So my daughter say’s to me the other night, “Why isn’t there any more rock music?” Well you could have hit me over the head with a 2×4. In the last few day’s we have been inundated with news of the 50th anniversary of the first Elvis hit, an all Elvis channel on satellite radio, and countless stories on the more or less 50 years of rock and roll. But the thought that rock and roll is dead, only we, the generation of it’s birth, never noticed to bury it, is actually quite an eye opener.

Following her honest question: “What ever happened to Rock and Roll?” of course I fired back that rock isn’t dead, there are still great bands out there. The first example that came to mind was Wilco. And in the absolute brilliance that can only come from someone young enough to think truthfully and honestly, I missed the obvious fact that I as an educated and brilliant adult would so obviously overlook, she said: “Ya, but they are really alt-country.”

What if Rock and Roll really is dead? If it really is, it’s been dead since the ’80’s. The first thirty years of Rock and Roll history contains the glorious birth and amazingly brilliant adolescence of rock and roll. But in the last 15 or 20 years, the form has languished like a fat, rotting, bloated dead carcass. Rock music today is more about fashion than form. We celebrate and bask in the glory of the superficial. But you already know that.

If I’m going to be honest with myself, the most interesting music I’ve come across lately would fall into the alt-country orbit. I’m listening to Buddy and Julie Miller right now. “You Make My Heart Beat too Fast” is obviously a rock and roll song. At least it sounds like one. But if I had to label it something, it would definitely be alt-country.

I find it more than a coincidence that Rock and Roll is languishing in the slow pains of death at the same time that radio has become more marginal. God, I got into radio because it was so damn cool. But the cool has been sold from the heart of radio in the same way it has been sold from the heart of rock and roll. And cool can only exist as long as it is cool. Once some advertising genius starts selling cool, as an industry of cool, it no longer is. Manufactured cool isn’t.

Maybe rock and roll isn’t dead. Maybe it’s lying somewhere in cardiac arrest waiting for a swift kick in the ass. But if a 16-year-old thinks it doesn’t exit, it doesn’t. If a teen believes that rock is dead. It is. No matter how much you or I want to romanticize it’s immortality.