Everything’s That’s New Is Old Again: Gen Xers & Millennials Redefine Classic Rock

For the cynical, classic rock is little more than a radio format, a marketing ploy.

WMJI, an album-oriented rock station in Cleveland, expanded its playlist in 1980 to include songs from the late 1960s and 1970s to run alongside contemporary tunes, calling itself “Cleveland’s Classic Rock.” Seeing success, similarly formatted stations elsewhere copied the idea and, within the decade, nearly every market in the country had a classic rock station.

It was a smart move — the demographically dominant Baby Boomers were now economically dominant and whereas oldies stations made them wistful for the nostalgia of their childhood, classic rock stations reminded them of the hedonism of the halcyon days of high school and college. Oldies were “The Wonder Years” and “American Graffiti;” classic rock was “Dazed and Confused.”

It would take volumes to define the traditional classic rock canon and music theorists would bristle at the notion that The Cars and the Allman Brothers Band would be genre mates, but nevertheless Ric Ocasek and Dickey Betts rubbed shoulders on classic rock stations for decades without much complaint from the listening public.

The precise bounds of classic rock are paradoxically impossible to define and universally accepted. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (who in 1964 said about obscenity that “I know it when I see it”), you know classic rock when you hear it. And for most of its life, that canon was essentially fixed.

That was by design, as Roy Shuker, an associate professor at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, wrote: the songs were “tried and true” and the format relied on “high listener recognition and identification.” Australian professor Catherine Strong from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology attempted to draw a firmer line, saying that classic rock is generally in four-four time (don’t tell Jethro Tull), performed by bands dominated by white American or British men (don’t tell Heart or Hendrix), rarely goes longer than four minutes (don’t tell Iron Butterfly) and features the standard guitar-bass-drums set-up (don’t tell Kansas). 

And its beginning is regarded as 1964.

Which means in alt-rock’s watershed year of 1994, the earliest classic rock songs turned 30. And now the tunes from that annus mirabilis are 30 themselves.

In other words, Dookie by cover artist Green Day (see page 32) is as far removed today as it was from the release of Meet The Beatles! and The Rolling Stones’ England’s Newest Hitmakers. 

What happened in 1994 was nearly as culturally revolutionary as the British Invasion three decades earlier. Grunge had emerged from Seattle with Nirvana’s touchstone album Nevermind three years earlier, displacing Michael Jackson on the charts and banishing the silliness of hair metal while setting off a global movement in the process. From then on it was stripped-down minimalist insouciance, which is exactly what Gen X needed as it wrestled with young adulthood in a world no longer shaped by the Cold War. Flannel was the right fit in a weak economy, guitars were the right instrument for the comedown from the all-too-disposable excess and cold synthesizers of the ‘80s.

Rock was back on Top 40 radio. Nirvana played alongside Ace of Base.

Importantly, grunge’s cultural salience opened the door for a swath of alternative rock bands to be successful. Green Day had more fun than Nirvana. Weezer was sillier than Pearl Jam. But a rising tide raised everyone’s boats.

Classic rock is more of a feeling than a checklist of musical purity, after all.

With 2024 marking a milestone anniversary of that critical year, plenty of the Class of ’94 are out on the road. Green Day plays Dookie in full (along with 2004’s American Idiot). Weezer similarly went start-to-finish with “The Blue Album.” Stone Temple Pilots and Live co-headlined a tour marking the 30th anniversary of their albums Purple and Throwing Copper. And then of course ’94 is the year Cool Brittania hit its peak with Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, a band whose reunion tour 30 years later inextricably sullied the term “dynamic pricing.”

Whether all of this is just a paroxysm of nostalgia or the redefinition of what — and when — classic rock is, remains to be seen.

And that makes a big difference for touring. A band reuniting to cash in on nostalgia — no shame in that — can play the hits at a few festivals, as numerous emo bands have demonstrated. But a classic rock band can have a very long and successful touring career indeed. Eagles are still selling out Sphere and the world waits for AC/DC’s next stadium run.

One way to differentiate between the ephemera of nostalgia and the solidity of classicism is cultural penetration, and there’s plenty of evidence contemporary acts look for inspiration — musical, philosophical and stylistic — from the bands of their parents’ generation. Olivia Rodrigo regularly gushes about Green Day, No Doubt and Rage Against the Machine and the Pixies (Kim Deal opened for her). Supergroup boygenius, the sensation of summer 2023, smirked and nodded at Foo Fighters with their bespoke suits (and brought Dave Grohl out to drum for them at the Hollywood Bowl) and posed Nirvanaesquely on the cover of Rolling Stone.

“We wanted to invoke the idea that bands are still big and in the ’90s bands were big and they aren’t big right now,” boygenius’s Lucy Dacus told Pollstar. “So we’re playing with imagery and trying to trick people into thinking bands are still big.”

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said he’s begun to notice the staying power — and long tail of appeal — his band’s music has.

“What I’m really seeing is how generational it’s become. You’ve got people that are anywhere from 14 to 45 or 50 years old. Someone wrote me and said, ‘I saw you in 1994, in ’98, and 2004 and now I’m seeing you again and I’m with my adult children.’ That’s a beautiful thing,” he told Pollstar. Culturally, it feels like those ’90s bands whose music has survived and remained across the shifting sands of taste are on the cusp of new classicism, worthy of standing alongside the stalwarts who have propped up the format.

Those grumpy cynics will say the decision about what classic rock is lies with the radio station programmers, for good or ill, and even they’ve started to recognize the reality, with early ’90s songs playing on classic rock stations for a decade now and early 2000s hits now making their way as the cutoff between classic rock and modern rock moves ever forward, which is nothing new; at some point U2’s earliest work moved off the latter and to the former and we hardly noticed.

But as ever, the final decision makers are the fans and Father Time. If Gen Xers and Millennials want blink-182 and Creed to join or even replace Bob Seger and Bachman Turner Overdrive, then that’s what’ll happen and the market will inevitably respond.