As rock ‘n’ roll has become increasingly irrelevant to the modern pop music conversation, its most faithful fans, those who still believe it’s infused with the same revolutionary transformative energy it had at its birth, have started to fall into one of three categories: snobs who would have spent the 60s listening to jazz and complaining about how vapid the music on the radio was, those who grew up on rock and aren’t about to ditch it for rap or dance music, and the very young. Out of all of them, the latter type of listeners have done the most work to rejuvenate the genre’s outlaw image—when all of your peers are listening to electronically generated music, listening to something with loud electric guitars front and center is a more rebellious act than it’s been in decades.
The twist is that this throwback to rock ‘n’ roll’s glory days is being marketing primarily to teen and tween girls, demographics that rock has never had much respect for, despite the number of albums they’ve bought over the years. They combine twinkish good looks and a Monkees-ish happy-go-lucky group attitude with a mall-bought bad-boy look of artfully tousled hair, ripped jeans, and Vans, and overall give off the same blend of wholesomeness with just a slight hint of alluded-to sexuality that several generations of boy bands have used to dominate the world, or at least certain parts of it, over and over again.
