Peak Rock And Roll  

TreeHugger has a post on a much discussed article at "Overthinking It" on The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs - Did Rock Music Peak Right Before Oil Did?.

What's the correlation between good, quality rock music and worldwide oil supplies? They both peaked around the same time, according to Overthinking It, and they both illustrate what occurs when you're using something up from a limited pool--crude oil stores in one case, and musical ideas in the other. Have we run out of both?

In order to make this amusing case, OI created the graph below by plugging in US domestic oil production by barrel and the songs from Rolling Stone magazine's Greatest 500 Songs of All Time feature onto the same timeline. The results show that most of the greatest rock songs were written back in the late '60s, and the concentration in quality has declined ever since. US oil production, meanwhile, was greatest in the mid '70s, and has also subsequently declined.