The Fragmentation of Rock

Based on a comment Dr. Campbell made on my previous entry

Back in the day, rock meant one thing. Everyone listened to rock because there wasn’t anything else around really. Rock was a unifier, something the collective could listen to and somehow, quite miraculously, appealed to almost everyone. Sure there were the really uptight squares, but even they had their rock to listen to. There was a certain amount of splintering, between hard rock and highschool, but mainly there was just rock. Pure, unwholesome rock.
But with innovation comes the need to push the boundaries and go further. In the 1960’s there was barely any fragmentation, possibly just between Motown and the Beatles, but even that was an insignificant break. In the 1970’s the main fragmentation was between pop (think disco and the like) and rock (Southern rock, Led Zeppelin, etc.), but it wasn’t a particularly big fragmentation, and even if you were completely devoted to ABBA, you still knew “Stairway to Heaven” or had heard of Elton John. Rock was still a major unifier during these decades, and would remain so (for the most part anyway) into the mid 1980’s. But beginning in 1975, and even more so with advent of the synthesizer, the major fragmentation of music culture began to happen and has not stopped since.
In 1975 Patti Smith released her first album, “Horses.” Shortly there after, sometime in 1976, the Ramones released their self-titled debut. And thus the need for any kind of guitar technique, or even knowing more than the very basic “power chords,” giving way to the music of the uncouth masses. Anyone with any kind of musical ability could pick up a guitar and start banging away two minute ditties about how cruddy life was, pick up a bassist and a drummer and…voila you have yourself a band. The style and “grace” that had been introduced to rock in the previous decade or so was thrown away, along with the gratuitous guitar solos that had become so beloved. In the mid 1980’s synthesizers became widely available, and so the DIY attitude that had come with punk flourished. Plunk away at keyboard, add guitar, bass, drum (machines) and a practically monotone leader singer and…voila you have a band.
By the 1990’s and the advent of the internet and Myspace, rock had fragmented beyond the scope of what was known back in the late 1950’s when rock was just beginning. Innovation and the need to sound more unique than the person next you (either because you wanted to, or because you felt you needed to, to get signed) drove what had once been a single entity, rock, into a million (actually more around a hundred) little factions, sub-genres, that overtook the whole. Meanwhile, completely new genres came forth from the world, hip-hop, R&B, electronica, and rap, all from the same need to show the world who you are, according to you.
And thus, with innovation and drive, the two things that birthed rock and roll in the very beginning, has torn apart, fragmented the genre. Rock is no longer a unifier for the masses. There isn’t a single artist that everyone knows and likes (though there are plenty of artists that everyone knows). This doesn’t mean rock is dead though. Rock has simply grown.