The “rock is dead” argument has been bandied about frequently since Gene Simmons posed the notion in a 2014 interview, but legendary guitarist Tony Iommi isn’t quite buying that hypothesis.
The Black Sabbath guitar great was asked about the “rock is dead” debate, to which he told Consequence of Sound, “I don’t think rock is going to die. That’s been said for years. I mean, how many times I’ve heard that statement over the past 50-odd years? It’s quite a lot, really.”
Further elaborating, he continued, ”I think good music is not going to go. There’s always going to be a market for it. There are going to be an amount of bands that fall by the wayside — as there always is, there always will be. But there are certain bands that are going to stick out and going to be there. You’ve got Metallica up there — they’re not going to go away. They’ve got a lot of fans and they’ve got a great fanbase. There are a lot of bands out there. No, the music is not going to go away.”
Though Black Sabbath hung it up in 2017, Iommi has been revisiting the band’s past records of late, reissuing 1980’s Heaven and Hell and 1981’s Mob Rules from the Ronnie James Dio-fronted era of the band.