Commentary: Rock gets a pulse from a new kind of beat

The No. 1 song in the United States, according to iTunes’ singles chart and the Billboard Hot 100, is “We Are Young” by Fun., a New York-based pop-rock group with a flair for anthemic choruses and a precious approach toward typography. (Yes, the period is part of the band’s name.)

As the latest entrant in a hit parade otherwise dominated by up-tempo dance music, “We Are Young” feels pretty anomalous; it comes from a different, decidedly slower place than Rihanna’s “We Found Love” or “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO.

Yet Fun.’s chart-topping single, which began its ascent in December after a left-field rendition on “Glee,” isn’t a lone-wolf novelty tune. These aptly named guitar guys arrive at their current vantage trailed by a pack of clever young rock acts (and a few wily veteran ones) determined to enliven their moribund genre, which in 2011 contributed as little to the pop-music conversation as it ever has.

The success some of them are experiencing could be seen late last month at the Roxy in West Hollywood, where Hot Chelle Rae played a boisterous Saturday-night concert before an audience packed with screaming teenage girls. Anyone who’s taken in a show lately by Nickelback or 3 Doors Down can you tell to what degree screaming teenage girls figure into those bands’ fan bases; even hard rock’s great artistic-commercial hope, the Foo Fighters, tend to draw older, dude-centric crowds.

That wasn’t the case in the 1980s, when young women helped propel hair-metal outfits like Poison and Bon Jovi to stardom. So how is Hot Chelle Rae reengaging a once-vital demographic? In part, with sex appeal: At the Roxy, frontman Ryan Follese sauntered onstage wearing a crisp white dinner jacket, his bangs expertly tousled in a way that recalled Nick Jonas at the Jonas Brothers’ arena-filling prime. Compare that with Chris Daughtry, whose style might be described as security-guard chic.

Follese and his bandmates are also doing musical work to attract those screaming girls, though not by revisiting a proven formula. Like Fun., who hired one of Beyoncé’s producers to oversee “We Are Young,” Hot Chelle Rae retrofits its old-fashioned guitar rock with traces of fresher forms: hip-hop, electro-pop, the computerized R&B once known as new jack swing.

In the band’s Top 10 hit “Tonight Tonight,” it moves far enough away from rock that meatier heads might not even recognize it as a song in the same fist-pumping vein as “Highway to Hell”; the same goes for “Honestly,” Hot Chelle Rae’s current single, which calls to mind a boys’ version of Miley Cyrus’ indelible “Party in the U.S.A.” (As it happens, Cyrus’ brother Trace recently introduced a project, Ashland High, that zeros in on some of the same pleasure centers as Hot Chelle Rae.)

Onstage, though, Follese and guitarist Nash Overstreet — both are sons of prominent country-music songwriters — took pains to signify as rockers, peeling off guitar solos with their backs pressed against each other and introducing a version ofWeezer’s”(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To” by remembering the days they spent playing covers in deserted Nashville bars.

The presentation felt like a purposeful alignment with the kind of acts that used to populate the Roxy and its neighboring clubs on the Sunset Strip. It also reminded you of OneRepublic, the wan post-Coldplay outfit that persisted in playing rock-style concerts after scoring a radio smash in 2007 with Timbaland’s remix of “Apologize.”

That tune, with its intricate weave of sad-guy piano and future-funk groove, sounds now like a precursor to the kind of digitally enhanced guitar music proffered by Fun. and Hot Chelle Rae, as well as by other groups such as Cobra Starship and Foster the People. So does “Moves Like Jagger,” the Maroon 5 disco trifle that rebooted that pop-rock group’s career last year after a coolly received collaboration with the influential hair-metal producer Mutt Lange.

What all of this music seems to be doing is combing through rock for the useful bits and doing away with what no longer works — or at least with what no longer fulfills pop’s responsibility to embody desire, energy and a sense of humor. For diehard rock fans distrustful of the syncretic (or the synthetic), Fun.’s accomplishment with “We Are Young” may be cold comfort. But when singer Nate Ruess asks “What do I stand for?” in a Queen-inspired passage on the band’s “Some Nights” album, it’s not hard to hear the answer: He represents one way to keep rock alive.

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