Well maybe not, but Billboard has only one rock song to have made it on the top ten pop charts for the whole decade! and that was Hey, Soul Sister(by Train), not exactly a riff guitar song. So what gives with the decline of R & R?
shareI think the formulaic rock band with a lead guitar, bass player, drummer and vocalist is so tired that the genre of rock was bound to die, regardless of what other forms of music were doing.
If you look back at some of the most creative rock bands of the past half century, most of them dabbled in synthesizers ie. the Beatles with the Mellotron, Pink Floyd with the EMS Synthi, the Gorillaz, Radiohead, etc. Most American bands don't have enough sense to incorporate synths into rock, which is why guitar-driven music declined after grunge fizzled out. One of the big exceptions would be Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, which is considered industrial rather than rock, but some tracks on the Downward Spiral crosses over into rock anthem territory with March of the Pigs and later The Perfect Drug. But the basslines are from synths. A few synths go a long way.