I think
Mdou Moctar's new album is great. It rocks. It's not dead.
Regarding the rock music purported to have died,
Thomas Frank said it best back in 1993...
The gushing of official voices like Time make necessary a clarification that would ordinarily go without saying: among the indie-rock circles which they mimic and from which they pretend to draw their credibility, bands like Pearl Jam are universally recognized to suck. Almost without exception, the groups and music that are celebrated as “alternative” are watery, derivative, and strictly second-rate; so uniformly bad, in fact, that one begins to believe that stupid shallowness is a precondition of their marketability. Most of them, like Pearl Jam, play pre-digested and predictable versions of formulaic heavy guitar rock, complete with moronic solos and hoarse masculine pourings. There is certainly nothing even remotely “alternative” about this sound, since music like this has long been the favorite of teenage boys everywhere; it’s just the usual synthetic product, repackaged in a wardrobe of brand new imagery made up of thousands of fawning articles and videos depicting them as “rebels” this or “twenty-something” that. A band called the Stone Temple Pilots, who grace the cover of other national magazines, have distinguished themselves as the movement’s bargain boys, offering renditions of all the various “alternative” poses currently fashionable: all in one package the consumer gets sullen angst, sexual menace, and angry pseudo-protest with imitation punk thrown in for no extra charge.