Is Rock And Roll Dead Essay

Today in our modern society, there are multiple different genres of music to pick and choose from. So obviously, there is at least one type that people prefer to listen to. The meaning of music varies from person to person. To some, music is an outlet to release one's inner emotions, while to others, music is just something to past time. Rock and Roll is one of America's pastimes, from the riff of electric guitars to the beats of the drums, one can't expect to live life without at least hearing one song from the genre. Rock and Roll has been huge since the 1950s, but recently there has been an outgoing debate revolving around whether rock has died. While there are some people who think that Rock and Roll is dying or is already dead, there …show more content…
In the article, “Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Dead? Only if You Aren’t Listening” by Kevin J. H. Dettmar, he discusses how people who claim that rock is dead, aren’t actively looking for it. He uses a great example by using someone’s last words. In the book by Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”, Dettmar uses the scene where Colonel Kurtz was on his death bed where he exclaims “The horror! The horror!” to Marlow, which soon afterwards, Marlow leaves Kurtz to die alone. The point of Dettmar using the example from the book was to state that those were Kurtz’ last words because Marlow stopped listening. He goes on in his essay to state that a lot of rock critics who use to write about older musicians had stopped listening to rock music altogether. He claims that all those people who claim that rock is dead are those who express their opinion the most, which is accurate in some sense. Dettmar notes that there were many artists that came and went in the past few decades with each passing “fad”, and they continue to do so. But he ultimately ends his essay stating that rock music is only dead, if you are not looking for it. But when you dig deeper beyond the surface, you can find that rock is very much