How did Rock and Metal grow so far apart?

Mastodon, Gojira, Lamb of God, Queens of the Stone Age, Baroness. These are some accessible tracks from all of these bands, but they all have pretty diverse catalogues (maybe not LOG so much). Generally the further back you go the more extreme.

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I don’t think I’ve ever considered Tool to be metal.

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Frankly, Tool is genre-defying. I can see metal, progressive and hard rock all applying - sort of. Tool, for good or bad, sort of falls into the category of Tool.

Metal and rock really split when grunge took over and metal became defined by Pantera. Metal for so long was a genre about pushing the envelope of “hardness”. So many bands went out just trying to one up Pantera and then each other until they basically ran out of “hard” places to go, leaving the genre a little stagnant, kind of like jazz after bebop, with only a niche appeal.

Mainstream rock was pushed off of radio and pushed out of pop music leaving it with an identity crisis in the late 2000’s. Bands like Alabama Shakes, Black Keys, Tame Impala, and Cage the Elephant tried to take it in more of a psychodelic blues based direction, but alt radio instead took it into the indie british techno pop direction, basically using alt radio as a dumping ground for pop acts that couldn’t crack the top 40 in the U.S.

The ladder for mainstream success for new rock and roll artists has largely been pulled up since 2005. There’s no infrastructure to bring it to those unwilling to truly hunt for it. That leaves just the stars of the grunge revolution in the 90’s as the only remaining true rock stars and pop culture icons, a status they thoroughly rejected and attempted to rebel against in the 90’s. Left as the standard bearers of a dying genre in the mainstream consciousness, they’re dropping like flies. It’s almost as if the rock world is just waiting for some band to come out of nowhere and start a new renaissance, be the face of a new movement that can unite metal with rock again.

I have an old Creem magazine from the late 70s that actually includes REO Speedwagon and Boston in an article called "Heavy Metal Roundup" where they give brief flippant comments about bands they consider still relevant in that genre at the time.

That's just a snapshot of the ever-moving target of the "heavy metal" genre distinctions and how completely futile it is to try and pin it down. Nobody has ever and will ever agree on where the lines are drawn but the evergreen debate about it tops the list as some of the dumbest discussions about music I've ever been privy to.

Present company excluded of course.

Good rock music has introspective lyrics and/or a rebellious theme. We're living in a fairly muted society and probably need a social revolution to occur for the next wave to appear

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I've been thinking this and desperately waiting on it for years now. I'm sure there are some great hard rock bands out there with good songs that can't get discovered because the current 'scene' doesn't allow for it.

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We need a good ole 60's/70's style spiritual revival

White Denim rips of Thin Lizzy some, but I’m cool with it.