The Sunday Read: ‘Is Måneskin the Last Rock Band?’
Oct 15, 2023
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Måneskin, the biggest Italian rock band of all time, discuss their rise to fame, the impact of streaming on rock music, and their mission to sell new guitar-driven songs to a young audience. The podcast explores the band's unique style, their triumphant return to Rome, and the history and evolution of rock music.
Måneskin represents a shift in the music industry, blurring the lines between rock and pop and challenging the notion of mainstream rock.
The rise of digital distribution and changing listener preferences has led to rock being seen as a genre to write songs in, rather than a way of life.
Deep dives
Monoskine: A Rock Band with Pop Sensibilities
Monoskine is an Italian rock band that has gained enormous popularity, particularly in continental Europe. Despite receiving criticism from music critics, the band has amassed billions of streams and a dedicated fan base. They represent a shift in the music industry, where rock music takes the form of pop, rather than being mainstream rock. The band's theatrical performances emphasize the return of big stadium rock shows, offering a zero-irony and unapologetic presentation. Monoskine's success challenges the notion of mainstream rock and highlights the changing landscape of the music industry.
Rock as Pop: The Evolution of the Genre
The podcast explores the history and evolution of rock music as a genre. From its origins in the 1950s to its dominance in the pop music scene until 2011, rock has undergone various shifts and transformations. The rise of punk, glam metal, and alternative rock contributed to rock's cultural impact and resistance to commercialization. However, with the advent of digital distribution and changing listener preferences, rock's influence has declined, leading to the genre being seen as a way of writing songs rather than a way of life.
Monoskine: Straddling Pop and Rock
Monoskine, as a band, operates within the logic of pop music while playing rock music. Their songs possess rock conventions but are produced under pop circumstances with contributions from industry veterans. The band's geographical and generational influences leave them less aware of certain eras of rock history, fostering a unique perspective on the genre. Monoskine's success challenges the traditional rock critic consensus and blurs the lines between rock and pop, highlighting the enduring power of rock as a cultural expression.
The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On a Thursday morning in July, the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.
The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way the writer Dan Brook’s generation experienced jazz.
The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting in September, Måneskin brought this business to the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — on a multivenue tour, with their first stop at Madison Square Garden.
This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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