From the Liner Notes of Joe Jackson's album Beat Crazy

Christ, I don’t know. Why the hell not? It worked for the Visigoths, didn’t it? What else were we going to do with the money?

It’s a weird question, and not just because Joe Jackson made some passable, even really good, stabs at rock and roll in his early days. It’s the idea that anyone had expectations from an accidental collision of spores, mucous and electrical currents. Certainly people attempted to appropriate rock and roll for their own purposes, be they ditzy peace-nicking, conveying loftier artistic ambitions, or making nihilism seductive. But did it arrive with a thesis statement or user’s manual?

The thin disguise of Jackson’s royal “we” is misleading, too. Clearly he knew it was doomed to failure (so why’d he make Look Sharp?) and he questioned his own efforts to imbue it with “some sense” (did anyone think it possible?). Chalk me up, not to the community bewailing the failure of tangible results in the propagation of rock and roll (I don’t even capitalize it like he does), but as the type who expects the same thing from rock as he does from jazz, R&B, hip hop, toaster pastries, and being stuffed in the trunk of a Chrysler. 

That said, rock and roll did, in fact, fail.

Well, more specifically, it developed a shelf life. It won’t last forever. I thought the new Drive-By Truckers record might have bought it more time but I’m not sure how much. But don’t feel bad. Everything has a shelf life. That doesn’t mean it goes away. “The end” has come for many styles. It came for baroque music too, but you still hear Pachelbel’s Canon every fucking time a car company wants to sell you peace of mind, don’t you?

Anyway: Jackson stopped doing rock and roll, made a great album called Night and Day that replaced guitars with Latin percussion, made some OK records using alternate production processes that were supposed to be significant, then went back to rock and roll. There’s no easy divorce from that strumpet.