‘Everyone seems to be in Zimmers’: After 70 years of mind-blowing excitement, is rock ‘n’ roll dead? | Pop and rock

nOne can truly say when rock and roll was invented. You could say March 1951, with the release of Rocket 88 by Jackie Princeton and his Delta cats. Or perhaps it was July 1954, when Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black stopped messing around between takes at Sun Studios and started working on “That’s All Right,” which became the future King’s first single.

But a truly rock ‘n’ roll year become Rock ‘n’ roll was 70 years ago, in 1955: the year Little Richard came into the world with Tutti Frutti; The year of the first riots at Elvis’ show; General Blue Suede and Maybelene shoes; General Bo Diddley sings his own praises. In the United States, Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets was the biggest hit record of that year. In the UK, its presence on the soundtrack of the teen exploitation film The Blackboard Jungle is said to have sent young boys into a cinema-shattering frenzy.

In fact, 1955 was at the heart of such a huge pop culture moment that if you’re over 40, you’ve almost certainly grown up with rock ‘n’ roll as a constant background in your life. In the 1970s, groups such as Stray Cats, Showaddywaddy, Matchbox and Darts were regulars on Top of the Pops. Shakin’ Stevens was the best-selling solo artist of the 1980s, and several rock and roll revival artists also achieved great success. Punk covered old rock’n’roll songs – and the punk rock’n’roll boom, psychobilly, was one of the biggest youth cults of the early 1980s. Even then, contemporary songs like George Michael’s “Faith” or Girls Aloud’s Love Machine referenced the music without descending into revivalism. KT Tunstall’s Black Horse and the Cherry Tree used the Bo Diddley beat “Shave and Haircut, Two Pieces”.

But today, this species is threatened with extinction. “There’s no one, except the children of current rock ‘n’ roll singers, to take the place of people who are dying,” says John Hopkins, who was editor-in-chief of British Rock & Roll until it was forced to close earlier this year. He cites Rockers Reunion, in January, the first major all-day rock ‘n’ roll concert of the year. “Everyone seems to be on sticks and zimmers,” my reviewer noted.

It’s not as if the pre-Beatles pop music has disappeared. Lana Del Rey has built her career on it. Laufey’s neo-bossa-nova and jazz ballads are huge. Steven Sanchez’s international hit Until I Found You may be a lost recording from 1958. In the UK, George Ezra and Jake Pugh borrowed from it, occasionally straying away from rockabilly, as Ezra did on Cassy O. Naturally, vintage soul appears everywhere. But rock ‘n’ roll, in the sense that a teenager 70 years ago would have understood it? Not much; Certainly not in the UK. When you hear the words rock ‘n’ roll these days, they tend to be presented as rough and ready, calling not for greasy locks, but rather themed bars with tattooed bartenders and Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox.

Hopkins says the only place old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll values ​​still thrive is what is referred to as the “thin” scene — in fact, the costumes of 1955. “But there are the same 20 bands playing the same 20 songs every week, and they don’t care about innovation. It’s a nice social event, but it’s not music.”

How could this happen to one of the most active and boundary-pushing styles of music in history? Observers say that as the spotlight gradually faded, the rock ‘n’ roll scene became more extreme and, arguably, cut itself off. “There are some strong rules in rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly about what you can do and what you can’t do,” says Robert Orton, guitarist for the Jim Jones Revue, who played a high-energy, energetic take on rock ‘n’ roll in the 1910s. “But in a very slow way, it’s shifting.”

Orton remains active behind the scenes—he books the annual Red Rooster Festival, which places great importance on rock ‘n’ roll—and makes clear that rock ‘n’ roll, like many enduring subcultures, has long been an overwhelmingly working-class endeavor. As a writer and editor, I know this means traditional media will be less interested in it. Also, the hardcore rock ‘n’ roll scene seems to reject outside interest – I contacted the organizers of several rock ‘n’ roll weekends for this piece, and no one responded. “They’re very isolated,” Hopkins agrees. “When I started working at the magazine, I went to an event and felt like an alien. It was very difficult to get to know people.”

To give an idea of ​​how marginalized rock and roll is in the UK now, consider one of its brightest young sparks. Dylan Kirk, from Kent, is 25, and his band Dylan Kirk & the Killers are superstars on the rock ‘n’ roll circuit, playing weekends and clubs. He performs between 30 and 40 shows a year. When we speak, he is looking for a new job to replace the one he has at Wetherspoons. This is not a world where the big break is just around the corner.

Kirk was inevitably introduced to rock ‘n’ roll by his parents, and then taught himself to play it on the piano. He even started playing because of them. “My dad was in the car one day and he said, ‘I was in this bar that has a piano. We’re going to go over there now and you’re going to play it.” I was very shy about singing, but that was the first time I’d played in front of anyone – just a little bit of a boogie.

Who are his audience? Are there children present? “The people I perform for now were part of the rock ‘n’ roll revival in the ’70s and ’80s. But there are young people too, all the way up to teenagers. I think most young people approach it as a lifestyle – it’s not about the music, it’s about the fashion.”

However, the question remains unanswered: even if there are not many young musicians playing rock and roll, why has this music completely disappeared from the pop music recipe book? “That’s a question I ask myself,” Kirk says. “I find it strange that I don’t hear that.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with rock ‘n’ roll is that everyone thinks they know it, and that they can define it with one word: Elvis. Yes, people tend to know some of the other songs – by Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Chuck Berry – but Elvis seems to be all they need. Witness the success of Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, and the way it continues to explore the depths of his life. No other musical genre is so closely associated with a single figure, someone who has been dead for 48 years, and who remains – by a very long shot – the most commercially successful rock ‘n’ roll artist today.

If the aging of fans is a problem for rock ‘n’ roll, so is the aging of the music industry. For decades, record labels and recording studios have been populated by people who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll, either as a formative experience or as background noise. Now the producers who might have suggested Bo Diddley’s pulsing percussion or syncopated rockabilly guitar have retired, and key A&R people are more likely to rely on algorithms and data than on personal taste.

Outside the United Kingdom, rock and roll remains a large subculture. Orton highlights the annual Rockin’ Race Jamboree in Torremolinos, Spain, which attracts up to 30,000 people for five days of rock ‘n’ roll, roots music and related activities (Kirk will be there next year). “It’s really incredible,” Orton says. “There were kids who couldn’t have been older than their late teens. They looked like they had just stepped out of The Wild One.”

Sweden is known for its ragtag culture and reverence for the 1950s – there’s even an “Inviken Rockabilly Town”, famous for its devotion to the past. Ask Spotify and they’ll give you a really interesting playlist of Swedish rock and roll. But even there, it seems, only the children of revivalists continue the tradition.

However, even though the United States birthed this idea, it may save rock and roll. J.D. McPherson, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, started out playing rock and roll, before expanding his repertoire to include older forms of American music. McPherson has noticed that his audience has gotten younger, especially since he released a Christmas album a few years ago. When he DJs, he notices the old rock ‘n’ roll songs that started playing at the end of the evening to indicate that the crowds were starting to fill the dance floor. He believes rock ‘n’ roll can make a comeback.

“It has to be a very good person, who can take advantage of the rhythms and textures of the music, but make it feel like it is now.” Why might this happen? “This is definitely happening with country music — with new traditional country music,” he says, referring to artists like Zack Tubb who have brought country music back to drums, bass, guitar, fiddle and pedal steel. Of course, a lot of country music stars – the ones filling arenas in the UK right now, like Chris Stapleton – have strong layers of rock and roll in their music.

McPherson says it “takes a little longer” to get to arena level himself. “But I think at some point something is going to happen. It has to be something real and it has to be someone he really likes. And he probably won’t call it rock ‘n’ roll at all. But when it does, it’s going to happen accidentally.”

Maybe it could even come from the UK. Take Bury-born, Elvis-indebted 23-year-old Elliot James Ree, who is earning millions from streams for his old tunes: he looks and dresses the part. The six songs he’s released so far, again, lean heavily towards pre-Beatles pop, rather than true rock ‘n’ roll – more like Richard Hawley than Little Richard – but all it takes is one song, the one that sounds more like Hound Dog than Love Me Tender, and we’ll be there. After all, as Chuck Berry pointed out, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t hard: it’s got a backbeat, and you can’t lose it, whichever time you choose.