Rock Candy: Millennials: The Path of Pop/Rock in the 21st Century

The music of the Millennials - people born after 1982 and before 2000 - is unlike anything that had ever come before it.

It was a mash-up of punk from the Seventies, heavy metal from the Eighties, and grunge from the Nineties, all wrapped up in ‘alternative’, whatever that still means. It was messy, it was emotional, it was glorious - and it all swept into the mainstream as the new millennium got underway.

Bands like My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, and Coheed and Cambria moved in and set up shop on the far edges of rock; Blink-182, Foo Fighters, Shinedown, 30 Seconds to Mars and others kept things commercial, and between them all, they changed pop/rock music forever.

Then there’s Lady Gaga, the Rock Chick who masquerades as a dance diva; Ed Sheeran, the British singer-songwriter who dares to fill Phil Collins’ shoes; and Billie Eilish, who managed to be born after the point where this book begins, and win 7 Grammy Awards and get into the Guinness Book of World Records twice before the point where it ends.

Rock Candy takes its first deep dive, not into a specific artist or band, but into an era - the era of the Millennials, 2001 to 2018, when all this happened. It’s a survey of the best bands and artists, the best albums, the best songs; it’s a critical examination of how the music industry had changed, and is still changing; and it’s an acknowledgment of a new phase of rock’s social awareness and consciousness, mashing up the discontent of the Sixties with the social media gestalt of the millennium, wherein those who live in the music of the moment are making up their minds how they will respond to that moment.