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We are the last rock hope. Shouldn't that be enough?

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Neg Ten Den

Rock Culture, What Rock Culture?

     So, I happen to be a part of this outstanding band with great melodies, lyrics, production, and an amazing rhythm section.  Our large and growing catalogue of songs has gone over really well online, to the tune of over 53,000 followers on Twitter/X.

     But for awhile now it seems like this is where the buck stops, like Negative Tendencies is almost in a holding pattern, while our music has gotten better and better.  I am perplexed by why this is?   and I think I have the semblance of an answer and that is the subject of this essay.

     I started to hone in on the solution to this riddle when I was watching the popular streaming show Only Murders In The Building.  This is a show about podcasters, is very up-to-date in references to the online world, very contemporary in other words.  Yet... I wonder why all the music on a show that has a quite elaborate soundtrack includes absolutely no rock whatsoever?  No Beatles, no rock nothing.  Why do many shows like this, Woody Allen movies and so on, stay so far away from playing a single rock song when there is still plenty of rock in the air on radio?  Seems very deliberate, no? but rock is still the music of choice in audiophile forums and Twitter threads alike.  They quiz you all day on classic rock songs and albums.  Hardly ever mention new songs or bands though.  What the hell happened to rock?

     I started to notice that one particular genre of rock music dominated these discussions and the balance was very distorted.  I would like to postulate that, despite the recent shortterm revivals, melodic rock like the Beatles and Stones for instance has been almost completely usurped by harder rock and metal.  My own personal name for this is "flunkee rock", because I associate this style with the dummy classes in high school where the kids would draw logos of these deeply non-substantial bands on the backs of their notebooks. It was a competition which band was the hardest or which lead guitarist could shred the fastest.  Beatles/Stones/Who style songs have mostly been relegated to the past but the flunkee rockers are still worshipped even though many of them happened back in the 80s.  Many of the hair bands fell off the map when Nirvana and the grunge rockers came but this is not what we see these days, we see just endless flunkee bands.  Why is it that fans of flunkee rock worship same bands til the end of time while those who liked cool music seem to have faded away from the culture?

     This is just a sampling of flunkee rock from today's rock fans.  Yes Led Zep and Pink Floyd are often adored alongside of them but that's flukey, exceptions to the flunkee rule.

Kiss

AC/DC

Metallica

Def Leppard

Judas Priest

Black Sabbath

Iron Maiden

Megadeth

Guns n' Roses

Dokken

Van Halen

Poison

Korn

Slayer

Pantera

Queensryche

Sepultura

Motley Crew

Slipknot

Skid Row

Mastadon

Testament

Dio

Anthrax

Opeth

System of a Down

Tool

Motorhead

Wasp

     U2 is still active, but they're a 3rd eschelon band in the first place and behold, despite some major attention grabbing attempts of late they are just not in the discussions.  There is just no place in the current music culture for new and indie bands that come from the school of Beatles, Stones, Who to rest their hats.  Flunkee rock has swallowed that genre, whole.  Enter Negative Tendencies.  People listen, mostly digging our shit.  but there's no container for us in the culture.  We're allowed to just float away like we never happened.

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