Quote:
1. Imagine Dragons --“Believer”
To understand the essence of America’s biggest current rock band, I turned to America’s greatest current music critic, Wikipedia, where I learned that “Imagine Dragons maintains a band culture of humility, relatability, and creativity” and are “an atypical band” because "three of the four members are not tattooed, and the group chooses not to attend afterparties." “I'm fired up and tired of the way that things have been,” whines Dan Reynolds, with the petulance of a Trump voter quoted in a Times election post-mortem -- not to imply political bent, mind you, just to say that rock’s epic dissatisfaction with the status quo and fist-pumping individualism are, well, ideologically malleable. Playing “Mutt” Lange to the Dragons' Def Leppard is the Swedish production team of Mattman and Robin, who've done great writing and production work for Britney Spears, Selena Gomez, and Hailee Steinfeld. In fact, two songwriters who worked on "Believer" and Linkin Park's "Heavy" had a hand in many of those same songs. So maybe the most interesting thing about “rock” in 2017 is that it’s being crafted by the same people responsible for “pop” -- except they’re doing a much worse job of it.
(was part of a decent snarkfest article about what what constitutes rock music in 2017 via what is on the Billboard rock chart currently)