The History of the 2010s Part 3: The New Genres
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\u2019s all you had to pay attention to...there wasn\u2019t exactly anything called \u201crock history\u201d back then because the music had no history...\nWhat 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\u2014which began as a fresh take on the 12-bar blues template\u2014separated, segmented, stratified, mutated,\xa0evolved\u2014with increasing speed...\nNew 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...\nThe 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\u2019s a tiny, tiny fraction of a second: a decimal point followed by 23 zeroes...\nBut there\u2019s no stopping the fission and fusion of rock...we\u2019re always going to get new sounds...keeping up with them all is another matter...\nThis 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\u2019re going to understand what happened to rock during that time, we\u2019re going to have to at least try...\nThis is the history of the 2010s, part 3...\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices