Rock is basically an adolescent music, reflecting the rhythms, concerns and aspirations of a very specialized age group. It can’t grow up — when it does, it turns into something else which may be just as valid but is still very different from the original. Personally I believe that real rock’n’roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.
–Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun,” 1970
And what can I add to that? Absolutely spot on.
what does he mean by, “a small island of new free music”?