Why Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy Marks The End Of An Era

The release this week of Guns N' Roses' new album, the 15-years-in-the-making magnum opus Chinese Democracy, may wind up marking the end of an era in pop music - when albums so big, by acts so popular, stop merely being music news and become genuine front-page stories. The music industry has changed so much in the last decade that it's harder than ever for a single musical act to break through on a G n' R-type level. The seismic shift hasn't been in what we listen to, but rather how we listen to it.

As recently as the '90s, we'd hear new music on our local commercial radio stations, or on MTV or one of its equivalents, and then go to our local record stores and buy it. But two of this holiday season's biggest new releases aren't even available in traditional record stores - Chinese Democracy is only for sale at Best Buy outlets, while AC/DC's Black Ice is a Wal-Mart exclusive. If you don't want to leave the house, you can always order the CDs online or download them straight to your hard drive. And with the plethora of Internet and satellite radio stations, plus the blogs and websites where many fans now hear new music, these new records can't saturate the airwaves and our eardrums the way "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" once did.

They probably won't sell in late 20th century-type numbers, either. According to SoundScan, which tracks music sales, Billboard magazine's top 200 best-selling albums accounted for a smaller percentage of total music sales in 2007 than any year on record, a trend that looks to continue this year.

In the words of Marvin Gaye, what's going on?

The twin technological innovations of downloading and Internet/satellite radio enable people who listen to music to have a greater choice of what to listen to than ever before. They let the artists who make music reach their target audience more effectively and cheaply than ever before. And they let businesspeople who sell music divide music buyers into ever-smaller demographic slices. And so, instead of a generation being brought together by a blockbuster, groundbreaking album like Thriller or Nevermind, we're now united by our ubiquitous white iPod earbuds - even if we're all listening to different music.

In this new digital world of unlimited possibilities, it seems almost impossible for a single artist to impact an audience beyond its niche. The soundtrack to Disney's High School Musical was the biggest-selling album of 2006, but if you're not a teen or the parent of one, odds are you haven't even heard a single song from it. Earlier this year, the rapper Lil Wayne became the first artist in three years to sell a million copies of a CD/download in a single week, but his massive success barely registered with people who aren't into the latest hip-hop releases.

Records like "Rock Around The Clock" or Sgt. Pepper or Thriller or Nevermind are cultural touchstones -- they've become greater than the sum of their songs and have shaped not just individual lives, but entire generations. Would the Sixties be the sixties without the Beatles? Would teen culture as we know it exist without Elvis? And can any record, no matter how brilliant, have a similar impact today? Somehow, I don't think so.

In recent years, the ability of pop music to define an era seems diminished. Maybe it's the breakdown of the industry's traditional machinery; maybe it's just that American Idol isn't the right breeding ground for a pop revolution. But that feeling of music being something larger than our own personal tastes is long gone. Songs like "Umbrella" or "Get Low" may be part of the soundtrack of a generation, but they're not going to change the plot of the movie.

The next Beatles or Michael Jackson or Nirvana may be toiling away in anonymity on a MySpace page somewhere, but the chance they'll be heard by an audience commensurate with their talent has grown slimmer. For all the talk of the "level playing field" of the music biz, and for all the choices today's music listener has, that's a big loss.

Comments

[davyB]

I guess this is all true, but not for me. I don't even want an iPod. I'm too damn indecisive to choose my own playlist, and besides, I want to hear what's going on. I want a radio and a dj who can choose for me, keep me in touch. Give me some latest gangsta, a little Beatles, a taste of these ballyhooed albums (which I would otherwise ignore), some Louis Armstrong, and I don't know whatall. I don't like my isolation from the culture.

Am I just a marginalized retrofool, or part of a new movement?

[avraamjack]

This commentary is understandable but it misses the point.

There are no truly great bands anymore.

If we ever get another band as good as the Beatles, you will see a mass movement.

Unfortunately, it seems all the great talent was probably aborted before birth or damaged by the chemical soup we live in.

We are left with some ok "elevator ready" bands but nothing to get excited about.

[squarebird]

avraamjack - your post just proved the point of the editorial .. there are bands whose talent equals or exceeds any in pop history, and you do not know of them. Have you seen or heard High Noon? Big Sandy? Marti Brom? Deke Dickerson? The Barnshakers?! So many more .. and don't get me started on what goes on in Austin Texas. There is a reason for this: Pick one genre, say Rockabilly. Rockabilly topped the charts for about a year in the 1950s. Most bands dropped rockabilly after that. Many rockabilly bands today started as teenagers in the 1980s or 1990s and are still performing and writing and improving .. for twenty or more years, not just five! The reason they don't either disappear or get known to you is because they can survive on the Internet-enabled niche audience. Unlike before there is no mass audience to do or die the band over. Did you know, fer instance, there is an annual 'Viva Las Vegas' international rockabilly fest at the Gold Coast casino of 6,000 rockabilly fans?! This is a festival of NEW bands who take original rock and roll style to ever increasing artistic heights, and it has a large audience .. but as the author above states, there is no way to get on the popular radar. An act can be popular without being known. That ceiling means that the world-class, seasoned rockabilly musicians are only making a slightly better living than the newly formed garage bands.

[bigbingtheory]

I don't know how one can say there are no truly great bands out there today. You are obviously not looking in the right places. There's plenty of great music out there for the discerning audiophile. U2 is still banging out great groundbreaking music. R.E.M.'s latest is as fresh as ever and those are the old farts! There's plenty of fresh blood out there, you just have to look and listen in the right places.

[thadchr]

Radiohead

[HenryBrooks]

Tony is absolutely right. But, there is an additional question needing an answer: where would the 60's Elvis era be w/o the 50's Little Richard, James Brown, Otis Blackwell, Rufus Thomas and B.B. King-among others?

[robbie44]

i expected that .

[DarthVector]

Mr Sachs, you bemoan homogeneity. How last century.

Curse the 60's and their musical commodities. Let a million new flowers bloom in real time instead.

Better yet, let's get music making back to the people. Have you ever sung with your family around a piano?

[sociocanuck]

Personally, I've lost all interest in "mainstream" music unless it fits into one particular category: it is or once was popular in Canada, but has never been that well known outside of the country - to varying degrees from 'not at all' to 'at least college radio noticed it'.

I'm not at all suggesting that young Canadian listening audiences are more discerning of pop music (we subjected the world to Avril Lavigne, and for that I am personally eternally sorry; not to mention that MuchMusic has basically become MTV Canada... in strange defiance of the existence of an actual MTV Canada) than American. But unless it's from the universally reprehensible "pop-punk" abomination of a subgenre, it's really hard to go wrong. Maybe we just don't have enough artists to reach that point where a statistically significant portion necessarily suck.

The problem starts when people begin defining good music as what can most easily be made into a cell-phone ringtone.

[KoreanWarVet]

Anyone listening to Top 40 radio or checking the charts in Billboard is looking in all the wrong places for the best new music. A fan of alternative music of all kinds--plus being an old dude born the same year as Elvis--I've put up a bunch of playlist music drawn from MySpace. Here are some of my faves: Port O'Brien, Conor Oberst, Langhorne Slim, Beth Hart, the Jones St. Boys, Joseph Arthur, Nicole Atkins, Hayes Carll, Camera Obscura, Carla Bozulich, Sera Cahoone, Felice Brothers, Scout Niblett, Cloud Cult, the Dodos, Josh Ritter, Weird Weeds, the Killers. the Thrills, Basia Bulat, Hannah Leah, Liam Finn, the Wedding Present, Bishop Allen, Bettye Lavette, the Builders & the Butchers, Jesse Malin, Lucinda Williams, Martha Wainwright, Cat Power.....to name but a few.
Truly, even w/o G'n'R, this is a whole new era--the democratisation of music.

[Tony Sachs - Huffpost Blogger]

And isn't it a shame that none of these artists will sell millions or have a fraction of the impact that G n' R have had. That's what the democratization of music hath wrought.

[flifishun]

Not sure what you mean by "impact".
I was a Sr. in high school when Appetite for Destruction was released.
It means nothing to me.

[flifishun]

Uncle Tupelo "No Depression" was released about a year before.
It means much more to me.

[bigbingtheory]

But I think the chances are far greater for more obscure bands to have a wider audience due to this democratization of music. The artists mentioned above could be counting downloads off their websites in the millions instead of scrounging together enough money to press a few thousand records. Instead of filling a club of hundreds they can be streaming to millions. I prefer the current state of music where artists have far more control over their content and distribution. Guns and Roses may have been popular but they weren't that good or groundbreaking. If anything theirs is an example of why the old way isn't as good as the new way.

[jonnyquest]

First off , most of the greatest music in the last 50 years never sold at the time of it's release with the exception of the Beatles , Stones , Motown , Stax and some more artists. Billboard is not the way to jugde music witness a few years ago when they gave JoLo "artist of the year " despite the fact that she hadn't put anything out for over a year ans a half !
The bands you mentioned all have a lot of talent with the exception of Jessie Malin , they have their fans and the majority of them will continue to influence generations of people/musicians in the future. How many people really bought the Velvet Underground , The Modern Lovers , New York Dolls & the Sex Pistols at the time of their release yet these 4 bands have as much influence as Elvis or the Beatles whether you know it or not.
Tony is right there will never be a ttime when a record/cd will ever have the cultural impact of Elvis , the Beatles , Michael Jackson's Thriller or Nirvana.

[jennined]

It's kind of a mute point, isn't it? Guns N' Roses is terrible nowadays. I can't expect Chinese Democracy to be anything near good.

[sociocanuck]

Moot point. And though, yes, you're probably right about GnR, tproblem is that the article wasn't really a commentary about that album at all.

[NoSillyName]

I was into other bands by the time Sgt. Pepper was released. IMO, the ground was broken by "Meet the Beatles". It was delicious pop-rock by a bunch of cuties with great accents, great hair, great humor, plus they wrote & played their own songs & instruments! What a concept! Loved hearing them progress into true artists.

Groundbreaking, indeed, in an era of singers who mouthed the words of others & didn't play any instruments. Sure, Elvis was the real deal who brought white suburbanites hot rock & roll, but his many talents were squashed, thanks to his trust in Parker and by the military.

The Beatles ushered in the era of the British Beat, that huge wave of talent from across the Pond. Something for everyone with an ear for the new & exciting. Stones, Yardbirds, Zombies, Kinks¦

I bought every Beatles album up through Revolver; I'd become a huge Harrison fan. Sought out his innovations on guitar & sitar. Loved those long instrumentals. Because of GH, in '66 I looked for & found albums in the "Psychedelic" bin of a Denver music store. There were two: "The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band" and "Thirteenth Floor Elevator". By '67, The Doors, Hendrix, Zappa, Velvet Underground, among others, were being played non-stop on my little stereo. Beatles? Oh. I bought Sgt. Pepper & really loved two songs. Not that I don"t appreciate what they accomplished with that old technology.

The Beatles are cultural touchstones, just not Sgt. Pepper.

[Nanook01]

While it is difficult to find music I like on the radio, I look for snippets of songs on web sites for bands I think I might like. I also hear some on movie tracks. I have found several Finnish bands I like (Stratovarius, Tarja, Nightwish, and a few more), and some old and new other bands (Savatage, Symphony X, Evenescense, QueensRyche and many more). While it is difficult for me to like music pumped to the masses these days, I think music and rock are still alive and well. Ijust have to look a little harder. These bands may never be nearly as big as the Beatles, but there is good music to be heard.

[smacklooshis]

The comments section for this article is going to be divided into older people who don't know what's going on currently in the music scene, pining for bands of the past and saying pop ain't how it used to be. The other group I'm gonna wager are younger people who are aware of what's going on and getting miffed that they are not being included as part of the historical dialogue. I USED to be a part of the latter group.

I was surprised to see Nirvana place so prominently in the above article because, growing up in the 90's, it was exactly the kind of empty pop that the boomers were telling us sucked. "What about Dylan? What about Joplin? What about Zeppelin?" The boomers would say. But each new generation doesn't want what the older generation had - they want something new and their own. So now I guess Nirvana, Radiohead and Public Enemy have joined the "heyday" ranks and I am supposed to criticize new pop music. Nope, not gonna do it. Midnight Juggernauts, Crystal Castles and Aesop Rock - they're all speaking to people and some of them might get a place in music history too.

As for G N' R, why should the new generation of music buyers like them? They'll probably be more excited about the new Eminem and rightly so - cause he's speaking their language.

[Octoberon]

"Popular music", however defined, has split into so many genres that it's impossible to keep track. In recent years, I've been listening mainly to continental European "metal" - gothic metal, black metal, doom metal, Viking metal ... within some of those genres there are many subgenres. More recently, I've moved away from that kind of music into medieval folk rock - most of it is German. However, none of this listening material goes anywhere near the mainstream. The nearest to gothic metal that most HuffPost readers will have heard of is Evanescence, but they're not that dissimilar from a good many European bands that have been around for years. Many of the European bands are thought of as being "underground", which could be a subcultural tag, but may just be a way of saying that they haven't penetrated the mainstream - in other words, the "business" hasn't got hold of them.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there were far fewer bands and artists by comparison, but there was also separate cultural and political foci. Putting the "summer of love" aside, do we really want another Vietnam in order to give popular music a sense of direction, or to make it somehow iconic? I don't think so, and I don't think that there's much to be gained any longer from looking for the "next big thing". Surely it's now better to settle down in a niche of your choice, searching out what you really like from the vast range on

[antiprop1]

Have you ever thought, maybe rock has ran its course. Its been 59 years since Ike Turner's Rocket 88. I just don't think fresh creativity can run forever using the same medium. I haven't been excited about rock since the heyday of grunge and now listen to alternative Jazz hip-hop and DJ chill music. Maybe my age is showing but I just can't get excited by the new rock scene.

[willfarnaby]

Radio's worst enemy was always itself, but it finally succeeded in devolving into an ocean of crapulence: chains of crypto-Nazi right wing hate beacons and, on the "music" side, purveying nausea-inducing dreck that serves only to interrupt the never-ending barrage of tedious, trivial commercials.

To be sure, there is some quality broadcasting, but that's rather rare, and certainly not aimed at the masses.

[SuperPenguin]

MTV & American Idol has killed musicianship. Add in merchandising the "look" and the "attitude" that is evident in every advertisement after niche audiences. Record labels have grown fat with scores of copycat artists in their catalogs, flooding the record stores and commercial radio air waves multiple times an hour on countless formatted channels.

American Idol has essentially told the world that if you can sound like every other R&B/pop singer who's in the billboards for the last 2 months, then you can move onto to stardom. Don't worry about writing your own material, we have an army of lyricists. Don't worry about finding a band, we have studio musicians. Don't worry about your pitch in the studio, we have software that can make you sound flawless. Just look good and we'll package you just right.

A sex tape can boost your career. Desperate for money? Do a reality show! Under 18? That's ok, show a little skin at an awards show. Some "leaked" racy pictures on MySpace works wonders.

AMERICANS IDLE is the epitome of what's wrong with modern music. After they jump through the judges hoops and all the dullards of couch ridden America choking on fried fat and burnt out dreams have "voted" on their legitimacy... what happens to them when the next season starts? *POOF!*.. vanished in the wind...

You want something new? You want to hear music that isn't saturated in cliche and redundancy? Make YOUR own music.

[antiprop1]

Super P you will probably hate me for saying this but Amy Winehouse is the most inspiring and talented musician to come along in years and look at her, she is a total mess! The fact that she looks kind of downtrodden makes her success that much more impressive. Plus she writes her music and words, rare in today's world of prepackaged divas.

[squarebird]

Amy Winehouse is the exception that proves the rule. She is in many ways a throwback. Don't know how she rose above the noise .. maybe it did take the combination of her being an authentic talented mess and someone in her sphere savy enough to get that mess noticed. The masses are still starved for the authenticity that is out there, they just don't know where to find it. Wayne "The Train" Hancock is just as authentic and talented, but unlike Amy - or Hank Williams or Jim Morrisson) he didn't have anyone around him (when he was at his spine-tingling creative peak) to take care of business while he self-destructed.

[killmenow]

I love your commentary, SuperP.

What gets me- what I have no concept of- is how kids today (I always sound so old when I say that) fall for the manufactured idols.

It doesn't bother them at all that the producers say, "...we have an army of lyricists...we have studio musicians...we have software that can make you sound flawless. Just look good..."?? That was so unacceptable when I was a teenager! If someone was just a product of some Svengali, that was NOT COOL!

[NoSillyName]

Sad commentary on the state of music. MTV killed innovation and it became all about LOOKS, not talent.

Now it seems everybody wants to be famous. For anything. So sad.

[Tayyib]

Music will still make a huge impression on youth and possibly define a generation..
for example my 21 yr old intern respectfully requested that i turn down the new Kanye West album ( I downloaded for Free) because he didn't want to hear it until he had his own personal copy to listen to in entirety.. and G and R should have been dropped in 1994.. what a waste of cash without Slash..

[antiprop1]

How can Axl even call it GnR without Slash and the boys. He is one of the best rock singers ever but you can't ignore the contributions of Slash.

[SuperPenguin]

Ah but you forget, it was also the melodies and harmonies of Izzy Stradlin that were there too