Is Rock Dead?

Stephan Jenkins (singer): Rock is unequivocally, completely dead. It is in a shallow grave and this miasmal stench is rising from the corpse. We are all, as musicians, necropheliacs, and MTV is your local snuff station... Three cheers for the stiff!

I think the question of "is rock dead" is one of these questions that comes along every year, or before a new movement comes along. You know like next Christmas, "Spin" magazine will have another issue of "Is rock dead?" again. And the fact is that rock music, in one form or another, deals with people who are at an age when they are casting off the identities that are given to them and making up ones of their own.

And rock music has a sense of rebellion and energy and sexuality in it that fits with that change in people. As long as people grow up and rebel and make their own lives, there's going to be some sort of rock music, whether we call this electronica or pop or metal or punk, whatever, it's going to be there.

So I'm really just saying that I just think the question is silly.

I don't really define the term rock, I think that's kind of silly. I think we didn't get into playing music in Third Eye Blind to get into a bunch of categorizations, we did it to get in them, we didn't do it to join a clique or a club... we did it to make one of our own. So I don't think that categorizations are important. I think that the swing music of the 30's had a lot of punk rock in it; these are impulses that have been in people and they just get put together in different ways to reflect the times that they're in. Because the music industry is not pumping out gigantic sales numbers, and because bands that could play stadiums before, now are playing small venues, doesn't mean that there is not a vibrant scene. Music is going on in all kinds of places, and I like being part of it even when it's sort of underneath the radar of big like mega concerts.