Internet Killed the Rock'n'Roll Star

So this is an idea I’ve been playing with, help me out Chippies.
Derek and I had a discussion several months ago about the decline or death of rock and roll and the new dominance of what’s come to be known as hip hop. He had some excellent theories to back him up and I found myself in concurrence. A month or so after adding this idea to the torrent of ‘new media theory’ I’ve been looking at, I was conversing with a friend who was talking about what he wants to do next with his life. He ended his collected thoughts and vague possibilities with a half serious jest that ‘becoming a Rock Star would solve all of his problems’. I say half serious because he is pursuing traditional acoustic song writing on the side, set up a myspace account, plays out occasionally and so on.
This seemed to conflict with Derek’s idea and I’m trying to determine if the Rock Star has/will die with Rock. Perhaps the Rap Star is the new Rock Star, but something about the diffusion of culture right now doesn’t give them as much iconic authority as what I’d see as a traditional Rock Star I guess Pop Star can’t be excluded either… but who is the last modern music ‘star’ anyone can remember? (well I just remembered Eminem so he kind of puts a hole in this and since I’m writing this off the cuff, please suggest others I’m missing if you want to refute all this) I’m sure some can be clearly sited as prominent figures in the industry, but anyone that has near the communication power of Lennon? Dylan? Kobain? Springsteen? Even more corporately propelled stars like Madonna don’t speak with any significance to their audience anymore being drowned in a broader bandwith of cultural musical output. It can also be stated that I’m out of touch with the popular music scene and have been since the late 90’s, but that’s not relevant to this inquiry (ithink). Basically Rock, and the Rock Star, no longer exist as they used to. That culturally powerful authority position- the purveyor of cool, fun and/or bad ass, is vacant.

When ‘Rock’ first gained weight as a genre and more so as a medium, it offered the opportunity for individuals or a group of individuals to craft potent, fun, occasionally message laden expression. As the story goes, the output created defined an era- rock music and all of it’s progeny so much permeate the social landscape that it’s not even looked at as a form of expression among other forms of expression, but the foundation for musical expression in today’s culture itself. My original cultural and socialized understanding of American music history got a little fuzzy before Elvis, before Rock. Many saw it/see it as the only true expression of the spirit which no other medium could touch or outdo. How loud the chord was struck, how right it felt can be summed up in the naïve assumption that, ‘Rock and Roll will Never Die’ (Young).
The important part of this all is the low start-up cost of becoming a rock star. Despite how the music industry operates today, music is still a medium of the people. People see and hope that all you really need is a guitar, some talent and some luck, and anyone can be a rock star and big time purveyor of cultural content. While a similar medium gaining prominence around the 1950’s, television, has perhaps further reaching modes of expression, the tools and costs for individuals or groups to create anything for that medium were not realistic. This of course leads us to the Internet, where we all know how the affordability of media editing tools and distribution possibilities of our (our=*cough. Net neutrality. Cough*) world wide web are changing this notion. So this is where the wondering begins. With the growing impotence of Rock and the huge diversity of music available, it may not be possible for music stars to exist like they used to, unless they morph into the Internet Star. We talk a lot about the Internet dethroning television, but I think it may also be dethroning the role popular music plays as we’ve come to know it.
In the end, if media ecologists like Marshal Macluhan and Neil Postman are to be believed, every new medium offers it’s own unique world of discourse and is never an extension of previous mediums. Television is not an extension of Radio, Internet is not and extension of Television. And while these mediums affect each other, they’re totally different in what type of output they’re prone to making. But again, I’m talking about the position and function these mediums occupy in modern culture, not which ones are better at what.

Now for us sci-fi futurists who attempt to foresee the evolution of internet/interactive media, to show what the Internet Star could become, I look at the work of Will Wright. His name has been attached to such milestones in interactive media like Sim City 2000 and The Sims franchise- he’s currently working on a new project which is bound to be another revolution in the gaming industry called ‘Spore’. Basically a simulation of ‘evolution’, you start as a one-celled organism trying to survive in a 2-D environment. After surviving as the fittest, you have the opportunity to evolve and evolve you do, the user designing every facet of there creature along the way, moving to an aquatic environment, then crawling onto land, and ultimately starting a civilization. The game gets even more macro but the content is not what’s important here, it’s the tools.
Spore is the first mass market experiment with what’s becoming known as ‘Procedural Content Generation’ (PCG). An indirect result of the Demoscene, PCG can best be explained by comparing a game like this to more traditional ones. Previous games like this required armies of programmers and animators to design all of the content for the various roads you can take your creature/society down, but with PCG it is instead designed with algorithms which create the animations and basically everything else in that virtual world, on the fly. It’s like animated clay and legos, and it allows for tremendous versatility in design in 3-D space.
Maybe I’m trying too hard, but I want to compare something like this to a newish form of rock star, the DJ. DJ’s reside in a specific sub-culture, but they take the outputs of generations of sound makers and will create there own sounds, ‘on the fly’. What interests me in the evolution of Internet media, and the Internet Star, is as new forms of content generation spread, what kind of work could be created? And I suspect with the growing sophistication of technology and audiences, even the Internet Star could give way to something even more media encompassing. Let’s DJ reality?