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The History of Rock Music - the 2000S

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The History of Rock Music - the 2000S The History of Rock Music - The 2000s The History of Rock Music: 2000- Genres and musicians of the 2000s (Versione italiana) History of Rock Music | 1955-66 | 1967-69 | 1970-75 | 1976-89 | The early 1990s | The late 1990s | The 2000s | Alpha index Musicians of 1955-66 | 1967-69 | 1970-76 | 1977-89 | 1990s in the US | 1990s outside the US | 2000s Back to the main Music page Inquire about purchasing the book (Copyright © 2002 Piero Scaruffi) Part 7. The Digital Age (roughly 2001-08) 1. The 2000s: Decade of Fear 2. DJs and Rappers 3. Bards and Dreamers 4. Tunesmiths 5. Populists 6. Intellectuals 7. Clubbers 8. Rockers 9. Trippers The 2000s: Decade of Fear TM, ®, Copyright © 2008 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. Within a few months the relative peace and stability of the Clinton era were totally reversed. The "dot com" bubble crashed in april 2000. The election to succeed Clinton was won by George W. Bush on a technicality (his opponent had won more votes). Nonetheless Bush interpreted the result of the elections as a mandate to pass highly divisive right-wing policies. The longest economic expansion in USA history came to a sudden halt in his first months as president. Then in september 2001 terrorists affiliated with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda carried out a spectacular attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people. The USA retaliated by bombing the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan and launching a worldwide "war against terrorism". Bush coined the expression "axis of evil" for the totalitarian regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that now represented the enemies in the post-Soviet era, and in 2003 proceeded to take out the first one, Saddam Hussein. For the rest of the decade the USA was involved in two lengthy wars of attrition, plus intense diplomatic pressures to deter North Korea and Iran. Those wars and a generally arrogant attitude towards the rest of the world gained the USA an unprecedented degree of hostility, even among the traditional allies of Western Europe (where millions attended anti-USA demonstrations). The USA's policy of "globalization" further alienated foreign masses, that widely interpreted it as a Edited and updated in 2010 by Rocco Stilo The History of Rock Music - The 2000s plan for world hegemony. Suddenly the world identified the USA not as the defender of freedom but as the most polluting country in the world and the most imperialistic, a barbaric regime that still administered the death penalty and that tortured prisoners of war. Anti-USA sentiment brought to power leftist regimes throughout Latin America. Internally the USA was rocked by political scandals while the budget deficit skyrocketed, the dollar collapsed and the trade deficit mushroomed. Signs of global decline were greeted all over the world: in 2007 China overtook the USA to become the world's second largest exporter, and Toyota passed General Motors as the world's largest car manufacturer. In 2007 the stock market hit a record high, but then oil prices started increasing dramatically and a financial crisis caused banks to collapse. One year later (in october 2008) the USA stock market had lost almost half of its value. The crisis spread from one continent to the other: markets worldwide plunged into chaos, heralding the worst recession since the 1970s and stroking fears of a new depression. During the presidential campaign of 2008 oceanic crowds gathered to listen to the first black candidate, Barack Obama, the son of an African man, a sign that the nation had not lost hope. The following january he, a man of African and Muslim descent, became the world's most powerful person in the capital of the Western and Christian world. However, he was now presiding over a worldwide economic catastrophe. During this era of turmoil the great social transformation within the USA took place in cyberspace. Over the decades, rock music has always been the soundtrack of alternative youth lifestyles. In the case of "Generation Y", born between 1981 and 1999, it was a "digital" lifestyle. They grew up with videogames, email, instant messaging, music downloads, movie rentals, cable television, blogs. This was the first generation for whom there was no centralized source of news and entertainment (previous generations had come of age in a world still dominated by three television networks, by five major record labels, by major movie studios and theaters, etc). This was the first generation for whom the primary source of information and news was the Internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had founded Google in 1998, and Google became the main interface with the world for an entire generation. Social networking software such as Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, became their primary source of socialization. In 2001 Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, a multilingual encyclopedia that was collaboratively edited by the world-wide web community, and soon became the most trusted source of knowledge. Just like in the previous decades, the biggest change in lifestyle was probably for women. The Western woman was still busy rebuilding her identity and her role in society. For example, this was the first time in history that so many women were still single in their thirties. The average age for a woman to get married had progressively increased, but now it had reached a point that made it unlikely these women would ever become mothers or even wives. Single women in their thirties constituted de facto a new social class that never existed before. Death of the Hero TM, ®, Copyright © 2008 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. 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 had a fundamentally different kind of exposure to world news. Previous generations were fed radio 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 McLuhan 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, instead, that uniform Edited and updated in 2010 by Rocco Stilo The History of Rock Music - The 2000s 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. 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, 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. Yet another definition of Rock Music TM, ®, Copyright © 2008 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved. 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 "technical" definition of rock music to start with. During 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 found 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.
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