The History of the 2010s Part 3: The New Genres

09/27/23 • 24 min

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It must have been so easy to write about rock back in the 50s...comparatively easy to today, i mean...everything was so new that that’s all you had to pay attention to...there wasn’t exactly anything called “rock history” back then because the music had no history...

What began as a spark in the early 50s turned out to be the musical equivalent of the cosmological big bang...and as the years and decades passed, this music—which began as a fresh take on the 12-bar blues template—separated, segmented, stratified, mutated, evolved—with increasing speed...

New genres began to appear yearly, monthly, and sometimes even weekly...today, it seems like every single day results in some kind of derivative spin-off sub-sub-sub-sub-genre...

The new sound and approach may gain traction and stay with us for some time, perhaps even carving out its own permanent space in the rock universe...more likely, though, a new genre will have a half-life shorter than hydrogen 7...and to save you from looking that up, that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of a second: a decimal point followed by 23 zeroes...

But there’s no stopping the fission and fusion of rock...we’re always going to get new sounds...keeping up with them all is another matter...

This is part of what makes writing a musical history of the 2010s so challenging...the number of iterations rock went through in that decade was insane...but if we’re going to understand what happened to rock during that time, we’re going to have to at least try...

This is the history of the 2010s, part 3...

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New genres began to appear yearly, monthly, and sometimes even weekly...today, it seems like every single day results in some kind of derivative spin-off sub-sub-sub-sub-genre...

But there’s no stopping the fission and fusion of rock...we’re always going to get new sounds...keeping up with them all is another matter...

This is the history of the 2010s, part 3...

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Previous Episode

The History of the 2010s Part 2: The Role of Indie Rock

Traditional wisdom says that the recorded music industry is dominated by the major labels...there used to be a bunch of them, but over the last 25 years, their number has been whittled down to just three companies: universal (the biggest), Sony, and warner music...

Here’s something you may not have know...at last estimate, about 95,000 songs are uploaded to the streaming music services every day...of that number, only about 4% are from those three majors...the rest is from indie labels and do-it-yourself musicians...

Let me flip that around: 96% of all new music comes from independent musicians...the market share of indie labels has been rising by double-digits for almost 25 years now...

Indie music—or at least material from bands not directly signed to one of the three majors—was an important aspect of the 2010s...major label acts were still important, but without the indies, it would have been a pretty empty decade...but thanks to the sheer volume of new music and some crafty distribution by indie-friendly companies, we got to hear a lot of it...

The width and breadth of indie over those ten years was staggering...and without the influence of independent musicians, styles, and trends, major label mainstream rock would have been much different...

Let’s examine that...this is part two of the history of rock in the 2010s...

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Next Episode

The History of the 2010s Part 4: The Revivals

It’s an established fact that music comes in many different types of cycles...a sound and style will be big for a while, reach a peak with the public, and then slowly fade out....but once established, it’s unusual for a sound to completely disappear, never to be heard from again...

The only genre I can think of is---maybe alt-rock-style rockabilly...it was big in the very early 80s with bands like the stray cats...but then it just kinda went away...there’s never been a rockabilly revival—at least in the sense and style and scope of what we heard way back then when it was huge for about 18 months...

Instead, after enjoying a time at the forefront of music, many of the cycle-prone rock sounds recede into the shadows, never really going away...they lie in wait until someone comes along—often a generation or two later—to rediscover and reactivate it...

When that happens, it’s usually given a sonic update and if the timing is right, the sound enjoys a new period of time in sun before the cycle repeats yet again...

The longer you live and the more music you become familiar with, the more you begin to see these cycles play themselves out, sometimes over and over again...we see it every decade...

The 2010s were no different...we saw a series of revivals, rediscoveries, and comebacks, all based on the musical dna of what had come before...let’s examine that...this is the history of the 2010s, part 4...

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