Rock (and U.S. Oil Production) Is Dead
- Posted by: Patrick James
- on November 11, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Overthinking It has a thought-provoking chart (view at full size here) that pits the declining quality of rock music against the declining amount of oil production in the lower 48 states. The remarkable similarity between the arcs of U.S. oil production and songs in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” by year is staggering. Some of their analysis:
Notice that after the birth of rock & roll in the 1950’s, the production of “great songs” peaked in the 60’s, remained strong in the 70’s, but drastically fell in the subsequent decades. It would seem that, like oil, the supply of great musical ideas is finite. By the end of the 70’s, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Motown greats, and other genre innovators quickly extracted the best their respective genres** had to offer, leaving little supply for future musicians.
Mere correlation? Dastardly causality? What would this look like if it used best-of data from a magazine that hadn’t ignored the majority of hip hop, electronic music, and the American underground for the last three decades?
Via Gawker.
DISCUSSION: 4 Comments
I guess we are pretty close to reaching Peak Rock Music.
This is definitely an interesting correlation between the two variables, but I don’t know how much it actually means being dependent on Rolling Stone’s opinion of a “great song.” The cast of The Hills was on the cover of the last Rolling Stone that I read so I don’t know how much credibility they really have. Also, music is alive and well. People aren’t making money like they used to, but there are geniuses and great artists in every genre right now. People are taking the material of the “greats” and building off of it in all sorts of new and exciting ways.
Seems to me the author has confused “great” with popular. There’s always been a lot of great music about that hasn’t made it into the popular psyche, in a variety of genres. I wonder if the graphic wouldn’t be even more accurate if the sheer volume of rock songs being produced, regardless of greatness, was compared to oil production.
haveandare and RichM, you may be taking it too seriously.