Maybe, this time, rock really is dead. In 2016, the pop charts were ruled by Justin Bieber, Drake, and Rihanna. The year’s most critically acclaimed albums were mostly made by pop stars, rappers, and people whose work loosely falls under the category of R&B. Rock’s entries in the best-of-2016 lists came from legacy acts like Nick Cave and Radiohead; very good younger bands that sound like very good bands from back in the day, such as Car Seat Headrest and Parquet Courts; or people who literally died, like David Bowie and Leonard Cohen, who both made albums about dying.



This is a very good thing, culturally speaking. The national music scene has never been this diverse. Too often, especially in rock’s heyday, it was dominated by acts that made their bones from taking nonwhite music and sanitizing it for white audiences. That tradition undoubtedly lives on, in musicians like Justin Bieber, but the pop charts and critics’ notebooks accurately reflect the American mosaic in a way that they really haven’t before. We may be in the midst of a gigantic leap backward as a country, but at least the music is good. Even the country charts are pretty woke.



In 1972, The Who’s frontman Roger Daltrey sang, “Rock is dead, long live rock.” But in 2016, he told the London Times, “Rock has reached a dead end. … The only people saying things that matter are the rappers and most pop is meaningless and forgettable.” Rock music this year was defined by death, resentment, and baby boomers making one last grasp at relevance, which was most evident in a slew of memoirs by aging rock stars.

Death wrapped its icy claws around 2016 at the start of the year and didn’t let go. Bowie released his final album, Blackstar, on January 8 and died after a long, secret battle with cancer two days later. Blackstar—his most haunting work since the late 1970s and also his finest—felt like a kind of obituary. (It was also accompanied by two genuinely scary music videos.) Only Bowie could echo both Keats and Kendrick Lamar as he morbidly sang about his decaying body and impending demise.



With Bowie, the clues were all there. But with Prince, you didn’t really see it coming. Yes, there were rumors of drug use and an emergency plane landing, but his death on April 21 was a punch in the gut. The greatest songwriter, performer, and musician of his generation, Prince’s music was as idiosyncratic and transgressive as pop music gets. No one wrote about fucking better than Prince, before or since. To label Prince “classic rock” feels sinful: Prince made Prince music, and “Darling Nikki” isn’t exactly blowing up classic rock radio like “Hotel California.” Prince fused multiple genres—funk, soul, R&B, and, yes, rock—without neatly falling into one category. But Prince also marked something of an evolutionary end for rock music: After him, rock stars looked backward more than they did forward, and they certainly looked more to rock’s own past than they did to other genres.

