Is rock & roll dead? It's a familiar refrain—and a myth dating back five decades, according to English professor Kevin Dettmar.

"It seems as if there is this continual cycle of death and rebirth. And what gets interpreted as the death throes of rock can be seen from another perspective or with hindsight as rock just changing into something else," says Dettmar, author of the recently published book Is Rock Dead? (Routledge).

The book isn't primarily about the music itself, Dettmar explains, but "about the way we talk about and write about rock & roll and why we seem to feel this need to keep declaring it dead."

Dettmar's interest in this phenomenon was sparked after reading what he labels a "snotty, smug review" of the Radiohead album "Kid A" by British novelist Nick Hornby in the New Yorker several years ago. That review, in which Dettmar says Hornby declared no important new rock & roll would be made and the "rock era was over," triggered his memories of other writers who had previously offered that view.

Dettmar's research, covering 50 years of popular media and scholarly writings, explores the different ways and reasons that each generation declares that rock & roll is on life support—or dead. The book also examines how rock musicians in varying ways "dance on their own graves" with songs that declare rock & roll is dead.

Dettmar says rock & roll is most often attacked during moments of national crisis. But rock is durable, having survived such cultural anxieties as fears of communism and greater teen independence in the 1950s, the anti-war movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and perennial worries over decadent values, which led to the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985 and the labeling of albums with explicit lyrics. (Those concerns persist today, most notably with rap.)

"If you look carefully at those moments, you'll find that we are not dealing with the real issues," Dettmar says. "We are displacing a lot of nervousness, insecurity, or anxiety onto rock & roll. It becomes a scapegoat for bigger issues and bigger problems."

One of the first declarations of rock & roll's death came in September 1956 with the release of "The Death of Rock and Roll," by Maddox Brothers and Rose, a white rockabilly group that performed at Louisiana Hayride shows with Elvis Presley. (The song is a version of the Ray Charles song "I Got a Woman.") One article of the day predicted that Presley would be the death of rock & roll because he had no talent and couldn't sing.

When writing about rock & roll performances, journalists of the time also focused on the music's "hysteria" effect on its audiences. The descriptions make it "pretty striking how angry or fearful people really were," Dettmar says.

Fast forward to today's debate about whether rap and hip-hop fit into the rock & roll genre. Dettmar believes that people need to stop making "narrow, fussy distinctions," about what rock is—and isn't.

"To me, that kind of ignores how much the two musics have in common," he says. "There is no hip-hop without rock. They are more similar than they are different."

Dettmar views many rock music critics of the baby boomer generation—those his age or a little older—as "territorial and defensive" concerning the music they grew up with. They bemoan the supposed death of rock, but Dettmar argues that they'd rather see rock embalmed in the past than embrace its continuing evolution.

"It's a sort of mid-life crisis—an inability to deal with their own ceasing to be at the cultural center of what is going on," he says.

The issue isn't that rock music is dying but that it keeps reinventing itself, he maintains.

"Every time a kid discovers a record and it picks him up and makes his day, every time a person gets excited about a new record or an old record gets rediscovered, rock gets reborn. It's not a static thing."

—by Pete Rosenbery, Media & Communication Resources