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  3. A quick glance at the Best Rock Performance category shows how withered the genre has become. David Bowie’s haunting 9-minute "B

A quick glance at the Best Rock Performance category shows how withered the genre has become. David Bowie’s haunting 9-minute "B

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问题     A quick glance at the Best Rock Performance category shows how withered the genre has become. David Bowie’s haunting 9-minute "Blackstar" took the Grammy prize with instrumentation that sounded more like anguished jazz than rock and roll. Meanwhile, none of the other four nominees were traditional rock recordings.
    Just a generation ago rock dominated the music landscape. By the 1990 Grammys, the genre was so stuffed with popular artists that there were three separate awards for Best Rock Vocal Performance—for Duo or Group, Female Performer, and Male Performer—plus additional awards for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, Best Hard Rock Performance, and Best Metal Performance.
    How has rock become so depleted? You can start by blaming the year 1991.
    Two years ago, a group of British researchers published a study that charted the evolution of music styles and timbres by looking at 17,000 songs between 1960 and 2010. Among their many findings was that the rock genre, so dominant throughout the 1970s and 1980s, took a sudden nosedive in the early 1990s. In fact, they determined that one year, 1991, marked "the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts. "
    What happened in 1991? Between 1958 and 1990, Billboard had constructed its Hot 100, the list of the country’s most popular songs, with an honor system, influenced by DJs and record store owners. But in 1991, Billboard changed its chart methodology to measure point-of-sales record data and directly monitor radio air play. This had a direct impact on the sort of music that made its way to the charts and stayed there. The classic rock and hair-band genre withered in the 1990s while hip hop and country soared up the charts. In the next 25 years, hip hop, country, and pop music have carried on mixing genres promiscuously (混杂地，杂乱的) to produce the music that currently dominates the charts.
    The recent British paper on the last half century of music found that hip hop has reigned the Billboard charts longer than any other musical style. Why might that be? In the early 1990s, some cultural critics argued that rock was qualitatively superior, because rap songs were mere "bricolage (拼凑，大杂烩)- " But it’s precisely because hip hop’s nature is to absorb other musical styles that it has proved so durably elastic.
    Today’s most popular hip hop artists sound very little like the styles that replaced rock in the pop music pantheon (万神殿) in the 1990s. They are more polyphonic (多音的；有韵律变化的) , with more diverse inspirations and richer instrumentation and production. Meanwhile, 2017’s rock sounded a lot like 1990’s rock.
According to the author, what may be the root cause for the decline of rock?
选项 A、Billboard changed its way of song-listing.
B、Cultural critics misled rock’s development.
C、Rock has stuck too much to its convention.
D、Hip hop has seized rock’s leading status.
答案C
解析 由题干中的root cause和the decline of rock可定位至第三段至最后一段。推理判断题。作者从第三段开始分析摇滚乐衰落的原因，其中第三段至第五段分析了直接原因，指出音乐排行榜的改革对音乐品鉴造成了巨大影响；而第六段和第七段分析其他乐种崛起并长期保持活力的原因，指出兼收并蓄、富于变化的音乐才能长盛不衰，而摇滚乐至今没有明显变化，故答案为C)。
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