Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Music Over the Hill, a Graying Rebellion Turned Establishment?

Look, I don’t like it any more than you do. But it’s time to face the music. Or at least its decline. If rock ‘n’ roll is not dead, its demise is rapidly being hastened by these 10 factors:

1. Rock ‘n’ roll halls of fame, museums and exhibits have turned a vital youth movement into an aged, tiring museum piece.

2. With both AM and FM rock stations dominated by oldies as a way to chase an aging population demographic, rock radio is going the way of big band music and “Music of Your Life.”

3. Once the music of rebellion, rock is now handed down from parent to child.

4. Rock music is now safe enough to be embraced by the biggest corporations as music for commercials--a lucrative trend that today’s rock musicians, with very few exceptions, welcome.

5. The prevalence of video has put added emphasis on style and visual presentation over substance. Music often becomes an afterthought.

6. The only original advancement in popular music in the past 10 years is rap. Rap is not rock.

7. Performing live has become, with few exceptions, ritualized, high-priced, rote behavior, a corporate exercise in encouraging T-shirt sales.

8. Elvis is dead. Buddy Holly is dead. Roy Orbison is dead. Marvin Gaye is dead. John Lennon is dead. Etc. etc. etc.

9. George Bush played electric guitar at one of his own presidential inaugural balls. Rock is the party music of Republicans.

10. Poison recorded “Your Mama Don’t Dance (and Your Daddy Don’t Rock ‘n’ Roll).”

I know, I know. “Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay, I dig it to the end.” So sang Danny and the Juniors, still making pacemakers short-circuit and gray heads bob on the Vegas circuit.

“Rock ‘n’ roll will stand,” insisted the Showmen, whom nobody has heard from in 30 years.

But even though the vitality and freshness of rock may endure through generations, and Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles will doubtless ring on into the next millennium, there are depressing mounds of evidence that rock ‘n’ roll--as prevalent as it seems to be--is nonetheless being kept alive on machines, endlessly rerun.

Bands such as Pink Floyd, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd and now the Doobie Brothers, the Who and the Allman Brothers are returning to arena-packed success, partially because radio keeps them alive. The Grateful Dead is actually more popular today than it was in its ‘60s heyday.

This lust for the past is precisely what makes the future of rock dim.

A lot of hits borrow liberally from the rock successes of the past: Phil Collins does Motown, Guns N’ Roses does Aerosmith (who did the Rolling Stones), Poison does Kiss. Most metal is nothing but recycled metal of the ‘70s on different speeds.

There are no real advancements in rock being made. Rather, we are inundated with Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, merely the Styx and REO Speedwagon of a new generation; here today, forgotten tomorrow.

Punk, the last shot of adrenaline to rock ‘n’ roll, was dead as soon as it became commercially assimilated.

“What were once sharp, angry fangs are rendered soft, ineffective gums,” wrote Julie Burcheill and Tony Parsons in their tract “The Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock and Roll.”

“By maintaining the music’s illusion of youth rebellion, it accomplishes its purpose--a greenback producer. Punk started as a movement born out of no fun and ended as a product whose existence was no threat.”

The obituary, recently reissued, was first released in 1978.

Rock ‘n’ roll’s real battles were fought in the ‘50s, when the vitality and urgency of this vibrant, new, racially integrated sound was fighting its way into the dull conservatism of the Hit Parade.

It was 32 years ago, at the Easter Jubilee of Stars at the New York Paramount, that Alan Freed proclaimed victory: “The big fight is over, and you and I have won.”

But what would even Alan Freed make of the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner, a high-priced exercise in self-congratulation where the top ticket price is $1,250 and the roughest of the rockers turn up in tuxedos?

“Jean Cocteau said Americans are a funny people,” Mick Jagger said in accepting an award for the Rolling Stones. “First you shock them, then they put you in a museum.”

As hard as it is to believe now, big band music was once the province of the young. And so was rock ‘n’ roll. I’ll put up a $10 donation to the impending Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland for everyone under 30 allowed into the Waldorf Astoria for the fete.

Now, parents spin their Beatles records for their kids, and they listen, blissfully, together. There is no rebellion, except when kids get older, pull on their black, $21 metal concert T-shirts, turn up this year’s version of Grand Funk Railroad and pretend that they’re rebelling (against whom? Certainly not the T-shirt manufacturer).

Part of rock’s success had to do with the fact that rock could sell. People could make big money on kids’ music. This raging commercial potential in the ‘60s is precisely what led to rock ‘n’ roll’s first underground movement. The creative, paisley-tinged psychedelia that served as the musical arm of the worldwide youth movement, shut out from the Top 40, started popping up on the generally unused FM dials.

When it suddenly became clear, a few years down the road, that money could be made at FM rock stations as well, play lists and strict formats were installed as well to keep stations at their profit-making peak.

This led to another revolution, in the ‘70s, by the punks.

But in the ‘80s, there was no revolution. When U2 throws a free concert, it is to promote the group’s interests or to shoot a film.

There are vital things coming from R.E.M. and the Replacements and Midnight Oil--and some inspired work by veterans as old as Keith Richards and Lou Reed.

But each of the aforementioned groups’ work is mere flowering of sounds they started recording at the dawn of the decade; the traditions of Richards and Reed go back even further.

When was the last time you were bowled over by an original new rock artist? (Sorry, folks, Tracy Chapman is a folkie.)

The rise of compact discs encourages replacement of old scratchy rock classics. The big price discourages trying one’s luck on new sounds.

Rock has become so widespread and familiar, it’s also safe. It’s in movies and commercials and is translated to Muzak at an alarming rate. Reader’s Digest and Time-Life are in the rock ‘n’ roll anthology business, just as they once anthologized, ahem, the Big Band Era.

And Loggins and Messina’s lame “Your Mama Don’t Dance (and Your Daddy Don’t Rock ‘n’ Roll),” possibly the worst song ever recorded with “rock ‘n’ roll” in the title (or the parentheses for that matter), is fittingly being recycled by Poison, the worst band of the day.

The single is No. 16 with a bullet. A fatal bullet.