More evidence for the decline and fall of rock and roll

March 29, 2024 • 11:45 am

I told you so! Rock reached its apogee in the Sixties and has been going downhill ever since.  Today’s popular music for young people is pathetic: autotuned, repetitive, trite, and without much creativity or inventivity. Look at the Billboard Top Ten this week, featuring Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift.  Yes, readers send me groups that, they claim, are as good as the Beatles. They often are okay, but they are definitely not as good as the Beatles. Or The Band, or Hendrix, or Clapton, or Joni Mitchell, or Steely Dan, or. . . . ad infinitum.

But don’t take my word for it; I’ve already defended my views extensively. Now SCIENCE itself proves the decline of rock, summarized in the article in the Guardian below, and based in a paper in the respectable journal Nature. You can read both by clicking below:

I’ll simply provide an excerpt of the Guardian article:

You’re not just getting older. Song lyrics really are becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday.

Lyrics have also become angrier and more self-obsessed over the last 40 years, the study found, reinforcing the opinions of cranky ageing music fans everywhere.

A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.

Before detailing how lyrics have become more basic, the study pointed out that US singer-songwriting legend Bob Dylan – who rose to fame in the 1960s – has won a Nobel prize in literature.

. . . . “What we have also been witnessing in the last 40 years is a drastic change in the music landscape – from how music is sold to how music is produced,” Zangerle said.

Over the 40 years studied, there was repeated upheaval in how people listened to music. The vinyl records and cassette tapes of the 1980s gave way to the CDs of the 90s, then the arrival of the internet led to the algorithm-driven streaming platforms of today.

For the study in the journal [Nature] Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the emotions expressed in lyrics, how many different and complicated words were used, and how often they were repeated.

“Across all genres, lyrics had a tendency to become more simple and more repetitive,” Zangerle summarised.

The results also confirmed previous research which had shown a decrease in positive, joyful lyrics over time and a rise in those that express anger, disgust or sadness.

Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.

The number of repeated lines rose most in rap over the decades, Zangerle said – adding that it obviously had the most lines to begin with.

“Rap music has become more angry than the other genres,” she added.

The researchers also investigated which songs the fans of different genres looked up on the lyric website Genius.

Unlike other genres, rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.

Rock has tumbled down the charts in recent decades, and this could suggest fans are increasingly looking back to the genre’s heyday, rather than its present.

Another way that music has changed is that “the first 10-15 seconds are highly decisive for whether we skip the song or not,” Zangerle said.

Previous research has also suggested that people tend to listen to music more in the background these days, she added.

There you go. If self-obsessed, angry, repetitive, and simpler songs are better songs, then you don’t have ears to hear. Further, “rock fans most often looked up lyrics from older songs, rather than new ones.”

My prediction is that “oldies” stations will continue to play music of the sixties and early seventies, and you won’t be hearing Ariana Grande even when the kids in Generation Z or Generation Alpha grow up.  Yes, people may prefer the tunes of their youth, for that was the musical background for their growing up, but it so happens that my youth happened to coincide with the greatest flowering of rock music. (Purely a coincidence, I assure you.) Like art, classical music, and opera, genres of art tend to wear themselves out and become senescent. Nowhere is this more evident than rock music.

I found the article in Nature Scientific Reports on which the piece above was based. Click to read; I’ll not go through it as it’s long and complicated:

The abstract:

Abstract

Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structure, emotion, and popularity. We find that pop music lyrics have become simpler and easier to comprehend over time: not only does the lexical complexity of lyrics decrease (for instance, captured by vocabulary richness or readability of lyrics), but we also observe that the structural complexity (for instance, the repetitiveness of lyrics) has decreased. In addition, we confirm previous analyses showing that the emotion described by lyrics has become more negative and that lyrics have become more personal over the last five decades. Finally, a comparison of lyrics view counts and listening counts shows that when it comes to the listeners’ interest in lyrics, for instance, rock fans mostly enjoy lyrics from older songs; country fans are more interested in new songs’ lyrics.

QED.

h/t: Jez

 

60 thoughts on “More evidence for the decline and fall of rock and roll”

  1. Agreeing, since I think this keen:

    My funny valentine
    Sweet comic valentine
    You make me smile with my heart
    Your looks are laughable
    Unphotographable
    Yet you’re my favorite work of art

    Is your figure less than Greek
    Is your mouth a little weak
    When you open it to speak
    Are you smart?

    But don’t change a hair for me
    Not if you care for me
    Stay, little valentine, stay
    Each day is Valentine’s Day

    composed by Richard Rodgers (music) & Lorenz Hart (lyric), 1937

    I like Greta van Fleet
    https://www.youtube.com/@GretaVanFleet

    1. classic modern example of passus duriusculus (“harsh passage”) – chromatic fourth – check it out.

      1. @ThyroidPlanet
        are you saying Funny Valentine has the harsh passage? At which point coinciding with the lyric?

  2. I guess I’m not surprised the song’s of today are more depressing and self-centered. Like many other studies show, the youth of today have increased anxiety about their economic future than youth of the past and have a depressing outlook on the state of the planet that (as they see it) no one gives a shit about. Sapolski’s Behave gives scientific explanations of how the young brain is far more passionate and explosive…iirc the chapter titled: “Dude, Where is my Pre-Frontal Cortex.” So when life gets more depressing and/or complicated, the youth feel it more keenly.

    Either way, there is still great music being created. I always tout Steven Wilson as someone who continually releases as great of music as any musician from the 60’s or 70’s. Of course, he’s in his late 50’s and was “raised” on 60’s/70’s music.

  3. Here’s a new thought I had yesterday on this :

    How do we listen to music now-a-days? In particular, anyone listen to the album from start to finish lately?

    I have not – I should start again!

    1. I have a collection of over 1000 cds and about 100 vinyl lps (the remnant of about 300 I’d collected between 1977 and 1987, when I started buying cds), and I do regularly listen to them from start to finish. Most of my collection consists of music from the mid-60s to mid-90s. Up to within the last 15 years, I was still getting at least a few new cds every year, but my collecting has significantly tapered off since then. For several years, from 1965 through 2000 or so, I have several studio albums from each year. For the last 24 years, there are several years for which I don’t have any representative album. But then, I haven’t been listening to music radio stations or other outlets for new music nearly as much as I used to. Occasionally, I’ll hear a new song and really like it enough to want to get whatever cd it’s on, but that happens far less than it did 25 to 45 years ago.

  4. There is still much great new music in rock genres with wonderful complexity, but you wont hear it much on normal radio stations I suspect. I have, with exception of NPR news, given up on radio. For me, one positive about social media is that I learn so much about new music and not autotune highly compressed music. Made connections in various places in the world exchanging ideas of new music to have some organic growth in new discoveries. I don’t disagree with the perspective of what is regarded as more popular or mainstream though. It is only scratching on the crust…

    1. Since about 1999, NPR has also been the only radio network I usually listen to too. My local NPR station does have a program on which they play an eclectic collection of music, most of which I like and on which I sometimes hear songs I’d never heard before and really like (and they’re not always new songs).

    2. Well, how about sending us about five links to YouTube videos with great new music? That would be a better way to demonstrate your point than to just assert it. I am eager to find new music as good as the old stuff I love.

      2. You’ll probably find this a very odd answer, but the genre of music that I think tends to be best nowadays (and that doesn’t get much attention) is music that’s composed for video games. Here are five examples that I think are particularly good:

        One-winged Angel – the music for the climactic battle in Final Fantasy VII (1997): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leJ-kA9IV5c

        Time’s Scar – the main theme for Chrono Cross (1999): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ratd8lfc4A

        Baba Yetu – the main theme for Civilization IV (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A

        The Opened Way – the main battle theme from Shadow of the Colossus (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-g1ncoKihw

        Gusty Garden – the best-known piece of music from Super Mario Galaxy (2007): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFuTy7ubo74

        Now that I think of it, most of the video game music that I consider the best is from 15+ years ago. Maybe this genre also has declined, although if it has that’s happened much more recently, or maybe I just feel this way because of my nostalgia for the games I grew up with.

  5. I used to sit down and listen to music, be it rock, classical, or avant garde, often with high-quality headphones (and on high-quality stereo equipment). When good quality wireless headphones became available in the 1990s, I would often listen to both my vinyl records and CDs via those headphones while puttering in a garden.

    Now I mostly listen to Pandora via my phone connected to Bluetooth speakers in my bathroom during my morning ablutions and while taking a shower. My wife & I rarely listen to music together except when we have dinner at our cosy bistro table with candles. Although my hearing seems to be fine (I’m 74), my listening habits have devolved along with the decline in the quality of rock & pop music. It sometimes makes me sad.

    I got married late in life, so maybe I listen to music less because I don’t want to impose on my wife with an impromptu desire to hear “Drumming” by Steve Reich again, or “Hejira” by Joni Mitchell — or the “electronic tonalities” of Bebe & Louis Barron from the soundtrack of “Forbidden Planet.” I don’t want to give her sonic whiplash.

    But mostly I think I’m distracted by being able to access the recorded history of the world on the internet.

  6. I’m not convinced. I would think there are two big effects going on here:

    1) Over 40 years there has been a vast increase in the quantity of music available. It is now way easier and cheaper for anyone to record their own music and stream it. This has vastly reduced the quality threshold needed. Hence, it may well be the case that, owing to this big expansion, there has been a decline in the average quality of available music, even if there is just as much high-quality stuff being recorded as there ever was.

    This is what seems to be going on in Fig 2 of the paper; there is just as much good stuff today as there ever was, but there is now also a lot of worse stuff.

    2) Survivorship bias. Stuff from 40 years ago that is still available and still being streamed is likely to be best from that era, a winnowed sample. Low-quality stuff from that era would have been forgotten about.

    1. Exactly on #2. The worst song I have ever heard, from any era, is “Brand New Key” by Melanie, I believe it was written in 1971, so well within the peak years of rock.

      The song is so bad it was the inspiration for this hilarious skit from the Kids in the Hall:

      1. Noooooo! I love Brand New Key! Can’t we file this under different strokes for different folks?

    2. I’m still waiting for links to new music that is as good as the good stuff I listened to when younger. Just asserting that it exists doesn’t convince me: I WANT TO HERE THE STUFF THAT PEOPLE IS TOUTING. How about sending, say, five links to music in the last five years that is as good as the best music from the Sixties.

      There is a lot of assertion in these comments, yet almost no examples

      1. I’ve probably posted many of these before, and they don’t really hold to the 5 year limit but music has been downhill longer than that. The thing is, others have posted recent music that they swear is great, and I eagerly check them out (and I will continue to), but probably 98% of them don’t do anything for me. I don’t know why, but perhaps what one finds to be good is also a matter of hit or miss. Funny how what I like has an old sound. Or is more like good country music — that music has stayed more true it itself. Anyway, here goes.
        1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUSLN-9_LhQ
        2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sQGQEmZS10
        3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PH7dK6SLC8
        4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boeuk8N_Gsw
        5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBv1SWTDfiI
        6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE-gdNIL8WI

        Nothing will top the greats of the past, though. I think that is true enough

      2. There is an enormous amount of dreadful music these days, but I don’t understand why you lump Taylor Swift into that category. I have said this before, but I can only assume that you are forming your opinions after hearing only a tiny fraction of her work.

        You’ve asked for five youtube links demonstrating good contemporary music. I’ve gone a bit further and collected seven, with five from Swift and two from Olivia Rodrigo. I urge you to listen, give them a fair chance and then tell me your opinion. Are they all rubbish? Or are there some good songs on this list? Here it is:

        Cornelia Street live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGvCApIEQY
        Betty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orXAg5dIMa8
        Happier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQFmRXgeR-s
        Last Great American Dynasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5xdY6MCeI
        August: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn_0zPAfyo8
        All Too Well 10 Minute Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRxrwjOtIag
        Drivers Licence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDBbnmKpqQ

    3. That’s a good point. But there was enough in the 60’s and early 70’s that I often listened to the radio while driving. I quit mid 70’s or so because I just didn’t like it. Never went back.

  7. There’s a lot to unpack in that article, and I won’t attempt it now. The last 20 years or so have gotten pretty abysmal, and I have read many times about the “death of guitar rock”. Which mostly (though not entirely) means “rock”. But at the risk of provoking Dr Coyne’s wrath, I will plead the case that there was plenty of innovative, intelligent and completely worthy rock beyond the early 70s. No, there will never be another Beatles, but the later 70s, the 80s (an unfairly maligned decade), and the 90s all produced some gems. Even today there are still worthy artists making interesting music, but no, none of it is classic rock. A lot of it didn’t, and doesn’t, get broad mainstream exposure, but that doesn’t devalue the music. And of course, there was also a lot of junk released in those years, but that has been true of every era.

    There are many reasons for the decline of rock, preeminent among them, in my view, the conquest of popular music by rap/hip-hop. I simply cannot find (and yes, I have absolutely tried) much about that musical genre to like. To each their own, but as young people have gotten angrier* and more narcissistic so has their music.
    (*Seems to me that the youth of the 60s had as much, if not more, reason to be angry).

    Criticizing hip-hop is guaranteed to provoke “OK Boomer” style responses, or these days straight out accusations of racism. But it is inarguable: hip-hop is not rock and roll, and the latter continues to fade. All things go in cycles, though, and I wonder what will supplant hip-hop?

    One last whimsical observation: the article states that “Lyrics have also become much more self-obsessed, with words such as “me” or “mine” becoming much more popular.” I don’t argue with this at all, but apparently self-obsession was already becoming a problem in the 60s. After all, a certain aforementioned band from the era once commented on the phenomena in a song called “I Me Mine”.

    1. Was George Harrison predicting in that song, mostly recorded in 1969, but touched up and released in 1970, what would become known as the “Me Decade”? I think that was actually the last song Paul, George & Ringo (but not John) worked on before the Beatles broke up.

    2. As far as I can tell, words like derivative, repetitive, unimaginative, and formulaic are entirely inadequate to describe the banality of rap/hip hop.

  8. “All rock constantly aspires towards the condition of Muzak”

    With apologies to Walter Pater.

  9. “Are we not men? We are DEVO!” And these lyrics are closing in on fifty years ago. No one is writing songs with words like ‘plebeian’ in them nowadays. Taylor Swiftt can only DREAM of being as good as the Beatles.

    1. “Plebeian.”

      … flashed Barbara Streisand singing “Cry Me a River” in the 1960s

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GHFRKqvXtc

      Oh. She rips her heart open trying to hurt him. I’d be afraid.

      I remember all that you said
      Told me love was too plebeian
      Told me you were through with me

      That one partial stanza tops the entire long lyric of Justin Timberlake’s song of the same name.

  11. No argument from me with PCC or science!

    I humbly and highly recommend a podcast called “The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn.”

    http://benvaughn.org/radio-show
    https://z1077fm.com/podcasts/many-moods-ben-vaughn/

    Or just search in your favorite podcasting app.

    Why it’s great:
    1) It spans many decades and genres.
    2) It’s commercial free!
    3) As a very talented musician, songwriter and composer himself, Ben Vaughn is an excellent curator of music. For example, you may have heard why an artist is considered great and may know some of their hits, but he’ll dig up some of their hidden treasures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Vaughn
    4) It’s professionally produced, not just “some guy” playing records.

    Oh, did I mention it’s completely commercial free?? 🙂

    I’ve downloaded them all and put them on shuffle. My goal to ignore news and politics as much as possible until tRump is either dead or in prison along with his cult of personality.

    I’ll listen to some great music until then!

  12. I don’t know how to classify much of the popular music on mainstream radio today, like Taylor Swifts’ music, but I don’t personally hear it as rock music. It doesn’t have the sound. So is that really even rock music, or …?
    In any case, it is obvious that the mainstream whatever-that-music is, it is on the whole pathetically simplified, angsty, self-centered, and dumb. T. Swift is good, I will admit, but she would be unremarkable in the 60s and 70s. I rant about this stuff to my wife once a week on our drive to and from work since she only wants to play top 40. That same damn electronic ‘tikka tikka tikka’ loop. That occasional electronic ‘whack’ sound. You know what I mean. It’s the only instrumentation in many songs today, played behind a breathy auto-tuned over-paid and over-famous vocalist.

  13. Well, I do, partly because it’s too much of a fag to keep taking records off and putting others on, but mainly because, by now, to me, each record forms a sort of artistic whole. I don’t think I could contemplate playing, say, Whole Lotta Love, and then taking Led Zeppelin off and putting on Joni Mitchell.

    And that’s just ‘popular’ music! If I want to listen to a Brahms or Nielsen symphony, or a Schubert or Finzi song cycle, I want to hear all the movements, in order, without interruption. Why would anyone want to do anything else?

    1. Apologies: this was meant to be a reply to Thyroid Planet way back at #3. Don’t know why it turned up here.

  14. People interested in music from a technical pov may find Rick Beato’s Youtube channel useful. Search for Rick Beato, or “Everything Music”. Beato is pronounced Bee-AT-o. Rick is well aware of the problem and makes videos about it every few weeks.

    There’s also Fil whose podcast is called Wings of Pegasus. He has a particular interest in criticizing AutoTune, especially when used in vocal performances/recordings.

    Fun fact: When the Beatles broke up, all four members were still in their 20s. They (George, really) wrote one of the great love songs, “Something”. I count it as their best song. Frank Sinatra sang it regularly – what greater praise could there be?

  15. I have two sons-in-law, both in their late 30s, both very good guitarists, and both occasional band members. Most of the stuff they enjoy playing is from the ‘classic’ era of the 60s to the 80s. They both write their own material, but it tends to be in the classic tradition.

    We are proud to have in our town one of the best small music venues in the country, which has featured the debuts of some of the biggest bands around. Their best-attended gig every year, by a country mile, is the annual Bowie Tribute Night. Go figure!

  16. I agree with verdict on the decline of rock/pop music. Commenting on the repetitiveness of modern music, 1971 pop music icon, Bill Withers, said,

    And I know, I know, I know, I know
    I know, I know, I know, I know, I know
    I know, I know, I know, I know, I know
    I know, I know, I know, I know, I know
    I know, I know, I know, I know, I know
    I know, I know.

    Those are six continuous lines from his 26 line big hit, Ain’t no sunshine, which also includes six lines of ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone’ and six lines of ‘Anytime she goes away’.

    Still, a decent music arrangement and, IMO, a better voice, can make this a terrific song: listen to Canem @

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWVe1GGvs4U

    though even she struggles with the I knows.

    1. That is still a good song. Even the mediocre and forgotten music from back then is like goddamm Mozart now.

    2. I agree with Mark that “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” is still a very good (not great) song despite the repetitiveness of the chorus. It is, however, a great melancholic song. A style I enjoy, albeit in small doses. Another great example of this is “She’s Leaving Home” from The Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album.

      P.S., The movie “Notting Hill” is arguably the best use of the song “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone”.

  19. The vast influence that rap/hip-hop came to have from the 90s onwards has always mystified me. From a strictly *musical* viewpoint, rap is almost a nullity: basically a form of toneless, rhythmic chanting, sometimes with a repetitive, essentially static, sequence of rudimentary chords. Rap is primarily a lyric form rather than a musical one, and the ability of the best rappers to improvise lyrics that scan and rhyme is sometimes quite impressive. But what they actually rap *about* must surely represent some kind of cultural and moral nadir: a mixture of misogyny, gun worship, and the crassest forms of materialism centred around cars and a ridiculous obsession with gold, with a delivery that embodies arrogance, aggression, and self-satisfaction. How this product has managed to capture such a wide public is utterly baffling.

  21. If you compare an era without rap with era with rap, then obviously the mean will be angrier, simpler, and more repetitive.

  22. Firstly, to discuss the decline of R&R, we need to agree on how we define it. I tried to look it up, but did not find consistent and cohesive definitions.

    Then , there is the subject of shared experience. When I was a teenager, everyone listened to the same two or three radio stations, then to MTV. Now, there are a great many streaming services, infinite sources of music downloads, and no reason to expect much overlap in each other’s playlists.

    Since nobody else is doing it, I will put down a few links to current music that I find I really enjoy, even if I cannot explain why-

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI52dp3r2o0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1vDFDAWlQg

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIyl9bCp6W4

    Of course, I am of the opinion that the apex of popular music occurred right before Skynyrd’s plane crashed, and will never recover from the event.

  24. I heartily recommend the documentary mini-series “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544732/) if you have an Apple+ TV subscription. I’m only halfway through the series but am quite impressed with how it relates the songs released around 1971 with societal changes and world events such as the Vietnam war. I was born in January 1961 so didn’t really appreciate the impact of that music till a few years later.

    The most recent band I consider comparable to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Queen, The Who, etc. is The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I started listening to them around 1996. Since then there have been a few bands (e.g., Lake Street Dive) that I consider quite good and would recommend. Yet I haven’t heard anything from a band I would consider equal to the greats of the 1960’s and 1970’s in the past 20 years.

  25. The decline may be there as rock as I knew it, it has peaked and now it’s about those songs, albums, that can stand up and be counted after the passing of time. Like jazz pieces made standards being shunted around and every now and then someone slays a piece that equals the original or…, betters it. Subjective point being popular tunes, tracks are still being r3egnerated, movies, gaming…
    funny thing to me, I think there is this big bar to eclipse, Mozat et. al., 250 years at least and perhaps then you could say you wrote a good song… you could record your acceptance speech for the occasion now just in case.
    But unlike Achilles paradox they will never catch up to the classics if both are still being played at… live concerts, parties, seduction, and other gyrating events. yeah!
    Penny Lane is in my ears
    and in my eyes…

  26. Have noticed this for decades now.
    Not many sad tales in Chuck B lyrics, poetry.
    But country music!?!?
    Man there’s a trail of tears.

  27. I’m not sure why you spelled SCIENCE in all capitals… Initially I thought it was published in Science, but it’s in Scientific Reports, a lower tier publication of Nature Publishing Group…

    1. It’s in all caps because it’s a joke, and when I write it like that I mean SCIENCE as in “the scientific process”, just as drugs on t.v. are said to be approved by DOCTORS.

  28. Yep, nothing nearly as sophisticated today as Tutti Frutti or Be Bop a Lula. I jest. I entirely agree that the music from, say 1956-1972, which happens to coincide with my youth, is vastly superior. Besides The Beatles, The Stones, The Band, Dylan, CcR, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Feat et much al, there were all the great black artists: Sam Cooke, Aretha , Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, The Temptations, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, the many terrific “girl groups” and so on. It really was a cornucopia.

  29. Late to the party – but the only rock group to hold my interest since Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (in the 70’s), hails from Japan.

    Don’t be fooled by their stage costumes, they are masterful musicians –

    Perhaps an instrumental to start?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ZSvmnkS00&ab_channel=BAND-MAID

    Live “Old-time” bass / lead guitar duel?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfORoQIqB3E&ab_channel=BAND-MAID

    Just rocking live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbyQCJn6rYg&ab_channel=BAND-MAID

    Their compositions are driving, intricate without cacophony (lots to notice on repeated plays), and joyful.

    1. Great, suggestions, Dave. When reading all the sad comments above, I just kept thinking – have they never heard of Band-Maid?

      1. Thanks, would be interesting to hear Jerry’s take on them.

        The language issue is probably a barrier for many, as lyrics are seen as an integral part of the experience. That may be why the Mexican band “The Warning” (which has similar intensity to Band-Maid) is rapidly gaining popularity.
        As for me, the “deepities” (thank you Dan) of lyrics fall on deaf ears.

        Plus, “World Domination” is hard… 🙂 even if they are re-invigorating rock ‘n roll.

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