Rock music
Broad genre of popular music / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Rock is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles from the mid-1960s, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom.[3] It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the blues and rhythm and blues genres of African-American music and from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a 4
4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political. Rock was the most popular genre of music in the U.S. and much of the Western world from the 1950s to the 2010s.
Rock musicians in the mid-1960s began to advance the album ahead of the single as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, with the Beatles at the forefront of this development. Their contributions lent the genre a cultural legitimacy in the mainstream and initiated a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. By the late 1960s "classic rock"[3] period, a number of distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, and jazz rock, which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene. New genres that emerged included progressive rock with extended artistic elements, glam rock, highlighting showmanship and visual style. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock.
From the 1990s, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal. Some movements were conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk revival in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture, but remains commercially successful. The increased influence of hip-hop and electronic dance music can be seen in rock music, notably in the techno-pop scene of the early 2010s and the pop-punk-hip-hop revival of the 2020s.
Rock has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the U.K., the hippie movement and the wider Western counterculture movement that spread out from San Francisco in the U.S. in the 1960s, the latter of which continues to this day. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the goth, punk, and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex, and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity. At the same time, it has been commercially highly successful, leading to charges of selling out.
A good definition of rock, in fact, is that it's popular music that to a certain degree doesn't care if it's popular.
—Bill Wyman in Vulture (2016)[4]
The sound of rock is traditionally centered on the amplified electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularity of rock and roll.[5] It was also greatly influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists.[6] The sound of an electric guitar in rock music is typically supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered in jazz music in the same era,[7] and by percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals.[8] This trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, and the synthesizer.[9] The basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic blues band instrumentation (prominent lead guitar, second chordal instrument, bass, and drums).[6] A group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock band or a rock group. Furthermore, it typically consists of between three (the power trio) and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist, drummer, and often keyboard player or other instrumentalist.[10]
Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple syncopated rhythms in a 4
4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four.[11] Melodies often originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions.[11] Since the late 1950s,[12] and particularly from the mid-1960s onwards, rock music often used the verse–chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model.[13] Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock.[14] Because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that "it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition."[15] In the opinion of music journalist Robert Christgau, "the best rock jolts folk-art virtues—directness, utility, natural audience—into the present with shots of modern technology and modernist dissociation".[16]
Rock and roll was conceived as an outlet for adolescent yearnings ... To make rock and roll is also an ideal way to explore intersections of sex, love, violence, and fun, to broadcast the delights and limitations of the regional, and to deal with the depredations and benefits of mass culture itself.
—Robert Christgau in Christgau's Record Guide (1981)[17]
Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, sex, rebellion against "The Establishment", social concerns, and life styles.[11] These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, and rhythm and blues.[18] Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a "cool medium" with simple diction and repeated refrains, and asserts that rock's primary "function" "pertains to music, or, more generally, noise."[19] The predominance of white, male, and often middle class musicians in rock music has often been noted,[20] and rock has been seen as an appropriation of Black musical forms for a young, white and largely male audience.[21] As a result, it has also been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics.[22] Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression".[23]
Since the term "rock" started being used in preference to "rock and roll" from the late-1960s, it has usually been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics, but from which it is often distanced by an emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and a focus on serious and progressive themes as part of an ideology of authenticity that is frequently combined with an awareness of the genre's history and development.[24] According to Simon Frith, rock was "something more than pop, something more than rock and roll" and "[r]ock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and sincere".[24]
In the new millennium, the term rock has occasionally been used as a blanket term including forms like pop music, reggae music, soul music, and even hip hop, which it has been influenced with but often contrasted through much of its history.[25] Christgau has used the term broadly to refer to popular and semipopular music that caters to his sensibility as "a rock-and-roller", including a fondness for a good beat, a meaningful lyric with some wit, and the theme of youth, which holds an "eternal attraction" so objective "that all youth music partakes of sociology and the field report." Writing in Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), he said this sensibility is evident in the music of folk singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked, rapper LL Cool J, and synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys—"all kids working out their identities"—as much as it is in the music of Chuck Berry, the Ramones, and the Replacements.[26]
Rock and roll
The foundations of rock music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and quickly spread to much of the rest of the world. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western.[27]
Debate surrounds the many recordings which have been suggested as "the first rock and roll record". Contenders include "Strange Things Happening Every Day" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1944);[28] "The House of Blue Lights" by Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack (1946);[29] Wynonie Harris' "Good Rocking Tonight" (1948);[30] Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" (1949);[31] Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), which was later covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952;[32] and "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (in fact, Ike Turner and his band the Kings of Rhythm), recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in 1951.[33]
In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music (then termed "race music") for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music.[34] Four years later, Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" (1954) became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture.[35][36] Other artists with early rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Gene Vincent.[33] Soon rock and roll was the major force in American record sales and crooners, such as Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and Patti Page, who had dominated the previous decade of popular music, found their access to the pop charts significantly curtailed.[37]
Rock and roll has been seen as leading to a number of distinct subgenres, including rockabilly, combining rock and roll with "hillbilly" country music, which was usually played and recorded in the mid-1950s by white singers such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and with the greatest commercial success, Elvis Presley.[38] Hispanic and Latino American movements in rock and roll, which would eventually lead to the success of Latin rock and Chicano rock within the US, began to rise in the Southwest; with rock and roll standard musician Ritchie Valens and even those within other heritage genres, such as Al Hurricane along with his brothers Tiny Morrie and Baby Gaby as they began combining rock and roll with country-western within traditional New Mexico music.[39] Other styles like doo-wop placed an emphasis on multi-part vocal harmonies and backing lyrics (from which the genre later gained its name), which were usually supported with light instrumentation and had its origins in 1930s and 1940s African American vocal groups.[40] Acts like the Crows, the Penguins, the El Dorados and the Turbans all scored major hits, and groups like the Platters, with songs including "The Great Pretender" (1955),[41] and the Coasters with humorous songs like "Yakety Yak" (1958),[42] ranked among the most successful rock and roll acts of the period.[43]
The era also saw the growth in popularity of the electric guitar, and the development of a specifically rock and roll style of playing through such exponents as Chuck Berry, Link Wray, and Scotty Moore.[44] The use of distortion, pioneered by Western swing guitarists such as Junior Barnard[45] and Eldon Shamblin was popularized by Chuck Berry in the mid-1950s.[46] The use of power chords, pioneered by Francisco Tárrega and Heitor Villa-Lobos in the 19th century and later on by Willie Johnson and Pat Hare in the early 1950s, was popularized by Link Wray in the late 1950s.[47]
Commentators have traditionally perceived a decline of rock and roll in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1959, the death of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a plane crash, the departure of Elvis for the army, the retirement of Little Richard to become a preacher, prosecutions of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and the breaking of the payola scandal (which implicated major figures, including Alan Freed, in bribery and corruption in promoting individual acts or songs), gave a sense that the rock and roll era established at that point had come to an end.[48]
Global spread
Rock quickly spread out from its origins in the US, associated with the rapid Americanization that was taking place globally in the aftermath of World War Two.[49] Cliff Richard is credited with one of the first rock and roll hits outside of North America with "Move It", effectively ushering in the sound of British rock.[50] Several artists, most prominently Tommy Steele from the UK, found success with covers of major American rock and roll hits before the recordings could spread internationally, often translating them into local languages where appropriate.[51][52] Steele in particular toured Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, the USSR and South Africa from 1955 to 1957, influencing the globalisation of rock.[51] By the late 1950s, as well as in the American-influenced Western world, rock was popular in communist states such as Yugoslavia,[53] and the USSR,[54] as well as in regions such as South America.[52]
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American blues music and blues rock artists, who had been surpassed by the rise of rock and roll in the US, found new popularity in the UK, visiting with successful tours.[55] Lonnie Donegan's 1955 hit "Rock Island Line" was a major influence and helped to develop the trend of skiffle music groups throughout the country, many of which, including John Lennon's Quarrymen (later the Beatles), moved on to play rock and roll.[56] While rock and roll in the US was becoming dominated by lightweight pop and ballads, British rock groups at clubs and local dances were developing a style more strongly influenced by blues-rock pioneers, and were starting to play with an intensity and drive seldom found in white American acts;[57] this influence would go on to shape the future of rock music through the British Invasion.[55]
Pop rock and instrumental rock
The term pop has been used since the early 20th century to refer to popular music in general, but from the mid-1950s it began to be used for a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll.[58][59] From about 1967, it was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, to describe a form that was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible.[24] In contrast rock music was seen as focusing on extended works, particularly albums, was often associated with particular sub-cultures (like the counterculture of the 1960s), placed an emphasis on artistic values and "authenticity", stressed live performance and instrumental or vocal virtuosity and was often seen as encapsulating progressive developments rather than simply reflecting existing trends.[24][58][59][60] Nevertheless, much pop and rock music has been very similar in sound, instrumentation and even lyrical content.[nb 1]
The period of the later 1950s and early 1960s has traditionally been seen as an era of hiatus for rock and roll.[64] More recently some authors[weasel words] have emphasised important innovations and trends in this period without which future developments would not have been possible.[65][66] While early rock and roll, particularly through the advent of rockabilly, saw the greatest commercial success for male and white performers, in this era, the genre was dominated by black and female artists. Rock and roll had not disappeared at the end of the 1950s and some of its energy can be seen in the Twist dance craze of the early 1960s, mainly benefiting the career of Chubby Checker.[66][nb 2]
Also significant was the advent of soul music as a major commercial force. Developing out of rhythm and blues with a re-injection of gospel music and pop, led by pioneers like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke from the mid-1950s,[69] by the early 1960s figures like Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder were dominating the R&B charts and breaking through into the main pop charts, helping to accelerate their desegregation, while Motown and Stax/Volt Records were becoming major forces in the record industry.[70][nb 3] Some music historians have also pointed to important and innovative technical developments that built on rock and roll in this period, including the electronic treatment of sound by such innovators as Joe Meek, and the elaborate production methods of the Wall of Sound pursued by Phil Spector.[66]