When you’re nearly 50 and you turn on the classic rock station and you hear something that was the antithesis of “classic rock” when you were a kid, it gets a body to wondering. I mean it only makes sense in one way: back in the early 80’s, Classic Rock was mostly stuff from the 60’s, but I remember hearing a lot of “That’ll be the Day” by Buddy Holly and similar 50’s stuff. And of course, by the time the 90’s rolled around, it was KBILLY’s Super Sounds of the 70’s. Now you hear Nirvana and Weezer and Metallica. Gen-X is Classic Rock now, and Millenials are right around the corner.

But the music of the 90’s doesn’t sound exactly like the music of previous decades, and it doesn’t sound like what followed in the 2000’s. every decade, every era, was noticable and unique, even as riffs and tones and ideas got recycled and mixed. So calling everything past a certain date “Classic Rock” is both true and limiting. It doesn’t tell you what kind of music you’re getting, just that it isn’t current.

Back in 2007 VHI and BBC2 created a documentary called “The Seven Ages of Rock”. Based on the Wikipedia entry, it’s more about subgenres than eras. This kind of makes sense, because certain subgenres appeared at certain times. This doesn’t tell us the historical thrust, as it were.

I’d like to propose the following:

1. Proto-Rock (1945-1954) The rythmn and blues era, the Western Swing era. You might maybe could extend this back, maybe to the 30’s, but not much more than that.
2. The Golden Age (1954-1963) The first wave. Rockabilly and surf rock. An American phenomenon, considered low-class and childish.
3. The Classic Rock Age (1963-1976) When Bands were bands and Rock as an Art Form became more important than Rock as dance music.
4. The New Wave (1976-1987) Technology changes, and the music bifurcated: dance pop on the right of the dial, underground indie on the left. Hip-Hop steps onto the stage.
5. The Alternative Age (1987-1996) Polarities reverse, and the hidden becomes everywhere. Indie and punk and metal converge briefly, explode, and retreat as newer genres come into vogue, riding the new technological and market dynamics.
6. The Long Retreat (1996-2026) slowly and then all at once, the genre loses market share and currency. After about 2010, the Poptimist Vibe has taken over, and Pop is as inescapable now as it was in the early 20th century.

The last is the longest era. It’s important to note that Hip-Hop as such has not remained the dominant form, but has put its form into everything. Pop and Country and everything else have absorbed Hip-Hop into their styles, so the form itself has stagnated and left the charts. One might call the Long Retreat the Era of Hip-Hop, and now that this is over, what happens?

I will say that the younger generations, when they think of Rock, don’t really differentiate between eras, and are as likely to dig on the Beatles and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin as they are Nirvana and Green Day and Metallica. In fact, they’ll often enjoy both Boomer and Gen-X styles, because it’s all ancient history to them. Which means that these may not mean as much as we thought so at the time.