By Spencer Davis. In the closing days of the Cold War, political theorist Francis Fukuyama argued that humanity had reached “the end of history”—not literally, of course, but as a shorthand to explain his notion that, after centuries of evolution, our systems of government had reached their final and logical endpoint in the global triumph of liberal democracy. No other system of government could ever better meet mankind’s inherent social and psychological needs, he maintained, and so we were now at the end of the road. Of course there would always be work to be done in terms of maintaining good governance, passing laws to address new problems, and so on—but the changes would be small rather than big. There would be no more seismic reinventions of government in our future, no viable contender to replace democracy wholesale (as communism and fascism had once tried to promise). History, understood as the story of man’s political progress, had already written its final chapter.

Setting aside the question of how rosy that projection now looks in the age of Trump, you might ask what the hell any of this has to do with this website? Well, I’d like to posit a theory of my own: that in the last decade, we have quietly reached the end of music. Continue reading →

By Spencer. By now, you’ve likely seen the quote making its way around the internet from the interview Kiss frontman Gene Simmons gave to Esquire Magazine: “Rock is finally dead.” If you read the interview in its entirety, you see that he’s not really eulogizing rock music as a genre; he’s speaking about all music, insofar as the record industry has passed into irrelevancy as a means of financing and distributing it, and he’s critiquing the role that internet file sharing has played in making songwriting and recording a virtually profitless enterprise for the aspiring musician. Simmons isn’t wrong about any of that, and he’s not exactly treading new ground in pointing out what a thousand writers for Slate and Salon have been saying for a decade and a half now. I’m not here to add to that tired storyline.

I was much more intrigued by the question I thought Simmons was addressing: is rock music, as we’ve always understood that term, dead? Continue reading →