A question with a hundred answers, a feeling with a thousand consequences, a life, an attitude, a song? Can rock ‘n’ roll be classified? Or is its unclassifiable nature that makes it the beast of a genre that it is, the musical medium that keeps generations wanting more?

Rock music is proof of why change is necessary and good. No one will ever be able to recapture the feeling they had when they first heard the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band” because the music lives, in many ways, beyond the sound. Rock music occupies a particular time and space, a time and space that can be revisited in memory but perhaps not revisited in sound or experience in the same way ever again. The feelings that rock music arouses come about because of the newness of the attitude it brings with it. Therefore, in order for rock music to be rock music, it must be constantly pushing boundaries, moving forward — changing.

One of the greatest frustrations I have run into in this year as a rock music director for KWLC, has been forcing myself to classify the music we get into genres, when really, it is all rock ‘n’ roll with different takes on composition. Rock ‘n’ roll permeates throughout most of the music we receive as it was all created with some feeling, some attitude, in mind. Looking back into the classical period, Beethoven was most definitely a rocker, creating symphonies that shocked the masses, titillating the senses with his piano compositions and moving through his social circles with an inescapable, unavoidable, simply riveting presence. He had the rock ‘n’ roll attitude. However, when we listen to Beethoven now, do we recapture the feelings it evoked during the late 18th and early 19th centuries? Although strong sensations are evoked when one listens to his 9th Symphony, Beethoven’s work, just like any true rock ‘n’ roll artist, lives in another space and time that we may visit and learn from, but perhaps never be satisfied by when similar compositional attempts are made in the present.

The major labels of the music industry have survived over the last 10 plus years by working to re-create a sound, feeling and image that sold in previous years. Therefore, instead of ushering in change, they work to recreate the rock music of the past in the rock music of the present, resulting in less satisfying versions of a memory. Although all art arguably goes through trends, the industrial role in music is perhaps sustaining certain trends beyond their time. There will not ever be another Beethoven, and there should not be, just as there could and should never be another Led Zeppelin or Nirvana. Rock ‘n’ roll should not be contained and copied — that defeats its rebellious nature. Rock music must remain in constant motion in order to re-invent itself.

The next phase in rock ‘n’ roll may still be hazy, just like the next phase in life might be for some readers out there. The inevitability of uncertainty before clarity is not something that can be directed, nor is it useful to copy the way things sounded in the past in attempts to find comfort or satisfaction. Instead of trying to direct the next move, in rock ‘n’ roll and in life, it’s best to remember what Mr. Dylan told us and rest assured that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Stay tuned.