Here are the top ten recording artists of 2011, and once you've got past the anomalies that is Adele, what does it tell you?
1. Adele
2. Rihanna
3. Katy Perry
4. Lady Gaga
5. Lil Wayne
6. Bruno Mars
7. Nicki Minaj
8. Taylor Swift
9. Justin Bieber
10. Chris Brown
6 out of 10 top slots being women is impressive, 4 out of 5 top slops being women is amazing. But it is really just a continuation of 2010. So how about this: 2 hip hop stars and 7 dance pop stars, now that is telling you something. How many country stars? Taylor, yeah, but not really, Adele? A freak occurrence. And rock stars? Coldplay?? Anybody? nope, nobody.
The pop landscape has changed, rock and roll is to dance in 2011 what jazz was to rock and roll in 1967: a fringe element with artistic integrity but still a specialist shop. This is neither good nor bad, the complaint might be that dance pop lacks any, I dunno, soul because it is a producers art form. Maybe, to a degree, it isn't "Positively 4th Street" that's for sure. But still, LCD Soundsystem for one is sure soulful enough so… I don't care what any one says, it depends where you sit.
And that's the mainstream. As you go the outskirts of dance, the next generation, you find two things in common with rock and roll.
1. Poor kids making loud noises on cheap machines.
2. The integrity of those who believe in what you are doing.
The transition, the one LCD and Drop the Lime point towards, is the rock band as dance band. Gone are guitar and bass, replaced by drum machines and synth sample, replaced by vocoders and tapes and protools. Like rock, or rather it is rock when you make the form and content of rock the blueprint for everything that is happening now.
Which makes my opening comment not quite accurate, The thing is, rock didn't use the forms of jazz, but dance pop uses the forms of rock. They are similar methods of sales.
So the lesson here is rock and roll is here to stay, it will never die because even if it is made from different instruments, it comes from the same place.