Newsweek: Is rock music improving?

Rock's Big Bounce
In the 10 years since Kurt Cobain died, a once thrilling genre has struggled. Now a new community of bands is emerging and finally making it safe to go back into the mosh pit.


By Devin Gordon
NewsweekMay 17 issue - Have you ever been outside in 106-degree heat? The air is crushing. You dehydrate instantly. You fantasize about cooler places, like Arizona. In 106-degree heat, the average indie-rock fan—thin, brittle, white as chalk—will spontaneously burst into flames. So it was a shock when 60,000 of them braved the elements recently for the Coachella music festival outside Los Angeles. Two days, all outdoors, all to see 82 bands with names that sound like parodies of band names: Death Cab for Cutie, Broken Social Scene, the Flaming Lips and one that could've been the festival's motto: ... And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. (Yes, that's a real band. And yes, they're good.) Two years ago, the indie-rock scene was sputtering. Coachella was a quirky, decently attended event. And now? "I had no idea it was such a big deal," says Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard. "We were touring in Japan beforehand and people kept telling us they were flying from Japan to be at Coachella."

After a grim decade, the rock scene is once again producing music—lots of it—that's worth getting on a plane to hear. And better still, people are buying it. Last month, Seattle bizarro-rockers Modest Mouse turned heads when their new CD debuted at No. 19 on Billboard's album chart, selling 80,000 copies in a week. Gibbard has become such an indie rainmaker that his side project, the electronic-pop duo the Postal Service, has sold 250,000 copies of its first CD, "Give Up." "Five years ago, a record that sold 50,000 copies was a huge success in our world," says Rich Egan, president of Vagrant Records, home of punk pinups Dashboard Confessional. "The standard has totally changed." File-sharing, once thought to be the death knell for the music industry, has actually helped trigger a spending spree. Even MTV and big radio are starting to notice, playing artists they wouldn't have touched three years ago. Does the current scene have a Nirvana, an R.E.M., a U2? Not yet. "But I've talked about this with friends a lot lately: something amazing is about to happen," says Gibbard, 27. "I don't want to guess what it'll be, but you can just feel it coming."

If you tuned out on rock music a few years ago because you just couldn't stand to hear another Creed song, it's time to come back to the flock. For too long that giddy sense of digging up buried treasure that comes with discovering a new band was a once-, maybe twice-yearly occurrence. Now, thanks in part to file-sharing and iPods, which have turned even graying rock fans into music collectors again, it's hard to get through the week without making a find. We're in a golden age for pure songwriting, with rare talents like Gibbard, the Shins' James Mercer and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy revitalizing the four-minute pop song and making a case that, in fact, it hasn't all been done before. If there's one knock against this new school of rock, it's that no one seems willing to step up and become class president. "At some point, Bono looked at Elvis and said, 'Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do,' " says former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. A fractured pop climate and a general cynicism about musical saviors, he argues, has made young bands even less likely to pursue grand visions than Pearl Jam and Nirvana were. "There's just as much talent in this generation, but the constant message to kids starting new bands is: this is really not that important."

For a decade, that message was reinforced by the marketplace. Hip-hop grew dominant. And it didn't help that rock's last ruling age—the early ' 90s—ended so bitterly. If Kurt Cobain is your model of stardom, maybe selling 150,000 CDs is plenty, thank you. But lately, mainstream hip-hop has been bogged down in egocentric emptiness. And major-market radio, dominated by Clear Channel and drab rock acts like Nickelback and Puddle of Mudd, has bored listeners into experimentation. There's a refuge ready and waiting for them. Online music has coalesced from a loose band of pirate Web sites into a full-on industry. "Each month we get our statements from Apple—for our music bought on iTunes—and we're starting to make some serious money there," says Jonathan Poneman, founder of Nirvana's original label, Sub Pop Records, whose roster now includes the Postal Service, the jangling guitar rockers the Shins, and Southern-smoked folkie Iron & Wine. "If that model's working, and it appears to be, that changes everything."

It's already beginning to. The "alternative rock" genre has increased its industry market share for five straight years, according to Billboard director of charts Geoff Mayfield. (Even rap hasn't performed that well.) Last week MTV, the high court of bling videos and Britney Spears, added five rock clips to its coveted "Buzzworthy" stable. According to MTV programming chief Tom Calderone, that's a first in his four years at the network. "The system is being reinvented without the permission of the major music labels," says Nic Harcourt, host of the tastemaking KCRW Santa Monica radio show "Morning Becomes Eclectic." "Now that it's started, it won't stop. That means we'll be getting a healthy batch of new artists for years to come—and there'll be lots of people who want to hear them."

Another refreshing change is that today's rock bands are less sanctimonious, and much savvier, about money matters. "They're taking their cues from hip-hop," says Universal Records president Monte Lipman. A decade ago licensing a song for a commercial would've been sacrilege for an indie rocker. Today only a few purists blink when a Shins song pops up in a McDonald's ad or when Delta lifts a track by the British songstress Jem. "The Clash has licensed stuff. The Who's done it," notes Vagrant's Egan, who was reared on uncompromising hard-core acts like Fugazi. "So you think, 'What, exactly, am I fighting against?' " Today behavior that used to constitute "selling out" has become a way to fend off the siren call of a corporate deal. If your band makes enough money off an ad, then there's no need to bolt your indie label for a major. Signing a major-label deal is "more like a sentence than an agreement," says singer Todd Baechle of the Faint, a dark, tech-y punk band on the influential label Saddle Creek Records. If you want your CD all over chain stores like Best Buy, majors provide the muscle. But for most indie rockers, nothing beats being free.

With Bret Begun, Jac Chebatoris and Jennifer Ordoñez

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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