Modern-Rock Radio Continues Its Slide Into Irrelevance, Three Days Grace Advocacy

noah | September 28, 2007 4:04 am

A post on Kings Of A & R bemoaning the state of modern-rock radio (and calling out Kid Rock’s lyric-writing “abilities,” specifically when it comes to couplets like “So hot I wanna get you alone / So hot I wanna get you stoned” ) caused me to take a glance at this week’s Billboard Modern Rock charts, and while somehow Linkin Park wasn’t at the top, the rest of the top 10 wasn’t pretty:

1. The Pretender, Foo Fighters (eight weeks on chart) 2. Bleed It Out, Linkin Park (15 weeks) 3. Never Too Late, Three Days Grace (18 weeks) 4. Paralyzer, Finger Eleven (32 weeks) 5. Misery Business, Paramore (12 weeks) 6. All Around Me, Flyleaf (16 weeks) 7, Big Casino, Jimmy Eat World (four weeks) 8. Supermassive Black Hole, Muse (21 weeks) 9. Icky Thump, The White Stripes (22 weeks) 10. What I’ve Done, Linkin Park (25 weeks)

Now I’ve beaten this drum before, but honestly. 32 weeks for that Finger Eleven song? Eight of the 10 tracks in the top 10 being on the chart for three months or more?

In the Kings of A & R diatribe, the author says, “Do you know why the modern rock ring tone business sucks? Because modern rock doesn’t have personalities.” Fair enough, although I would like to throw out two corollaries to that theory aside from the fact that this stuck-in-1999’s-amber playlist seems to age the audience out of the ringtone market: One, there’s so little movement within the genre–both in terms of how quickly songs get rotated in and how quickly artists get rotated in–that people won’t really be inspired to change their ringtnes too often, and two, that there aren’t really many hooks in any of these songs that can be sliced out for the purpose of annoying the people next to you on the bus. Not that “ringtone rap” and the inanities dictated by the genre are a good thing, but really: can you hum the hooks of more than half these tracks? (And no, screaming in a strangled-cat voice and saying “That was one of the Linkin Park songs!” doesn’t count.) Is it any wonder that people who want a guitar to chime when they get a call would stick with the opening chords to “Welcome To The Jungle”?

(Although that Paramore song is still pretty darn catchy.)

Modern Rock: From Hero To Zero… [Kings Of A & R]

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