Matt Walsh argues rock music is dead, citing Billboard and Spotify data showing dominance by pop, rap, and country. He blames streaming algorithms for fragmenting culture, industry economics favoring solo acts, and outsourcing songwriting which stifled experimentation. Walsh explicitly links the genre's decline to Barack Obama's presidency, claiming it silenced rebellious bands like Green Day and Pearl Jam regarding political mandates. Furthermore, he attributes the loss of the white suburban demographic to psychiatric medication and big tech suppression, concluding that without new rebellious artists, rock will not return despite critics prioritizing diversity over quality. [Automatically generated summary]
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Rock's Decline in American Culture00:07:22
As you may have noticed recently on the show, we've started to focus more on cultural commentary, a little less on politics.
And the reason for that is partly, if I'm being totally transparent, I find the entire political podcasting space to be increasingly boring and redundant.
Everyone's saying the same things.
Everyone is talking about the same stories.
Conservative podcasters all repeat essentially the same basic talking points, unless they're fighting with each other, which is even more boring and at this point, even more redundant.
So I find it all incredibly uninspiring and uninteresting.
Which is enough reason to try to find different things to talk about.
Also, culture matters.
And that's why cultural commentary has really always been my primary focus.
All I'm doing now is kind of doubling down on it.
Culture is the shared traditions and heritage and values and artistic output of a given group of people.
It shouldn't need to be explained why that matters.
And if that doesn't matter, then it's hard to see how anything could possibly matter.
The problem in our culture is not so much that it's turning bad or being corrupted, although there is.
Certainly, plenty of that happening.
It's more that the culture is disappearing.
It's being erased.
American culture is vanishing.
So, on that note, today I want to take a look at something that used to be a hugely influential, unique, and distinctly American element of our culture, which in recent years has all but evaporated.
And that would be rock music.
Now, I have some personal ties to this issue long before I became a podcaster with my very own fancy fish cam.
In the early 2000s, I was a small market rock DJ.
It's not something I talk about very often, although every now and then various media outlets like to bring it up.
But today I'm going to make an exception because I now realize that in that capacity, I witnessed the last gasps of the entire genre of rock and roll.
I saw firsthand how it entered a slow motion death spiral and it would never recover for reasons that no one has ever really explained.
A cultural institution, a global phenomenon, one that is distinctly American.
Has essentially vanished.
So, how exactly did that happen?
Whatever your personal musical tastes happen to be, this matters because, again, culture matters.
And when a pillar of American culture just fades into oblivion, seemingly out of nowhere, it's worth talking about and trying to figure out why.
So, let's do that now.
Now, to start with, let's establish the premise rock music is dead.
The data makes it very clear that I'm not overstating the case here.
The genre basically doesn't exist anymore, certainly not in the mainstream anyway.
If you pull up the Billboard year end Hot 100 singles of 1996, here's what you'll see when you look at it.
You know, there are better years in the 90s to illustrate the point that I'm trying to make, but I'm taking this one because it was exactly 30 years ago.
As you can see, there's plenty of rock here, including Counting Blue Cars by Dishwala, The World I Know by Collective Soul, Wonderwall by Oasis, Hook by Blues Traveler, Just a Girl by No Doubt.
Until it sleeps by Metallica.
You got a Pearl Jam song, you got Gin Blossoms, a Goo Goo Doll songs on there as well.
There's also songs by iconic rock performers in bands like John Mellencamp, Melissa Etheridge, Smashing Pumpkins.
So if you're into rock music, needless to say, there's a lot there.
Most of these songs were wildly popular at the time and remain popular to this day.
They're classics.
And we used to get music like this every single year, a lot of it.
Multiple songs that would become classics of the genre.
Every single year, year after year.
Now, with that in mind, take a look at the current Billboard Top 100 as of April 2026, which mainly looks at streaming in addition to radio plays.
Completely different story.
The top songs right now are all just this urbanized pop stuff.
Pop and rap and country have kind of fused together and everything sort of sounds the same.
This particular list is dominated by country songs by artists like Cody Johnson, Luke Combs, Ella Langley, with that Choose in Texas song.
Along with pop and RB, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Olivia Dean, some rap as well.
Now, to my eye, the only new rock song on the entire list is number 33, Freaking Out by Dexter and the Moonrocks.
Weezer's on here as well, but that's for a song, the song Go Away, which came out a decade ago.
If you look at the top 50 streaming songs in the United States on Spotify, it's even worse.
The Billboard chart, as mentioned, includes both radio and it also includes physical media sales, but nobody listens to radio or buys physical media.
And the people who do tend to be much older.
So if you're going to find any rock music, you're going to find it when you include those sorts of things.
But if you go to streaming and you go to Spotify, it gives you the best idea of the actual listening habits of people, especially younger people.
So here's the list I counted seven different Justin Bieber songs on Spotify's list of their top songs right now.
Not a single new rock band on here, not a single one on the entire list, not one.
Fleetwood Mac, The Killers, the Googa Dolls are all charting with songs that are well over two decades old or many decades in Fleetwood's case.
Mr. Brightside is on here that came out in 2003.
And just to hammer the point a little further, there's an outlet called The Metalverse, which recently published an article entitled The 25 Most Popular Rock Bands in 2026, according to Spotify.
Let's put that up on the screen.
Now, again, these are the most popular rock bands in 2026.
Eldon John.
Which I wouldn't consider a band or rock, really, is number four.
Yes, a singer who was in his prime in the 1970s is currently considered the fourth most popular rock band in the United States on the most popular streaming platform.
And just for the sake of getting the full picture here, here's the full top 10 Arctic Monkeys, Linkin Park, Queen, Elton John, ACDC, The Beatles, Credence Clearwater Revival, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac, and Nirvana.
These are the top rock bands in 2026.
So it's basically a bunch of classic rock.
Closest you can possibly get to a band that's current is the Arctic Monkeys, which formed in 2003.
Linkin Park, the number two currently most popular rock band, formed in 1996.
Its lead singer died nine years ago.
And we see the same decline in the live music scene.
The only rock bands packing arenas today are geriatric boomer bands that peaked 50 years ago U2, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Rolling Stones, Springsteen.
There hasn't been a new Nirvana or a new Radiohead, a band like that, a sensation.
In the rock music space, or anything close to that level in memory.
In the 70s and 80s, some of the biggest music festivals in the world were Lollapalooza and Woodstock, and they were almost exclusively rock shows.
Today, the biggest festivals are like Coachella.
They're mostly pop, hip hop, EDM.
According to Nielsen Music, the number of Americans who say they listen regularly to rock music has declined from 27% in 2013 to 22% in recent years.
Why Professional Writing Killed Experimentation00:15:31
But those are mostly over the age of 55, those people.
And they're generally listening to stuff that came out decades ago.
So that's the diagnosis.
Rock music has died as a genre.
I mean, it's just undeniable when you look at the data, just that's the fact.
A thing that once defined American culture is now no longer even a part of it.
But the question of why is a lot more difficult to figure out.
One possible theory is related to the decline of the monoculture, which I've discussed on this show in the past.
There are now so many different streaming platforms and so much variety in content that it's become very difficult, if not impossible, for this country to have a shared cultural experience anymore.
I mean, there really isn't one.
There are plenty of high quality bands and movies and albums that can be very successful and profitable, and yet most of the country hasn't even heard of them.
By contrast, at the time of the British invasion and for several decades afterward, people had.
Very few options for discovering new music.
They learned about bands from a small number of networks, particularly late night television, magazines, radio stations.
When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, more than 73 million people were watching.
More than 73 million people in the United States, that's roughly 40% of the population of the entire country at the time, were watching this one performance live while it happened.
Other than the Super Bowl, no other cultural event gets anywhere near that kind of viewership today, not as a percent of the population.
Here's what it looked like to give you an idea.
I think it's fun.
Now, the modern comparison, unfortunately, would be somebody like Justin Bieber.
He just headlined Coachella.
Obviously, he's one of the most popular entertainers in the world.
According to Billboard, Bieber's set, quote, drew more than 100 million social impressions between the two weekends that he performed.
But those social media impressions, whatever that means exactly, were spread out over the entire world.
And also, you know, social media impressions don't really mean anything because people are, that just means that somebody engaged with it or saw it in their feed for a few seconds.
And it was sandwiched in between a bunch of other content.
They probably forgot they even saw it.
Not the same thing as 40% of the country sitting down at the exact same time to watch an entire performance live on TV.
If the internet existed when the Beatles were popular, if you were to try to translate the numbers, they would easily exceed those numbers.
They already exceeded 70 million viewers in just one country on TV.
Now everybody has a phone and a TV, and they're all watching 10 different things, often at the same time.
Which is one of the reasons that no one band can repeat the Beatles' success.
Late night shows and MTV have been replaced.
Music radio, which used to shape tastes and introduce you to new and especially local bands, no longer exists.
Now, the point is that we all used to be a part of the same culture, the same zeitgeist.
Young people had different tastes from older people, that's always been the case.
But everybody was swimming in the same cultural pool.
Now there are a million pools, or perhaps more like puddles.
And everybody's sort of splashing around in their own, disconnected from the others.
And all of that is determined by the algorithms.
The fracturing of the monoculture helps to explain not just the death of rock music, but of every other once mighty aspect of American culture.
All that stuff has been taken down because the monoculture went down.
But the decline of the monoculture isn't a sufficient explanation for the end of rock music in particular, because as we already established, Some genres of music are still thriving, arguably, anyway.
Not to the extent that they used to be.
I mean, there's even in other genres, there's no one.
I mean, there's a Michael Jackson movie is out right now.
Not much of a Michael Jackson fan myself.
But there's no one today who can compete with the star power that Michael Jackson had.
It just doesn't exist.
I mean, the closest you get is somebody like Taylor Swift, and it's just not the same thing at all.
I mean, Michael Jackson could.
Could go literally anywhere in the world.
He could go to a tribe somewhere in some third world country in a jungle and they would know who he was.
And that kind of thing doesn't exist anymore.
So you can't use that alone to explain why rock music has died.
There has to be another factor or set of factors to explain what's going on here.
On his YouTube channel, Rick Beato suggested another way of looking at the problem, which is to zoom out a little bit.
Instead of focusing on the end of rock music, we should try to figure out why bands in general of all genres. Are dying out.
Watch.
If you go to the top 50 chart right now in the US, you have Sabrina Carpenter, you have Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, you have Jimin, you have Chapel Roan, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, Morgan Wallen, Shabuzi, Kendrick Lamar, Tommy Richmond, Hosier, Zach Bryan, Casey Musgraves, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims.
It's just literally all solo artists.
So, next as an experiment, I put together a list of the top 400 artists in ranking of monthly listeners on Spotify.
And I look to see how many bands on there were created in the last 10 years.
Take a guess how many.
You might think, oh, I don't know, 25 bands, something like that, in the top 400 has to be a lot, right?
It's actually only three.
Only three bands in the top 400 artists on Spotify have formed within the last 10 years.
Three.
The only three bands he identified in the top 400, which formed within the past decade, were Grupo Frontera, Maniskin, and Richie Mitch and the Coal Miners.
None of them were ranked in the top 100 by audience size.
So less than 1% of the top 400 artists consists of bands that were formed in the past 10 years.
Again, pretty.
Striking.
The vast majority of artists are individual performers like Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and so on.
Now, there are several reasons why this change occurred.
For one thing, when everybody started streaming music, the economics for musicians became a lot tighter, it became much harder to split revenue between four or five people.
And more importantly, music production software is far more advanced than it was 20 years ago.
You don't need a band to create a drum track or a bass line anymore.
You could just have the software do it.
And on top of that, Social media rewards individual stars.
Audiences prefer to interact or think they're interacting with, say, Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez or whoever on Instagram rather than an entire group.
You know, they want to talk to the star, not the star and her sweaty backup guitarist.
That's not even getting into the fact that bands are much bigger risks for studios because they can split up, they can get involved in lawsuits.
Risk mitigation has become the name of the game, which is also why movie studios only put out sequels and franchise films.
They want safe and popular IP, less risk.
Mitigating risk is a great way to increase profits, but it's a terrible way to make art.
In fact, it's how you kill art.
That's what's happening right now.
But bands bring a lot of risk.
Take a look at what happened to Third Eye Blind, for example, one of the most successful alternative rock bands in the 90s.
They went through about a dozen personnel changes, multiple lawsuits were filed.
It's a nightmare for executives who would prefer the entertainers just shut up and make them more money.
But Rick Beato identified another possible cause in addition to all these, and this may be the key point.
Watch.
The other amazing thing about these bands is that they wrote their own songs.
Now, you would have artists like the Supremes or the Jackson Five that were part of Motown that have songwriters like Holland Dozier Holland that wrote for the Supremes or the Corporation that wrote for the Jackson Five, but for the most part, they wrote their own songs.
Now, you would have artists from the 70s and 80s that would actually split off, for example, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins from Genesis or Sting from The Police that would make their own solo records and have massive hits that they still wrote themselves.
This didn't really change until the late 90s and early 2000s.
This is when you started to have boy bands, for example, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, that would have these co writer producers or writer producers that would write their huge hits.
This is where people like Max Martin started to come on the scene.
And this also happened in rock music.
I know because I was part of this thing, being a producerslash songwriter.
You started to see artists like Aerosmith that had Diane Warren writing their biggest hit they ever had, their only number one.
I don't want to miss a thing, which came out in the early 90s, and rock bands of the early 2000s that would almost invariably have producer songwriters that would make their record.
And this really happened because the labels got involved, the AR people.
They were making less money because they were selling less records, and they wanted to guarantee that they had huge hit songs on every record.
So they would actually hire songwriter producers or get multiple songwriters to contribute to the record.
These would be rock bands that would appear to be bands, but they'd actually be co writers or Producers writing and making the records themselves and not even including the band in there.
Once record labels began outsourcing songwriting and became even more risk averse, certain kinds of music thrived.
It was much easier to make somebody like Justin Bieber into a star, for example.
His producer had him record some lo fi videos on YouTube, made him seem authentic, and then paired him with ready made beats and lyrics.
And all he had to do was go along with the script, and he became a money printing machine.
Plenty of other musicians did the same thing, as he mentioned.
But at the same time, other genres of music stagnated as a result of this change.
One of those genres was rock.
Rock's all about experimentation and boldness.
One of the Beatles' innovations, along with the Beach Boys, was making albums that didn't directly capture the feeling of a live performance.
They added effects and techniques that couldn't be replicated live, like loops and full orchestras and layered tracks and so on.
Other bands hadn't done anything like that before.
Rock musicians also advanced the idea, which originated in the 1950s, of a concept album like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by Pink Floyd or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis.
Albums that lasted the better part of an hour, and the tracks were intended to be, were not intended to be completely distinct from one another.
They were telling a story or they were communicating a coherent theme across multiple tracks.
And some of these tracks were extremely long, over 20 minutes in some cases.
Then there was Lou Reed's Metal Machine music, which was just an hour of guitar humming and feedback.
No vocals or anything approaching an actual song that people would want to listen to.
It sounded like this.
It was regarded correctly as one of the worst albums ever released.
The label pulled it from the store in a matter of weeks.
But the point is, it's not the kind of thing that a studio would voluntarily produce.
It's not an assembly line creation.
You got to give it credit for that, at least.
It took risks, to put it mildly, more like a middle finger to the executives.
And there was David Bowie, who changed his whole identity and his music style every few years, and on and on and on.
When you hire professional writers to produce radio friendly hits or streaming friendly hits these days, it's hard to replicate this kind of experimentation.
Now, that's not to say that Bowie didn't have famous producers.
He absolutely did, but he came up with his own style.
He was the chameleon of rock, along with many other entertainers.
He also created the expectation that rock music would be inventive and distinct.
And once that went away and rock became a sappy, generic, made for radio commodity like everything else, Aerosmith's I Don't Want to Miss a Thing comes to mind.
Then rock as a genre had no reason to exist anymore.
And by the way, I Don't Want to Miss a Thing was originally intended as a power ballad for Celine Dion.
That's according to the songwriter.
They only made it into an Aerosmith song because Steven Tyler's daughter was cast in the movie.
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Although I admit I have a soft spot for the song as a 90s kid, and it was a prime example of the now extinct monoculture.
It was a song everybody knew from a movie everybody saw.
And it was an original movie, too.
I mean, at least not a.
I mean, that year they came out with like four different movies about asteroids hitting the Earth, but it was not a pre existing IP, is the point.
So, a movie that's a huge hit, not a pre existing IP, with a song on the soundtrack that becomes utterly ubiquitous, none of that happens anymore.
But as tempting as it would be to blame writers for what happened to Rock Music, the truth is there's plenty of other factors at play.
And I don't intend this to be a political monologue exclusively, but it's hard to ignore the fact that Rock's decline was cemented during the presidency of Barack Obama.
You know, it's become something of a meme to blame Barack Obama for everything.
Thanks, Obama, being the operative phrase.
But in this case, unironically, there's a genuinely a reason to blame him.
There's a genuine reason to blame him for a lot of stuff, and this included.
You know, I've made the case before that the culture peaked in 2007 and across all the different artistic genres and mediums and has been declining ever since.
And I'm not going to repeat that whole case, but I think you can see it if you look at it.
And it's no coincidence that, you know, who was elected, whose presidency began in 2008, Barack Obama.
In the case of Rock, you know, it's obvious.
I mean, Rock's all about rebellion, it's about raging against the machine.
And raging against the machine became unacceptable the moment the machine was run by a black leftist.
Look what happened to Green Day, for example.
Not long after Barack Obama took office, they stopped singing about politics all the time, went back to breakup songs.
Then when Trump won, they began singing explicitly about the MAGA agenda, making it clear that they're, you know, shills for the Democrat Party.
Rage Against the Machine and Politics00:08:00
Pearl Jam began performing at fundraisers for Obama.
System of a Down took a conveniently timed hiatus from criticizing the establishment once Obama became president.
This is not a phenomenon that's unique to rock.
Of course, comedy died at roughly the same time for the same reason.
When people listen to you because they think that you're authentic and bold, and then you immediately begin and transgressive, then you immediately begin carrying water for an extremely powerful establishment figure because he's black and liberal, you lose all credibility.
You might as well shut it down at that point.
Even the rock musicians who did criticize Obama ultimately turned out to be shills for the establishment.
Rage Against the Machine is one of the best examples.
Their most famous lyric is F you, I won't do what you tell me.
And then during COVID, Tom Morello, the group's guitarist, demanded that everyone do exactly what the authorities told them to do.
He became a shill for government officials who committed the single greatest infringement on American civil liberties in modern history.
I mean, throughout COVID, Tom Morello promoted all the social distancing and all the mandates that many years later the self described experts would admit was fake all along.
He supported the public health bureaucracy as it ruined millions of lives, including the lives of children who were forced to stay at home instead of learning in school or socializing with their friends and family.
And he wasn't the only one.
I mean, by the way, if there was a real, if rock music had existed at the time, punk rock was a thing.
Like there would have been a huge music festival in defiance, in the middle of COVID, explicitly in defiance of all this stuff.
That would have been a punk rock thing to do, but it didn't happen.
Instead, all the rock stars said, yeah, wear your mask and stay at home now.
Be good little boys and girls.
Then in 2022, when he started holding concerts, the venues demanded that all attendees take, The COVID shot or provide a negative COVID test to get into a Rage Against the Machine concert.
You can see the screenshots there.
This is from their show at the United Center in Chicago, although there are plenty of other shows like this.
Quote What to expect?
The Rage Against the Machine tour will now start in the spring of 2022.
Proof of COVID 19 vaccination or negative test required.
All guests age five and over must provide proof of full vaccination or negative COVID test within 72 hours to enter the United Center.
Guests will provide their proof of vaccination or negative test within 72 hours, then continue through the security checkpoint.
Before the mobile ticket is scanned.
Nothing says rage against the machine more than bringing your COVID test through the security checkpoint so you can have access to the event.
Now, when people bring this up, Morello claims that actually these kinds of restrictions were lifted by the venues at the time the concert actually began.
But that's not a defense because, again, he was constantly promoting all these mandates for several years.
Here's what Morello told The Guardian in 2021, which was looking for his reaction to January 6th We came within a baby's breath of a fascist.
Coup in this country.
Interestingly, one of my dreams has always been to storm the Capitol, but not with a bunch of all white right wing terrorists, you know.
The ugliest part about it is how they co opted the idea of standing against the man, at least in the U.S. There can be no nuanced thinking like, yes, Big Pharma is horrible, but getting a vaccine to save your grandma is good.
It's a dumbed down version of resistance.
So that's the nuanced thinking that only smart people like Tom Morello are capable of.
Apparently, in his view, nuanced thinking means Big Pharma is horrible.
But their vaccine will save your grandma.
First of all, the problem with this thinking is that it's not nuanced at all.
It's just dumb.
If Big Pharma is truly horrible, then why would you trust them when they say that their vaccine will save your grandma?
Wouldn't an industry that's truly horrible also be capable of lying about claims like that?
And secondly, if Big Pharma isn't lying and their drug actually will save your grandma, then why are you saying they're horrible?
I don't know about you, but if someone saved my grandma from certain death, I probably wouldn't call them horrible.
Maybe they have other flaws, but it seems pretty harsh to say they're horrible right after they save your grandma, unless, of course, you don't like your grandma.
As is the case here, the vaccine did not save your grandma.
Big Pharma is horrible.
So you just go with the first part, not the second.
In any event, these people are obviously frauds.
Rage Against the Machine has long been signed with a big subsidiary of Sony called Epic Records.
So they want to bring down capitalism and take down Wall Street.
But meanwhile, they're working for one of the biggest multinational corporations on the entire planet.
They also play at huge corporate sponsored festivals and charge fans hundreds of dollars for tickets.
For the average fan who wanted to go to that 2022 tour, tickets were going for $300 to $400 a pop.
It's egregious, and it doesn't just destroy the image of this one group, it also undermines the credibility of the entire genre, which is part of the story here.
But I want to put all the blame on Raids Against the Machine because this is clearly a larger issue with the industry in general.
Think of it this way when Turning Point USA put together their counter programming for the Super Bowl halftime show just a couple months ago, which was wildly successful by any measure, How many rock bands lined up to participate?
Not many.
I mean, none except for Kid Rock, who is also an artist from the 90s.
But all the rest of them, they didn't want to step out of line.
They didn't want to get labeled as right wing or problematic.
They certainly didn't want to anger their label or the NFL.
Even though you would think, like, again, if you're rock and roll, I mean, hey, we're counter programming the NFL, this big corporate event.
That's pretty rock and roll, isn't it?
But no, they remain silent as a Puerto Rican who can't speak English mumbled some garbled lyrics in front of some gay dancers, a sleepy Mexican, and a prop sign that read, We accept EBT.
This is the dystopian vision of America that virtually no musician in the country would dare to challenge.
I guess that Super Bowl halftime show in the eyes of most musicians today was better than anything they could do.
And the sad thing is, they're probably right about that.
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The End of an Art Form00:12:49
So, whatever your politics may be, you should be able to see that politics nevertheless has directly contributed to the end of this once great American art form.
But again, it's not the only factor.
If you look at all the changes that have taken place in this country since the decline in rock music began, you quickly discover some other explanations as well.
And chief among them is demographic replacement.
Changing attitudes towards white people.
And no footage illustrates what I'm talking about better than this video from Leonard Skinner's performance at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977.
This again is in Oakland.
See what you notice here.
That was recorded just months before the plane crash that took out the band.
You're not going to find a crowd like that in Oakland anymore.
Notice how thin everybody is, for one thing.
Didn't have anywhere near as many obese people in the country compared to today.
Also, obviously, pretty much everyone is white.
The Hispanic population in Oakland has tripled since then by official estimates.
Actual numbers are probably much higher since most illegal aliens don't fill out the census.
But the real reason I wanted to show that video is to illustrate a few basic points.
The first is that a lot of major rock bands came from California, where white suburban culture is simply gone.
It's been wiped away completely, which is why many of the more recent rock bands like Greta Van Fleet and the Black Keys are from the Midwest, where the vestiges of white suburban culture still exist, sort of.
But on the other hand, Greta Van Fleet is a totally shameless ripoff of Led Zeppelin.
The fact that they're one of the only popular recent bands you can name really tells you something.
I mean, when's the last time there's been a new sound or style in rock?
Every generation until now has pioneered their own sound, you know, hair metal in the 80s, grunge in the 90s, emo in the 2000s, into the indie hipster stuff as you get into the early 2010s.
What does the 2020s have?
We're more than halfway through it.
I'd argue that it's the first decade since the invention of rock as a genre that has not had its own unique and popular sound.
The other reason I want to play that clip is to make the point that rock music is a part of white culture.
Yes, there have been great black rock musicians.
Yes, rock music was influenced by what came before it, which includes some blues influences and that sort of thing.
But ultimately, getting together in a garage with your friends and jamming out was.
Predominantly a white suburban male activity.
White suburban male culture was targeted for extinction years ago, and now it's basically extinct.
And so is rock music.
That's not a coincidence.
When you demonize an entire race of people and tell everyone that they're responsible for all of society's problems, when in fact they created Western civilization, then naturally white people are going to be more self conscious about doing things that white people typically do.
And that includes making this kind of music, it includes attending these kinds of concerts.
You know, I'd also be interested.
I was thinking about it to see a graph that shows, on the one hand, the decline of rock music, and on the other, the prevalence of psychiatric drugs, especially ADHD medication.
Because, speaking of the war on boys, for all races in this case, for the past several decades, boys and young men in particular have been drugged into oblivion to make them more compliant in a public school setting.
It's no surprise that the artistic output from this group.
Would decline as we turn them into mentally numbed automotons.
You know, I mean, I sometimes see these videos that pop up on social media of a clip of an old, you know, of a rock music video from 20 or 30 years ago.
And it always has a caption like, hey, we miss it when white boys were doing this.
We need young men doing this again.
Saw a clip like that just yesterday with a caption along those lines.
Well, Okay, young men used to work out their angst and energy through music.
A lot of them did.
Now we drug it out of them before they hit third grade.
Big tech algorithms also play a role, as they always do.
They're designed to suppress anything that's white coded and that includes rock music.
But more generally, in the modern era, the music industry, like everyone else in the entertainment business, is a slave to the algorithm.
Every song is designed to succeed in the algorithm.
The reason that a Goo Goo Dolls song is randomly charting again is that it's being used in TikTok videos as part of a TikTok meme.
This is the path to success now, primarily because young people today spend most of their time interacting with each other through screens.
They're scrolling videos on TikTok and Instagram.
They're not really socializing offline.
And that phenomenon creates some second order effects.
One of those effects is that young people aren't interacting enough to form a band in the first place.
That's why the underground scenes are all dead punk, heavy metal, everything.
It's also why music is a lot less creative now.
Think of the story of how the Killers were formed.
The lead singer, Brandon Flowers, responded to a newspaper ad.
In the Las Vegas Weekly, that was placed by the guitarist and Dave Kooning.
And the ad specified that Kooning's influences included Oasis and the Smiths, which attracted Flowers because everyone else in Las Vegas was interested in new metal and punk.
So Flowers drove over to his apartment where he played a guitar riff for him.
Flowers then wrote the lyrics to Mr. Brightside based on that riff.
That's the reason that the song exists.
Two people, complete strangers, began working as a team the moment they met each other.
And they made one of the biggest songs of the century.
It's still popular today because they went and met up in person.
But it's difficult to imagine a similar story happening today.
Obviously, no one places advertisements in the newspaper anymore because no one reads newspapers.
But more importantly, when people go online to communicate, they rarely end up meeting in person.
They're usually playing games or, you know, doom scrolling, looking at brain rot, trolling each other in the comment section.
By one estimate, as reported by NPR, over the past 20 years, face to face socializing fell roughly 30% for American men.
And 45% for teenagers, which is a dramatic decrease.
I suspect that that's also a huge undercount.
Now, what do these teenagers do instead?
Well, they dream about becoming streamers and YouTubers now, not rock stars.
This is probably the first generation in 70 years where the average white 15 year old boy doesn't daydream of becoming a rock star.
And it's not hard to see why.
Take a look at this list from the New York Times, which supposedly lists the top 30 living American songwriters.
This list just came out this week.
And here's who they have on the list Jay Z, Young Thug, Kendrick Lamar, Outkast, Missy Elliott, Mariah Carey, The Dream, Bad Bunny.
These are the top songwriters, living songwriters, again.
American songwriters.
Bad Bunny's not even American.
Anyway, Babyface, Stevie Wonder, Nile Rogers, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis, Smokey Robinson, Lionel Richie, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Carol King, Willie Nelson, Dan Warren, Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams.
Romeo Santos, Valerie Simpson, Brian and Eddie Holland, Josh Osborne, Brandi Clark, and Shane McAinally.
We remember Shane McAinally.
He's the guy that purchased the baby and has been emotionally abusing the child on social media for clicks.
So this is an atrocious joke of a list for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that it almost completely leaves out modern American folk and Americana, which are actually vibrant and eclectic genres, still today, where most of the best songwriting is being done right now.
And it's And it has been done historically.
It's mostly just pop and rap and that sort of thing.
To the extent that they have any rock musicians at all, it feels like a hedge.
They're all from the 1970s.
This is what's promoted now in every major venue.
This is what young people are seeing.
It's no wonder they don't want any part of it.
The same is true with the Super Bowl halftime shows.
There hasn't been a rock band featured this decade at all.
Last one was Maroon 5, which was more pop than rock.
That was in 2019.
And ever since Jay Z took over the Super Bowl halftime show, they've barely had any white people on stage at all.
Other than Eminem, they haven't had any white headliners.
Now, to be clear, my intention is not to complain that good music doesn't exist anymore or that good rock music can never exist again.
Maybe it can.
And there is good music being made, but the fact remains that the popular genres have all been urbanized and dumbed down and they've all kind of fused together.
And music critics are cowards who think that if they're listing top living songwriters, then two thirds of the list have to be black people, even if that means including Missy Elliott, for example, who had like one hit 30 years ago.
And even some of the iconic musicians they list are all a lot more left wing than they were in their primes.
No young person looks up to Bruce Springsteen anymore for this exact reason.
He's best known today as a dumb, whiny leftist who reads the talking points from the DNC.
What we've learned is that rock musicians, unfortunately, get lamer and gayer as they age.
We can only conclude that if Kurt Cobain were alive today, sad as it is to say, he'd be making PSAs about climate change and defending democracy against fascist Republicans.
That's why you need the younger crop to come in and keep things lively and rebellious as these old guys lose their edge and start demanding COVID tests at their concerts.
But we don't have a younger crop anymore.
And until that changes, one of the greatest cultural exports in America's history, rock music, is never going to return.
And no matter your taste in music, that would be a tragedy.
You know, Don McLean sang about the day the music died over 50 years ago.
It was a nine minute folk rock song that shot to the top of the charts, something that could never happen today.
And in that classic song, the day the music died referred, of course, to the plane crash that killed some of rock's biggest stars more than a decade before that.
But he might just as well, and even more so, have been singing about our day and age.
Except it wasn't any plane crash that killed rock music in the end.
It died instead by a million cuts.
And that's a harder obituary to put into song.
And even if you could put it in a song, would there be anyone left to sing it?
That will do it for the show today and this week.
Have a great weekend.
Talk to you on Monday.
Godspeed.
I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, Their statues should not be in the Capitol.
History is written by the victors, and since the 1960s, we've been told, mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, that the South committed treason.
But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?
History Written by the Victors00:00:21
What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?
Did they know something they're not allowed to say today?
It's time for the truth.
So here it is.
Robert E. Lee was a military genius. and a man of immense honor, who was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war, this is the real history of the Civil War.