![]() ![]() None of these bands has scored a legitimate hit since their recent return to action, which fits them squarely into the parameters Gordon defined for classic rock. For Simple Plan it’s “ I Don’t Want To Go To Bed,” which features Nelly, sounds like Flo Rida, and had the misfortune of launching a beach-themed video the same day DNCE dropped “Cake By The Ocean.” And for Sum 41, it’s something like the movie Pixels but with memes. Dream,” which nauseously crossbreeds pop-punk with the easygoing acoustic poolside pop of Sugar Ray. Besides returning to their meat and potatoes, each of those acts has also attempted pivots of a sort: For Good Charlotte it’s “ 40 Oz. Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, and Sum 41 have all released new songs recently that could pass for 2002 Warped Tour favorites, but there’s a definite sensory whiplash between the pinched, pubescent vocals these bands made their name on and the rapidly aging faces from whence those voices now spout. The short answer is that generally, it does not. This music seems like the exclusive province of teenagers, so how could it possibly grow old with grace? It thrived during the teen-driven TRL era but seemed to have more in common with boy bands than nu-metal, an alignment crystallized by the existence of pop-punk boy band 5 Seconds Of Summer and the work of music journalist Maria Sherman. Radio-friendly pop-punk has traditionally been an inherently youthful genre, music for snotty adolescent pranksters and budding rock fans who haven’t yet ventured beyond the radio. Much stranger than the idea of the Strokes as classic rock is the prospect of mall punk as classic rock. (Also they haven’t released a good album in 13 years, and it feels more like 26.) It’s not weird to think of them as classic rock because they aspired to be classic rock from the beginning. Julian Casablancas sung with an aloof bellow that made him seem much older than he really was. They won over a ton of young people, my 18-year-old self included, but they adhered to archetypes that immediately ingratiated them with the old-guard music press on both sides of the Atlantic. ![]() The Strokes always carried themselves like classic rockers anyway: worshipful of their forebears, spearheading a revival of decades-old sounds, rendering Vinyl redundant 15 years before it went on the air. That includes the Strokes, as Pitchfork’s Jeremy Gordon pointed out while wisely noting, “Becoming classic rock means a band can recycle their iconography without losing their edge, as far as casual and younger listeners are concerned… It also means, weirdly, that they’re no longer expected to be good.” ( Wazzup, ’90s Fest?) Even some acts from after Y2K pass for classic rock these days. From grunge to rap to their bastard child nu-metal, the entire ’90s has aged into profitable nostalgia, including (especially?) the weird parts. ![]() If you pay attention to the music business, you already know this. ![]() And for those of us who came of age in the 1990s, it’s been happening in a big way lately. It’s something every generation has to grapple with, but like college, marriage, raising children, and watching your loved ones die off one by one, this phenomenon feels new and uncharted when it happens to you. Hey you! Out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old: Everything you grew up on is classic rock now. ![]()
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