You need to be a bit more patient. Rock music hasn't even existed a hundred years. It's easy to look at the genius' of the past and say that they did things "better," when, as you point out in your last sentence, we remember less than 1% of the musicians from the past. The Baroque and Romantic periods are separated by nearly 100 years of musical change.
I'm sure the musicians of the past weren't thinking that they were in the Baroque period, or the Classical period, or the Romantic period. They had their own genres, which nobody bothers to remember today. It's only centuries later that we can label those periods of music with broad terms like Baroque, Classical, or Romantic.
We can't judge the present with our eyes on the past, because the present can never compare to all the works of all the genius' of the past combined.
swamprat_basic
That's just it, dude. Rock music has only existed a few decades. Metal has existed for an even shorter period of time than rock has. And yet how many 'genres' do we supposedly have for these two musical styles already? History doesn't have a habit of creating more genres. Rather, it lumps similar music into broader categories, demanding significant differences between musical genres, which is exactly how it should be. In reality, there are not dozens of genres of metal. There is metal, and in the end, that's the only genre category that's going to remain - if it doesn't get lumped in with all other rock-based music, which may very well happen.
You'll also notice that my former comment about who is responsible for a genre holds true as well. The Romantic era, the CIassical era, the Baroque, the Renaissance... not one of them can be pinned on a single artist, or even a few artists. It was the combined efforts of hundreds of composers that led to these distinct musical styles, and they evolved over many decades. Sure, we can and do break down these broad categories. But never to the point where individual artists are credited with creating new genres. Really, it boils down to lumping entire nations or movements into a single genre (like calling early 20th century French music "Impressionist" for instance). And that's very much like recognizing the difference between metal and jazz, without detailing every tiny development in either genre as a new genre, right?
So it all comes back to the same thing. Crediting individual artists (or even small groups) with the creation of a new genre is silly, mainly because such a small body of composers can not hope to create a body of music that will stand up to the march of time as an independent and significant historical movement in music. In the end, our categories are much less specific, and we start talking about all the musical developments in the entire Western world that occurred over many decades as being part of one genre. And only after a lot of time has passed and a lot of evolution has occurred do people wake up and realize how little fundamental difference there really was between all these forms of music that they consider to be so different. Maybe eventually they'll realize how many fundamental similarities that such 'disparate' genres as pop, metal, jazz, rap, and rock share, and start to refer to it as one collective whole, characterized by those fundamental similarities, which are very different from the fundamental similarities of music in the distant past and in the future. That doesn't mean we can't break it down to these smaller categories (each has enough internal variety and independence to be considered a individual), but by recognizing the significant musical similarities they share, we can then start to see the development of an actual musical movement (20th century Western popular music), and that is what really deserves to be called a genre in the end.
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