The number one song in America is a rock tune. This isn’t as
atavistic as a silent movie winning Best Picture at the Academy
Awards. But in Chartland, where pop princesses and rap royalty
reign, rock just hasn’t been part of the ruling class for some
time. For the past five weeks at least, rock has ruled again.
“We Are
Young” by the band fun. — as in lower-case “fun” period — is
the first rock ‘n’ roll song to top the Billboard Hot 100 since the
summer of 2008, when Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” became the 999th
number-one song of the rock ‘n’ roll era. Those are the only two
rock songs of the last decade to claim the top spot. To put this in
perspective, Adele, LMFAO, Rihanna, and Katy Perry have
each spent considerably more time atop the singles chart
over the last year than have all rock acts combined over the last
decade.
Many purists might point out that the situation is even worse
than the recent chart drought indicates. Neither “We Are Young” nor
“Viva la Vida” is rock ‘n’ roll in any Chuck Berry sense. Who stole
their guitars? The musical taxonomy perhaps owes more to what they
are not (teeny-bop pop, rap, country, R&B) than to what they
are, which is harder to pin down.
To be sure, a top-charting single has never really been the
measuring stick of the guitar-bass-drums set. Neither Led Zeppelin
nor The Who scored a number one hit in the U.S. But acts as diverse
as The Edgar Winter Group, Fine Young Cannibals, Guns N’ Roses,
EMF, The Box Tops, Simple Minds, and Don McLean all found number
one without really looking for it.
Number one used to look for rock. Now it couldn’t find it with a
search party.
But fun. somehow stumbled upon numero uno. The bestselling song
of 2012 is upbeat and uplifting. Singer Nate Ruess does Lindsey
Buckingham impersonating Freddie Mercury. The main instrument here
is his theatrical voice. “We Are Young” is a soaring, sing-songy
mantra: “Tonight, we are young/so let’s set the world on fire/we
can burn brighter/than the sun.” If you didn’t initially catch this
infectious ode to youth, it comes around again five times in a
multi-tracked vocal accompanied by a monotonous beat and a
reiteration of a single piano chord. Instead of boring, repetition
becomes a habit.
The most recent rock ‘n’ roll single to claim the highest spot
on the charts has much in common with rock ‘n’ roll’s first
number-one hit. Whereas Bill Haley pledges to “rock ‘til the broad
daylight,” fun. boasts of drinking to last call. Both understand
their mission as supplying the soundtrack for the springtime of
life. When Bill Haley and the Comets conquered the charts with
“Rock Around the Clock” for eight weeks in the summer of 1955, they
did so after a slow climb that began the previous year as a b-side.
Similarly, fun. released “We Are Young” in September of 2011 only
to reach number one in March 2012. Radio, the catalyst for most
hits, proved a latecomer for both tunes. The television program
Glee and a one-minute Chevrolet Super Bowl commercial
catapulted “We Are Young” into public consciousness. The movie
Blackboard Jungle did the trick for “Rock Around the
Clock.”
Something went wrong for rock somewhere between “Rock Around the
Clock” and “We Are Young.” Rock stars morphed from supernovas to
red dwarfs. The genre became lyrically opaque, sonically dour, and
stylistically inconspicuous. In a single generation, rock evolved
from Elvis in sequins to Cobain in flannel, from Roger Daltrey
swinging a microphone to Eddie Vedder staring at his shoes, from
McCartney singing silly love songs to Morrissey sobbing that last
night he dreamt that somebody loved him. The phrase “alternative
rock” became a redundancy, as it pushed rock itself outside of the
mainstream. The more seriously they took themselves the less
seriously the public took them.
The success of “We Are Young,” coming within a genre that
perversely now views success as a failure, may prove rock music’s
last gasp as popular music. The rock acts looking down at number
one from below play dark, depressing, uninspiring, inaccessible
music that you can drink but not dance to. That’s just not fun.
