Note: This interview appeared as an MTV feature on how rock is "dead"

Johnny Temple (bass): I think that right now, there's not a lot of exciting stuff happening in rock and roll. The whole alternative rock phase sort of passed, but I think it's really silly to suggest that rock and roll is somehow dying or dead. I think it is in a lull, but I think that the sound of live music, which I think is essentially a major component of rock and roll as opposed to electronic music or other forms of music, I think the power of electric guitars and drums and stuff is always, or at least for a long time to come, going to appeal to people... especially young people. It can't be... the thrill of seeing live music isn't going to go away, and rock and roll is one of the best forms of live music to see just because of the power that it has and how truly different rock and roll can be on record versus live. It's no fun to see electronic bands play live. You might as well be at a rave or something. It's sort of inconsequential that it's live... with a few exceptions.

Scott McCloud (guitar, vocals): It seems like there's a lot of good music and bad music out there. I think that right now, everybody is really obsessed with the future, and I think that's probably because of the millennium. And everybody thinks the future of music is going to be some futuristic computer thing or something, but I think that when the year 2000 actually finally does drop, and I'm pretty sure that I'll still be here, it's going to be something really weird that gets popular. It's going to be like a Lynyrd Skynyrd reunion, you know, something horrible. We're all going to be like, 'This can't be the future. The future is supposed to be weird cool boots and tight pants and weird bleepy sounds. Come on, that's the future. It's like a video game, right?' It's gonna be like, 'No, it's not.'

Temple: Totally regressive.

McCloud: Right. It's going to be like, 'Oh, now I get to start all over. It's going to be a long way until the 60s or the 2060s, until anything cool happens, man.' It's just always going to be going around, so I think in the next couple of years there will be a lot of changes. And right now I just think that the current climate of things for whatever reason has just gone really pop is what it is. It's just really pop.

Alexis Fleisig (drums): But it's just a return. It's a cycle. Radio was really pop, then in the 80s it got sort of metal, and then it sort of went more alternative rock, and it's just pop again. It's top 40.

McCloud: You get sick of whatever is currently out there. You get sick of it really quick. Everybody does. You want to rejuvenate the whole thing, so it just keeps going in a cycle.

Temple: Another thing is that what we're talking about is rock on the mainstream level, but for us as a band and as individuals our main orientation towards rock has always been more from the independent music scene... bands that are putting out records on Dischord Records and Touch and Go. If you step away from the mainstream and look, 'Oh, Pearl Jam's new album isn't selling as well as their record did five years ago,' you'll see that there's a bunch of bands continuing as they have been on the independent level, on Touch and Go bands like June of 44, Delta 72... I don't think they're on Touch and Go but Tortoise... There's all these bands, and there hasn't even been a lull necessarily at that level, and there's great stuff that happening. And often the most interesting stuff is happening at that level. There's a new Fugazi record, and I'm sure there's tons of people buying that. There's a lot of really exciting stuff. Often you just have to look below the mainstream to find out what the most dynamic rock stuff is that's happening.

Fleisig: In a way, the music industry is sort of chasing its tail. It keeps looking for the next big thing, but it's so following itself. It sort of latches onto something that's sort of popular, and it makes a lot of imitators and markets a lot more imitators, and then it just sort of doesn't happen. It just keeps dwindling and getting smaller and smaller. So you have to look around that.

Temple: I think that they're claiming it's dead because on the mainstream level, there's not a lot of interesting stuff happening. I think it's pretty obvious that it's a lull, and not that it's dead, and so maybe that's just a more sensationalist way of saying that a lot new rock is kind of boring these days, which I agree with.

McCloud: Like with electronic music, which especially here in the States it seemed like it was over-written about almost. It seemed like rock critics were basically trying to find any stone untouched and be like, 'This is it,' and just kind of went a little overboard. But part of that was because, yeah, a lot of the rock music that's out there is pretty bland and a lot of it's pretty boring, and on the electronic scene, there's a lot more interesting sounds happening. There's more stuff coming out. It was exciting. There were changes. There were things happening every day and week that were enticing and intoxicating and very cool sounding. I don't think that means rock is dead. In a lot of cases a lot of this electronica stuff is feeding off of each other anyway. It's all hybrid stuff anyhow.

Fleisig: There's also a different approach to the way bands are sort of marketed and perceived. I think we no longer live in a time when you can have bands like Bruce Springsteen and the Who and like massive bands that whatever they do is amazing. There's just a much shorter attention span now. There are like a handful of bands now that are massive bands, and even they get knocked aside really quickly.

McCloud: If you think back to the times like that when rock bands were definitely making albums more than they were making just songs... and a lot of bands are certainly still making albums today... but the whole thing seems a little, at the moment, not too centralized on band's albums as it is on making isolated songs that break through. It's the kind of thing that gets attention as opposed to an album that is a work in a place and time of a group that has a has a life span that is more than six months. Right now there's not enough bands probably getting the chance to cultivate that side of themselves to survive more than one year of popularity, which is really a shame. Definitely it's like churning through people instead of like chilling out for a second.