ABSTRACT
It should come as no real surprise that competitors and critics insisted from early on that rock was dead; as we’ve seen, manifestos declaring the death of a new art form is a time-honored rhetorical strategy, almost a generational obligation, and rock’s death is neither the first nor the most significant to have been shouted from the rooftops. But rock is perhaps the first popular form to take hold of the premature announcement of its demise and embrace it as a subject for its ongoing production—proving, with a perverse logic, that rock isn’t dead because it continues to sing about its own death, feeding off its own corpse, rising phoenixlike from its own ashes.
