Is Attitude the Only Thing Setting Hard Rock Apart?

The funny thing about hard rock is that a lot of people think it has died a long time ago. I know that sounds hilarious, but that’s the absolute truth.

The problem with rock music nowadays is the fact that it really is a victim of its own success. People are so eager and so enthusiastic about rock music that they can’t listen to enough of it. They listen to so much rock music that it has been sliced, diced and filtered and reclassified a million times over.

If you don’t believe me, please understand that are many labels to rock music. There’s emo rock, there’s corporate rock, there’s classic rock, there’s hard rock, there’s psychedelic rock, and there’s punk rock.

And there are also the many different types of cores. And these cores are, of course, based on hard core punk. There is speed core, there is ska core, there’s emo core, even. And on and on it goes.

And when you look at this massive mosaic of rock music and all its permutations, it’s as confusing as it is elegantly bewildering. It just has so many permutations. And this is why a lot of people are saying that you really cannot tell hard rock apart based on the notes, the arrangement and what you hear.

This is mostly true because there are a lot of hard rock music that sounds very similar to each other, but they’re under different categories.

Different types of people follow these categories depending on the label. This is why a lot of academics are saying that pretty much attitude is the only thing that’s setting hard rock apart.

This is too much of an assumption. This is a little bit presumptuous. I would suggest that it’s the other way around. I would suggest that it’s the scene or the following or the community that sets different strands of hard rock apart.

In other words, you can tell a lot about Led Zeppelin based on the people following Led Zeppelin. They are slightly different from people that follow Black Sabbath or AC/DC. These are then slightly different from people that follow the modern band, Greta Van Fleet.

It’s really all about the attitude of the community. That’s how you set it apart.

Because when you go from one concert to the next and you hang out with different crowds, you can tell based on your interactions with them, as well as based on what you can see them wear, that there is a little bit of a community difference from one strand of hard rock to the next. So it’s partly attitude, but it’s mostly the community that sets hard rock apart.

Hard rock can actually fragment into dozens

If not hundreds, of different acts and different scenes and communities.

This might seem confusing, but this is actually what’s so awesome about it. It’s definitely not monolithic, not like in the 1970’s where recording companies just cranked out basically the same music over and over again under different bands.