By Peter Krupa
Collegian Features Editor

For better or for worse, rock and roll is dying. After going through innumerable revolutions and revivals since its inception in the 50s, popular rock and roll finished out the last half of the 90s with a pathetic “new metal” whimper, and as yet it shows no signs of recovery.

Sure, the entrenched and humongous record companies still sell millions of albums every year to rebellious teenagers who don’t know any better. But let us, for a change, measure success by something other than money: how many of these “hit” rock and roll songs will have the staying power to impact a culture 40 years from now?

The 60s and 70s gave us an amazing volume of music, much of which is now a part of the American psyche. The list of songs from this era still regularly covered in bars and clubs is staggering.

It is doubtful, however, that in 20 years, bar patrons are going to be calling for Creed covers as loudly as they do for Tom Petty today.

The reason for this is, simply enough, bad lyrics.
Of course, in many cases the music in contemporary rock and roll is lousy as well, but rock music is usually simple anyway. Lyrics are what determine whether people will want to hear the song again in 20 years.

In this respect, there is a vast difference between the bands of our parents and the bands of the 90s.

Bands from the 60s and 70s—bands like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and the Eagles—were much more conscious of their roots in blues and folk music. Their lyrics told a story or presented an image, and were essentially imaginative. Songs like “Hotel California” by the Eagles and “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones combine catchy melodies and creative musicianship with intriguing lyrical images.

Modern rock and roll lyricists, however, do no such thing, for they have firmly lodged themselves in the rut of the Existential “I.” To put it less pedantically, the rock music of the last ten years has been extremely self-conscious and self-absorbed in the character of the artist himself. It’s impossible these days to listen to an entire rock album without the embarrassing spectacle of some rock star’s personal issues played out in bad lyric.

For instance, Nickelback’s song “Too Bad” addresses his absent father: “You left without saying goodbye / Although I’m sure you tried /…/ Made it out, still got clothing on our backs / And now I scream about it / How it’s too bad.”

Songs like this should be kept for the artist’s own personal therapy, not hung out like dirty laundry for public consumption. The same could be said of some of the more ambiguous existential struggles that we find in rock, like in Linkin Park’s “Crawling:” “Crawling in my skin / These wounds they will not heal / Fear is how I fall / Confusing what is real.”

The crux of the discussion comes down to a question of the nature of art. Good art should be, at least in part, an imaginative pursuit. Art has an impact on people because it touches the peculiarly human ability to imagine and to dream.

Hard life experiences and emotional turmoil should be channeled by artists into fuel for the imagination. Surely Mick Jagger and Tom Petty had plenty of traumatic and difficult experiences in their lives that they could have told us about in song.

Instead, they projected those hard times into stories of high school romance, street-fighting men, and, in one case, Satan.

Modern rock bands, on the other hand, skip the creative step and go straight for the feeling, beating us over the head with their own wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Case in point is another one of Nickelback’s songs, which contains the brilliant lyrics “I’m hating all of this,” and “I felt like s*** when I woke up this morning.”

Creed’s Scott Stapp occasionally takes a stab at being poetic, but for Stapp that usually means lots of Bible clichés ripped out of context and thrown into the song for a tingly, psuedo-spiritual flavor burst.

There’s nothing wrong with being a tortured artist: from van Gough to Byron to Kurt Cobain, it’s practically expected. The difference, however, between a great tortured artist and an annoying one is that the great ones play out their problems in imaginative and subtle images and leave the biography to the biographers. The annoying ones simply tell you, over and over again, how tortured they are.

This is boring. In fact, it’s obnoxious, and 20 years from now, no one is going to care to hear songs about the existential, personal struggles of rock stars that they dimly remember.

I’ve been especially hard in this article on “new metal,” both because those bands are particularly flagrant and because I particularly hate them. But the current phenomenon of touting feeling and personal experience over imagination is also present in pop, punk rock, R & B, and just about everywhere else.

Perhaps this explains, in part, why the record companies are floundering right now, but that is the subject of another article.

The fact is that modern rock bands are selling themselves on the popularity of a cliché—the image of a tortured artist. Because of this, our generation has produced little memorable rock music. Hopefully, change is on the way.

Peter Krupa is a senior majoring in English.