When Does A Movement Die?
 

when does a musical movement die? is it officially dead once its co-opted by big corporations and dumbed-down for the mainstream? is it oversaturation that kills it? does it die the moment its overground?

take punk for example. if you think punk is dead, when do you think it died and what do you think killed it?

It arrived in 1976 and by 1978 it had died. Replaced by New-Wave, Post-Punk and Hardcore Punk. Grunge arrived around 1988 as a mainstream sound and died around 1995 and was replaced by Post-Grunge or converged with the Alternative Rock scene. Thrash came in around 1983 and died out around 1988 in fact killed off by Grunge and most of the original thrash groups by this time, had slowed down their sound and were bringing different elements in anyway.

These dates I`ve put, are just relative to the movements in general, as the hardcore elements will still keep the movements candle burning, even after it has largely died out with a lot of the original acts moving onto other styles.

When pivotal bands from that movement make the cover of Rolling Stone magazine?

The late 80s and the flood of awful and unoriginal bands becoming the new representitives of the genre.

Most people or fickle...
So movements come and go because, by nature, humans or ultimate copy cats.
So when someone or something new comes along, it most likely will get masses of followers.

Then more new things come along.

The multitude of of copycats often kill off a movement and certainly dilute the quality of the overall sound, from the heights reached by the original artists. Its most impressive though, when a group comes late onto the scene or at least late to the publics attention and really takes a tired genre, and breathes new life into it, as Sepultura did in the late 80`s with the thrash movement.

Punk for me felt officially dead when I noticed there were songs accepted as proper punk that were about trivial things like hitting on girls and driving cool cars in the US. There is no one point in time when this happened - for example the Ramones sang about all kinds of largely irrelevant nonsense and I could accept that. It relates more to when I personally discovered this and felt the rebel spirit in punk was almost completely gone from the music of the contemporary punk mainstream.

Today, I wouldn't say movements die though. Only in a highly relative and subjective way ;)

I think the idea that a movement dies when it becomes mainstream is pretty off though. It wasn't popularity which killed off prog in the 70s .. It probably had more to do with the subsequent rise in popularity of guys like this and their beliefs :

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/johnnyrotten.jpg

Any one of us can of course appreciate Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd at the same time, but the truly massive scale popular opinion can't. Different bands and genres are competing for a limited resource, our collective interest, and thus there are winners and losers. I think a movement would die when (or rather "if") there's no interest in it anymore or, more arguably, when it's changed so much that it's become something completely different and noone has interest in the original shape of it. In the latter example, it may have passed on some genes to it's offspring. ;)

When people with horrible taste in music start listening to them.

A lot of punks had pretty deplorable taste in music overall. I mean they were supposed to be anti commercial and everything but these guys were sh*tting on progressive rock which just happened to be big at the moment while praising stuff like Bay City Rollers and The Ohio Express, I mean come the holy f*ck on.

That's not quite what I meant but never mind.

When band's material start to deteriorate and their songwriting isn't as good as it once was and people lose interest could be one reason, or the style of music changes and it isn't the same sound as the music they were making at the start of the movement.