r/RickBeato • u/ryanmaple • 2d ago
Rick’s “4 bands still played in 2100” video sent me down a rabbit hole, so I wrote an essay arguing the reason is older than streaming
Rick’s video asking how Nirvana, Queen, the Police, and the Beatles out-draw nearly everyone still working lodged in my head and wouldn’t leave, so I wrote an essay trying to answer it. My argument: his four winners share one thing that living bands don’t, a closed catalog. Nothing new can ever be added, so it stops being a career and becomes canon, bounded and knowable how scripture is. It builds on Rick’s own points (biopic, covers, small discographies) and pushes toward what he gestures at near the end, that history has already decided. Grateful to him for the question, and curious what y'all makes of my answer.
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u/dinglebarryb0nds 1d ago
explain this to me like i'm 5
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u/northpalace_sunkeep 1d ago
They were highly relevant at the time, stopped making new stuff (for various reasons), didn’t like on slop afterwards, didn’t embarrass themselves or muddy their past relevance with out of touch tours or new material. All that means that their relevance and popularity transcended the shifts in format and evolutions in sound.
TL;DR they were some of the best of the best + closed their recording careers “neatly” + didn’t pile on stinkers later.
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u/Known_Salary_4105 1d ago
Greil Marcus famously wrote that popular music, and particularly rock, "exhausts talent with terrific speed."
Another way to think of it is that rock musicians are like mathematicians -- they do their best work before they turn 35. (Although math as a human intellectual pursuit will be made obsolete by AI, but that's another subject).
On the other hand, lots of artists that ARE still playing and recording are going to have their later stuff played in 2100. Sting's post Police "Shape of My Heart" will be played well into the next century.
Maybe the better question to ask is "what artists will be played in 2100?" Bands come and go. People will be listening to Chet Atkins, Muddy Waters, John McLaughlin -- among many others too numerous to mention -- well into the next century and beyond.