How dire is the state of mainstream rock? So dire that “Sublime With Rome,” a band with no higher ambition than mimicking Sublime, has had a song on the Billboard charts every week since May. “2011 may well be remembered as the most numbing year for mainstream rock in music history,” declares New York Times critic Jon Caramanica. “Declaring a genre dead is the worst, least imaginative sort of proclamation, so let’s call it zombified.”
Rock is, after all, still shambling around, but “the genre didn’t produce a single great album, and the best of the middling walked blindly in footprints laid out years, even decades, earlier.” Critics are praising the likes of Foster the People, even though it basically rehashes “the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s.” Sure, there is good work on the fringes, and on independent labels, but “it wasn’t so long ago that major-label rock had bursts of vitality,” Carmanica laments. Now “it’s a living funeral.” (More entertainment stories.)
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