in fact, because it had little in common (ideologically as well as artistically). The demise of the cover art
A little noted side effect of the digital download and of the consequent demise of the CD was the end of an illustrious craft that dated from the dawn of recording: the cover art. That art had peaked during the 1960s, when each album cover was carefully assembled or painted. The advent of the CD had downgraded the cover art, simply because the CD was smaller and did not allow the artists as much space. However, CDs could still came packaged in creative manners (other than the usual environmentally-unfriendly plastic wrap). Once the industry shifted to the digital download, though, the cover art died. For the first time, the music was to be enjoyed with no visual complement. If the music came with a video, then most likely the video was a recording of the musicians.
Preface

2000: life expectancy in the USA is 77

2000: the NASDAQ stock market crashes, wiping out trillions of dollars of wealth

2000: the population of the USA is 280 million and the most populated state is California with over 30 million people

2000: British and American biologists decipher the entire human DNA

2000: Clinton announces a record budget surplus, the largest in US history

2000: George W Bush becomes president on a technicality, even though Clinton's vice-president Al Gore wins the majority of votes

2000: the divorce rate in the USA is 57%, the highest ever in history

2001: the USA enters a recession, ending the longest economic expansion of its history

2001: the USA tests a missile defence shield

2001: the Voyager leaves the solar system

2001: Arab terrorists affiliated with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization blow up the World Trade Center, killing 4,000 people

2001: the USA bombs the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan and chases Al Qaeda members throughout the world

2001: several cases of the biological weapon anthrax are detected around the United States

2001: Bush announces that the US withdraws from the anti-ballistic treaty (ABM)

2001: 3% of the American population is in jail

2002: Russia becomes an ally of NATO

2002: US stock markets crash, following corporate scandals, the third consecutive year of decline

2002: Bush announces the first budget deficit since 1998, bringing the grand total to six million billion dollars (about $21,000 per US citizen)

2002: American scientists synthesize a live virus from chemicals

2002: Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world with over 200 billion dollars in revenues (followed by Exxon and General Motors, also American)

2002: the West Nile virus spreads from state to state and kills dozens of people

2002: George W Bush enacts a doctrine of first strike against foes and of continued military supremacy by the USA

2002: a serial sniper (John Allen "MUhammad" Williams) shoots a dozen people at random in the Washington/Maryland area

2003: The space shuttle "Columbia" crashes during landing, killing the whole crew