I almost feel like a genre has to &quot;die&quot; at some point in order to live (i.e. gain relevance) again. Something that stays in the public consciousness past its prime gains association with being &quot;something your parents like&quot; and eventually &quot;something your grandparents like&quot;, and these are <i>bad</i> associations if you want something to get wildly popular.<p>A lot of brands that have carpet-bomb &quot;get everyone hooked at once&quot; marketing campaigns, like Old Spice, end up with this effect where nobody wants to use the product since it&#x27;s what their dad uses, and they don&#x27;t want to smell like their dad. So Old Spice has set upon the strategy of letting its marketing go quiet for a few years, and then, pretty much once per generation, running a new fleet of ads claiming that Old Spice is &quot;not your dad&#x27;s deodorant&quot;, but is in fact best associated with buff 20-something men.<p>The same happens in clothing (look at e.g. 80s clothing coming back into fashion just as everyone&#x27;s mom had finally stopped wearing it.)<p>Now, I&#x27;ve never seen anyone cite explicit evidence of it occurring in music as well, but it <i>would</i> fit the general mechanism. It might be why e.g. disco has mostly stayed dead (it&#x27;s survived in the public consciousness with the image of the aging, pervy &quot;uncle&quot;, a white guy with an afro wearing white suede and rollerblades, trying to retain his relevance); while genres like jazz are perennial (getting once again associated with being &quot;young and cosmopolitan&quot; at each turn of the clock.)<p>If rock can truly <i>die</i>—if we can let go of &quot;classic rock&quot; music stations and dads sporting worn-to-dishrags &quot;rock concert&quot; tees—and allow the ground of the genre&#x27;s image to lay fallow for a bit, we might be able to sew something new there.