Jay Jay French , guitarist for Twisted Sister , has a keen understanding of music as a business and offered his opinion on the current state of rock and roll, far from the commercial success it enjoyed in past decades.
This is a recurring issue in the lives of rock fans and musicians, since the charts are dominated by other styles and only established bands still appear in the mainstream, with rare exceptions.
“The market doesn’t create anything, it just follows trends. Hip hop, female pop, country rock are big trends,” he analyzed in an interview with Dean Cramer (via Ultimate Guitar ) . “Rock isn’t, and it’s been around for 50 years. So I don’t sit around crying about whether rock is alive or not. I mean, it’s not dead. But it’s certainly a style of music that isn’t popular.”
Jay Jay took the opportunity to reiterate a point he made a few years ago. “So here’s the question – where are the 25-year-old rock stars? Where are they? The answer is – there aren’t any. Not anyone who’s really broken through in a big way. So that says the market is different,” he continued. “If I were a 20-year-old kid wanting to get into the music world, like I once was, I’d look around and say, ‘How do you make money in this fucking business?’ That’s what I said to myself when I was 20: How do you make money? And I followed the trends of how to make money in the business.”
READ ALSO: Jay Jay French of Twisted Sister: “Rock 'n' roll is a criminal enterprise”
