Here’s a fun game for members of the whole family. Pretend you are a cultural historian. The year is 2055. You have been tasked with writing a chapter on the last hundred years of popular music. What subjects are you focusing on? Which artists? What songs?
More to the point, how significant is the genre of rock & roll in your century-long survey? Rock & roll was the defining musical form in the post-war West, and its influence reached global proportions within a couple of decades. Then it crested. Though it remains a significant part of the worldwide musical landscape, rock has long since ceded the dominant spot.
I may not have the same perspective as those 2055 cultural observers will possess, but with better than fifty years to look back on, I am going to say that rock & roll’s descent from the forefront of modern popular music began with one of its most lauded compositions.
The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” took rock to a new level…and spelled its eventual demise
From the moment the Beatles closed their groundbreaking album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” the writing was on the wall. Contrary to whatever Danny & the Juniors might have thought, rock & roll was not here to stay. At least not as the top dog in the music universe.
I am certainly not arguing here that “A Day in the Life” is anything short of a brilliant creation. Lennon’s conception – pulling stories from a newspaper and using them as the basis for a pop song – was both a throwback and a cutting-edge idea. McCartney’s sprightly middle section balances the more languid verse in a manner that characterized the greatest of their collaborations.
But here’s why it doomed rock as a dominant pop genre. It’s too long, and given the melodic and rhythmic shifts that define it, you can’t dance to it.
Oh, and also because it became instantly recognized as a work of genius … one which other rock & rollers would of course try to emulate.
I came across a fascinating study recently. It was undertaken by Maria Scricco in 2023 and, as near as I can tell, was produced in her Applied Media Analytics course while a student at Elon University. Scricco studied the way popular music has changed in the digital age. As part of her analysis, she assigned “danceability” grades for the most popular genres in music over the past 70 years.
“Danceability,” of course, is at least partially subjective. But some factors can be analyzed. These mostly concern rhythmic speed and consistency. Faster, steadier beats tend to make a song more “danceable.”
Rock & roll finished dead last for danceability quotient. It was far behind every other major genre. Rap and Latin music led the way. And the 1960s as a whole had the least danceable music.
But I suspect, had Scricco been able to divide the decade in half, the numbers would have looked a little different. Early rock & roll was dance music. It was short, allowing for great bursts of energy. It was fast-paced.
By the middle of the 1960s, some of those factors were beginning to change. By the time of Rubber Soul (1965), the Beatles were indeed writing less rhythmic songs and concentrating more on other elements. Their lyrics became far more ambitious. Their experiments with sound collages replaced reliable up-tempo drum and bass lines.
But most of their songs remained at least partly danceable. And short. Before Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles rarely had songs that ran more than three minutes.
Even on Rubber Soul, the longest track is just 3:18 - “You Won’t See Me.” That was the longest album track the band released before Sgt. Pepper. John’s single “Strawberry Fields Forever” crept just above the four-minute mark, and like “A Day in the Life,” featured a major tempo change in the middle that dissuaded dancing.
At 5:38, “A Day in the Life” was the longest song the Beatles had ever released when it came out in 1967. They topped the five-minute mark on the same album with George Harrison’s sitar-based “Within You Without You." But it was “A Day in the Life” that, more than any other early rock song, signaled the shift from popular dance music to serious work of art.
Soon, the Beatles would be crafting even longer, undanceable hits like “Hey Jude.’ And soon, everyone else was following suit. The era of the concept album was born. Rock songs with multiple sections and uncommon time signatures became standard. The songs got longer and longer.
I don’t mean to suggest that all this changed overnight, or that rock music couldn’t still make clubgoers sweat. But the market was bifurcating, and then bifurcating again. Funk, reggae and disco emerged to provide the requisite dance beat and prepare for a different future.
There were still formidable musicians creating excellent rock & roll – as there are to this day – but the writing was on the wall for those who cared to look. The mainstream was about to be shattered by a series of setbacks.
Altamont. Jimi and Janice. Jim Morrison. That’s a lot of loss to absorb. And of course, the Beatles broke up.
But in hindsight, it’s easier to see those things as one-offs, or by-products of larger cultural forces. Something had been baked into rock’s DNA. As one of its greatest practitioners (who also wrote music you could not dance to) would write less than ten years later, “the festival was over, the boys were all planning for a fall.”
Look, I’m equating popular music with dance music here, and you may not share my opinion. Remember, I am not saying that the ability of any genre to make people dance is a sign of quality. Merely popularity.
But popularity bequeaths a fair amount of cultural significance. The upper classes have always sat politely and listened to the music of the day while the teeming masses beneath them have moved their feet and wiggled their hips on the dance floor.
Many of us who grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s were conditioned to believe that rock & roll was the music of those teeming masses. But I'm not so sure my imagined cultural historian in 2055 – freed from the prejudices that come from living through an era – will share that opinion. And she might hold up the Beatle’s “A Day in the Life” as proof.
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