God Bless Buttrock?

we used to be a proper country.

One of the most incredible things about human history is how time and time again, no matter how bleak or oppressive things might be. When humans are in a tight corner, we create.

In fact, I'd argue that one of the biggest things that separates us from humans from other animals is that when other animals are faking facing extinction?

 We create meaning, a way to create order in chaos, and in the end immortalizing the time period.

 Some of the most lauded moments of  creativity in history; from the Vietnam war to the French revolution,  comes from people who are simmering with discontent  and looking for an outlet to share their perspective. 

If I were a pop culture predictor in 2000, I would have said there was a rich soil for a cultural revolution to sprout. An unprecedented attack on a beloved American city, the birth of Napster, in the rise of the Internet, and the accessibility of desktop computers now everyone can access virtually any piece of media for free- this should have been a massive cultural revolution up there with 60s.

Instead, this is what we got:

Music in the 2000 specifically, pop music, was arguably the biggest and most bombastic it will ever be in history, bigger than it was now and probably ever. 

Pop music was so big back then that your vocal ability was less important than your stage presence, charisma and performances. Hip-hop had finally crossed the mainstream, mostly shedding its social justice and anti-establishment identity It gained in the 80s and 90s in favor of commercialism. It was a bling bling era baby.

 The energy looking back was so big and bombastic (no pun intended) that you almost forget just how technically bad, the time was, economically, politically, especially compared to now. It genuinely feels like everything is burning. Perhaps the death of monoculture has something to do with it, the lack of a cohesive cultural identity to attach and escape reality from. Cancel culture was very primitive then, we didn't cancel people for being predators or racists, the biggest sin you could commit back then was that you weren't patriotic enough. (or that your nipple accidentally showed on tv). The few artists who tried to make a commentary on the times, did so to mixed if not miserable results.

Instead we got Buttrock, a pseudo genre so formless and flaccid it should be called whiskey dick.

Now when I say buttrock was the only response to the times, I say that very loosely. Most music is birthed in response to changes in society and periods of war. Buttrock is a truly postmodern advent, in that it was a genre of music that felt like it was designed to be listened to while you chugged a Monster and signed up for the military reserves.

Buttrock was for a type of blue collar kid that you definitely did massive rips with of their homemade gravity bong. They were the types who drank Mountain Dew, worked on their (American) car constantly, and wore camo jackets. If you made a Venn diagram of how many of them still listen to Eminem it would be a circle.

(Side note, are white trash teen boys still as fun as they were back then? It seems like most of them are just edgeless discord mods now. We’re losing recipes.)

The best way to describe Buttrock is like porn, the line is blurry but you know it when you see it. But if I had to try and define some of its attributes it would be a lead singer with a gravelly voice, like they're doing their best impression of Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain but lacking the genuinely low levels of dopamine to do it effectively. 

They use the same 4 notes (esp that fucking drop D note) for all their songs, and the melodies plod along, and explode into a chorus. Which makes sense, its softcore arena music, Music you can pound at a WWE match while the DJ spam drops bomb and eagle sound effects.

You know when you would play the rock stations in the early 2000s in the car? Buttrock was the affliction and bejeweled cross soaked music that would play while you prayed the station would play just one MGMT song before you reached your destination. 

That’s actually where a lot of people think the term came from. You would be driving through your suburban town and the rock station would say something like “we play nothing but rock” and so they dropped the ‘nothing’ thereby calling it Buttrock. And boy is that fucking accurate. Buttrock sounds exactly like the kind of music you’d hear playing from your plumber as you accidentally catch a glimpse of his asscrack while he works underneath your sink.

Other themes are toughness, masculinity, patriotism, drinking, addiction, sobriety, and sadness. Really there’s only two types of Buttrock songs, the ones mentioning the first and then the second type of song, is usually some sort of love ballad about a woman trying to romance her, or a bitter toxic breakup song about that same girl (she’s a bitch now).

Beyond that, aesthetically buttrock had a certain douchebag aesthetic that was palpable. Soul patch goatees, long hair parted all the way down the middle, soaking in hair gel, tribal tattoos, ed hardy, affliction t shirt, cross necklaces and leather bracelets, and ornate jeans. 

The irony of the cycles of youth generations is that what one generation thinks is cool, the next generation rejects entirely out of rebellion, a way to separate and identify themselves from their proverbial older sibling. Lately I’ve been noticing a rise of gen z and popular culture changing their mind about nickleback, saying they dont deserve the flack they got, and believe me, I am not one of those people. If you were a fan of rock music at all, having to hear 5 nickleback or nickleback derivative songs was enough to make you hate them just out of spite, regardless of the quality. I saw someone on tiktok call this music “divorced dad music” and I thought it was so funny, not only because Tiktok/Gen z love rebranding things that already have a name to them, but also because it reflects the change in how Buttrock is perceived.

20 years ago, it was seen as a stain and those who liked that music were seen as lame people who only liked mainstream corporate rock, something that sounds edgy but has no teeth.Much like the early wave of emo rap in the 2010s, you had your Lil Peeps, your Juicewrlds, and even when it sounded bad, it still sounded authentic. You believed that they were actually depressed and fighting demons. But much like the grunge movement, once labels realized there was money to be had selling depression, they started signing and planting artists who were clearly not sad about anything, and looking to come up off the wave. Like if you were too young to remember the sentiment then, the best example I can give is when I first heard ‘Mood’ by24kgoldn and iann dior at the grocery store, 

the line that made me realize holy shit this is ass:

I busted out laughing, not only because that is an insane line with his Lunchables ass voice, but this sounds exactly like someone who is performing having mental illness on a song. And that’s playing at the fucking grocery store. 

The levels are.. In any case, I bring that up because if you weren't around during the buttrock era or were too young, this is the equivalent of how people felt about it at the time. 

It felt deeply inauthentic and formless and borrowing heavily from a much more real and authentic genre.

Because of that, Buttrock left a bad taste in most people’s mouths, and was the punching bag for a longggg time. The young people of the 2000s, mostly made up of Gen x’s and older millennials saw grunge music as the genre that represented their generation, and saw butt rock as the antithesis of it, and much like any youth generation, they can smell corporate bullshit masking as being “a part of the culture”.  

Today its seen as divorced dad music and that makes sense, the generation of dads that previous generations think of when they think of dad music is like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol, Van Halen, Motley Crue, that kind of stuff, but for gen z kids with millennial parents, its Nickleback, Staind, 3 Doors Down. 

But I will say this, as someone who grew up during that time period, looking back, I think even I have gained a lil space in my heart for it, what once annoyed me then, hearing today reminds me of a simpler, happier time. Like how cute, you feel self loathing in 2005. It's all so dramatic and childish, in hindsight, the drama is so minimal you wish you could go back.

But I think another reason why Buttrock was hated so vehemently is because rock was dying really quickly as a relevant genre once the 2000s rolled around. I remember reading Meet Me in the Bathroom and one of the things that always stuck to me was that they said that after Kurt Cobain died record labels were scrambling to find the next hottest thing, and eventually that led to The Strokes getting signed by RCA, which is often referred to as the “last rock band to get signed to a major deal”. And despite their first album being a smash record selling millions, The Strokes never really took off into the mainstream. Neither did bands like Muse, the Arctic Monkeys, or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs despite massive critical appeal and amazing music.

Something switched in the 2000s with rock music. Everything became extremely fragmented, the indie kids wouldn’t listen to metal, the metal kids wouldn't listen to indie, nobody listened to Ryan Adams, and the only rock music that was being played to mass audiences was buttrock style music. So naturally, much like Drake is regarded to rap music, as rock music faded farther from the mainstream, buttrock caught a lot of the hate as to why it declined for oversaturating the market with formulaic, cheap, and forgettable music.

Then when autotune and EDM/Club entered the pop space, it immediately rendered the classic guitar bass and drum combo archaic. 

Incorporating electronic elements into music whether vocally or instrumentally was fresh and hot. Using actual instruments was a relic, and at this point in rock felt more like a homage than a necessary equipment. 

The best way I can compare it is to when Pixar entered the animation space. It came and introduced audiences to 3D animation, a new concept that felt so futuristic, with its hyperrealism and technological feat. I remember being a kid then, and I thought anything animated in 3D was just cooler by default because it was new. I had very little desire to watch 2d movies even though most of my favorite animated films were in 2d, once I saw that new technology that's all I wanted to see.

Now, in 2023, animated films in 3d aren’t seen as new or exciting, in fact it's so normal and trite that Disney literally made Wish, a movie with very little plot and its main selling point was that it was 2D. And the same has happened to Buttrock. Of course they see it as divorced dad rock. It's their dads and uncles, who played that music in front of them while they bitched about custody payments over a Coors light.

 Much like how boomer dads played the 70s version of dad rock, these kids don't remember a time where it was lame to like this music nor do they understand the significance of why it was hated at the time. Its significance to Gen z and younger is a nod to their childhood nostalgia, filling them with the same warm feelings any person feels when something reminds them of the safety of childhood and warmth of a parent.

Buttrock used to refer to the late 80s hairbands like Motley Crue, and in the 2000s referred to the post grunge artists like Nickleback, but really buttrock isn't about a specific sound, it's a way to describe whatever mainstream generic inauthentic mainstream pop band is at the top of the hits. I'd even argue that bands like Imagine Dragons, AJR, and 21 pilots are the buttrock of today, flavorless, hollow music that combines the most innovative sounds and themes of today into a flaccid, unidentifiable mush. And just like Nickleback, in 10- 20 years, the generations under genz and gen alpha are going to rebel and declare this music as ‘getting a bad rap” much like we did. 

Did Buttrock deserve the shit rep it got? I dunno maybe? I mean most of the producers from those bands switched over to country, now infecting it with the same problems rock had with it. But even still, the evaporation of this genre is another reminder of a subsect of American culture and people that’s been forgotten, and maybe that's worth giving a thought.

Buttrock was never cool, but that’s the point. It’s the sound of a messy, transitional era in American culture—half earnest, half embarrassing. And like an old diary entry, its legacy isn’t artistic; it’s cultural, reminding us that even the “worst” genres can become nostalgia when enough time has passed.