The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1772 - Rock Music is Completely Dead. This is Why.

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00:00:30.000 As you may have noticed, recently on the show, we've started to focus more on cultural commentary, a little less on politics.

00:00:37.100 And the reason for that is partly, if I'm being totally transparent, I find the entire political podcasting space to be increasingly boring and redundant.

00:00:46.160 Everyone's saying the same things. Everyone is talking about the same stories.

00:00:50.720 Conservative podcasters all repeat essentially the same basic talking points unless they're fighting with each other, which is even more boring and at this point even more redundant.

00:00:58.380 So I find it all incredibly uninspiring and uninteresting, which is enough reason to try to find different things to talk about.

00:01:06.280 Also, culture matters.

00:01:07.780 And that's why cultural commentary has really always been my primary focus.

00:01:11.340 All I'm doing now is kind of doubling down on it.

00:01:14.360 Culture is the shared traditions and heritage and values and artistic output of a given group of people.

00:01:20.980 It shouldn't need to be explained why that matters.

00:01:23.800 And if that doesn't matter, then it's hard to see how anything could possibly matter.

00:01:29.200 The problem in our culture is it's not so much that it's turning bad or being corrupted, although there is certainly plenty of that happening.

00:01:37.900 It's more that the culture is disappearing. It's being erased. American culture is vanishing.

00:01:46.120 So on that note today, I want to take a look at something that used to be a hugely influential,

00:01:52.520 unique, and distinctly American element of our culture, which in recent years has all but

00:01:59.360 evaporated. And that would be rock music. Now, I have some personal ties to this issue. Long

00:02:04.500 before I became a podcaster with my very own fancy fish cam, in the early 2000s, I was a small market

00:02:10.920 rock DJ. It's not something I talk about very often, although every now and then various media

00:02:15.540 outlets like to bring it up. But today I'm going to make an exception because I now realize that

00:02:19.660 in that capacity, I witnessed the last gasps of the entire genre of rock and roll. I saw firsthand

00:02:26.860 how it entered a slow motion death spiral and it would never recover for reasons that no one

00:02:33.460 has ever really explained. A cultural institution, a global phenomenon, one that is distinctly

00:02:39.700 American has essentially vanished. So how exactly did that happen? Whatever your personal musical

00:02:47.920 tastes happen to be, this matters because again, culture matters. And when a pillar of American

00:02:54.340 culture just fades into oblivion, seemingly out of nowhere, it's worth talking about and trying

00:03:00.860 to figure out why. So let's do that now. Now to start with, let's establish the premise.

00:03:05.660 um rock music is dead the the data makes it very clear that i'm not overstating the case here

00:03:11.820 the genre basically doesn't exist anymore certainly not in the mainstream anyway

00:03:16.060 if you pull up the billboard year-end hot 100 singles of 1996 here's what you'll see when you

00:03:22.800 look at it uh you know there are better years in the 90s to illustrate the point that i'm trying

00:03:27.780 to make but i'm taking this one because it was exactly 30 years ago as you can see there's plenty

00:03:33.660 of rock here, including Counting Blue Cars by Dishwalla, The World I Know by Collective Soul,

00:03:40.400 Wonderwall by Oasis, Hooked by Blues Traveler, Just a Girl by No Doubt, Until It Sleeps by

00:03:46.460 Metallica. You got a Pearl Jam song, you know, Gin Blossoms, Goo Goo Dolls songs on there as well.

00:03:53.220 There's also songs by iconic rock performers in bands like John Mellencamp, Melissa Etheridge,

00:03:59.020 Smashing Pumpkins. So if you're into rock music needless to say there's a lot there. Most of these

00:04:05.640 songs were wildly popular at the time and remain popular to this day. They're classics and we used

00:04:12.120 to get music like this every single year. A lot of it. Multiple songs that would become classics

00:04:17.540 of the genre every single year. Year after year. Now with that in mind take a look at the current

00:04:23.360 Billboard Top 100 as of April 2026, which mainly looks at streaming in addition to radio plays.

00:04:31.160 Completely different story. The top songs right now are all just this urbanized pop stuff.

00:04:36.980 Pop and rap and country have kind of fused together and everything sort of sounds the same.

00:04:43.660 This particular list is dominated by country songs by artists like Cody Johnson, Luke Combs,

00:04:48.340 Ella Langley with that Shoes in Texas song, along with pop and R&B, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Olivia Deen, some rap as well.

00:04:59.220 Now, to my eye, the only new rock song on the entire list is number 33, Freakin' Out by Dexter and the Moon Rocks.

00:05:06.160 Weezer's on here as well, but that's for a song, the song Go Away, which came out a decade ago.

00:05:11.000 If you look at the top 50 streaming songs in the United States on Spotify, it's even worse.

00:05:15.000 The billboard chart, as mentioned, includes both radio and it also includes physical media sales, but nobody listens to radio or buys physical media.

00:05:23.920 And the people who do tend to be much older.

00:05:26.740 So if you're going to find any rock music, you're going to find it when you include those sorts of things.

00:05:31.180 But if you go to streaming and you go to Spotify, it gives you the best idea of the actual listening habits of people, especially younger people.

00:05:41.100 So here's the list.

00:05:43.240 I counted seven different Justin Bieber songs on Spotify's list of their top songs right now.

00:05:48.500 Not a single new rock band on here. Not a single one on the entire list. Not one. Fleetwood Mac,

00:05:54.620 The Killers, The Goo Goo Dolls are all charting with songs that are well over two decades old or

00:05:58.520 many decades in Fleetwood's case. Mr. Brightside is on here. That came out in 2003.

00:06:04.880 And just to hammer the point a little further, there's an outlet called The Metalverse,

00:06:08.460 which recently published an article entitled The 25 Most Popular Rock Bands in 2026, according to Spotify.

00:06:16.420 Let's put that up on the screen. Now, again, these are the most popular rock bands in 2026.

00:06:22.840 Elton John, which I wouldn't consider a band or rock, really, is number four.

00:06:30.180 He has a singer who was in his prime in the 1970s, is currently considered the fourth most popular rock band in the United States.

00:06:37.460 on the most popular streaming platform.

00:06:40.240 And just for the sake of getting the full picture here,

00:06:42.280 here's the full top 10.

00:06:43.980 Arctic Monkeys, Lincoln Park, Queen, Elton John,

00:06:47.020 ACDC, The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival,

00:06:50.180 Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleetwood Mac, and Nirvana.

00:06:53.180 These are the top rock bands in 2026.

00:06:55.020 So it's basically a bunch of classic rock.

00:06:57.000 Closest you can possibly get to a band that's current

00:06:59.800 is the Arctic Monkeys, which formed in 2003.

00:07:02.860 Lincoln Park, the number two currently most popular rock band,

00:07:05.320 formed in 1996.

00:07:06.160 its lead singer died nine years ago. And we see the same decline in the live music scene. The

00:07:11.920 only rock bands packing arenas today are geriatric boomer bands that peaked 50 years ago. U2, Pearl

00:07:17.320 Jam, Foo Fighters, Rolling Stones, Springsteen. There hasn't been a new Nirvana or a new Radiohead,

00:07:25.820 you know, a band like that, a sensation in the rock music space or anything close to that level

00:07:32.140 in memory. In the 70s and 80s, some of the biggest music festivals in the world were

00:07:37.660 Lollapalooza and Woodstock, and they were almost exclusively rock shows. Today, the biggest

00:07:41.480 festivals are like Coachella. They're mostly pop, hip-hop, EDM. According to Nielsen Music,

00:07:46.260 the number of Americans who say they listen regularly to rock music has declined from 27%

00:07:50.460 in 2013 to 22% in recent years, but those are mostly over the age of 55, those people,

00:07:55.540 and they're generally listening to stuff that came out decades ago.

00:07:59.960 So that's the diagnosis. Rock music has died as a genre. It's just undeniable when you look at the

00:08:05.040 data, just that's the fact. A thing that once defined American culture is now no longer even

00:08:11.420 a part of it. But the question of why is a lot more difficult to figure out. One possible theory

00:08:17.480 is related to the decline of the monoculture, which I've discussed on the show in the past.

00:08:23.120 There are now so many different streaming platforms and so much variety in content that

00:08:27.400 it's become very difficult, if not impossible, for this country to have a shared cultural

00:08:32.080 experience anymore. I mean, there really isn't one. There are plenty of high-quality bands and

00:08:37.480 movies and albums that can be very successful and profitable, and yet most of the country

00:08:43.780 hasn't even heard of them. By contrast, at the time of the British invasion and for several

00:08:49.320 decades afterward, people had very few options for discovering new music. They learned about

00:08:53.680 bands from a small number of networks, particularly late-night television, magazines, radio stations.

00:08:58.280 When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, more than 73 million people

00:09:04.220 were watching. More than 73 million people in the United States, that's roughly 40% of the population

00:09:09.960 of the entire country at the time, were watching this one performance live while it happened.

00:09:16.840 Other than the Super Bowl, no other cultural event gets anywhere near that kind of viewership today.

00:09:21.320 Not as a percent of the population

00:09:23.860 Here's what it looked like

00:09:25.920 To give you an idea

00:09:27.420 Oh, yeah, I'll tell you something

00:09:38.600 I think you'll understand

00:09:41.980 When I say that something

00:09:45.700 I want to hold your hand

00:09:49.220 I want to hold your hand

00:09:53.320 I want to hold your hand

00:09:57.420 Now, the modern comparison, unfortunately, would be somebody like Justin Bieber.

00:10:03.000 He just headlined Coachella.

00:10:04.440 Obviously, he's one of the most popular entertainers in the world.

00:10:06.560 According to Billboard, Bieber's set, quote, drew more than 100 million social impressions between the two weekends that he performed.

00:10:15.260 But those social media impressions, whatever that means exactly, were spread out over the entire world.

00:10:19.940 and also you know social media impressions are don't don't really mean anything because people

00:10:25.600 are that just means that somebody engaged with it or saw it in their feed for a few seconds

00:10:31.580 and it was sandwiched in between a bunch of other content they probably forgot they even saw it

00:10:36.680 not the same thing as 40 percent of the country sitting down at the exact same time to watch an

00:10:43.620 entire performance live on tv you know if the internet existed when the beatles were popular

00:10:49.460 they'd, you know, if you were to try to translate the numbers, they would easily exceed those

00:10:53.580 numbers. They already exceeded 70 million viewers in just one country on TV. Now everybody has a

00:11:00.220 phone and a TV and they're all watching 10 different things, often at the same time,

00:11:03.640 which is one of the reasons that no one band can repeat the Beatles' success.

00:11:10.000 Late night shows and MTV have been replaced. Music radio, which used to shape taste and

00:11:13.940 introduce you to new and especially local bands, no longer exists. Now, the point is that we all

00:11:20.180 used to be a part of the same culture, the same zeitgeist. Young people had different tastes from

00:11:24.020 older people. That's always been the case. But everybody was swimming in the same cultural pool.

00:11:30.600 Now there are a million pools, or perhaps more like puddles, and everybody's sort of splashing

00:11:35.760 around in their own, disconnected from the others, and all of that is determined by the algorithms.

00:11:42.220 The fracturing of the monoculture helps to explain not just the death of rock music, but of every other once mighty aspect of American culture.

00:11:52.160 All that stuff has been taken down because the monoculture went down.

00:11:58.580 But the decline of the monoculture isn't a sufficient explanation for the end of rock music in particular,

00:12:02.980 because as we already established, some genres of music are still thriving, arguably, anyway.

00:12:09.620 not to the extent that they used to be i mean there's there's even in other genres there's no

00:12:15.220 one i mean there's a michael michael jackson movie is out right now not much of a michael jackson fan

00:12:20.200 myself um but there's no one today there's there's there's no one today who can compete

00:12:28.560 uh with the star power that michael jackson had it just doesn't exist i mean the closest you get

00:12:33.620 is somebody like taylor swift and it's just not the same thing at all i mean michael jackson could

00:12:37.820 go literally anywhere in the world. He could go to a tribe somewhere in some third world

00:12:43.340 country in a jungle, and they would know who he was. And that kind of thing doesn't exist anymore.

00:12:51.060 So you can't use that alone to explain why rock music has died. There has to be another factor

00:12:56.160 or set of factors to explain what's going on here. On his YouTube channel, Rick Beato suggested

00:13:01.780 another way of looking at the problem, which is to zoom out a little bit. Instead of focusing on

00:13:06.240 the end of rock music. We should try to figure out why bands in general of all genres are dying

00:13:12.700 out. Watch. If you go to the top 50 chart right now in the U.S., you have Sabrina Carpenter,

00:13:20.360 you have Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, you have Jimin, you have Chapel Roan, Billie Eilish, Post Malone,

00:13:26.100 Morgan Wallen, Shabuzi, Kendrick Lamar, Tommy Richman, Hosier, Zach Bryan, Casey Musgraves,

00:13:31.960 Benson Boone, Teddy Swims. It's just literally all solo artists. So next is an experiment. I put

00:13:38.440 together a list of the top 400 artists in ranking of monthly listeners on Spotify. And I looked to

00:13:46.240 see how many bands on there were created in the last 10 years. Take a guess how many. You might

00:13:52.060 think, oh, I don't know, 25 bands, something like that in the top 400 has to be a lot, right?

00:13:57.120 it's actually only three only three bands in the top 400 artists on spotify have formed within the

00:14:06.220 last 10 years three the only three bands he identified in the top 400 which formed within

00:14:11.780 the past decade were uh grupo frontera maniskin and richie mitch and the coal miners none of them

00:14:17.720 were ranked in the top 100 by audience size so less than one percent of the top 400 artists

00:14:22.580 consists of bands that were formed in the past 10 years. Again, pretty striking. The vast majority

00:14:29.360 of artists are individual performers like Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Bruno Mars, The

00:14:33.140 Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and so on. Now, there are several reasons why this change occurred.

00:14:39.220 For one thing, when everybody started streaming music, the economics for musicians became a lot

00:14:43.100 tighter, became much harder to split revenue between four or five people. And more importantly,

00:14:47.640 music production software is far more advanced than it was 20 years ago. You don't need a band

00:14:51.400 to create a drum track or a bass line anymore.

00:14:54.860 You could just have the software do it.

00:14:56.620 And on top of that,

00:14:57.600 social media rewards individual stars.

00:15:00.000 Audiences prefer to interact

00:15:01.300 or think they're interacting with,

00:15:02.720 say, Lady Gaga or Selena Gomez

00:15:04.840 or whoever on Instagram

00:15:05.920 rather than an entire group.

00:15:07.480 You know, they want to talk to the star,

00:15:08.700 not the star and her sweaty backup guitarist.

00:15:11.440 And that's not even getting into the fact

00:15:12.460 that bands are much bigger risks for studios

00:15:15.460 because they can split up,

00:15:16.700 they can get involved in lawsuits.

00:15:18.980 Risk mitigation has become the name of the game,

00:15:20.980 which is also why movie studios only put out sequels and franchise films.

00:15:25.580 They want safe and popular IP, less risk.

00:15:32.200 Mitigating risk is a great way to increase profits,

00:15:35.600 but it's a terrible way to make art.

00:15:37.620 In fact, it's how you kill art.

00:15:39.760 That's what's happening right now.

00:15:41.840 But bands bring a lot of risk.

00:15:43.740 Take a look at what happened to Third Eye Blind, for example,

00:15:45.920 one of the most successful alternative rock bands in the 90s.

00:15:49.260 They went through about a dozen personnel changes.

00:15:51.380 Multiple lawsuits were filed.

00:15:53.680 It's a nightmare for executives who would prefer that the entertainers just shut up and make them more money.

00:15:59.040 But Rick Beato identified another possible cause in addition to all these.

00:16:02.180 And this may be the key point. Watch.

00:16:04.540 The other amazing thing about these bands is that they wrote their own songs.

00:16:08.580 Now, you would have artists like the Supremes or the Jackson 5 that were part of Motown that have songwriters like Holland Dozier Holland that wrote for the Supremes.

00:16:18.220 or the corporation that wrote for the Jackson 5,

00:16:20.660 but for the most part, they wrote their own songs.

00:16:22.940 Now, you would have artists from the 70s and 80s

00:16:25.340 that would actually split off,

00:16:27.120 for example, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins from Genesis,

00:16:30.840 or Sting from The Police,

00:16:32.440 that would make their own solo records

00:16:34.020 and have massive hits that they still wrote themselves.

00:16:37.880 This didn't really change until the late 90s and early 2000s.

00:16:42.420 This is when you started to have boy bands,

00:16:44.640 for example, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC,

00:16:46.800 that would have these co-writer producers or writer producers that would write their huge hits.

00:16:52.920 This is where people like Max Martin started to come on the scene. And this also happened in rock

00:16:58.340 music. I know because I was part of this thing, being a producer slash songwriter. You started

00:17:04.300 to see artists like Aerosmith that had Diane Warren writing their biggest hit they ever had.

00:17:09.520 They're only number one, I Don't Want to Miss a Thing, which came out in the early 90s,

00:17:13.960 and rock bands of the early 2000s that would almost invariably have producer songwriters that

00:17:21.000 would make their record. And this really happened because the labels got involved, the A&R people.

00:17:26.120 They were making less money because they were selling less records and they wanted to guarantee

00:17:30.580 that they had huge hit songs on every record. So they would actually hire songwriter producers

00:17:36.420 or get multiple songwriters to contribute to the record. These would be rock bands that would

00:17:41.660 appear to be bands, but they'd actually be co-writers or producers writing and making the

00:17:47.500 records themselves and not even including the band in there. Once record labels began outsourcing

00:17:52.660 songwriting and became even more risk averse, certain kinds of music thrived. It was much easier

00:17:57.720 to make somebody like Justin Bieber into a star, for example. His producer had him record some

00:18:02.920 lo-fi videos on YouTube, made him seem authentic, and then paired him with ready-made beats and

00:18:07.880 lyrics, and all he had to do was go along with the script, and he became a money printing machine.

00:18:12.400 Plenty of other musicians did the same thing as he mentioned. But at the same time, other genres

00:18:17.440 of music stagnated as a result of this change, and one of those genres was rock. Rock's all about

00:18:24.220 experimentation and boldness. One of the Beatles innovations, along with the Beach Boys, was making

00:18:28.320 albums that didn't directly capture the feeling of a live performance. They added effects and

00:18:32.720 techniques that couldn't be replicated live, like loops and full orchestras and layered tracks and

00:18:37.680 so on. Other bands hadn't done anything like that before. Rock musicians also advanced the idea,

00:18:42.900 which originated in the 1950s, of a concept album like The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by

00:18:47.300 Pink Floyd or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis. These are albums that lasted the better

00:18:52.480 part of an hour, and the tracks were not intended to be completely distinct from one another. They

00:18:57.380 were telling a story or they were communicating a coherent theme across multiple tracks.

00:19:02.900 And some of these tracks were extremely long, over 20 minutes in some cases.

00:19:06.640 Then there was Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music,

00:19:08.700 which was just an hour of guitar humming and feedback.

00:19:12.380 No vocals or anything approaching an actual song

00:19:14.520 that people would want to listen to.

00:19:16.260 It sounded like this.

00:19:35.820 It was regarded correctly as one of the worst albums ever released.

00:19:41.200 The label pulled it from the store in a matter of weeks.

00:19:43.540 But the point is, it's not the kind of thing that a studio would voluntarily produce.

00:19:47.080 It's not an assembly line creation.

00:19:49.480 You've got to give it credit for that, at least.

00:19:51.020 It took risks, to put it mildly.

00:19:53.200 More like a middle finger to the executives.

00:19:54.960 And there was David Bowie, who changed his whole identity and his music style every few years, and on and on and on.

00:20:00.940 When you hire professional writers to produce radio-friendly hits, or streaming-friendly hits these days,

00:20:04.840 it's hard to replicate this kind of experimentation. Now, that's not to say that Bowie didn't have

00:20:10.580 famous producers. He absolutely did, but he came up with his own style. He was the chameleon of

00:20:14.600 rock. Along with many other entertainers, he also created the expectation that rock music

00:20:18.700 would be inventive and distinct. And once that went away and rock became a sappy, generic,

00:20:24.680 made-for-radio commodity like everything else, Aerosmith's I Don't Want to Miss a Thing comes

00:20:29.480 to mind, then rock as a genre had no reason to exist anymore. And by the way, I Don't Want to

00:20:34.840 Miss a Thing was originally intended as a power ballad for Celine Dion. That's according to the

00:20:38.340 songwriter. They only made it into an Aerosmith song because Steven Tyler's daughter was cast in

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00:22:03.140 Although I admit I have a soft spot for the song

00:22:05.580 as a 90s kid, and it was a prime example

00:22:07.840 of the now extinct monoculture.

00:22:09.860 It was a song everybody knew from a movie everybody saw,

00:22:13.760 and it was an original movie too.

00:22:15.660 I mean, at least not a, I mean, that year they came out with like four different movies about asteroids hitting the earth, but it was not a preexisting IP is the point. So a movie that's a huge hit, not a preexisting IP with a song in the soundtrack that becomes utterly ubiquitous. None of that happens anymore.

00:22:30.920 but as tempting as it would be to blame writers for what happened to rock music the truth is

00:22:36.860 there's plenty of other factors at play and i don't intend this to be a political monologue

00:22:41.420 exclusively but it's hard to ignore the fact that rock's decline was cemented during the

00:22:46.040 presidency of barack obama you know it's become something of a meme to blame barack obama for

00:22:51.100 everything thanks obama being the operative phrase but in this case unironically there's

00:22:55.560 a genuinely a reason to blame him there's a genuine reason to blame him for a lot of stuff

00:22:59.200 and this included. You know, I've made the case before that the culture peaked in 2007

00:23:06.540 and across all the different artistic genres and mediums and has been declining ever since.

00:23:16.560 And I'm not going to repeat that whole case, but I think you can see it if you look at it.

00:23:20.300 And it's no coincidence that, you know, who was elected, who started, whose presidency began in

00:23:26.220 2008 Barack Obama. In the case of Rock, it's obvious. I mean, Rock's all about rebellion.

00:23:30.960 It's about raging against the machine. And raging against the machine became unacceptable the moment

00:23:35.760 the machine was run by a black leftist. Look what happened to Green Day, for example. Not long after

00:23:41.500 Barack Obama took office, they stopped singing about politics all the time, went back to breakup

00:23:46.020 songs. Then when Trump won, they began singing explicitly about the MAGA agenda, making it clear

00:23:51.460 that they're shills for the Democrat Party. Pearl Jam began performing at fundraisers for

00:23:56.020 Obama's system of a down took a conveniently timed hiatus from criticizing the establishment

00:24:00.920 once Obama became president. This is not a phenomenon that's unique to rock. Of course,

00:24:05.380 comedy died at roughly the same time for the same reason. When people listen to you because they

00:24:11.640 think that you're authentic and bold and then you immediately begin and transgressive, then you

00:24:17.740 immediately begin carrying water for an extremely powerful establishment figure because he's black

00:24:22.240 and liberal, you lose all credibility.

00:24:25.220 You might as well shut it down at that point.

00:24:27.700 Even the rock musicians who did criticize Obama ultimately turned out to be shills for

00:24:31.100 the establishment.

00:24:31.740 Rage Against the Machine is one of the best examples.

00:24:34.260 Their most famous lyric is, F you, I won't do what you tell me.

00:24:37.980 And then during COVID, Tom Morello, the group's guitarist, demanded that everyone do exactly

00:24:42.680 what the authorities told them to do.

00:24:44.580 He became a shill for government officials who committed the single greatest infringement

00:24:48.200 on American civil liberties in modern history.

00:24:52.240 Throughout COVID, Tom Morello promoted all the social distancing and all the mandates that many years later the self-described experts would admit was fake all along.

00:25:01.300 He supported the public health bureaucracy as it ruined millions of lives, including the lives of children who were forced to stay at home instead of learning in school or socializing with their friends and family.

00:25:11.600 And he wasn't the only one.

00:25:13.140 I mean, by the way, if there was a real, if rock music had existed at the time, punk rock was a thing, like there would have been a huge music festival in defiance, in the middle of COVID, explicitly in defiance of all this stuff.

00:25:28.760 That would have been a punk rock thing to do, but it didn't happen.

00:25:32.280 Instead, all the rock stars said, yeah, wear your mask and stay at home now.

00:25:36.520 Be good little boys and girls.

00:25:37.900 then in 2022 when he started holding concerts the uh the venues demanded that all attendees

00:25:44.860 take the covid shot or provide a negative covid test to get into a rage against the machine

00:25:51.200 concert you can see the screenshots there is from their show at the united center in chicago

00:25:56.540 although there are plenty of other shows like this quote what to expect the rage against the

00:26:00.740 machine tour will now start in the spring of 2022 proof of covid19 vaccination or negative

00:26:06.060 tests required. All guests age five and over must provide proof of full vaccination or negative

00:26:12.020 COVID tests within 72 hours sent to the United Center. Guests will provide their proof of

00:26:16.360 vaccination or negative tests within 72 hours, then continue through the security checkpoint

00:26:19.540 before the mobile ticket is scanned. Nothing says rage against the machine more than

00:26:24.960 bringing your COVID test through the security checkpoint so you can have access to the event.

00:26:31.480 now when people bring this up morello claims that actually these kinds of restrictions were lifted

00:26:36.380 by the venues at the time the concert actually began but that's not a defense because again

00:26:41.100 he was constantly promoting all these mandates for several years here's what morello told the

00:26:45.500 guardian in 2021 which was looking for his reaction to january 6th quote we came within a baby's breath

00:26:51.060 of a fascist coup in this country interestingly one of my dreams has always been to storm the

00:26:54.840 capital but not with a bunch of all all white right-wing terrorists you know the ugliest part

00:27:00.860 about it is how they co-opted the idea of standing against the man, at least in the U.S.

00:27:05.660 There can be no nuanced thinking like, yes, big pharma is horrible, but getting a vaccine to save

00:27:11.220 your grandma is good. It's a dumbed-down version of resistance. So that's the nuanced thinking

00:27:18.760 that only smart people like Tom Morello are capable of. Apparently, in his view,

00:27:22.400 nuanced thinking means big pharma is horrible, but their vaccine will save your grandma. First

00:27:27.240 of all, the problem with this thinking is that it's not nuanced at all. It's just dumb. If big

00:27:31.440 pharma is truly horrible, then why would you trust them when they say that their vaccine will save

00:27:36.020 your grandma? Wouldn't an industry that's truly horrible also be capable of lying about claims

00:27:42.320 like that? And secondly, if big pharma isn't lying and their drug actually will save your grandma,

00:27:48.140 then why are you saying they're horrible? I don't know about you, but if someone saves my grandma

00:27:53.800 from certain death, I probably wouldn't call them horrible. Maybe they have other flaws,

00:27:58.040 but it seems pretty harsh to say they're horrible right after they save your grandma,

00:28:00.820 unless, of course, you don't like your grandma. As is the case here, the vaccine did not save

00:28:06.760 your grandma. Big Pharma is horrible. So I just go with the first part, not the second.

00:28:10.180 In any event, these people are obviously frauds. Rage Against the Machine has long been signed

00:28:15.320 with a big subsidiary of Sony called Epic Records, so they want to bring down capitalism

00:28:19.320 and take down Wall Street. But meanwhile, they're working for one of the biggest multinational

00:28:22.780 corporations on the entire planet. They also play at huge corporate-sponsored festivals and

00:28:27.620 charge fans hundreds of dollars for tickets. For the average fan who wanted to go to that 2022

00:28:32.680 tour, tickets were going for $300 to $400 a pop. It's egregious, and it doesn't just destroy the

00:28:39.520 image of this one group. It also undermines the credibility of the entire genre, which is part

00:28:43.320 of the story here. But I want to put all the blame on Rage Against the Machine because this

00:28:47.560 is clearly a larger issue with the industry in general. Think of it this way. When Turning Point

00:28:52.340 USA put together their counter-programming for the Super Bowl halftime show just a couple months

00:28:58.200 ago, which was wildly successful by any measure, how many rock bands lined up to participate?

00:29:05.800 Not many. I mean, none except for Kid Rock, who is also an artist from the 90s.

00:29:14.860 But all the rest of them, they didn't want to step out of line. They didn't want to get labeled

00:29:18.880 as right-wing or problematic.

00:29:21.200 They certainly don't want to anger their label or the NFL.

00:29:25.240 Even though you would think, like, again, if you're rock and roll,

00:29:28.540 I mean, hey, we're counter-programming the NFL,

00:29:31.040 this big corporate event.

00:29:33.320 That's pretty rock and roll, isn't it?

00:29:36.440 But no, they remained silent as a Puerto Rican who can't speak English

00:29:39.400 mumbled some garbled lyrics in front of some gay dancers,

00:29:42.060 a sleeping Mexican, and a prop sign that read,

00:29:44.480 We accept EBT.

00:29:46.300 This is the dystopian vision of America that virtually no musician in the country would dare to challenge.

00:29:52.280 I guess that Super Bowl halftime show in the eyes of most musicians today was better than anything they could do.

00:29:57.760 And the sad thing is they're probably right about that.

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00:31:54.300 So whatever your politics may be,

00:31:56.180 you should be able to see that politics,

00:31:57.900 nevertheless, has directly contributed

00:31:59.580 to the end of this once great American art form.

00:32:06.320 But again, it's not the only factor.

00:32:08.180 If you look at all the changes that have taken place in this country

00:32:11.160 since the decline in rock music began,

00:32:12.980 you quickly discover some other explanations as well.

00:32:15.980 And chief among them is demographic replacement

00:32:19.320 and changing attitudes towards white people.

00:32:23.220 And no footage illustrates what I'm talking about

00:32:25.280 better than this video from Lynyrd Skynyrd's performance

00:32:27.640 at the Oakland Coliseum in 1977.

00:32:31.420 This, again, is in Oakland.

00:32:33.300 See what you notice here.

00:32:57.640 Thank you.

00:33:27.640 That was recorded just months before the plane crash that took out the band.

00:33:55.140 you're not going to find a crowd like that in Oakland anymore. Notice how thin everybody is,

00:34:00.000 for one thing. Didn't have anywhere near as many obese people in the country compared to today.

00:34:04.140 Also, obviously, pretty much everyone is white. The Hispanic population in Oakland has tripled

00:34:08.900 since then by official estimates. Actual numbers are probably much higher since most illegal aliens

00:34:13.980 don't fill out the census. But the real reason I wanted to show that video is to illustrate a few

00:34:18.260 basic points. The first is that a lot of major rock bands came from California where white

00:34:22.800 suburban culture is simply gone. It's been wiped away completely, which is why many of the more

00:34:28.580 recent rock bands like Greta Van Fleet and The Black Keys are from the Midwest, where the vestiges

00:34:33.580 of white suburban culture still exist, sort of. But on the other hand, Greta Van Fleet is a totally

00:34:38.060 shameless ripoff of Led Zeppelin. The fact that they're one of the only popular recent bands you

00:34:42.380 can name really tells you something. When's the last time there's been a new sound or style in

00:34:48.040 rock? Every generation until now has pioneered their own sound. You know, hair metal in the 80s,

00:34:52.420 grunge in the 90s, emo in the 2000s, into the indie hipster stuff as you get into the early

00:34:58.340 2010s. What does the 2020s have? We're more than halfway through. I'd argue that it's the first

00:35:03.080 decade since the invention of rock as a genre that has not had its own unique and popular sound.

00:35:10.620 The other reason I want to play that clip is to make the point that rock music is

00:35:15.260 a part of white culture. Yes, there have been great black rock musicians. Yes,

00:35:21.620 rock music was influenced by what came before it, which includes some blues influences and that

00:35:26.000 sort of thing. But ultimately, getting together in a garage with your friends and jamming out

00:35:31.920 was predominantly a white suburban male activity. White suburban male culture was targeted for

00:35:38.080 extinction years ago, and now it's basically extinct. And so is rock music. That's not a

00:35:44.360 coincidence. When you demonize an entire race of people and tell everyone that they're responsible

00:35:49.040 for all of society's problems, when in fact they created Western civilization, then naturally

00:35:54.460 white people are going to be more self-conscious about doing things that white people typically

00:35:58.420 do.

00:35:59.140 And that includes making this kind of music.

00:36:01.420 It includes attending these kinds of concerts.

00:36:04.940 You know, I'd also be interested, I was thinking about, to see a graph that shows on the one

00:36:08.540 hand the decline of rock music and on the other, the prevalence of psychiatric drugs,

00:36:13.180 especially ADHD medication.

00:36:14.700 Because speaking of the war on boys, of all races in this case, for the past several decades, boys and young men in particular have been drugged into oblivion to make them more compliant in a public school setting.

00:36:31.180 It's no surprise that the artistic output from this group would decline as we turn them into mentally numbed automotons.

00:36:38.700 automotons. You know, I mean, I sometimes see these videos that pop up on social media of a

00:36:46.420 clip of an old, you know, of a rock music video from 20 or 30 years ago. And it always has a

00:36:53.120 caption like, hey, we miss it when white boys were doing this. We need young men doing this again.

00:37:01.120 Saw a clip like that just yesterday with a caption along those lines.

00:37:05.340 Well, okay, young men used to work out their angst and energy through music. A lot of them did.

00:37:15.840 Now we drug it out of them before they hit third grade.

00:37:21.000 Big tech algorithms also play a role, as they always do. They're designed to suppress anything

00:37:25.540 that's white-coated and that includes rock music. But more generally, in the modern era,

00:37:29.520 the music industry, like everyone else in the entertainment business, is a slave to the

00:37:33.940 algorithm. Every song is designed to succeed in the algorithm. The reason that a Goo Goo Dolls

00:37:39.820 song is randomly charting again, it's that it's being used in TikTok videos as part of a TikTok

00:37:46.560 meme. This is the path to success now, primarily because young people today spend most of their

00:37:52.720 time interacting with each other through screens. They're scrolling videos on TikTok and Instagram.

00:37:56.840 They're not really socializing offline. And that phenomenon creates some second-order effects.

00:38:01.580 One of those effects is that young people aren't interacting enough to form a band in the first place.

00:38:07.140 That's why the underground scenes are all dead.

00:38:09.180 Punk, heavy metal, everything.

00:38:11.500 It's also why music is a lot less creative now.

00:38:14.540 Think of the story of how the Killers were formed.

00:38:16.220 The lead singer, Brandon Flowers, responded to a newspaper ad in the Las Vegas Weekly that was placed by the guitarist and Dave Kooning.

00:38:23.920 And the ad specified that Koenig's influences included Oasis and The Smiths, which attracted Flowers because everyone else in Las Vegas was interested in new metal and punk.

00:38:32.560 So Flowers drove over to his apartment where he played a guitar riff for him.

00:38:36.940 Flowers then wrote the lyrics to Mr. Brightside based on that riff.

00:38:41.280 That's the reason that the song exists.

00:38:43.100 Two people, complete strangers, began working as a team the moment they met each other.

00:38:47.380 And they made one of the biggest songs of the century.

00:38:49.600 that's still popular today because they went and met up in person.

00:38:55.040 But it's difficult to imagine a similar story happening today.

00:38:57.600 Obviously, no one places advertisements in the newspaper anymore.

00:39:00.620 No one reads newspapers.

00:39:02.300 But more importantly, when people go online to communicate,

00:39:05.140 they rarely end up meeting in person.

00:39:06.500 They're usually playing games or doom scrolling, looking at brain rot,

00:39:13.240 trolling each other in the comment section.

00:39:15.980 By one estimate, as reported by NPR over the past 20 years,

00:39:18.700 face-to-face socializing fell roughly 30% for American men and 45% for teenagers,

00:39:25.780 which is a dramatic decrease. I suspect that that's also a huge undercount.

00:39:32.800 Now, what do these teenagers do instead? Well, they dream about becoming streamers and YouTubers

00:39:36.920 now, not rock stars. This is probably the first generation in 70 years where the average white

00:39:45.000 15-year-old boy doesn't daydream of becoming a rock star? And it's not hard to see why.

00:39:52.240 Take a look at this list from the New York Times, which supposedly lists the top 30 living

00:39:56.440 American songwriters. This list just came out this week. And here's what they have on the list.

00:40:03.500 Jay-Z, Young Thug, Kendrick Lamar, Outkast, Missy Elliott, Mariah Carey, The Dream, Bad Bunny.

00:40:09.460 These are the top songwriters, living songwriters. Again, American songwriters. Bad Bunny's not even

00:40:14.780 American. Anyway, Babyface, Stevie Wonder, Niall Rogers, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Smokey Robinson,

00:40:21.680 Lionel Richie, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon,

00:40:27.340 Carole King, Willie Nelson, Dan Warren, Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Romeo Santos, Valerie

00:40:33.840 Simpson, Brian and Eddie Holland, Josh Osborne, Brandi Clark, and Shane McAnally. We remember

00:40:42.720 Shane McKinley. He's the guy that purchased the baby and has been emotionally abusing the child

00:40:48.020 on social media for clicks. So this is an atrocious joke of a list for a bunch of reasons,

00:40:54.840 starting with the fact that it almost completely leaves out modern American folk and Americana,

00:40:58.800 which are actually vibrant and eclectic genres still today, where most of the best songwriting

00:41:03.940 is being done right now, and it has been done historically. It's mostly just pop and rap and

00:41:09.540 that sort of thing. To the extent that they have any rock musicians at all, it feels like a hedge.

00:41:13.980 They're all from the 1970s. This is what's promoted now in every major venue. This is what

00:41:19.780 young people are saying. It's no wonder they don't want any part of it. The same is true with the

00:41:24.380 Super Bowl halftime shows. There hasn't been a rock band featured this decade at all. Last one

00:41:28.160 was Maroon 5, which was more pop than rock. That was in 2019. And ever since Jay-Z took over the

00:41:33.980 Super Bowl halftime show, they've barely had any white people on stage at all. Other than Eminem,

00:41:38.900 They haven't had any white headliners. Now, to be clear, my intention is not to complain that good music doesn't exist anymore or that good rock music can never exist again. Maybe it can. And there is good music being made. But the fact remains that the popular genres have all been urbanized and dumbed down and they've all kind of fused together.

00:41:58.920 and music critics are cowards who think that if they're listing top living songwriters then two

00:42:05.180 thirds of the list have to be black people even if that means including missy elliot for example

00:42:10.540 who had like one hit 30 years ago and even some of the iconic musicians they list are all a lot

00:42:17.440 more left-wing uh than they were in their primes no young person looks up to bruce springsteen

00:42:24.020 anymore for this exact reason. He's best known today as a dumb, whiny leftist who reads the

00:42:29.520 talking points from the DNC. What we've learned is that rock musicians, unfortunately, get lamer

00:42:35.480 and gayer as they age. We can only conclude that if Kurt Cobain were alive today, sad as it is to

00:42:42.000 say, he'd be making PSAs about climate change and defending democracy against fascist Republicans.

00:42:48.180 that's why you need the younger crop to come in and keep things lively and rebellious as these

00:42:56.560 old guys lose their edge and start demanding COVID tests at their concerts but we don't have

00:43:04.560 a younger crop anymore and until that changes one of the greatest cultural exports in America's

00:43:10.560 history rock music is never going to return and no matter your taste in music that would be a

00:43:18.160 tragedy. You know, Don McLean sang about the day the music died over 50 years ago. It was a nine

00:43:25.220 minute folk rock song that shot to the top of the charts, something that could never happen today.

00:43:31.260 And in that classic song, the day the music died referred, of course, to the plane crash that

00:43:35.300 killed some of rock's biggest stars more than a decade before that. But he might just as well,

00:43:40.940 and even more so, have been singing about our day and age. Except it wasn't any plane crash that

00:43:47.020 killed rock music in the end, it died instead by a million cuts. And that's a harder obituary to

00:43:54.140 put into song. And even if you could put it in a song, would there be anyone left to sing it?

00:44:02.260 That will do it for the show today and this week. Have a great weekend. Talk to you on Monday.

00:44:06.800 Godspeed.

00:44:17.020 that if people have committed treason

00:44:18.900 against the United States of America,

00:44:21.460 their statues should not be in the Capitol.

00:44:25.440 History is written by the victors.

00:44:26.880 And since the 1960s, we've been told,

00:44:28.400 mostly by people whose ancestors

00:44:30.380 didn't even live here during the war,

00:44:32.240 the South committed treason.

00:44:34.820 But if the Confederates were traitors,

00:44:39.180 then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?

00:44:44.040 What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of?

00:44:47.020 Do they know something they're not allowed to say today?

00:44:51.020 It's time for the truth, so here it is.

00:44:53.020 Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor.

00:44:57.020 He was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war.

00:45:01.020 This is the real history of the Civil War.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 01, 2026

Ep. 1772 - Rock Music is Completely Dead. This is Why.

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