Is rock less inventive than other popular music genres?

my death of "rock"

across the way. I wouldn't let "other popular music genres" off the hook so lightly, though.

how many times have you heard autechre glitch in electronica songs?

they are always great bands out there and i guess the best ones you cant easily fit into a genre. hence any ones that can aer usually copying something.

Well thats my 2p anyway

Well then you've answered your question, haven't you.

I don't know about Bloc Party, but - whether or not you think it's totally revolutionary - Kid A is an album OF ITS TIME....(and don't say it sounds "just like Neu!" cuz then you've never heard a Neu record)....it could have only come out at that time....Same with At The Drive In, or Limp Bizkit....or Tool.....or System of a Down.....or US Maple.....or The Advantage........there's tons of stuff that I can think of in rock that sounds like it came out in the 00s and COULD NOT have been from any other era....so I don't know if that's the "revolution" your talking about....

As for rap....I can't think of anything that doesn't have a historical precedent.....Kanye West is definitely inf. by the RZA's "Can It Be All So Simple" and seems like a modern extension of the Large Prof/Pete Rock era.....Crunk has roots in Miami Bass and 90s techno, which in turn goes back to Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk.......the G-Unit sound is primarily Dr. Dre derived and seems to be continueing the lush, expensive sound he started with the Chronic......Outkast has Prince influences....

Basically, these kind of "lack of invention" things I think are basically schemes people use to justify their opinion about whatever style of music they don't like at the time.....

Hip Hop, Dance etc... These genres tend to run on the medium of the mix (in the radio or in the club), and so the material, even if it is self-consciously retro and references the past, is somewhat "infected" by an eye toward intra-genre compatability. Thus Kanye might slavishly sample old records but he's not going to do away with other components (largely in the beats, and of course let's not forget the rappers) which remind us that, hey, this is 2004, and don't get too comfortable with Lionel because we might be playing Lil' Jon next.

I like Kid A a lot, in fact it might be the only Radiohead album I still listen to, but I'm not sure about it being so much "of its time". It's not the one people will be picking out in years to come to exemplify the sound of 2000. And its basic strategy is sort of similar to Bowie's Low of a couple of decades before. (The instrumental track on it could even fit pretty easily on to the second side of Low.)

I don't think it will "exemplify the sound of 2000" but I think it DOES sound like an album made at that specific time....the techno/dance influences are too strong for it to sound like low....

I'm not sure I believe this. Rock includes "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" (well unless you want to call it punk and says it's not rock, which some of you probably would want to do) and "1983/A Merman I Should Turn To Be," which strikes me as a pretty broad range of possibilities. (FWIW, most new rock doesn't interest me, nor do I listen to much of any of it, for that matter.)

I wasn't argueing that....I was (trying) to say that I think Kanye has a distinct, defininable sound that will be remembered as a hallmark of this era...however, I can just as easily see historical precedents to what he's done as I can with any rock album that I mentioned....that's all.

Oh I agree with this completely. I was about to post a qualification that ultimately, especially in retrospect, most music that exists within some sort of popular context will sound "of its time" (britpop is a good example of this - it's the mid-nineties, not the mid-sixties, that I think of when I hear Oasis). And with this sort of post-punk (and the same is true for Strokes-style garage rock) the bands could as easily have been inspired by eachother as by the original post-punk bands.

At the same time, on a purely sonic level, I think that any scene with a bit of a "record-collector" bent to it can recreate old styles with a greater level of accuracy than more straightforwardly populist scenes (and this bit isn't about rock vs dance vs hip hop either, but, eg. post-punk vs nu-metal or Metro Area vs Mylo). I think for bands like Interpol and Bloc Party there is a level of awareness regarding the ancestral roots that is taken for granted even among the younger generation of fans. I can't really imagine meeting an Interpol fan who didn't a least know of Joy Division, but I can easily imagine a Linkin Park fan who had never heard of Depeche Mode. But this may be my own private misconception.

Actually, I can, believe I've met a couple or two! When you further consider that Joy Division aren't 'classic rock' in a populist American sense where Depeche Mode are (oddly enough), then maybe this is a matter of perception based on where you're at as much as anything else. I wouldn't call it a misconception on your part, mine could easily be simliar!

I'm with Simeon on this. E.g., Gore Gore Girls and White Stripes are certainly inventive (and good) while drawing on music from 30 and 40 years back - and part of the inventiveness is to mix up stuff from 30 and 40 years ago in a way that hadn't been done back then - but nonetheless aren't nearly as inventive as the sources they're drawing on, some of whom (Dylan and Holy Modal Rounders and Led Zeppelin) were drawing on music 40 years previous to them.

And as a couple people pointed out above, what to call "rock" isn't (and wasn't) a given; so Backstreet Boys and Timbaland, who sound way more rock 'n' roll to me than do Isis or White Stripes or Bloc Party, might have been called "rock" if various labelers over the last 40 years had labeled things differently. Or maybe a whole bunch of things might be called "jazz" if back in the '40s the label had adhered to Louis Jordan as much as it did Charlie Parker (so Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley might have been called "jazz," and the Beatles and the Stones and Tommy James & the Shondells).

>like them or not, bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, RATM, Chili Peppers, etc. were pretty goddamned inventive in the 90s. It was the Lollapallooza era; the market wanted inventive, so we got it.<

In other news, the answer to the thread-title question is "no."