I'd say that of my top 100 songs, at least 80, and probably more, could be grouped into some form of rock and roll, even if I'd describe them primarily as folk-rock or emo or power pop or some other subgenre first.
As a result, I don't really think of many songs as being strictly rock, and I don't have a definition handy for what makes a song, or a band, strictly rock, other than this: The Darkness's Permission to Land is the greatest pure rock album of the 21st century.
The Darkness is about wild-ass guitar solos and drugs and sex and out-and-out hedonism such as would kill an ordinary person but only inspires the Hawkins brothers and their merry men to rise to new levels of bitchin' licks on distorted electric guitars.
I can't really break down why I love this song so much (except that Justin Hawkins says "the pursuit of" like "prosciutto") from a standpoint of music or lyrics. It's all about how this song--and the entire album it's attached to--make you feel. And it makes me feel like I'm watching someone who, as a five-year-old, said he wanted to be a dinosaur hunter when he grew up, and no matter how many people told him dinosaurs didn't exist anymore, he didn't care, and is now actually roaming the forest with a pith helmet and a comically large-caliber rifle, looking to take down a triceratops.
With Permission to Land, The Darkness achieved a feat so outrageous people usually get mocked for suggesting it. But they decided to go all-in and make sure it was impossible, before finding out that it wasn't. It's how we put a man on the moon.
