“First you take a deep breath then we’re gonna go there… It’s like the opposite of meditation,” Dominic Fike huffs into the microphone during a pause in his final performance of the night in Atlanta, Georgia earlier this September. He vocalizes, and from hushed decibels, he builds and builds until he’s screaming alongside “dirty” or overdriven/distorted guitar tones. The event’s streaming camera cuts are frenetic, flashing from views of Fike, the band, the fog, the stage and above the crowd where clusters of “Rock On” hand signs hang in the air.
For those reliving the concert or watching for the first time, this experience is as quality as it can get– the live-stream production offers the best camera angles for the given moment, rivaling the front barricade standing room..
The live music industry today is inseparable and indistinguishable from the spaces of digital culture. These include streamed events, listening parties and both label and fan-made merchandise marketplaces–all of which provide access to a degree of global audience engagement unheard of before social media. Fans and artists dwell and are created here.
Gen-Z’s self-aware chatter through social platforms and prevalent social injustice dialogues finds itself funneled through rock’s characteristic decibel levels and lyrical grime. In other words, Gen-Z artists and fans alike have things to scream about.
Previously, a pop-centered artist, Gen-Zer Dominic Fike proved his worth in salt as a modern rockstar when landing his Coachella 2023 performances with a “gritty and emotive voice while thrashing on his guitar,” per Rolling Stone.
Fellow Gen-Zer Willow Smith also took the Coachella 2023 Mojave stage by electrifying storm, as she performed tracks from her album “<COPINGMECHANISM>,” a title callback to online discourse’s regular use of therapy terminology. Her set design donned clusters of digital nostalgia like clunky landline phones, blank monitors with rounded frames of silverstone shades and a disembodied guitar neck tilted parallel with her own Flying V in hand.
The modern grasp of the ever-evolving rock genre can be found in recent critical acclaim of this year’s live performances and most anticipated releases. Earlier this month, with her latest album release “GUTS,” Olivia Rodrigo is powered by a classic through-the-telephone voice distortion and distressed guitar fuzz while riding out the strife of social media sensitivities and situationship nuances—a lyrical combination that is new, yet true to the rock melodic history.
Her vocal scrapbook of breakup memories on the track “get him back!” can lead her listeners to discover a roster of rock song subjects like in Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked,” or The Who’s “Pinball Wizard.” The motif here is a series of storytelling pre-chorus verses sung like a string of gossipy diary entries written in cursive without the pen ever lifting from the paper. Sonically, the scene is set with lurking guitar pulses that fabricate the feeling of an inevitable pop-rock chorus pounce.
The fans that make up rock music modernity by adjacency, experimentation or curiosity make clear that the celebrations of releases and performances alike often have no online-only equal. Particularly in the LA scene, hunting particular paraphernalia is a rewarding and worthwhile hobby to round out a listener’s dedication to rock artistry.
An attendee of the Smorgasburg Record Fair posed and gleamed with a vinyl he’s pursued for ten years, a rock Latin album titled “It’s Time For” by Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers. A nearby recent university student remarked that she will never buy a vinyl online again after she received one damaged in the mail. So she and like-minded others are led here, on cracked backlot concrete, where thick plastic rustled with a flap as visitors flipped through the shrink-wrapped vinyl records at Smorgasburg’s every third Sunday market located at the Row in Downtown L.A.
Smorgasburg is promoted to welcome all ages, but here at Rock & Sock, attendees from Gen-Z and older were seen to mesh between the four-pack knee highs and “Greatest Hits” double LPs. The booth’s owner boasts that his wife handles the socks and he does the rock. He shares that the age range and thus listening-habit diversity of his customers is rich, stating that there is now a common understanding of the complete history of music because everything vintage and modern-day is openly accessible. He also elaborated a caveat that, for the first time in history, artists are directly competing with each other regardless of the decade they belong to.
Artists too, have reached out through the decades to find music’s tangible vinyl counterparts that had never made it to any streaming platform. This is the motivation for Discotchari, an LA local band and host of one of the Smorgaburg vinyl record booths. Interestingly, they assert that today, the playlist title takes the place of genre as a classifier. In the bins of their table’s frontmost corner–arguably the most valuable real estate of a vinyl record collection display–is a crate labeled “Essentials & Exceptionals.” If one were to flip through and skim the top margins of this collection, they would come across the album graphics of both household names and someone new.
Of similar idiosyncratic nature for on-the-fly, yet hand-picked music discovery, is Spotify’s Rap ‘n’ Roll playlist, hosting blends of grunge and ballad vocals complemented with sharp rap features and vice versa—all standing as bold independent tracks collected in this digital niche. However, to put aside the shuffle button that skips according to a calculated crossfade, try a record fair like Smorgsburg’s to browse through neatly filed, hand-curated bins of LPs and EPs from familiar favorites and the yet-to-be-discovered
Today’s live music scene helps determine how the rock genre moves and breathes today. In an age where music from any decade is accessible, discovery is spontaneous and celebrations are year-round.