The Professor of Rock is a great Youtube channel, if you're into old (and frankly, not so old) rock 'n roll music.
Yes, yes, the genre seems to have largely faded from public view, and astonishingly quickly, at that. However, it is not dead. And despite the stupid stereotype that appears to have prevailed, about fans of rock - particularly "old" or classic rock music - being for rednecks, it simply is not true. Bottom line is that it was less than a generation ago when rock music still felt prevalent on most radio waves, across most of the Western world.
However, rock has lost some of it's power and influence in recent decades. That goes without saying. It needs a jolt, perhaps something similar to what Nirvana managed to do in the early nineties, particularly when their track "Smells Like Teen Spirit" suddenly took over the world. Maybe it will happen, but maybe not. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, however, the "old" rock really does appear to be fading away. Some musical acts who once were longstanding kings not just of rock, but of popular music in general - bands like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Kinks, the Grateful Dead, and the Creedence Clearwater Revival, to name just a few - have been gone for decades now. Other longstanding acts, like the Rolling Stones and the Who, are still around, but largely consist of only a couple of original members left.
The times they are a changin'...
Still, we classic rock fans received a couple of blessings this year. It all seemed to happen just in the past month and change, in fact. The Rolling Stones released an album of new material for the first time in over a decade and a half. And the Beatles have released new material also...well, sort of. They released one last song, "Here and Now." Peter Jackson has suggested that there may still be "new" Beatles material still to be released, although that seems unlikely with two of the original four members gone, and the other two in their eighties. Indeed, both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have suggested that this will truly be the final Beatles song ever released. When you consider that this indeed is the last song that all four members of the Beatles worked on knowingly to work on and produce something as it is, and not some hodgepodge of material that may be combined to form some new "Beatles song," or some kind of AI filling in for the void of actual involvement by the members of the Fab Four, than it is difficult not to admit that "Now and Then" is indeed the "final" song ever released by the Beatles.
Yet it came out in 2023, all of these decades after the Beatles themselves broke up. Even more than a quarter of a century since the last time that the Beatles released new material when "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" were released as part of the Anthology albums released in the mid-nineties.
So I, for one, am counting my blessings in this regard. It will be the last year that both the Beatles and the Stones will have released new material. Let's appreciate the moment for what it is.
Below is an informative video that tells the inside story on the making of "Now and Then."
If You DIDN'T TEAR UP the First Time You Heard this SONG..You DON'T Have a Soul! | Professor of Rock
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