What *Is* Butt Rock?

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Songs used in this video: Come On Feel The Noise - Quiet Riot (Not how the title's spelled, I know, but I don't trust YouTube) I Was Made For Lovin' You - KISS Nothin' But A Good Time - Poison You Give Love A Bad Name - Bon Jovi Rockstar - Nickelback 45 - Shinedown So Cold - Breaking Benjamin Broken - Seether ft. Amy Lee Radioactive - Imagine Dragons Pompeii - Bastille Jungle - X Ambassadors Come With Me Now - KONGOS Some Nights - fun. Cherry Pie - Warrant Headstrong - Trapt 'Til The Love Runs Out - OneRepublic 2) Thanks to Matt Krol and Patrick Willems for lending me their voices for this! Check out their channels: youtube.com/extracredits and youtube.com/c/patrickhwillems 3) Coming up with the list of examples for 3rd-wave butt rock was hard. Not because the movement didn't happen, but because it's still all tangled up in the rest of what's going on around it. With the first and second waves, it was relatively easy because there are broadly accepted canonic lists, built largely (although not entirely) in retrospect. Like, honestly, I don't think Buckcherry sounds all that much like a lot of their contemporaries in 2nd-wave butt rock, but I don't really need to prepare a justification for their inclusion here because it's already a pretty widely accepted fact. For 3rd-wave, though, I'm making this up myself, so in order to make my case as clear as possible, I had to focus on a very narrow, archetypal definition in order to establish a clear connecting thread through my examples. There were lots of other bands I could've cited, like AWOLNATION, Gotye, Florence and the Machine, Young Guns, Council, Banners, Young the Giant, Robert DeLong, 5 Seconds of Summer… but while they all exist in the correct orbit, they didn't quite capture exactly what I was looking for in a "perfect" 3rd-wave butt rock band. (Basically, bands that sound as much as possible like Imagine Dragons, even though "sounding like one particular band" isn't really how genres work. The definition is a work in progress.) Even OneRepublic, which I did cite, feels like it's a little on the fringe, but again, I think that's largely because no one's bothered to tease out the particular strain of modern rock from its contemporaries before. Without a genre label, it's hard to draw clear boundaries, so if there are bands I missed, or bands I included that you don't think I should've, sorry. Hopefully, at the very least, thinking through why you disagree with me will give you some better insights into how you feel this musical movement works. 4) There is an argument to be made that, if people haven't put it together organically, the 3rd wave doesn't really exist, and sure, that's fair. Again, a genre isn't just about sounding similar, so if that's all that's tying them together, it's not really there. But I can tell you from first-hand experience that it felt like a new genre to me at the time, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one, so I do think there's value in trying to categorize it as such. Whether or not butt rock is the right lens to do it is another question, and one I'm not fully prepared to answer, but at the very least I feel like it's an instructive lens. 5) There's also the point that, in many ways, the three waves of butt rock are not culturally contiguous. That is, there isn't a clear continuity of fandom that runs through all of them. This isn't unheard of: Pop music, for example, is another genre that does not prioritize continuity. But it does complicate the question of what butt rock "is", especially when compounded by the fact that the butt rock label has historically been applied first by external sources, so the connection between the three waves is more about outside perception than internal fan behavior. Doesn't mean that connection isn't real, but it does make it complicated. 6) When I say the second wave was over in the late 2000s (Or the first wave in the early '90s, for that matter) I don't mean everyone suddenly stopped caring about them. Many bands from those eras are still popular today. But that's the thing: They're still bands from those eras. There stopped being new bands within the movement, or at least there stopped being very many of them. Just want to be clear that if you're still listening to Shinedown in the year 2022… I mean, so am I. We're just not on the cusp of mainstream rock anymore. 7) I mentioned that Fun. was probably the band to really kick off the 3rd wave, specifically with the release of Some Nights in 2012, but as with any artistic movement there are precursors. OneRepublic formed in 2002, and they had a couple albums in the back half of the decade, including some noteworthy hits, but Native in 2013 was the still a breakthrough for them, and stylistically sounds more like what I'm talking about than their previous work. American Authors similarly had been around for a while, but their breakout hit, Best Day Of My Life, also came out in 2013. Honestly the best argument for a band with breakout success in this style before Fun. would probably be Florence and the Machine: Their work has a lot of similarities in terms of spectacle, but the lyrical themes don't feel very butt rock, and the orchestration is often very complex, so it doesn't quite feel right to me. They tend to sound more like an orchestral performance than a rock show to my ears, so I'd view them more as precursors of the movement than originators. (Although I feel like there's probably some value judgments implied in those terms, so to be clear, I don't believe that one is better than the other.) The argument could certainly be made, though, and if it fits for you, great, go with that. 8) An interesting dynamic that I couldn't find the space to talk about is that advances in modern technology have vastly increased the number of possible sounds that can be produced live by a performer, allowing 3rd-wave butt rock to embrace some electronic elements without losing the live concert dynamic. I'd still hesitate to apply the label to anything purely electronic (Especially in terms of drum sounds and overt autotune on vocals) but many 3rd-wave bands employ more studio tricks than their predecessors, because their listeners can still believe that it could be reproduced live. 9) This might go without saying, but when I talk about what the music "wants", that's an extremely subjective question! There is no right answer because music is not a conscious, living entity. I suppose a more precise way to phrase it would be that you're asking what kinds of ideas and experiences the music most consistently and effectively evokes within you, but that's not as pithy. 10) I should note that, in his video, McKenty was talking specifically about 2nd-wave butt rock, and his usage of the term did not seem to incorporate the 1st or 3rd. The point remains when applied to them as well, though. 11) No one asked, but in case you were curious: The Wall, Led Zeppelin IV, Nevermind, the White Album, the Black Album. (Although, full disclosure, in some cases the real answer is I don't care.) 12) I mentioned that Angus Young has at the very least said similar things to the infamous 12-albums quote, so here's a source on that. In a 2020 interview (found at www.facebook.com/TheProjectTV/videos/6739367398632… ) he said "As my brother used to say, when somebody said, 'Every album you've ever made sounds the same,' he said, 'Yeah, it's the same band.' When we started, we weren't reinventing the wheel. This is what we do best — we make rock and roll."

Butt Rock waves recontextualized: 1st wave: Hair Metal 2nd wave: Post-Grunge 3rd wave: Whoa-core

Hey, Mark Lee here, author of the piece you cited. I really enjoyed this video and you make a lot of good points, particularly that a genre shouldn’t be defined solely by what it isn’t. Thank you for this important contribution to the field of Butt Rock Studies!

The definition of butt rock being “what a live show feels like” was phenomenally accurate. Well done!

In Norwegian we have the word “puddelrock” (“poodle-rock”) to describe approximately what English speakers might call “hair metal”.

I really expected the sentence "In butt rock, you don't just get to imagine what a live show would look like" to be followed up by "In butt rock, you get to imagine dragons "

I always used “butt rock” as a term for “post-grunge,” the mid-90s-to-mid-2000s radio hard rock with the singer doing the weird Eddie Vedder impression (Creed, most notably). And Yes, it’s often meant as a pejorative to mock lowest-common-denominator sound and appeal. As for the 80s-era, I always referred to that as “c*ck rock,” and I’d call the third wave “beer commercial rock.”

I’d never heard the term “butt rock” before this video but once you explained it it does kind of make sense. But to me it’s always been “Radio Rock”. It’s the rock that you hear the same song five times during your eight hour shift. The rock that will end up played on “the best of the (three consecutive decades)” stations twenty years after the music was popular.

I’ve never heard the term Butt Rock. If you had uploaded this video on April 1st I’d be certain the whole thing is an April fools! But now I know about Butt Rock I’m going to start using that term! 😆😄

The first band that comes to my mind when I hear the words “butt rock” is Nickelback. I’m old enough to remember the very end of the popularity for post-grunge and nu metal, but all my knowledge of glam metal is as something from the past. I never thought of Imagine Dragons and similar bands as butt rock, just pop rock, but I understand the relation now.

I've only heard Butt Rock referred to in relation to Sonic music and Crush 40, cool to see it has decades of history behind it.

I'm so glad to hear you explain the different waves. I've tried explaining butt rock to friends whenever I use the term, and they get really confused when I say "yeah butt rock is like Poison, but there's also other butt rock that is like Nickelback". I was never able to understand how this makes sense but the way you described it really makes me feel more settled.

Butt Rock is (to me) that genre of music I can loudly sing in my car, not caring if I look like an idiot. They're easy to sing along with, and usually involve intensity. Watching this vid and hearing all the example songs reminded me of many of these songs I've missed, so thanks!

"It's easy to write off butt rock because it doesn't play by those rules, but idk. Maybe those rules suck?" that puts it well I think. Awesome video

my first thought about butt rock is that late 2000's era of music with bands like Five Finger Deathpunch and Disturbed. I picture the person who listens to them as a bald 40 year old dad who wears Tapout shirts and takes his 13 year old son to baseball games where he yells too loud about the umps missed calls.

It seems weird to me to put Fun in the same class as Imagine Dragons, Bastille, etc. I mean yeah, they share a sense of big theatricality, but Fun strikes me as way more pretentious and way more "serious" -- whereas I can kind of hear Imagine Dragons as a spiritual successor to hair metal, Fun feels to me way more inspired by silly/pretentious bands like Queen. I also think Fun is much less about capturing the feel of a live concert -- see the auto-tune guitar solo on Some Nights for an example of something that very clearly 'breaks the illusion,' as you say.

I'd suggest that Dragonforce and Black Sabbath aren't part of the same genre: at this point, Metal has become so heavily diversified that it is almost useless as a descriptor. Black Sabbath is traditional Heavy Metal, Dragonforce is Power Metal - two different genres with vastly different aesthetics, which are both part of the same large artistic movement or lineage or whatever.

What's weird is that the one time I could recall hearing the term "butt rock" was from fellow popular music historian, Todd in the Shadows, who used it not only to describe Nickelback but also Grand Funk Railroad of all bands, predating those bands mentioned.

I've mostly used the term to refer to "normie rock" or "radio rock". And I think you pretty much just analyzed what makes radio rock appealing to the mainstream. Nice job.

I think there's a reason that the "nothing but rock" etymology has stuck even if it's not the true origin; people associate the "butt-rock" sound with fans/radio stations etc that regarded other music besides butt-rock as wimpy and soft sounds for babies. Of course no generalization like that can be entirely true, but certainly when I was a teenager in the 90s that was often the sort of hyper-masculine gruff & tuff image that the classic rock and mainstream rock stations tried to project. I'm not really sure I'm buying the post-2010 radio-friendly pop-rock bands as being a part of that lineage. In the '90s, for example, there were bands like Hootie & The Blowfish and Counting Crows, and they were on the radio and critics didn't love them, but people didn't think of them as butt-rock because they didn't have quite the same kind of image.