The guitar solo was once the pinnacle of rock excess, all sex and noise and youth.

You heard the opening riff of Van Halen’s Running With The Devil and it wasn’t just a song, it was a celebration of freedom. When AC/DC added cannons and a two ton Hell’s Bell to their stage show, it felt earned. Excess was the point. If Led Zeppelin wanted to sing about hobbits and Mordor before calling down the thunder gods, sign me up.

Seventies rock built monuments.
Eighties rock poured on gasoline and lit a match.

Then the ’90s showed up with a fire extinguisher and a thrift-store flannel.

If you asked Billy Corgan he would put forth the idea MTV betrayed rock. Or should I say the ‘myth’ that a room full of pencil pushers in New York woke up one day and said “Let’s kill rock and replace it with DJs and boy bands.”

I guess if you need a villain. I think it is a little more banal. MTV didn’t cancel rock, rock just stopped being so much fun.

The Main Character Syndrome

Rock was the universe in the ’70s with a gravitational pull that extended across the radio dial. Pink Floyd charted maps of the human psyche. Rush turned Romantic era poetry into rock anthems. You listened, but also had whole new world’s opened to you.

As America limped into the ’80s all subtlety was gone. Rock was at a crossroads between Punk and Disco. Blondie became huge, but weren’t sure what they were. Punk had gone underground and disco was dying, so rock did what it was supposed to and leaned in. We got Bon Jovi single handily saving the hairspray industry, Def Leppard taking studio wizardry to heights previously only imagined for rock gods, and Metallica giving us theatrical precision wrapped in fury.

The look became cartoonish, the stage shows overblown spectacle where every song ended in an anthemic chorus, and every new release an event of epic proportion. Across the country teenagers tuned MTV into must see TV, for bands the video became identity. The single was cool on the radio, but seeing the video was what everyone would be talking about in school the next day.

MTV amplified rocks every crazy impulse.

Getting Smaller All The Time

And then there was flannel.

The ’80s looked right in the camera and screamed “I am the show,” the ’90s shifted it’s gaze and said “don’t look at me.” The over indulgent guitar solos had been replaced with the Doll’s mantra “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” And when you got to the chorus it wasn’t overblown, that would be dishonest. The big hair was gone, the studio clarity morphed into fuzz, and the ambition turned modest.

But it wasn’t an accident, it was a correction.

All the eyeliner and polytechnics in the world couldn’t make rock feel real again. Pearl Jam sang like their lives depended on it. Alice In Chains made you look at things you couldn’t unsee. Weezer took awkward and made it an art form.

And it worked.

But the why is what no one talks about, rock got smaller.

Gone were the 10 minute opuses. Solos became compact, but fierce. Rock shows filled with lights and props were casually throw into a backroom. It was as if rock had developed an intolerance of the excess that was it’s superpower.

The Bigger The Better

You can say that MTV pivoted here because it hated what rock had become, but it it is probably something simpler; rock stopped being a spectacle.

Having hour on hour of what amounted to anti-performance videos made it hard to keep viewers engaged. It is an uphill battle to sell attitude when it rejects attention. MTV had a void to fill, enter hip-hop, pop, r&b, and reality TV. The Real World was more in line with the old rock ethic of shock, drama, and need.

What rock had become was a landscape of fiercely loyal camps. The Pumpkins with their faux grandeur. Soundgarden roaring as mono-culture was fragmenting. And then Radiohead flushing the whole idea of a rock formula down the cultural throne.

That wasn’t MTV decentralizing rock, it was rock cannibalizing itself.

The Reactionary Generation

The ’90s was what it wasn’t.

Not glossy or flashy or virtuosic for the sake of virtuosity.

The problem is that the veracity of their movement is it wasn’t designed to build empires. It instead stood amongst the rubble, took a deep breath, and reset to rocks real roots.

The ’70s drew the blueprint.
The ’80s built the mansion.
The ’90s hung a sign on the door that read “Please remove your shoes.”

For some that was shrinkage, for other salvation.

That is the painful truth; the ’90s made rock less dominant, not worse.

It wasn’t unified. The theatrics were gone, so was the myth. Rock was no longer the loudest thing and MTV was built on loud. The guitar solo didn’t really die, it just was relegated to the back burner.

What is unpolished to one person is anti-corporate rock to another, but if your version of rock was built on the epic anthem and a solo that was like edging, the ’90s can seem tame.

And rock was never meant to be tame.