Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Rock music had a rebellion
until no longer relevant.
Life does that.

It ripped off the blues
and did shows and choked
on its vomit, oh the drugs.
Obviously it couldn't last.
Oh the drink and drugs.

Then synthesizers took over
in the Year of Our Lord 1980s,
yet yhe whole thing was still on
trial after world wars and the
the cowboy elected president
who wanted to lock up rebels.

now it's autotune - even worse, AI. No talent required. The music industry's way of reducing labor costs.

somewhere in there
jazz-fusion opened its eyes
up & coming jazzers
trying their hand at rock -
complex chord changes
odd time signatures
virtuosic solos...
but disco sold more records -
and the record companies
liked selling records -
and told them
"you want us to sell your product
it better sound like this..."
RIP fusion
1969-1976

Pretty much. That's when most of the damage was done

Oh, I get like this sometimes. Thinking that things fit into grandiose socio-political cause-effect patterns. Stateside and in the UK in particular, after two World Wars, Korea, and the Vietnam tragedy and draft, there was a real rejection of what seemed a dangerously accelerated extension of the same old status quo and barbarism of centuries of top-heavy rule of the many by the few. The "counterculture" movement was called that for a reason. Yes, drugs opened a window or two, though even folks in the movement (like Hunter S. Thompson, and I think Sly Stone too) saw and cautioned about their obvious limitations and pitfalls. And rock music indeed was intertwined, a reaction and rebellion as well. Did these intertwined movements succumb and erode to excesses and self-parody? Yes, at times, like most if not all human affairs.

Meanwhile, the Autocrats and Quasi-Autocrats were NOT PLEASED. The First Crackdown was Nixon. The Second Crackdown was Reagan. And from there the music began to slide under a creeping electronic / digital glaze. Musicians still played instruments of course, but less often, it seemed, and WHERE WERE THE HORNS ?!?!

Ah, but I digress ... (and oversimplify).

Where is rock music now?
Has it finally been beaten down
by the terminal police forces
in our so-called governments?

just in the beating of our hearts

And in our heads. I had the Doors' LA Woman stuck in my head yesterday. Not sure why it took me so long to figure out that it's metaphorical-- a song about LA as a "woman." Then I read somewhere that the "Mr Mojo Risin" bit near the end is an anagram of "Jim Morrison" ... Huh, ok ...