Rock music comes in many varieties, often determined by geographical location. Sunny, attractive Southern California gave us the Beach Boys and their upbeat songs about girls, cars, and surfing. Beautiful but rainy Seattle gave us the alienation and angst of grunge. And then there's the Swamp Rock of Creedence Clearwater revival, with their rootsy songs about the bayous, rivers, and swamplands of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta.
Detroit delivered raw, high-energy, working-class style rock 'n' roll in the late-1960s and 1970s from such stars as Iggy Pop, Bob Seger, and the MC5. Southern Rock had the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, which blended blues, country, soul, and hard rock. Avant-garde New York rock became synonymous with the raw guitar sound and urban-noir lyrics of the Velvet Underground. So what about Midwestern Rock? Is that vast expanse of American land, mostly overlooked by the self-involved media centers of New York and Los Angeles, not deserving of its own special designation? It has its own niche in the rock world. It takes a little digging to learn about it.
The common outsider perspective that the Midwest is a quiet patchwork of cornfields, manufacturing towns, and suburban sprawl might suggest that it's not fallow ground for the rebellious spirit of rock music, but Detroit disproved that misconception over 60 years ago. “Midwestern,” as applied to rock, lacks the cool cachet of a descriptor like “grunge.” Maybe that's why it came to be also known as Heartland Rock.
Regional music reflects the culture of its location. While Brian Wilson would've expressed his musical genius had he been brought up in Maine, the fact that he was from Southern California was advantageous to his band, The Beach Boys, who sang about a fantasy world that was attractive to young people from cold, landlocked places like Minnesota. Rockers from the Midwest, however, enjoyed no such geographical advantage. It's hard to craft a mythical setting as attractive as a warm, seaside place of fun, fast cars, bikinis, and blondes from a location defined by its flatness, earnestness, farms and industrial output.
Rockers from the Midwest took the unglamorous, sometimes exhausting realities of Rust Belt working-class life and came up with a stripped-down style of rock that was devoid of theatrical flourishes of a flashy band like Queen. The Midwest isn't flashy, although Alice Cooper did come out of Detroit. Just as one's birthplace doesn't lock a musician into a particular musical style, it doesn't lock one out of it. For example, even though all the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival were born in California, they performed songs about riverboats on the Mississippi.
The term Midwestern Rock, which has undergone a couple of iterations since its coinage, first emerged in the 1980s when three musicians addressing Steinbeckian themes—Bruce Springsteen (not from the Midwest), Hoosier John Mellencamp, and born-and-bred Detroiter Bob Seger—were packing stadiums. Their working-class narratives stood in contrast to the Tolkienesque fantasies of Prog Rock bands (e.g. Rush, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson) and the Wildean theatricality of Glam Rockers like David Bowie, Queen, and T. Rex.
Springsteen, Mellencamp, and Seger crafted their sound by substituting three chords and a backbeat for world building and art for art’s sake. Springsteen wrote and sang about Johnny 99, a desperate auto-plant worker who shoots a night clerk after losing his job, while Bowie wrote and sang about Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual cosmic messenger sent to Earth to deliver a message of hope as an apocalypse looms in the horizon. The self-indulgence of that song, which I've listened to many times in the past, now makes me grimace. Not so for songs like the underrated Bob Seger's 1977 wistful hit, “Main Street,” with lyrics like this: “And she'd dance with that look in her eyes/With that edge of a hot-blooded woman/See her walking through the shadows/To the rhythm of her high-heeled shoes.” Ziggy Stardust probably wore high heels too, but his story isn't as relatable.
Mellencamp (who may not even know more than three chords) wrote songs inspired by his Indiana upbringing. “Jack and Diane” is a coming-of-age story about two working-class teenagers growing up in the American heartland. With his hit “Small Town,” the singer/songwriter encapsulated his worldview into one evocative lyric: “Well, I was born in a small town/And I can breathe in a small town/Gonna die in a small town/Oh, that's good enough for me." The message that small, nondescript towns could be cool sounded unique to music fans at that time.
While the original Heartland Rock, which started to fade around 1990, was all about blue-collar anthems and filling up huge stadiums, the second iteration of the sub-genre responded to the times by moving away from huge crowds and high-budget videos while retaining the same blue-collar grit, acoustic/electric guitar mix, and slice-of-life storytelling. When a musical movement becomes defined by the excesses of stadium shows, it's both at its peak and nearing the point of commercial exhaustion. As younger people began to look for more intimacy and authenticity, new bands were born. Midwestern bands like Wilco (formed in 1994 by the remaining members of alt-country group Uncle Tupelo—most notably Jeff Tweedy), the Replacements and the BoDeans, with their stripped-down roots rock/folk fusion, emerged to satisfy evolving, “left-of-the dial” tastes. Simultaneously, the roots revivalism of the "No Depression" (a roots-music publication) alt-country movement sprouted up and became a parallel phenomenon within the Heartland Rock 2.0 experiment.
Indie openness to new sounds replaced the over-commercialization of the original experiment. The new Midwestern Rock bands retained the emotional desperation and working-class storytelling of their predecessors and combined it with energy of guitar-driven alt-rock and the adventurousness of avant-garde indie rock. The migration away from massive stadiums wasn’t a retreat. It was a return to the true spirit of Heartland Rock, which was never meant to be packaged for sports arenas or car commercials.
That spirit continues on to this day with the Americana and Alt-Country music of artists like Jason Isbell and Zach Bryan, and the Heartland Punk of bands like The Gaslight Anthem and The Menzingers. On the mainstream side, the sonic framework and everyday stories of the Seger/Springsteen/Mellencamp years is now the bread and butter of modern Country radio. Current Country artists like Eric Church and Luke Combs tailor their music for the same massive sports arenas that were at the heart of Heartland Rock 1.0.