i saw an article about how there's no rap music in the billboard charts and it made me wonder when the last time there was rock music in the charts. now, i tuned out of mainstream rock music a long time ago; since 2000, i could count the number of popular rock artists i've been interested in one hand and they would include the white stripes, st vincent, son lux and that's about it. my tastes have entirely separated from the mainstream for decades. i was aware that bands like mcr, paramore and fall out boy were popular and were the last wave of rock music to get any kind of mainstream success, but i wasn't very interested in them. i had long assumed that there was some continuing concept of rock music, and it was probably something like that, or close to it.

somebody did the research and i didn't realize how obscure rock music has really become, in terms of the mainstream charts. see, the flip side of this is that there have been some excellent underground art rock bands over the last 15 years, a lot of them extremely punk rock, and they have large underground followings that make them seem pretty successful. i guess you can sell a lot of records nowadays without breaking the billboard 100. if you spent the period after 2010 listening to the more popular upswell of underground punk, you might not have even noticed that the type of music that avril lavigne makes is no longer remotely popular.

here's the list:

https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1adgk10/every_rock_song_that_peaked_in_the_top_10_of_the/

i would be far more selective in my description of 'rock' than they are and argue that only fall out boy and paramore meet the definition, since 2010, and that the last rock song to hit the billboard charts was by fall out boy in 2015. in that period, though, there have been outstanding underground rock records released.

it doesn't seem dead, if you're into it.

it's certainly no longer mainstream, though; not even remotely. that's ok. i like jazz and classical music, too.