That Rock and Roll Just Won’t Go Away— But Has The Male Rockstar?

I can remember where I was when I watched Arctic Monkeys receive their Brit award for best album of the year: I was 16 and upset that One Direction lost to this band from Sheffield. Until I saw said band members stride across the stage, Alex Turner being the visual embodiment of a cool, confident rockstar. I watched as he exclaimed that even though sometimes Rock and Roll seems to be fading away, it will never die.

I wasn’t a rock fan, but I wanted to believe him so much. I watched the clip of his speech every time it was shared (which was a lot), and I became invested in rock music. I believed if he managed to convert a lot of people like me from this acceptance speech alone, rock and roll would never die.  

And Turner was right; rock and roll will never die, but it seems like the male rockstar did.  

It has been ingrained in us that when we think of Rock and Roll, we instantly think of a man. Freedom and rebellion against society’s traditions, expectations, and norms are considered “masculine” terms. Men are the musicians; women are the demure groupies.  

The genre consists mainly of bands with a frontman, whose role is to be loud, rebellious, aggressive, and to piss people off; rock music has managed to stereotype musicians and be exclusionary towards women.  

When you think of a cliché male rockstar, you probably imagine gelled hair, a leather jacket, a hypersexual cynic with an attitude. In Mary Ann Clawson’s article “Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescence Rock Band”, she says: “Playing rock music is by definition an act of aural-spatial domination, the production of sound so loud there is literally no room for anything else to be heard”. The genre must have powerful rhythms and electrifying guitar riffs to motivate the listeners and keep their adrenaline high while also being authentic to their self-expression. For men, rock music was a way to assert their manhood, to act like heroes, because the wars were over, and these young men needed a purpose. 

Historically, women have been excluded from this experience. Until the Me Too movement started. Rock music has been at the centre of every socio-political change because it’s all about standing up to the man and having something to say—a cause to fight for. And in the last 9 years, there has been no shortage of female causes needing to be addressed from a female point of view.  

It just happens to be that the last big male hurrah in rock music was the release of Arctic Monkeys’ ‘AM’ right before Me Too (not to mention Turner donning the cliché rockstar look to accompany it). After the huge success of the album, rock music became interesting again, and everyone was waiting for Arctic Monkeys’ new album. When ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ dropped, it was met with a lukewarm reception. It wasn’t what was expected after those heavy drums and gritty guitars.

Personally, I liked it. It’s a work of art, but is it rock? Partially, yes. It surely offered a commentary on life post-social media, and the message grew more prominent during the lockdown, Turner seemed to be reinventing a new rockstar image that defied the old aesthetic.  

The year after, The Strokes won their first-ever Grammy for ‘The New Abnormal’: a masterpiece of an album that did nothing for the rock scene despite the grand artistry behind it. It’s ironically the new abnormal. Green Day and Blink-182 are still stuck in the late 90s-early 2000s. The Killers seem to be a little lost. And Arctic Monkeys can’t really be considered rock anymore after their latest release ‘The Car’. Pop rock is surviving because of its commercialism, but the frontman ideal is dead. They’ve either aged out, are exploring other creative endeavors, or they just have nothing more to say.  

Since the beginning of the 2020s, if you ask any person between the ages of 15 and 35 about the state of rock music today, they will probably think of Olivia Rodrigo. Screaming and jumping on stage, shaking her hair, yelling on soundtracks, and going unhinged in music videos, she is now the embodiment of 2024’s rock music, despite her mainstream success. 

She is definitely not the first female rockstar. They were always there: Linda Ronstadt, Patti Smith, Tina Turner, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Gwen Stefani, St. Vincent, and Avril Lavigne, all of which seem to be inspirations for Rodrigo. While these women were mighty successful and legendary in their own right, at the height of their stardom, the rock scene was still populated by male musicians who didn’t give them enough room to redefine the genre. 

Women loved ‘Sour’ and the adequately titled ‘Guts’ because we felt vindicated. Our female rage, festering inside us after years of battling sexism, being sexualized, assaulted, heartbroken, and undermined, was begging to be let out. We wanted to dance to the sound of ‘good 4 u’ and ‘all-american bitch’.  As if that wasn’t enough, Rodrigo started her tour and in a quite controversial move, used her tour to raise awareness about reproductive rights and support abortion funds. I honestly can’t think of anything more rockstar. 

But is Rodrigo embodying a new and pure female rockstar persona, or is she a female rockstar modeled according to the male rockstar attributes?  

To assert her autonomy, Annie Lennox opted to show her masculine side by dressing like a man in an attempt to be judged for her music and not her body. You don’t get that with Rodrigo. She is embracing her femininity and not submitting to the sexism of society despite its lurking.  

Rodrigo is also backed by the fact that she is a mainstream pop act under a big label, unlike the indie rock bands creating trailblazing rock sounds but lacking the marketing machine to support it. She gets to infuse her songs with punk rock influences and is spearheading the revival of the genre while bringing it back to the mainstream since she is one of the most listened-to artists at the moment.  

She has been accused of being unoriginal because of her use of samples from other songs— critics say it comes off as a lack of creativity. However, I’d like to think of it as a musical collage: how you can combine different samples, instruments, and vocals to create a new sound. It’s no easy feat. It’s also creative in its own right.

And it seems to be the one thing defining this generation: recycling.  

We recycle old sounds. We recycle old aesthetics. We are into vinyls. We keep putting old songs back in the charts. It’s reviving. It’s sustainability. When it comes to art, nothing dies.

The male rockstar is not completely gone; he is just lying dormant, while female rockstars are the ones redefining the music industry one strong beat at a time.