When Does Modern Rock Become Classic Rock?

When I describe an era of music as “oldies,” what springs to mind?  The answer depends on how old you are.  

Our view of the past evolves as we move into the future.  A teenaged Sex Pistols fan sneered at the Age of Elvis in the 1950s because that music was twenty years old and totally irrelevant to their lives, something that original Elvis fans couldn’t understand.  

Yet we see exactly the same thing today.  Today’s teenaged Deadmau5 follower has every right to adopt the same attitude towards Nirvana.  Meanwhile, original grunge fanatics seem to have forgotten that they felt exactly the same way about the Stones and Led Zeppelin as they bought their tickets for Lollapalooza in 1992.

There’s something of a philosophical crisis in rock radio right now.  At what point do the modern rock stations cede music of the early 90s to their classic rock brethren?  When does Pearl Jam’s “Alive” and the Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” join the pantheon of songs from Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd?

Part of the issue is that modern rock radio has done a lousy job of creating new stars with staying power.  Outside of Coldplay, Linkin Park, Arcade Fire, Gorillaz and everything Jack White seems to touch, there’s been a dearth of new alt-rock superstars.  Instead, modern rock radio has chosen to go back to that bucket of 90s music over and over and over again.  

This is created something of a crisis when it comes to commercial radio stations that play music in the alternative tradition.  They’ve become addicted to a form of rock that is in increasingly short supply. Along with praying for new albums by the Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, they wish for reunions by bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.  Meanwhile, they live on one-hit-wonders and artists one- and two-album careers, few of whom build any long-term mass appeal.  

(There’s a long, long discussion about why commercial alt-rock stations have increasingly narrow playlists with high song rotations, but that’s for another time.)

But modern rock radio and classic rock stations aren’t the only formats in crisis.  The very nature of oldies radio continues to evolve.  As it does, tiny bits of our rock’n’roll past disappear.

The AV Club has an excellent piece on the matter.  I quote:

In 2012, oldies stations as they were originally defined—stations that played music from the beginning of rock ’n’ roll through the early ’70s, roughly the era when AM hits yielded ground to FM album-oriented rock stations—are hard to find. Some have retreated back to the AM dial or the Internet. Some cities have dropped them entirely.

Old music still gets aired on satellite radio, which offers more specialized stations based on decades or styles. But as good as these are—digging deeper into their area of focus than oldies stations ever did—they lose something that’s appealing about the oldies format, namely the way it lumps together a diverse array of music that climbed that charts from the age of Elvis through the era of Watergate, and the way that diversity revealed something about our pop past.

If you’re interested in how music flows into history, how it’s presented and how we perceive it, I strongly recommended that you read the rest of this article.