482. "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" Arctic Monkeys

"I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor"
Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2006

History will remember Arctic Monkeys as one of the 749 bands the British music press hyped as "the next Beatles!", and one of the three or four that actually ended up being good. (Not you, Kula Shaker. Go away.)
I'll remember them for something else; I loved this debut record, and the follow up has a song in the top ten of our countdown, but listening to what was the Next Big Thing at the time made me realize something: rock music was done evolving.
To be sure, there are a limited amount of sounds you can make with a guitar, bass, drums and voice. People have added electronic elements, that sounds pretty good sometimes.
But we aren't going to have a new genre of rock music. The 60s had psychedelia, the 70s punk, the 80s post-punk and new wave, the 90s grunge, along with a hundred different sub-genres. After that, all we've had is nostalgia. The White Stripes are probably the best band of the last 10 years, but if you had never heard them before and someone told you White Blood Cells came out in 1968, would you argue?
It looked for a while that Radiohead might be doing something new, but then they stopped caring about making music that people would enjoy hearing.
The best band right now, Arcade Fire, are doing yeoman's work, and progressing with each record.  But as awesome as it sounds, it's not a new sound.
And that's okay. Just was weird to realize.

This is a song for robots from 1984.