Unclejeff, I disagree with your analogy about the state of todays radio vs. 50 years ago - it was much more local and diverse then. You can pick a trivial tune off the hit parade, sure, but you're ignoring the rich stew of musics from which rock & roll developed. Also, you're confusing the continued evolution of a pre-established art form with the birthing of something really new - do you actually think that in our current mass-media climate, a new musical art form on the scale of rock & roll could spontaneously arise? I don't believe that's happening any time soon, and that the continued viability of rock as a post-golden-age but still-able-to-regenerate art form is being stifled like never before. Keep this up for long enough, and even the quality of the underground withers over time, as new generations coming up lack the exposure to a stimulating, organic artistic environment (remember, it's a pop art form, and that implies some degree of mass accessability and participation in its growth) that forms within them the raw material necessary for new important artistic movements. Rock is a dissapated and stratified art form whose remaining energy is either yoked to a money machine or toiling in obscurity, and whereas radio once nurtured it, it now does its best to squash the life out of it.
