Music of conviction and personality will always go on, but in this artistic end of days, where Jimi Hendrix is sold as nostalgia rather than art, and rock and roll, once rebellious, is so establishment that there's a Les Paul in every doctor and lawyer's closet; the music that a lot of us grew up on has been so mollified we can barely recognize it.
Rock and roll is dead. Consider this its autopsy.
Strange thing that came of this-- it made me think of a friend's declaration: "The Beatles killed rock and roll," and my response "I never really liked rock and roll, anyway." Both statements could be provably true, as long as we define our terms.
Mainly the term "Rock and Roll."
As far as I'm aware, Rock and Roll is the thing that came up with Bo Diddley, took off with Chuck Berry, and was sold to suburban America by Elvis: rhythm and blues based, obsessed with I/IV/V, backbeat, and a hooky chorus. So, the thing that is Rock and Roll was gunned down by the Beatles around the Revolver/Rubber Soul era (when they started doing away with a lot of that formalism)... though it managed to crawl to LA, to slowly bleed to death.
By the year of my birth (1974), Rock and Roll only had the barest relation to its R&B origins... if the Rolling Stones worship Robert Johnson, so be it, but the music that was subversive in my grandparents' era was the mainstream in my parents' day. By the 8os, not only was rock dead, but its reanimated corpse was wearing a lot of make-up, teasing its hair, and donning spandex.
Generally, the term Rock is applied to just about anything that has an electric guitar involved... which is fine, so long as we all agree that we aren't actually talking about "Rock and Roll" when we're using the term. The great "rock" bands today (the ones that I think are great) have nothing to do with the 40's and 50's-- even those godawful retro rock acts that had a groundswell a few years back are dedicating their lives to unartistically copying the 1970s arena stuff (from Zepplin to AC/DC: the kind of thing I just don't like. Sorry: I don't like it). Seriously, though-- even the stuff they're aiming to emulate has got nothing to do with Little Richard.
Currently "Rock and Roll" tends to be either a nostalgia act or modern corporate programming: crap like Nickleback-- a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... ad nauseum. Either way, I'm on board with Rock and Roll being dead... though I'm quite thankful that there's plenty of other music out there for the rest of us, the "music of conviction and personality" mentioned in the opening quote. I have no idea what to call any of it (though new, arbitrary names for anything we're listening to will be coined weekly by local, free papers), but it's everywhere, if you look for it.
P.S. "Pop" is not a genre. It is an abbreviation of "popular." It's only musical connotation is that it sounds like what most people are willing to buy.