“Half as good as it used to be”: the movement Jack Black thought damaged rock and roll
Rock and roll has never been down for the count since the moment Chuck Berry started strutting his guitar in the 1950s. Although people like to claim that it has played its final chords ever since the 2000s, the fact that it’s not as popular as it used to be doesn’t mean it’s necessarily dead, either. It has been on life support more than a few times, and that has never ceased to be a problem when Jack Black was first starting to fall in love with the genre as a kid.
Even though he has focused his attention on acting most of the time, no one is going to find a better student of rock and roll than Jack Black. He certainly had the passion for the genre that makes everyone enjoy it in the first place, but looking at the kind of roles he has taken on and the high-end production behind many of Tenacious D’s albums, you’d swear that School of Rock is merely a far more exaggerated version of what Black is like in real life with half of his friends.
And when Black first began his musical journey, he couldn’t have picked a better time to jump into rock and roll. He had grown up at the time when hard rock was first turning into heavy metal, and for anyone that was of his age during the dawn of the 1980s, people like Ozzy Osbourne seemed almost superhuman half the time, usually doing anything they could to cause a stir in the press.
That may have been a great way for people to get their eyes on a specific band, but other methods were waiting on the horizon. The radio might have been the only place most bands thought of as success, but the minute that MTV debuted in the early 1980s with arthouse music videos, every musician started to see the potential that came with being able to get a million eyes on their band if they spent a few hours strutting their stuff on camera.
“MTV was good for good-looking bands.”
jack black
Then again, it didn’t take long for that to become abused, either. It was certainly fun to watch the early artsy videos from Talking Heads, but after people like Michael Jackson showed fans how popular someone could get through MTV, the hair metal bands started to erode everything to the point where grunge was almost a necessity. Even when Kurt Cobain and his band of misfits turned the genre on its head, the rise of reality television after them made almost every other music video obsolete.
Tenacious D may not have been shy about making their own music videos, but Black said that his quote in School of Rock about MTV killing rock and roll was a lot more accurate than most people thought, saying, “MTV was good for good-looking bands. But obviously, some of the best musicians and rockers are butt-ugly, so as soon as you cut away all of those people, your music is automatically half as good as it used to be.”
Given that Black was coming from the same generation where celebrities like Paris Hilton were trying their hands at being a pop star, it was clear that the tide was turning. Both the reality television and music video aspects of MTV had started to converge, and while some bands found a foothold where they could, it was time for rock and roll to start changing again by moving to a different format.
While the biggest names in rock nowadays come from indie rock, it might have been a blessing that the genre forgot about MTV. Bands might continue to release music videos and throw them up on YouTube for the world to see, but for Black, he knew that a musician would be worth their salt as long as they had a great tune behind any of the fancy window-dressing going on on camera.
