Andrew Hickey’s 500 Songs and the End of Rock Music
Summer Camp Revelations
I don’t have a lot of clear memories from my childhood, but I do remember when I was about 11 or 12, sometime around 1974 or 1975, walking into the little empty assembly hall of summer camp, where some mysterious older teenager spun a record on a little self-contained player. I was entranced. I didn’t know this record beyond possibly a couple songs I had heard on the radio, and the album had no label or name on the outside. But I remember clearly this experience of hearing Led Zeppelin “IV” for the first time. I’m pretty sure I talked my parents into buying the record shortly thereafter, and it would have been available in my rural hometown by then because it had been out a couple years. In those days, rock music was a bit mysterious, and the barriers to entry in accessing it were part of the deal.
And a few years later—in 1977 when I was 13—I convinced my 50-something father to drive us to see Zeppelin as my first concert (photos here and one above). He had to go to the show with us because there was no parents’ drop off zones back then, although to him, this rock music was a annoying, silly, noisy garbage, and—as far as he was concerned—night and day different from the big band music of his youth (he saw Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman live). But to me and my friends, Zeppelin—and everything that came with and after and along with it—was life changing, and a mysterious connection to the world outside my cornfield hometown, to some place where the cool people hung out.
Half a century later in 2024, in the middle of this sweltering NYC summer, I have completed a months-long project of listening to all 233 (+ 179 Patreon) current episodes of Andrew Hickey’s remarkable podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. Hickey started this epic series back in 2018, but I only heard about it in the last year or so on Penn Jillette’s podcast, and from discussions about some of the episodes on several of my musician friends’ feeds.
Rock Is Over
I’m not a nostalgic person; I’ve always been relentlessly focused on the future and (hopefully) better times ahead. But early retirement from full-time teaching last year has had me questioning and examining a lot of things in my life. And as someone to whom music means a great deal, Hickey’s podcast has laid bare something personally profound that I sort of knew but didn’t really fully realize (emphasis added by me):
Rock and roll as a cultural force is, it is safe to say, dead. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and nor does it mean that good rock and roll music isn’t being made any more. Rather, rock, like jazz, has become a niche musical interest. It’s a large niche, and it will be so long as there are people around who grew up in the last half of the last century, but the cultural influence it once had has declined precipitously in the last decade or so. These days, various flavours of hip-hop, electronic dance music, manufactured pop, and half a dozen genres that a middle-aged man like myself couldn’t even name are having the cultural and commercial impact that in previous decades was mostly made by guitar bands.
(From Episode 0 (Introduction) of the podcast)
To see how out of touch I really am, I skimmed through the current “Top 50 US” playlist on Spotify. While I at least had heard of most of the artists on the list, and had some idea who they were, I hadn’t listened to a single song before, except maybe as gas station background music when out storm chasing. This of course made me feel like the stereotypical old person who doesn’t understand what the youth are doing. But a larger issue is that these days I don’t think anyone has any real handle on what’s going on in the culture, and I’d say every song on the list is some kind of hybrid of previously dominant forms. So I think Hickey is really onto something here. But when and why did this happen?
When asked by a listener, “…have you reached any conclusions in your own mind as to why genres of music—whether folk or jazz or rock—lose their cache[t] with the mass culture? And do you agree that rock is on its way out?” Hickey responds: I think the reason is fairly straightforward -- I think people like novelty, and want something that speaks to their own experiences, and those things change over time. There'll always be an audience for good work in any genre, but the only way, say, Bix Beiderbecke's [jazz musician from the 1920s] music would remain culturally vital is if there had been no social changes in the hundred years since Beiderbecke's peak. And no, I don't agree that rock is on the way out, I think it made its way out a long time ago. I think the last time we can realistically talk about rock music being at the centre of the culture is some time in the mid-nineties, around thirty years ago. In Britain that would be with Britpop and the bands that came up then, in America the rise of grunge and "alternative". Possibly you could place the end of rock as a cultural force a little later, because bands like, say, the White Stripes or the Strokes were culturally relevant, but the bulk of the culture had moved elsewhere by then already. (From the 7500 Member Q&A, private to Patreon subscribers)
And to expand further on why this happened, Hickey has another idea that makes sense to me. When asked a question about the staying power of today’s music going forward, Hickey responded in another Q&A, “… It *is* possible that there'll be less nostalgia for current music, because there was a general trend from the early seventies onwards, which I believe has continued to this day, of new music being ever less central in teenagers' lives than it was. In the sixties, music was about the only cheap entertainment option that teenagers had any real control over, and it was absolutely central. By the eighties and nineties, when I was growing up, there were things like home video, computer games, and so on, but music was still very important and one of several means by which teenagers' identities got shaped. These days there are many, many, *many* things calling out for teenagers' attention, and so I believe music matters less to them, and so there might not be the same kind of nostalgic attachment that makes older music matter to people who grew up in previous decades.
Further along in this idea, it seems that the rock music of my youth has become some of the current era’s “folk” music. Passing through the Seattle airport this spring, a young 20-something was playing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, a song released in 1975, around the time I was in summer camp learning about Zeppelin. I was baffled as to how this now ancient song would have any relevance to this young musician, especially since part of the allure of the music of my youth was that it stood in opposition to the music of previous generations. But that doesn’t seem to be the case these days; I recently went to a screening of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense where the band appeared, and I would estimate that probably 1/3 of the audience appeared to be in their 20s. That movie was released 40 years ago; seeing that movie in my 20s would have been like going to a screening of a Benny Goodman movie that my father enjoyed. I always respected that big band music, but to me—in those times—big band music just felt old and not at all relevant to my life.
I think Hickey’s really onto something with these ideas, and to me it’s all part of something larger going on. I have written a lot about the maturation of the tools we use to make live shows, and how that has impacted things. In those articles, I say (for the live entertainment world, in any case) that we have now invented a mature set of paint brushes, and our story tellers can now focus on painting. And I think something like that has happened in music too, where there is no scarcity, and just about everything ever recorded is available to anyone who can afford internet pretty much for free. Hickey talks in his podcast more than once of artists going to extraordinary lengths back in the 1960s to get a physical copy of a record; today everything is just a click away. And I think this is all part of something larger at play; the NY Times had an article last year titled Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill (gift link here ). You can quibble with the article, but there sure is something going on that feels strangely new and stagnant at the same time.
NYC
I first moved to NYC in 1990, almost 35 years ago, when, by Hickey’s definition, rock music was still at least somewhat culturally relevant. By then, of course, the 1970s glory days of the CBGB scene were long past, but the idea of being in the middle of a place with a thriving music scene and record stores and book stores was (along with my career) a major draw to the big city. In my first couple decades here, I saw many rock shows, but worked too much to really be part of a scene. But around 2009, I got my first digital camera, got back into photography (I had been a film photographer until I drifted away after losing dark room access after college), and had a bit more career flexibility. So, I started taking pictures of shows (portfolio here), and through photography I started connecting with a lot of musicians, and found some amazing bands making new and original rock music, like my friends .357 Lover , Mother Feather , Soraia , Lizzie and the Makers, Bubble , and many more. But over time, I slowly realized that I was going to more and more “tribute” shows. Some of these groups, like The Loser’s Lounge, which has been the central hub of NYC musical connection for me, Tragedy and Lez Zeppelin are populated with astonishingly talented and creative musicians, who have really created something interesting by bringing a new perspective to this older, now “classic” music. And over time, the big tours by the rock icons of my youth slowly became part of a nostalgia circuit, seemingly as irrelevant and hokey to my teenage self as the 1950s acts still on tour then and the “Oldies” stations that used to be on the radio. Even the music photography icons I so admired—Preston, Gruen, Rock, Godlis, Simon, Goldsmith, etc—are now really part of the nostalgia as well. It’s not likely any photographer today could ever make an impact like those talented artists did, and there’s no real opportunity for anyone coming up, because the music world (and its press) is so fragmented and siloed. Music photography these days for me is a creative act of support and fandom.
And this leads me to the ultimate outcome of all this. In David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, he talked about how a physical place to connect was a vital part of the development of his music. But today, is that physical connection necessary? NYC is less affordable (in constant dollars) than ever, and there’s likely more cross-pollination of musical ideas happening online or at summer festivals than in any dark rock club, as much as I still love those places.
Learning from the Podcast
Plowing through all these hundreds of hours of Hickey’s podcast, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the roots of rock music (which even include my father’s favorite Benny Goodman), and also about how it was made. Growing up in the relative information vacuum of the 1970s, so much of the music I heard seemed to spring fully formed out of the minds of genius musicians who had played it the first time I heard it. But, of course, that was a naïve view; Hickey lays out clearly how all those musicians were drawing from their own influences, from the zeitgeist of the time, and of course from tunes written by others. He also has explicated some fascinating ideas, like the idea that new musical instruments, technologies or ideas often appeared first in novelty recordings, where the artists are trying things out without really committing. And a rise in popular novelty recordings often would indicate a shift in the musical culture. With hundreds and hundreds of hours of episodes available now, starting on this epic podcast journey is a daunting undertaking. But Hickey does a great job of including references in every episode, so you can do what I did—pick some songs by artists you know and care about and jump in. For some of the older artists or those less relevant/interesting to me, I read the transcripts (I learned every time I tried to fast forward that the episode would lead to some interesting connection relevant to me). And definitely join Hickey’s Patreon, since there are a lot of fascinating songs in the Patreon-only bonus episodes, and it’s worth supporting Hickey in this epic endeavor. And if you want a good overview of the podcast up to this point and the approach, listen to Hickey’s interview with Rick Rubin.
The Future
I hope none of this comes off as me whining about how “in my day things were better”, but instead of a bit of wrestling with an odd, uneasy feeling in this strange cultural moment. I still don’t consider myself a nostalgic person: I still look forward to new releases and plan to continue to see shows—especially small shows of original, interesting music. I’ve always had tremendous respect for my musician friends who persist in making their art, despite the displacement of the record industry and the rise of Spotify and YouTube. But Hickey has led me to admire them even more, realizing that they are challenged not only by the loss of historic commercial support structures, but also because they are now playing into a niche market, one that I happen to be a part of and enjoy very much. I have no doubt that if any of my amazing musician friends was making music in the industry 30 years ago, they would have had the support of record companies and all the stuff that goes along with that. That world is now over.
As I write this, Hickey’s most recent episode is a song from 1969, and he’s just starting to enter the core of era of music that meant a lot to me, including Zeppelin and beyond. I’m looking forward to being enlightened about these artists of my youth, but Hickey is currently covering about one song per month, and at that rate he will take about 25 years to get through the remaining songs. I wish Hickey good health and hope he gets through all 500 while I’m still alive.