Alice Cooper doesn’t agree with Gene Simmons saying ‘rock is dead.’
“I just can’t get away from the sort of the classic rock from the ’70s only because it just still works,” the singer told Riff X’s Metal XS while discussing how his music has changed over the last 55 years. “It’s a sort of a classic configuration of music where we’re all sort of based in early Beatles, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, and then you take it off in your own direction.”
He continued, “Almost every good hard rock band goes all the way back to Chuck Berry, ’cause that was the basis of that 4/4 beat, with the backbeat. And then you find your way to make it Alice Cooper, the way that Guns N’ Roses found a way to make it Guns N’ Roses, and Aerosmith found a way to make it [their own]. It’s all in how you perform it and really your personality coming out in it.”
“Somebody once said, talking about music is like dancing about architecture. It’s almost impossible to talk about it. You have to hear it and then either you like it or you don’t like it. But it’s basic hard rock, and it’s the one music that has gone for 50 years without losing its edge,” Cooper said of hard rock.
The rocker added, “Grunge, punk, hip-hop, disco, they’ve all had their moments, but hard rock has been the middle. It’s always been there, and it always will be. Led Zeppelin will always be Led Zeppelin. And you play Led Zeppelin for a 16-year-old kid and they go, ‘Oh, yeah.’ There’s something about that kind of music that will not die.”
Still, Simmons thinks differently than Cooper. The bassist made his famous comments in a 2014 interview with Esquire. He said, “Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant when you toured they would give you tour support.”
“There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters — the creators — for rock music, for the soul, for the blues — it’s finally dead. The point is, yeah, rock is dead,” Gene shared.
In April, the musician added to his ‘rock is dead’ theory in a Rockast interview. He mentioned the lack of musicians like The Beatles in today’s music. He believes that because of downloading and file sharing, artists don’t get paid. It makes it hard for new talent to succeed and become big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uinkUtc2-mk
