Lost Generation of Great Frontmen - Conclusion

There were those who wanted to proclaim Kurt Cobain as the "posterboy of Generation X."

One thing about being a posterboy, a role model, a leader....If you're gonna lead people, you have got to have someplace to lead people to.

Nobody wants to follow a leader who is going to get them killed.

By April 5th of 1994, rock had gotten about as far from "glamorous" as would have ever been thought possible in the 80s.

No more gorgeous, "self-indulgent" guitar solos that served as the vehicle of the spirit of the guitarist.

No more stage clothes. If these clothes are good enough for copping, they're good enough for rocking.

No more stage shows with the dazzling lights and the blazing pyrotechnics.

"We don't want to do anything too over the top."

Well it's all those things that made rock so fun and so exciting to young people!

Grunge did away with the glamor and the showmanship and the attitude and it just so happens that the 90s were the last time that rock music dominated as the young people's choice in popular music. The kids who grew up in the 90s gravitated towards the glamor, the showmanship and the attitude they saw in hip hop when they grew up. They saw hip hop stars livin' large and said: "Yeah! I want that"!

I understand grunge wanted to present something authentic but there are a number of ways to go about doing that. If your heart and your soul and your passion are fully invested in what you're doing, then the way I see it, that is authentic as it gets!

You do realize this is rock 'n' roll don't ya? What if The KIng had decided he wouldn't shake his hips when he was onstage because it was too "showy"?

Would we even have rock music?

Rock music isn't just a sound; it's an attitude. It's bravado! It's swagger!

How else do you figure that a character vocalist like Mick Jagger could ever be the lead singer of "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World" if it was all based purely on technical prowess?

Mick Jagger is a legend and an icon because he gets into character so incredibly well for any song he sings. He sings what that character in that song needs to get across what he wants to get across. Mick can also walk and talk and strut with the best of them and he maintains that energy level the whole time he's out there.

The women wanted Mick and the men wanted to be Mick Jagger. He has had the swagger and the strut to make believers out of rock audiences from the 60s right up until today.

Where are the next great frontmen coming from?

As Blackie Lawless succinctly put it: "They ain't"!

The nightclub business has declined to where there are not even half as nightclubs as there during the peak of the club days when young bands would go to the clubs to gain experience playing for a live audience and where good bands went to become great bands.

The clubs were the breeding grounds for the great frontmen of the future.

Real estate prices are out of hand to where even if you wanted to buy a little club in a nice urban area, you'd have to charge $14 a drink to have a chance of making any money. You'd have to cut costs as much as possible, so if you had a choice of booking three live bands for a Friday night or hiring one DJ, which would you choose?

Young people also don't go out as much as they did in previous generations. The tech boom has sadly resulted in a lot of young people settling for being passively entertained by Tik Tok, texting and video games. So, even if you opened your club the demand for it would not be what it would have been in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s...or even the 2000s.

The decimation of the industry's business model made it so that 90% of the major labels had to shut down. Of what was left of the majors, they became incredibly risk averse. They decided to put their money into the cheapest, easiest music to make that had the most potential commercial appeal.

Since pop is short for "popular", that meant the predominantly female vocalist-led pop music world would be kept safe.

Only music very mainstream or extremely cheap and easy to make would continue to be made.That was the heart of the deal. That was the heart of the pact.

In the bargain, rock music lost a generation of great male frontmen.

What bright, talented young person is going to dedicate their life to an industry that has no viable business model?

The chances of becoming a rock star were always very slim and people knew it but they persisted because still, there was that shot!

Now, the shot is so ridiculously elusive, the odds of getting that shot are so absurd that to dedicate your life to going after that shot...you absolutely have to be a lifer.

Except you always did have to be a lifer.

The business was always so competitive that you had to not just want it; you had to need it. If you could imagine yourself being happy doing something other than rock music for a living, then you'd better do that because you would not make it in rock.

The entertainment business has always been ultra-competitive. The prize has always gone to those who were willing to do what it takes, whatever it takes. Blackie Lawless lived in a three foot by twelve foot closet for over a year. So did George Clooney.

Through a process of attrition, show business business weeded out people who did not belong in it.

That was when the nightclub business was booming and the major record labels were thriving.

The biggest change we find in our rock music industry is how little industry there is left! It's pretty much incumbent on the bands now to do for themselves what the major labels once did.

Say what you will about labels being stingy or coercing artists to change their music into something the label believed would be more commercial or giving artists deals that favored the label over the artist, but I'll tell you this:

When a major label got behind an artist and wanted to give that artist exposure...it was a thing of beauty to behold. They could, for lack of a better word, "herd" millions of young people in the direction of hearing that hot new artist and it could produce results that were nothing short of phenomenal.

Look at how Guns 'N' Roses did with their debut album. Appetite For Destruction set the record and to this day, holds the record for the biggest selling debut rock album of all time.

There's nothing even a little bit like that left today. That elusive "shot" to get a major record label sign you and advance you the money to tour America and Europe...who does that today?

What bands has Spotify taken under their wing and put money into...or what bands has YouTube done that for? Oh! Only the major labels did that? You mean the very labels people used to love to hate? It's funny how time changes your perspective, isn't it?

Major record labels used to spend money on what they called “artist development.” That means that even if a band’s first few records didn’t sell, as long as they believed in the band and saw potential, they’d keep you on a contract so you could keep getting paid while you went through the process of developing into a better band that makes better albums.

Nothing like that exists today.

Now anybody can make an album and guess what? Just about anybody does make albums these days.

Get out your trusty DAW and whether you have any business being in the music business or not, you'll make an album. Will it be heard? Not likely.

Maybe you'll come up with some cutting edge idea like: "Hey! What if we were the first metal band to have all guys in the band...except for a female lead vocalist? Then we'd have the pop appeal that historically has come from having a woman fronting the band, just like in pop music, but we'll have all the aggression and virtuosity of having men handle all the other positions."

That's not a bad new idea.

Problem is, it's been done so much that it's now the norm. Now there's nothing even a little revolutionary about having a woman front a band of men.

Compounding the problem, it became trendy for male vocalists to want to learn to "scream." We're in, hopefully, the tail end of that fad right now.

I'm not talking about a scream placed in an apt part of a song, such as Rob Hallford's dramatic scream at the end of Victim Of Changes. I'm not talking about that at all.

I'm talking about men who didn't want to be known as rappers, but didn't want to put forth the requisite effort to learn how to sing, so they learned to use their voices as percussion instruments. As long as they drowned every lyric out in tons of distortion, nobody would call them rappers.

Keeping in mind that metal is a sub-genre of rock, try to name a modern rock frontman that became a rock star within the last fifteen years.

I don't mean a "YouTube star." I mean someone who fronts a rock band that makes platinum albums, debuted no earlier than 2009 and can headline Madison Square Garden with just their band's name on the marquee.

As things stand now, rock actually has a fairly middle-aged audience in America. That's problematic. Here's why:

Rock, being a genre of music based on rebellion and sex and bravado...who does that describe better than people in their teens and twenties?

Really, the person who would be most capable of saving the rock music industry right now would be the person who can devise a new business model that works at least as well as the major label business model did in the 20th century.

That was the gold standard. Whoever comes up with a business model that works is gonna be a multi-billionaire.

I'm an optimist. The way I see it, if the internet could be used to destroy a business model, then the internet should also be able to be used to create a viable business model that works as well or better than the major label model that worked so well and gave us every rock star from Elvis Presley to Corey Taylor.

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