Tuesday, July 24, 2012

What will replace rock music? Even hip-hop?

There is one thing that is classically part of teenager rebellion - rock music.  But I notice that teenagers are not that nuts about rock music.  It looks like adults over the age of 40 are the ones that are nuts about rock music - Old people are nuts about rock music. When rock music has become the "teenage rebellion" music, the people that grew up listening to it are in the 70s and even 80 years old.  It has become a genre of music that is starting to decline as the oldest people who remember rock music are almost to the grave.  The Rolling Stones are literally going to be the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead are literally going to be the Greatful Dead.

Hip-hop is another form of music that seem to be maturing - that used to be the "teen rebellion" music about the 1980s and 1990s, and become mainstream in the 2000s, but now the people that are rap fans are having children and are now currently parents, which is making hip-hop stodgy.  Hip-hop has even become on VH1 as retro countdown, which shows the "adultness" of the music.

I really don't know what is the "teen rebellion" music of the 21st century, but it looks like hip-hop has not even become the "rebellion sound."  Rock music has started to become even artsy like jazz and classical, and it is starting to become even appreciated by the upper crust educated people and academia. The Beatles are not rebellion - they are class assignments that can be analyzed.

I do have some ideas of what teenagers want.  I can see electronic music is going to be "teen rebellion", but even the electronic sound has become the mainstream sound.  There is a possibility that "country music" might be the new teen rebellion.

Country music used to be liked  only by "old farmers", but now I see a lot of teenagers nuts about certain country stars.  Country music has a rebellion to it; it has a counterculture to it.  It is about the freedom and the Wild West, the shotgun and the moonshine - something that teenagers can be nuts about.  A lot of things in country music seem very rebellious in teen music - you sing about things teens want to do such as driving fast in pick up trucks, mudding in four wheelers, and going against the government, just like the hippies of the '60s and '70s.  It does have rebellion, especially with the school system, which emphasizes things such as diversity and tolerance, which will make teenagers very racist today.

Techno and dance music could be teen rebellion music - there is always a bunch of teenagers that like techno and are not nerds anymore.  Now "scene kids" are liking techno and this genre called "dubstep."

Or to be ironic - teen rebellion is now assumed in textbooks, but teens are going to "rebel" by being goody two shoes and conforming.  There are a lot of very clean cut teenagers, especially when the norm is for "teens" to be rambunctious and rebellious. You might be seeing very clean, boring teenagers for a long time, which might make teenagers endangered species.

I can see another form of "teen rebellion" music, just to add to it, might be "video game" and "anime" music - it looks dorky, but maybe the millennium teenagers is going to be dorky.  Maybe the ideas of dork is so 20th century - the dork might be a teenager in a gangsta outfit.




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