Some very encouraging news crossed my desk last week. It appears that the Hip-Hop scare of the late 20^th and early 21^st century may be on the wane. Record company executives are reportedly alarmed that, for the first time ever, sales of Rap and Hip-Hop CDs declined dramatically at the end of last year and the trend continued into this year. It’s too early to tell, but industry analysis indicates that two factors may be at play in the stunning trend. One, the most obvious, is that when artists continue to kill each other, the stable of marketable product is likely to decline. Secondly, Rap music, which in case you didn’t know, is primarily formed by shouting song lyrics with the same tone a parent uses when he discovers his four-year-old has used his $120 Mont Blanc pen to stir mud pies, has been linked by scientists to poetry. That’s right. Young people are learning in increasing numbers that songs that contain words but no actual singing are in fact, poetry – the same junk Mrs. Jenkins makes them read in English class. If this trend is something substantial and not a mere bump in the marketplace road, I’d like to suggest that we replace the departing rap with another form of popular music – Rock.

      Oh, but we have rock music, I hear you saying. I would beg to differ. If you take away what is classified as Classic Rock on the radio (Lynyrd Skynrd, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith with one other random artist inserted each hour) and then remove new rock and roll songs performed by 60-year-old guys who used to perform rock, you are left with two distinct categories. I will call the first genre of today’s radio rock music, Soy Latte Rock. I won’t mention any specific bands, so as not to have my email box clogged with death threats, but you get the idea. These records are made by people who wouldn’t know a power chord if one jumped into bed with them. They have taken rock music and stripped it of its muscle, adding numerous notes, instruments, and worst of all, chords, which render songs unbearable to those of us who really can only handle three chords at a time. To make matters worse, these artists don’t sing about cars or the process of losing/getting a girl. Instead they sing about colors and other concepts. We let Led Zeppelin and Rush get away with that, but only because they used power chords, not harpsichords.

     The other kind of new rock is classified by some as speed metal or death metal. This is because you have to be on speed to tolerate it and it makes most listeners yearn for death. I’ve tried to listen to it on many occasions. I even like that song that goes, “yeershh kleep mufft mufft yaaaaang kill,” you know the one. However, it doesn’t take long to get your fill of a musical form in which every song sounds like my uncle did when he passed that kidney stone last year.

     At this point, you may have correctly identified me as a “dinosaur.” I’m willing to accept that moniker, but I have tried to keep up. You have to admit, however that there is a shortage of really good rock music. Take any other genre, bluegrass, Celtic, country, soul, R&B, folk, and even jazz, and you’ll find stuff that people in their teens and people in their 40s like. The arena rock many of us grew up on, however, is in short supply. By now, some of you are wondering, “Am I a dinosaur too?” Here are some ways to know for sure.

1. Have you ever gone off the road because playing an air guitar solo simply could not be accomplished without taking both hands off the wheel? You are probably a dinosaur.
2. Do you ever sit awake at night and wonder when it became unacceptable to use a Moog synthesizer in a song? One year everybody used them, and the next year, they were gone. I blame Emerson, Lake and Palmer. They did go a little overboard.
3. If you stop with your family on a vacation for directions, and someone says to “head east,” do you immediately start singing, “Save my life I’m going down for the last time?” I’m here to pull you out of the tar pit.
4. Did you quit smoking 20 years ago, but still have your last lighter because you used it to show your approval during a Bad Company show? Your fossils just turned up in the Mojave Desert.
5. Did you spend a day last week in an unexplainable funk because that guy from Boston died? That was a Jurassic bummer.

     Maybe, just maybe, it’s all coming back around. If not, I’ve discovered that iPods play Dire Straits just as well as Coldplay.