Do You Remember Rock & Roll Radio (When It Didn’t Suck)?

It might seem like an odd idea to have anyone explain the state of something as commonplace as rock radio, but in the indie-centric blogosphere, you can’t assume prior knowledge about popular music that escapes the Hype Machine‘s gaze. Even in the critical community at large, where pretty much any populist genre (country, Radio Disney, ringtone rap) gets its share of respect and scrutiny from a dedicated gaggle of writers, mainstream rock is just about the only significant slice of the SoundScan pie that gets dismissed across the board without a second thought. (Possibly because those other stabs at populism came out of attempts to banish the bogeyman known as “rockism.”) One of the seeds for this column was planted while playing corporate-rock apologist in response to Maura’s potshot at the Modern Rock Top 10, which looked to me to be a hell of a lot better than the chart’s been at most points in the past five years. And I don’t care what anyone says, “Bleed It Out” (see above) and “Paralyzer” (see below) are fucking catchy songs.

Despite the persistence of faceless nu-grunge merchants like Seether, the chart is fairly diverse at the moment: Warped Tour insurgents (Paramore), pretentious British art-rock (Muse), hoarse-throated orthodox punk (Against Me!), and the perennially critic-friendly White Stripes have all staked out real estate on the current Top 20. Bands with grass-roots followings and indie origins are all over the radio–just not the kind of grass-roots followings and indie origins that get Pitchfork love, for the most part. But these bands all play loud, guitar-heavy rock music that sounds good on FM frequencies, which hasn’t been a big part of the indie zeitgeist for a long, long time. For once, mainstream and underground rock are mutually exclusive, as much for musical reasons as for any kind of indie loathing of the mainstream. There’s still some indie crossover happening on the radio waves, but it’s mostly on sleepy triple-A stations.

Back around the turn of the century, the relative health of rock radio was popular debate fodder for music fans everywhere, but nowadays even its detractors seem to have lost some of their passion for the argument. The endless cycle of “rock is dead!”/”rock is back!” trend pieces that accompanied every major event in the rock press (Radiohead “abandoning” guitars, the Strokes-led garage rock revival, etc.) seem to have run their course, with hip-hop fans now picking up the torch to argue endlessly about whether their beloved genre can be dead despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a foregone conclusion that mainstream rock sucks. Granted, that assumption’s frequently right. But it’s probably wrong more often than you think.

Recently, Billboard brought back the Top Rock Albums chart that it had discontinued in 1984, which might be seen as an acknowledgment that rock music is as marginalized as it’s been in the last 23 years. Which still isn’t that marginalized, though: the bottom album on the Album Rock chart’s Top 10 is at No. 32 on the big chart, which means that roughly a third of the most popular albums of the country are still rock music, at least by Billboard‘s somewhat inconsistent definition of the genre. Guitar rock doesn’t rule the monoculture like it once did–and it never will again–but the media’s no longer in a panic about it. Rock’s big unit-shifters of recent years have been, for the most par, VH1-friendly balladeers of all stripes, from Maroon 5 to Nickelback, and TRL-beloved emo-not-emo phenoms like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. Not exactly the kinds of bands that folks like Jann Wenner would feel great about grooming for eventual canonization in Cleveland, but not as difficult for them to embrace with a straight face as Limp Bizkit or Creed were when they were running shit a few years ago.

But even now, with thoroughly 21st-century mediocrity like Linkin Park ruling rock radio, the format is clearly living in the shadow of the ’90s. Although plenty of bands have tried, and failed, to maintain or regain the relevance they enjoyed a decade ago (paging Billy Corgan), those that have succeeded now get to be big fish in a slightly smaller pond. Bands that made more music in the ’90s–and for the most part were more popular then, too–have enjoyed most of their No. 1 singles on the Modern Rock chart since 2000. Eight of Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ 11 chart toppers, half of Green Day’s eight, four of the Foo Fighters’ five, and all four of Nine Inch Nails’ were racked up in this decade. Perhaps it’s just a less competitive field than it used to be, or perhaps aging program directors will add anything with name recognition to their playlists en masse just to keep Three Days Grace at bay.

The prevailing wisdom is that Modern Rock radio had its glory days, and they’re long gone by now. But looking at lists of ’90s chart-toppers just reminds me that there was always a lot of horrible, horrible bullshit clogging up those stations’ playlists. There was no sudden downhill slide set in motion by Staind, or Sugar Ray, or even Bush. And only once we free ourselves from the rose-colored glasses of the Nirvana era can we crank up our local rock station and enjoy the good–or channel-surf past the bad.