Long Live Rock 'n' Roll
Modern rock and its many, many splinters from the tree of rawk
Last week, hair metal soared on TV then died in a basement. But what happens when the underground unseats Michael Jackson on the charts?
Are You Hardcore If You Cry?
The underground always take the left turn. So this time, the Gen X apathy typified by Nirvana became the millennial sob. (I can say that, I’m a millennial.)
But before that story, let’s talk about Hardcore.
This is the other evolution of the CBGB punk scene. Not Blondie or Talking Heads. Acts like Bad Brains:
Here’s an interview I did with a man at the heart of it, Harley Flanagan. Fair warning, this interview is gnarly. He lived a brutal life. Music was his escape.
Rites of Spring kept the noise but broke the rules. Instead of rebellion and street justice, they sang about feelings, vulnerability, personal pain.
Some folks call this emo-core. I’m not qualified to identify how “core” something is. This isn’t Hardcore History.
But this wasn’t softer necessarily. It was still punch-you-in-the-mouth rock. Then Rites of Spring’s Guy Picciotto joined Fugazi. Fugazi famously played $5 shows for years. No merch. No majors. Washington D.C.’s counterculture:
Riot Grrrl and Feminism in Rock
Riot Grrrl came up in the same years, same cities, often same venues. In the basement with DIY zines.
Sleater-Kinney would later carry the lineage straight into indie rock. Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker’s twin-guitars on Dig Me Out (1997) is so post-hardcore and so not. No bass player. Just pure guitar punch.
Girls to the Front!
From Emo to San Diego
One of my childhood faves, Blink-182, was running around naked on San Diego stages. Tom DeLonge with his California / Chicano singing accent said one of their biggest influences was Fugazi.
Tom said in an interview, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t really about the music. It’s about the emotion.
There are too many classic bands of this era, from Midwest Emo’s chiming guitars like American Football in 1999 to Vans Warped Tour darlings like Fall Out Boy and Paramore. Then they began to splinter, each defining their genre as something emergent from hardcore’s early incarnations. Sometimes it took the form of a more heart-on-their-sleeve direction, and sometimes it adopted an unabashedly pop infused energy. Regardless of the container, the ethos of hardcore was still at their core like a sweaty engine running full throttle. Watch how the shift towards the mainstream began to take shape:
And then 19 years down the road, they landed here:
When Olivia Rodrigo released “good 4 u,” it was so much like Paramore’s “Misery Business” that Rodrigo’s team credited Hayley Williams and Josh Farro as co-writers on the song. From CBGB to DC hardcore to Blink to Paramore to Olivia Rodrigo. Rock didn’t die! It just became blurrier to draw the lines from A to Z.
Loud Quiet Loud
On the previous post the baton passed from Pixies to Nirvana. Let’s talk about one of my favorite bands of all time, that is also part of this lineage, Mother Mother. Vancouver origin, formed in 2005, eventually a TikTok phenomenon a decade later when their “Hayloft” went viral like a decade or more after its release. Their frontman and principal songwriter, Ryan Guldemond, was asked in 2018 to name his top three records. Number one was Pixies’ Surfer Rosa.
His father played it for him when he was 10. He called it, “the new truth.”
St. Vincent aka Annie Clark grew up in Dallas. She was in the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens’s touring band, then made Strange Mercy (2011) and her self-titled (2014), which won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album and one of my favorite albums of all time.
I love her guitar playing because it takes the “please no chops” energy… and adds chops. She’s a hell of a player, but knows how to dip in and out of virtuosity. The coolest kind of guitar!
And she connects right back to the Riot Grrrl tradition with her production of Sleater-Kinney’s The Center Won’t Hold (2019), and her identity as a queer woman from Texas.
She made an LP with David Byrne (Love This Giant, 2012), stylishly drawing a through line to the New Wave and CBGB scene from yore to the current. That is how it works post Nirvana especially. Squiggly lines. Underground and superstars blurred. Collaborators and splintering of genre.
I love it.
And then there’s Cage the Elephant. They even released a song called “Aberdeen” on my favorite record of theirs Thank You Happy Birthday. (Aberdeen is Cobain’s hometown.)
The song kinda rips off (homages?) “Where Is My Mind.” Aka the Pixies song Cobain himself said he was trying to rip off when he wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Cage singer, Matt Shultz, even does a Black Francis bark at the end!
Asked about “Aberdeen” on a Reddit AMA, Shultz said it was about a city in Scotland.
Yeah right, dude.
The Beatles’ Afterlife
The Beatles’ biggest legacy is that of the studio band. They (and their supporting cast like Geoff Emerick and George Martin) made the recording machine its own instrument.
So did Radiohead:
OK Computer (1997) made them the most important rock band in the world. Then Kid A (2000) with its electronics, spliced vocals, drum machines, ambience, outright dread. Radiohead was a rock band, but what was rock? Idk. I guess it’s what rock bands make?
Kid A made its own inertia and vocab. Stuff like chopped vocals, drum programming inside a rock song, ambient moments, a singer who treats his voice like another instrument to be processed. That’s the toolkit we’re still using today. Same deal for Bon Iver’s 22, A Million (2016). James Blake. Frank Ocean’s Blonde (2016).
The Guardian actually called Blonde a version of Kid A, haha, with Jonny Greenwood credited on guitar and Radiohead’s engineer Sam Petts-Davies.
It’s kinda like how Olivia Rodrigo traced the lines. Radiohead went horizontal, influencing hip hop and R&B and more.
Hell, the most commercial version of the same idea is Coldplay. They sold a hundred million records being a safer version of Radiohead. Sue me!
In October 2007, Radiohead’s EMI recording contract was fulfilled. So they released In Rainbows as a digital download with pay-what-you-want pricing. You could type $0 and download the album. I did. Sorry! I was young and poor!
Reminds me of the DIY energy of early Nirvana and Pixies though. Or how Albini asked to be paid like a plumber. Pay us what you want.
This also paved the way for Bedroom Pop and Lofi Rock. The stuff I make. And Tame Impala, Mac Demarco, Billie Eilish.
The Mainstream
Six months after Cobain’s death, in October 1994, Dave Grohl was driving around the Irish countryside trying to figure out if he ever wanted to play music again. (Sounds kinda similar to Paul McCartney with Ram, doesn’t it?)
Dave came across a hitchhiker wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt. And he realized he couldn’t outrun the band’s reach or legacy. So he flew home and booked a week at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle, played every instrument himself, then made 100 cassettes and gave them away to friends. He named the project “Foo Fighters” so people would think it was a band.
Yeah, it worked.
So Did Rock Die?
See above.
Rock might be mature. It might not be the center of youth culture today, but it’s kinda the engine still.
Distortion is everywhere. The lyrics and attitude are all over pop and hip hop. Loud-quiet-loud is damn near universal. DIY is bedroom production. The studio-as-instrument is what everyone does.
There’s a ton else out there. If you have Netflix, watch Woodstock 99.
The genre merged with others like the Police with ska and reggae and funk with Red Hot Chili Peppers. There are so many branches left to be explored. But the pattern is similar.
And the tradition is alive and well in 2026 in places it wasn’t in 1991. boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus) dropped the record in 2023 and walked off with Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Alternative Music Album at the 2024 Grammys. That’s three queer women winning the rock categories with what is functionally a 90s-indie album.
Rock survives. And thrives. Just in a different way than anyone back in the beginning could’ve expected.
Thanks for reading internet friend. It was a fun ride through the history of rock.
Scoob.pizza
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P.S. If you’re so inclined, keep up with all the things Love Music More by subscribing to this Substack’s companion podcast. Also if you want to check out my music on vinyl 🎨 you can make that spin happen. Rock on. ꐕ