re: Rock is dead. A reminder of its pinnacle.

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The Seaward

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Rock music is in its jazz phase

And I don’t mean it’s having a Kamasi Washington/Thundercat moment of extreme hipness. I mean it’s like Ryan Gosling’s version of jazz in La La Land: something fetishised by an older audience, but which has ceded its place at the centre of the pop-cultural conversation to other forms of music, ones less tied to a sense of history. Ones, dare I say it, more forward looking. For several years, it seemed, I was asked by one desk or another at the Guardian to write a start-of-year story about how this was the year rock would bounce back. But it never did. The experts who predicted big things for guitar bands each year were routinely wrong. No one asks for that story any longer.

That’s not to say rock and guitar bands aren’t still popular. Plenty of youngish bands can fill decent-sized rooms when they tour, and elicit a febrile response – I’ve never seen a room go bonkers the way Koko did for Catfish and the Bottlemen a couple of years back, for example. But guitar bands now feel as if they are at the periphery, and I don’t see much likelihood of that changing.

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