“The only thing”: The genre Slash said carried on rock and roll

Posted On March 26, 2025March 26, 2025

A lot of people have been looking at the state of rock and roll for a long time and wondering where all of the fun went. While every single delusional rock and roll will swear that bands stopped having any quality about them, the fact that no one can decide on when everything to hell is usually more of a sign of someone becoming a musical old fart than actually bothering to listen to any new music. Although Slash has been maintaining his status as one of the most recognisable guitar heroes of all time, he knows that there’s still hope for the genre in the modern age.

Granted, that has to come from people who aren’t listening to the standard Top 40 radio format. It’s clear that rock and roll isn’t as popular as it used to be, but no matter what Gene Simmons likes to say about the state of the genre, just because it’s not popular doesn’t mean it’s dead. There are many great heavy acts out there, but the only problem is that the radio has no interest in selling them.

Sometime around the 2000s, rock started to become more and more obsolete on the charts, and that meant radio stations playing the bare minimum of what qualified as rock. That’s why the bands that have come and gone for the past few years have all been people watering down rock and roll, either pleasing the older folks in the audience by playing cheap blues licks or making the kind of lyrics that make every singer sound like they have a fist for a brain like Five Finger Death Punch.

If you look a little closer, the world of metal has never been concerned with the charts. Black Sabbath were the most reluctant pop stars in the world when their album was storming the charts, and there’s a good chance that any member of Slipknot could have given a rat’s ass about whether Billboard had any interest in promoting them the same way they had done for NSYNC.

Over the past decade, though, metal has been revitalised in many ways. While they have embraced the dreaded keyboards that would make purists vomit on first listening, Bring Me the Horizon and Poppy have kept the genre alive. That also includes acts like Ghost bringing a more theatrical aspect to the genre as if they were Kiss if they actually bothered to take themselves seriously.

Slash was definitely raised in a different world from most of the modern metal acts, but he could still recognise the rebellious nature of rock and roll, saying, “We’re in this place where everybody’s in a panic because the music business has turned completely upside down, they’re like, ‘Well we’re cool! We’ve been doing it our own way all along.’ To this day, the only thing in Rock n’ Roll that’s survived the test of the millennium has been metal.”

And that’s ignoring the acts that don’t get on the charts as much. Even though bands like Periphery are making the kind of riffs that no one thought a human being was capable of, hearing them alongside the genre heavyweights was going to do a lot more for the genre than listening to whatever the latest sorry excuse for a rock song that Imagine Dragons had up their sleeve.

Since a lot of the novelty acts from years ago like Babymetal are also now turning in some fantastic metal music, it’s about time that most people take a look at what Slash was getting at. Music might not be “as good as it used to be” by some fans’ definitions of good, but it’s evolved into something much more exciting, and it’s up to you whether you want to get back on the hype train or stay in a nostalgia bubble.

Related Topics