“Rock and roll’s got no future. It don’t matter.”—Roger Daltrey, in The Kids Are Alright (1979)
The Who’s frontman said this as punk music was starting to fade and be overtaken by New Wave boys with short hair and skinny ties. It’s the kind of comment that invites debate. Kiss bassist Gene Simmons has been saying that rock and roll is dead for many years now, and it’s hard to argue the point. A look at the most-streamed songs across the world shows few to no traditional rock bands. Taylor Swift may be the closest you can get and I’m sure she’d be the first to tell you that she’s no rocker. Hip-Hop and Girl Pop dominate. The streaming universe is awash in anthems by twenty-something girls in skimpy clothes singing so-called empowering lyrics over a repetitive beat. The songs are written by committee, and often by the same people across multiple artists. Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen, Julia Michaels, and Diane Warren are just a few of the songwriters whose work is everywhere but who remain behind-the-scenes. Usually the artist will get a songwriting credit, but how much they contribute is open to investigation. Check the songwriting credits for your favorite hip-hop artist…most of them read like the phone book.
That’s not really a knock on the performers. This is the way record companies work now. It’s a modern-day Tin Pan Alley, matching songs to singers. “Beyonce will do a great job with this one.” “This has Sabrina Carpenter vibes.” I’m certain there’s genuine talent involved with these performers, but the trend right now is to over-produce and process that talent, to “guide” it if you will, towards an audience of pre-teen and teenage girls. Studio software like Pro Tools can give a remarkably good singing voice to any wino off the street. Bad pitch is easily fixed. Even instruments can be “fixed.” The drumming is a little slow? No problem, and no need for the drummer to do it again. Just press a button and hear the magic. You want strings on your ballad? No need to hire a string section, just bring out the synthesizer and set it to “violins.” So while I’m sure there’s talent in the mix, it’s being morphed by machines and record companies to give you a “sound” that might not otherwise be there. It’s making you conform.
Rock and roll music has always been about the opposite of conforming. It started as a noisy, squalling racket that had the older generations clutching their pearls and looking for fainting couches. Frank Sinatra was the epitome of cool, standing at the microphone backed by Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, and singing in a smooth, magnificent voice. Elvis Presley was the epitome of a hooligan, dancing at the microphone, thrusting his hips and shaking his legs, wailing old blues songs that were written by (whispers) black people. And don’t get me started on the outrageous flamboyance of Little Richard. The term rock and roll was just a blues euphemism for sex, and that was unacceptable in polite society in the 1950s.
But rock and roll found its audience…the teenagers whose grandchildren are now listening to Taylor Swift. Then, in a chapel in Georgia, a quickie wedding ceremony in Mississippi, a draft board in Memphis, a grand jury room in Missouri, and a field in Clear Lake, Iowa, rock and roll died. Little Richard found religion, Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, Elvis went into the army, Chuck Berry was arrested for violating the Mann Act, and Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were all killed in a plane crash.
But rock music proved very resilient. There were still echoes of it, but the rough edges were sanded off. The Beach Boys carried the flag, but their music was much less raucous and focused more on folk-like harmonies. The girl groups produced by Phil Spector turned out some marvelous music, but the star was the producer. Then came the Beatles and their British cohorts, and rock and roll was not only alive but thriving and more popular than ever.
The obituary for rock music has been written many times. When the bloated, symphonic sounds of Progressive Rock became popular, as singer-songwriters, disco chanteuses, and pop stars achieved great fame, many fans lamented the death of the three-minute, hard-charging, rock song. Then came punk and brought it all back to basics. As punk faded and those effete English boys with skinny ties and odd hair styles ascended, people mourned the loss of guitars, bass, and drums in favor of cold synthesizers. Then hair metal hit the mainstream and guitars were back. As that brand of glam metal turned quickly into one godawful power ballad after another, an outcast with unwashed hair and sporting a cardigan sweater brought it all back again.
But rock and roll music was always there even in the times when its death was being proclaimed. The charts always had at least one or two rock bands in the list. That is no longer true.
So the question is: Is rock and roll music finally dead, or is it just waiting in the wings for another generation of disenfranchised kids? The first part of the answer is that no form of music ever truly dies, it just fades from popularity. There will always be people playing rock and roll music just as there are still people composing classical music, or playing jazz. Somewhere out there is a piano player leaning into the writings of Scott Joplin and playing ragtime. So no, rock music isn’t dead. It’s just no longer the zeitgeist.
The fact is that there is still great rock music being made. In just the past few years, there have been great albums released by the Rolling Stones (Hackney Diamonds), X (Alphabetland and Smoke & Fiction), the Avett Brothers with Faith No More singer Mike Patton, (AVTT/PTTN), Grant-Lee Phillips (In The Hour of Dust), the Ruen Brothers (Ten Paces), Ty Segall (Possession), the Grip Weeds (Soul Bender), Vintage Trouble (Heavy Hymnal), Smashing Pumpkins (Aghori Mhori Mei), and Jack White (No Name). But all of those albums have one thing in common: they were made by artists whose careers stretch back decades. Where are the new faces in rock and roll?
For a hot minute magazines like Rolling Stone championed Harry Styles but he turned out to be just another pop star, the male equivalent of Sabrina Carpenter. More recently the attention has turned to an English singer named Dominic Harrison who calls himself YUNGBLUD (the capital letters are his). With no shortage of ego, YUNGBLUD maintains that his mission is to bring back old-fashioned rock and roll music.
In his acceptance speech for Best Rock Performance at the 2026 Grammys (for his live cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes”), YUNGBLUD declared that rock music is making a comeback and playfully challenged pop music:
“And everyone in a guitar shop or a bedroom with a dream…rock music’s fucking coming back. Watch out, pop music. We’re gonna fucking get you. God bless rock music, and God bless fucking Ozzy Osbourne.”
As they say: Big, if true. And somewhat surprising since his earlier albums leaned much more heavily on the current sounds of the pop charts: electronic drums, synthesized strings, mixing rapping with singing, catchy choruses, and a lack of anything really approaching sophistication. There are elements of rock that come through those earlier albums and each album subsequently gets a little bit closer to where he is now, but they remain solidly in the pop music camp. The leap in quality from his eponymous 2022 album to Idols is staggering, and YUNGBLUD knows it: “Would this be the album you would expect me to make next?” he told Apple Music. “Fuck no.” Hopefully this means Dominic Harrison has found his voice and now knows what YUNGBLUD is supposed to be.
Yet YUNGBLLUD didn’t win the Best Rock Album Grammy, losing to Turnstile, a punk-influenced band that sounds exactly like every other punk influenced band in the world today. In its own way this is almost as bad as handing a Best Metal Performance to Jethro Tull over Metallica, because within the range of my hearing the best rock album of last year is, along with Ty Segall’s Possession, clearly YUNGBLUD’s Idols. What gives young Dominic Harrison the nod here is the sheer, naked ambition of his album. It’s a sweeping, string-laden album full of rockers that pays tribute to everybody from Elton John and David Bowie (“Supermoon” and “Change”) to Blur and Oasis (the Britpop refrain of “Lovesick Lullaby”). It’s been a very long time since a rock artist started an album with a nine-minute long song (“Hello Heaven, Hello”), or capped a three-minute song with a four-minute instrumental coda that features a duel between heavy guitar and strings courtesy of players from the London Symphony Orchestra (“Ghosts”). In a time when streaming playlists of most popular songs all sound the same, the Cinemascope vision of Idols is nothing short of breathtaking.
Does any of this mean that YUNGBLUD is the future of rock music? No, not necessarily. YUNGBLUD could follow this effort with nothing even remotely approaching this level of quality and then quickly fade from view. Such is life in the vagaries of the pop charts. But what Idols does prove conclusively is that rock may have a future after all. This is his fourth album, following three albums of decidedly lower quality, and his third to debut at number one in the charts in much of Europe, though American success remains more muted. He is already a big star in his homeland, where rock music still has a grip on the public imagination. If rock music does have a future it will probably come out of England again. But while we wait, the success of Idols and the brash braggadocio of its creator gives rock music fans something to focus on and enjoy.
In 2008 a brash rocker came out of San Francisco with his first, self-titled, album. Ty Segall was a brief, noisy album of distinctly lo-fi rock. Under the murk and the distortion was a Nuggets-style garage rock album (at 23 minutes closer to an EP). Since then Segall has been releasing albums on his own and with various side projects at a pace that even Ryan Adams and Guided By Voices can’t hope to match. By my count, he’s put out 28 albums in the past 18 years. Of course, anyone who is that prolific is someone who by definition does not have an editor, and Segall has released some real junk over the course of his career. Some of his albums border on noise, and not a pleasant noise. But Segall is also capable of writing some incredible songs, and several of his albums are truly excellent. Such is the story of a restless, inventive musician who clearly burns with the desire to create. A new Ty Segall album is always worth checking out because you never know what to expect, and when he’s good he’s exceptional.
Americana came out of the dusty crossroads of folk, country, blues, rock, and soul. In its earliest iterations as “roots rock” it came in the shape of The Band, Gram Parsons, The Blasters, and others. It was always a responsive type of music. The Band were responding to the excesses of Sgt. Pepper and Cream. Parsons was responding to what he believed was the soulless aspect of modern country music. The Blasters were a breath of fresh air amidst the rhinestones and huge hair of the late seventies and early eighties, as well as a riposte to the punk ethos of burning down the past and starting anew. The Blasters wallowed in older styles of music and called their first album American Music. Throughout the eighties, nobody quite knew what to call this style of music that was neither fish nor fowl. Eventually the term “alt-country” was used to describe bands like The Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo, and then that label gave way to “No Depression,” named after the Carter Family song covered by Uncle Tupelo. Desperate for a label that would stick, the Grammy Awards instituted “Americana” as a category in 1990. It was, and still is, something of a catch-all.
Garage rock came out of the 1960s, a form of raw, back-to-basics rock and roll. The gateway drug for garage rock is the legendary collection Nuggets, originally compiled by future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye and released in 1972 as a two-record compilation of great lost tracks from the sixties. It has since been expanded into no fewer than five four-disc box sets, focusing on America, international, modern, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They represent an alternative view of the history of rock and roll, one where the big bands of the era are only heard through their influence. And it’s possible to hear all those influences in the three minutes it takes to spin out one of these songs. Part of the fun of garage rock is how it teases the ear, reminding you of something else but remaining fresh.
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