Rock (and U.S. Oil Production) Is Dead

• Posted by: Patrick James
• on November 11, 2009 at 12:29 pm

Overthinking It has a thought-provoking chart (view at full size here) that pits the declining quality of rock music against the declining amount of oil production in the lower 48 states. The remarkable similarity between the arcs of U.S. oil production and songs in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” by year is staggering. Some of their analysis:

Notice that after the birth of rock & roll in the 1950’s, the production of “great songs” peaked in the 60’s, remained strong in the 70’s, but drastically fell in the subsequent decades. It would seem that, like oil, the supply of great musical ideas is finite. By the end of the 70’s, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Motown greats, and other genre innovators quickly extracted the best their respective genres** had to offer, leaving little supply for future musicians.

Mere correlation? Dastardly causality? What would this look like if it used best-of data from a magazine that hadn’t ignored the majority of hip hop, electronic music, and the American underground for the last three decades?

Via Gawker.