The Future of Rock and Roll

It is hard to get faculty members to agree on much of anything these days, but I bet one common bond would be a dislike of the mind-numbing sounds that blare out of college dorm room windows and leak out of iPod headsets. If you live on a college campus, as I did for a decade, there’s simply no escaping the vulgar lyrics, headache-inducing drumbeats, and repetitive synthesized squeals that sound like a car with worn brake pads scooting over railroad tracks. How could the great rock and roll sound of our college years have morphed into such an unattractive – okay, I’ll say it – such a repulsive genre?

Yesterday I came across a Washington Post opinion piece by Daniel de Vise lamenting the closing of Wesleyan’s WESU, the nation’s second-oldest college radio station. His blog took me back a few years to when Oxford Ohio’s WOXY, one of America’s great independent alternative rock stations, shut its doors. (I’m sure you know WOXY’s slogan: “97X BAM! The Future of Rock and Roll,” because you heard Dustin Hoffman repeat it over and over and over in Rain Man. Yes, it’s that WOXY.)

WOXY’s demise caused heartbreak among the Miami University student body. A colleague’s sophomore daughter broke down when she learned the station was pulling the big switch forever. Another listener posted on a bulletin board, “There are a lot of us who grew up listening to this station and it has provided the soundtrack to virtually our entire lives. Somebody DO something!! Seriously, I'm going to cry.”

The listener is correct. College students not only experience an extraordinary personal bond with their radio stations but, more fundamentally, the stations really do provide a soundtrack for their lives. Rock and roll comes to us when we first become aware of the universal problems of life and yet are least able to understand them. When we are in this fragile state and for a decade or two thereafter, rock and roll has the power to put us in touch with our humanity:


It is late on a bleak Sunday night in January 1972 and I am finally headed home from Ohio State’s Smith Laboratory. I’m listening to Melanie on “92X” in Columbus, Ohio. My experiment is a mess, none of the data is reproducible, and throughout the long day I could practically hear my tenure clock ticking.
Now Melanie starts another song:

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye…

In my depleted state, the lyrics seem profound. I picture my three year old daughter asleep at home and resolve to spend more time with her, to be a better father. Something makes me turn up the volume and roll down the car window, releasing the music into the frigid air…


Rock and roll has always commingled the celebration of life with a challenge to the establishment. Whether it was Elvis gyrating his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show, John Lennon paying tribute to illicit drugs in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, or merely the bone-jarring drumbeat from a car passing through a residential neighborhood, the music has always expressed the universal angst-ridden lament of adolescence: “I am me. I am not like you. You need to respect me for who I am and take me seriously.”

But rock and roll is much more than about seeking independence during a time of self-discovery. Hard as it is for some of us of a certain age to admit, it is also about art. The best rock and roll is creative and meaningful. But that doesn’t mean we can all appreciate it.

I have a theory, unsupported by data or deep reflection, that like ducklings people are imprinted on with the music of their youth. Each generation grows up believing that its own music is natural and attractive, and that that which follows is unpalatable and discordant.

To me, rock and roll will forever be about taking it easy in Winslow, Arizona, about meeting Memphis barroom queens, and about being busted flat in Baton Rouge. For my wife, Carole, rock and roll will forever be about asking Alice when she’s ten feet tall, and about hiding her heart because Eli’s coming.

If my theory is true, then Neil Young had it right: rock and roll is here to stay. Rock and roll is an exuberant musical reflection of the human spirit, and one way or another, that spirit will find a way to express itself, just as it did during the Cold War when pirate radio ships floated like lily pads in the coastal waters off totalitarian states.

And so, “the future of rock and roll” is still bright. The genre will continue to morph into other forms and find other venues, just as it has since the days of Bill Haley and the Comets. About all I can predict is that whatever the next form takes, I won’t like it and I won’t understand it. But that’s just fine, because the music is no longer meant for me.

And so, while our students' radio stations may be dwindling, the spirit that created their music is alive and well. One day our students will be us, carping about the young and the foolish, but still truckin’ down the road on that long strange trip, listening to the doodah man in their memories.