At some point, all of our favorite musical genres have lost their way and become unrecognizable to their early fans. There's no shame in admitting that – if anything, it's a time-honored tradition. When a new form of rock music emerges, it's pure, created by musicians who are simply happy to be changing the game, and soon people begin to pick up on it. But then, as that scene gets popular or corporate money enters the picture, the culture mutates, and suddenly the genre we so loved becomes one we're not sure we ever fully understood.
The thing is, at the end of the day, the motives behind that music, the things that made those artists great in the first place, live on – they've just evolved. And while it can be easy to become jaded by that ("Damn kids, that's not real _____") it's important to remember that the dream is still alive, even if it takes the form of fresh young faces and weird new sounds.
In keeping with this, we've decided to honestly examine ten of our favorite rock subgenres with a focus on the three major moments in their development: What It Was, the initial spark that made this music exciting and important; What It Became, how this genre transformed into something alien to its early fans; and What It Is Now, how the core traits of that music live on in strange, awesome new ways.
Check out our breakdown below. And if you're a young rock fan who thinks their favorite bands will never change, well...let's touch base in a few years.