Is Rock Running on Empty?

For the first time in its near 40-year history, rock ‘n’ roll is no longer the creative center of pop music.

The important thing isn’t so much how another pop form--the controversial, inner-city street sound of rap--has for the moment grabbed the creative momentum, but how rock squandered its power.

There is still some experimentation and imagination in rock but the rate of progress is almost glacierlike compared to past eras.

And many of the most challenging new artists in rock have been forced into such an isolated fringe of the pop world that you need a road map to find them.

The blame for the current stagnation begins with conservative radio programmers who favor passive pop sounds over the independent rock spirit that radio stations once championed.

However, blame must also be placed on the mainstream rock audience that is willing to accept the hollow, artificial sound of countless hit bands--from Bon Jovi to White-snake--who feed off the tradition of rock without adding an ounce of passion to it.

These elements have been draining rock of its vitality since the early ‘70s. The fact that they haven’t brought the music to its knees earlier is a tribute to the richness of the rock tradition and the leadership of its best artists.

As rock moves into the ‘90s, however, it’s time to look at the durability of that tradition and the role of those artists.

Among the many questions:

Is the musical language of rock simply exhausted?

Are many of the music’s once-vital figures--including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones--slowly leading their followers down a path of nostalgia?

The answers are not encouraging.

Consider:

* Many of the most creative rock artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s--the Rolling Stones to Bruce Springsteen--do continue to fill stadiums and arenas, but their concerts are built largely around material they wrote at least 10 to 15 years ago. The result is creeping nostalgia that isn’t healthy for the artists or their audience.

One tenet of young rockers in the early days of the music was to keep growing musically so that they didn’t end up in Las Vegas showrooms, playing oldies for the supper-club crowd. But many of our most respected artists are now doing what they once feared. The only difference is they are playing the oldies in the Coliseums and the Forums instead of Las Vegas. (See accompanying article.)

* Dozens of the most popular new hard-rock bands--from Cinderella to Poison--are rehashing the same images and sounds of past rock models. This leads to a deadening of the rock ‘n’ roll pulse. These bands may appear to be upholding the tradition of Elvis, the Beatles and Hendrix, but it’s consumer fraud. Aside from the occasional, inspired Guns N’ Roses, arena hard-rock has become the professional wrestling of pop.

Where rock’s most prized attractions over the years have encouraged independent thinking by demonstrating their own individuality, the lesson served up by today’s passionless mainstream rock heroes is to simply accept the status quo. The sad part is that audiences have accepted the music on these terms.

* Thirty-six years after Bill Haley first invited American teen-agers to rock around the clock, the musical language of rock seems worn. Because most of today’s rock groups are dealing with instrumentation and chord structures that were introduced--and largely defined--in the ‘50s and ‘60s, their role is reduced largely to mixing and matching past styles.

Traces of the Stones, Beatles, Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin and the Byrds abound. The best of the new bands deal with issues of substance in artful and original ways, but it’s music, not themes, that gives rock its primary impact and the music of rock rarely dazzles the way rivals do in, say, rap.

* Radio continues to champion bland recording acts, while keeping potentially revolutionary new ones largely hidden from the mainstream pop audience. This trend began shortly after the Woodstock festival in 1969, when radio executives realized there were big bucks to be made from this new rock audience.

Instead of promoting the independent, experimental artists whose works infused rock with enough power to make Woodstock possible, stations began playing music that would appeal to the widest possible audience. This resulted in a timid, non-threatening approach that eventually ushered in a whole new set of heroes, few of whom mattered. Remember Kansas and Styx?

* MTV, which helped restore a spirit in rock in the early part of this decade by giving a young generation of fans its own, new heroes, has also elevated visuals to such importance in promotional campaigns that a discouraging number of new pop stars seem more gifted as dancers than as singer-creators.

If all this suggests that rock has run out of steam, it doesn’t mean that the trend is irreversible. At the same time, it is sobering to recall that other once-powerful pop styles have virtually disappeared. Rock is not guaranteed a place in the pop community of the 21st Century.

Did anyone who loved swing in the ‘30s imagine that by the ‘50s the music would seem like an antique?

Rock was built on a synthesis of pop styles--notably gospel, blues and country--and the music may now be able to rejuvenate itself by borrowing energy from emerging pop forms.

The need for fresh musical resources has been apparent for years to key veteran rock figures--including Peter Gabriel and David Byrne--who reached out to other pop cultures, including African and Latin American.

Britain’s dominance in rock over the last 25 years is due in part to the willingness of English music fans to assimilate musical strains from other cultures and countries.

Just as the British rock community embraced reggae and rap faster than U.S. rock listeners, British fans now are turning to various forms of hip-hop and the ultra-fast disco sound of Chicago-based house music more quickly.

One significant part of the much-publicized Manchester music scene in England is the way rock fans there accept equally music from the guitar-oriented or techno-pop bands from the area as well as disco music from Italy or Chicago, rap from Los Angeles and New York and more conventional rock. There’s no list of acceptable and unacceptable styles.

That’s not typically the case in this country. One reason U.S. rock fans are so narrow in their tastes is an “us” versus “them” attitude that was the outgrowth of radio station strategy in the mid-’70s. The stations felt that the easiest way to build a strong rock identity in the heavily competitive ratings battle was to exclude country, pop and soul music strains.

Rap’s vitality in recent years is due in part to the intensity of the black teen-age fans who insist on new attitudes and sounds from their favorites and who don’t depend on radio--which, outside of KDAY-AM in Los Angeles, rarely plays rap--to discover new artists.

The rock world appears powerful and unified when millions around the world tune in Live Aid or when thousands turn out night after night to see the consensus superstar of a given year--Prince during the “Purple Rain” tour . . . Bruce Springsteen on the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour . . . U2 during the “The Joshua Tree” tour.

But much of the audience seems simply curious--merely checking out what’s hot, akin to seeing the latest blockbuster at the local movie theater. The same fans might go with equal enthusiasm a few nights later to see the bland pop-rock offerings of Phil Collins or Richard Marx or Skid Row or Warrant.

While it’s possible for individual fans to find bands--from Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden to the Jesus and Mary Chain and Megadeth--that mean as much to them as the Beatles or the Who did in a different age, these bands show little sign of touching the mass pop consciousness.

Much of the mainstream invisibility of worthy “underground” attractions is due to the timidity of radio programmers, but hundreds of young bands have contributed to the gulf between the pop mainstream and the alternative rock scene.

Having grown up in a pop climate that taught them virtually everything on the radio is worthless, they don’t even try to reach for hits the way the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival once did. They are satisfied by the independent, largely underground network that was pioneered by such radical, uncompromising groups as Black Flag and the Replacements.

This has led to an impasse. Much of the pop world has lost faith that rock is still vital and much of the rock world no longer strives to reach a mass audience.

So what lies ahead?

If the mass pop audience refuses to demand more, it’s unrealistic to expect radio to change. Stations are presumably playing the music that people want to hear.

But the matter of respected rock veterans stripping themselves of the nostalgia components is a valid area of discussion. David Bowie’s revolutionary vow to stop doing all his old songs after his current “Sound + Vision” tour made sense--and several other veteran artists should consider following his lead.

Among them: Elvis Costello, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and Stevie Wonder.

Not everyone will be pleased if any or all of those 10 artists kisses the past goodby.

Accountants, record company executives and concert booking agents for a start will be disappointed--because there is money to be made in those oldies.

Fans don’t just love their MTV. They also love their old favorites.

Established acts who swear off the nostalgic hits may lose a good share of their concert audience.

Giving up the old material may be too much of a sacrifice for these almost legendary veterans in terms of ego and flamboyant lifestyles, yet there is much to gain in such a move, most notably the thrill of re-establishing one’s artistry.

Don Henley and Sting, in leaving the Eagles and Police, respectively, have already shown that it is possible to move forward successfully with a new body of work.

Bowie’s “Sound + Vision” tour stands as a valuable lesson on why nostalgia shortchanges both artist and fan.

Time and context are as important as chord changes and melodies in rock and Bowie’s old songs no longer speak to the times the way they did in the ‘70s, when the young Englishman challenged sexual and social conventions with a boldness achieved only by a handful of artists in the modern pop era.

Bowie’s own distance from the music at Dodger Stadium made it difficult for the older members of the audience to feel comfortable celebrating the past, and the idea of a history lesson for the younger fans was a cheat because they were getting the music without any understanding of the context that once made it relevant.

Will rock become a valuable but minority part of the pop spectrum--alongside, say, country music and jazz?

Or will rock rally and reclaim its dominance in the pop world?

The future may well depend on how the rock community--from radio programmers to artists to fans--answer this question: Is the music still worth fighting for?