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Punk is dead. Fortunately, being dead is really fucking punk
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excellent point. I love the way Sonic Youth titled their tour video where they shared stages with e.g. Nirvana “1991, The Year Punk Broke.”
I had the thought several years ago that rock “began” I’ll arbitrarily say in 1950 for ease of figuring; when R&B got ever wilder and strayed even further from it’s jazz roots and also around when Muddy Waters “invented electricity.” so that’s 72 years ago, say. and as you said it had been more-or-less fully explored 40 - 50 years ago.
so, ok, how long has there been, say, mariachi or tejano? samba? waltzes? zydeco? I mean, we put rock into this impossible space where it has to keep evolving and being the popular youth culture (probably because the baby boomer market – rock’s biggest mass market – defined itself as the “young generation” in opposition to the G.I. generation?) but I mean at this point I think it’s healthier to just think of it as a purely American, original form of folk music that went global for a while. we think of american folk music as having strong ties to Celtic and African traditions that we kept alive. well, rock has those traditions, too. I don’t think it’ll ever die (hey hey, my my) but it ain’t gonna top the charts anymore and so what? damn the charts. it’ll be handed down through family, neighborhood, city, and regional ties and any kids that want to plug into the scene can go down to the all-ages venue and jump around the way god intended.
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You’re not a sell out unless Johnny Quest thinks you are.
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That’s the unique character of rock and also one of its fatal flaws. It’s catering to a population that rarely had music written for it before and was inextricably intertwined with the culture of rebellion. It was a unique time in many ways and from it sprang a unique art form. As @dnealy points out…
but because it is largely predicated on being abreast of the times and is in reality a fairly limited expression of music, the immediacy of its cultural relevance had a built-in expiration date. In that way, hip hop totally did usurp its position as the voice of the day, though I don’t necessarily think it’s a zero-sum game and only one could survive; one just ran out of gas. That doesn’t take anything away from the amazing artists that have left us a recorded legacy nor the kids who are just now learning their first chords on a beat up Telecaster, but it is missing the urgency it once had. And that’s fine. It was exhausting constantly hearing about the “next Bob Dylan”.
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That’ll come as a shock to all the kids currently in punk bands… 
Still IS global, though. And I’ll also add even all those other genres are not “dead” in the sense that they don’t still evolve… they certainly do. In fact a great show on NPR that I enjoy is American Routes that plays all kinds of American musical forms. The host often has current artists of a variety of genres on the show, and many of them have found new ways to play older genres of music. It’s on Sunday nights on 90.1 between 6-8.
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Something, something, sax and violins.
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There are even more tons of rock bands that make little-to-no cash, but create new and interesting music, just as musicians always have. Rock as a capitalist tool and fame machine was killed by the very label system that created it.
Because
Long live rock.
Oh yeah, punk will never die, either, as long as there is The Man (or The Machine) to rage against.
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From my own research, I’ve concluded that many punks care less about that (although many are activists in their own right) and more about building up counter-institutions of their own that are democratic and sustainable.
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Ska’s coming back man!
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Dubstep never dies.
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