A type of popular music, originally called rock and roll, which spread throughout the USA and Europe in the 1950s. It began as a basically simple musical style, dominated by a strong dance beat and by the use of the electric guitar. It developed out of country and western, and more particularly from rhythm and blues - a style which previously had been played almost exclusively by US black artists. The term rock and roll was popularized by Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, who was also the first person to play rhythm and blues music to a predominantly white radio audience. The music gained widespread popularity during the late 1950s, when major artists included Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry. Primarily aimed at and enjoyed by a young audience, it became an important symbol of teenage rebellion. During the 1960s the format was expanded considerably by such artists as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, and by bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Then and since, the music has taken on a variety of outside influences, and groups have frequently expanded on the basic rock instrumentation of electric guitars, electric bass, vocals, and drums. Over the period, rock music has diversified into a distinct series of subgenres, such as hard rock, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and punk rock in the late 1970s - most of which have been characterized not only by musical differences but by their own associated features in dress, lifestyle, and (from the 1980s onwards) video publicity.
Rock is a form of popular music from the mid 20th century which typically features a vocal melody (often with vocal harmony) that is supported by accompaniment of electric guitars, a bass guitar, and drums, often with a strong back beat. Keyboard instruments such as organ, piano, or synthesizers are often used in many types of rock music. While brass and woodwind instruments, such as saxophone were common in some styles in earlier development of rock, they are less common in the newer subgenres of rock music since the 1990s. The genre of rock music is broad, and its boundaries loosely-defined, with related genres such as soul and funk sometimes being included in the definition of the term.
A major formative influence on rock was rock and roll, and rockabilly. In the 1960s, as British rock developed, the term "rock music" became popular. Rock has evolved into a multitude of highly-varying styles with widespread popularity.
Origins
Rock and Roll came from a fusion of musical cultures, and in turn its influence fed back to these cultures, a process of borrowings, influences that continues to develop rock music. Its success led to a dilution of the meaning of the term "rock and roll", as promoters were quick to attach the label to other commercial pop. While these key early rockers were indisposed to racism, local authorities and dance halls were very much divided upon racial lines.
Mainstream acceptance of rock and roll came in the mid-1950s when what Bo Diddley describes as 'ofay dudes' (or Caucasians) signed to major labels and started covering their material.
Towards the end of the 1950s "chessboard" crowds (both black and white patrons) would emerge at Rock and Roll concerts as fans discovered the original artists of the songs they knew from television and the radio, such as Little Richard's Tutti Frutti. The genre ignited British enthusiasm for rhythm and blues and the development of British rock.
Surf music
The rockabilly sound influenced the West Coast development of a wild, mostly instrumental sound called surf music, though surf culture saw itself as a competing youth culture to Rock and Roll.
British rock
In the United Kingdom the Trad jazz movement brought visiting blues music artists to Britain. 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, including John Lennon's The Quarry Men, the 1957 precursor to The Beatles. Britain developed a major rock and roll scene, without the race barriers which kept "race records" or Rhythm and Blues separate in the U.S.
Cliff Richard had the first British rock 'n' roll hit with "Move It", effectively ushering in the sound of British rock. And while Rock 'n' Roll was fading into lightweight pop and schmaltzy ballads, at clubs and local dances British rock groups were starting to play with an intensity and drive seldom found in white American acts, heavily influenced by Blues-rock pioneers like Alexis Korner.
By the end of 1962, the British rock scene had started, with groups drawing on a wide range of American influences including soul music, rhythm and blues and surf music. These groups eventually infused their original rock compositions with increasingly complex musical ideas. Towards the end of the decade, British rock groups began to explore Psychedelic musical styles that made reference to the drug subculture and hallucinogenic experiences.
1960s garage rock
The British Invasion spawned a wave of imitators that played mainly to local audiences and made inexpensive recordings, a movement later called Garage Rock.
Development of a counterculture (1963-1974)
In the late 1950s the US Beatnik counterculture was associated with the wider anti-war movement building against the threat of the atomic bomb, notably CND in Britain.
Bob Dylan and folk rock
The folk scene had strong links between Britain and America.
The Byrds, playing Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man, helped to start the trend of Folk rock, and helped to stimulate the development of Psychedelic rock. Neil Young's lyrical inventiveness and wailing electric guitar attack created a variation of folk rock. Other folk rock artists include Simon &
In Britain, Fairport Convention began applying rock techniques to traditional British folk songs, followed by groups such as Steeleye Span, Lindisfarne, Pentangle, and Trees.
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelia began in the folk scene, with the Holy Modal Rounders introducing the term in 1964.
The Fillmore was a regular venue for groups like another former jug band, Country Joe and the Fish, and Jefferson Airplane.
In Britain, Pink Floyd had been developing psychedelic rock since 1965 in the underground culture scene. From a blues rock background, the British supergroup Cream debuted in December, and Jimi Hendrix became popular in Britain before returning to the US.
The culmination of rock and roll as a socially-unifying force was seen in the rock festivals of the late '60s, the most famous of which was Woodstock which began as a three-day arts and music festival and turned into a "happening", as hundreds of thousands of youthful fans converged on the site. It is considered as the most important festival in rock history, and it was headlined by Jimi Hendrix who played anti-vietnamwar songs.
Progressive rock
The music itself broadened past the guitar-bass-drum format;
Dabbling heavily in classical, jazz, electronic, and experimental music resulted in what would be called progressive rock (or, in its German wing, krautrock). Progressive rock could be lush and beautiful or atonal and dissonant, highly complex or minimalist, sometimes all within the same song. At times it was hardly recognizable as rock at all.
German prog
In the mid-1960s, American and British rock entered Germany, especially British progressive rock bands. At the time, the musical avant-garde in Germany were playing a kind of electronic classical music, and they adapted the then-revolutionary electronic instruments for a progressive-psychedelic rock sound.
Italian prog
In Italy progressive rock had a great success in the 1970s and some bands played prog at the same level of the more famous American groups and went on tour in the States. Some Italian progressive rock bands were Premiata Forneria Marconi, Le Orme, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso and Area International Popular Group.
Birth of heavy metal
A second wave of British bands and artists gained great popularity during this period. Guitar-driven acts such as Cream and Led Zeppelin were early examples of this blues-rock form as well as heavier rock bands including Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Noted rock critic Lester Bangs is generally accepted as being the first journalist to use the label in print.
1970s rock genres
Arena rock
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who began the practice of live performances for large audiences in stadiums and arenas. The growing popularity of metal and progressive rock led to more bands selling out large venues. Entertainment companies marketed a series of arena rock bands, such as: Journey, Boston, Styx and Foreigner. The "arena rock" movement became a precursor to the power pop of future decades.
Soft rock
Rock music had a short-lived "bubble gum pop" era, of soft rock, including groups such as The Partridge Family, The Cowsills, The Osmonds, and The Archies. Other bands or artists added more orchestration and created a popular genre known as soft rock. Other well-known artists performing soft rock included Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand.
Rock crosses borders
In the early 1970s, Mexican singer Rigo Tovar took the musical elements of rock melody and blues and fused it with cumbia, and tropical music. He was one of the early Mexican artists to use the rock and roll image (e.g.
Disco, punk and New Wave (1973-1981)
Disco
While Funk music had been part of the rock and roll scene in the early 1970s, it would eventually give way to more accessible songs with a danceable beat.
The group most associated with the Disco era was The Bee Gees, whose music for the 1977 Paramount film Saturday Night Fever marked the pinnacle of the era. Many mainstream rock acts, including the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Queen (Another One Bites The Dust) and even the Grateful Dead, incorporated disco beats into their releases in attempts to keep up with the trend; many rock radio stations began to adopt all-disco formats.
But by the end of the 1970s an anti-disco backlash occurred as, in the rush to capitalize on the popular format, the overall quality of disco music began to fall and as rock fans reacted to the perceived loss of traditional rock outlets in favor of disco.
Punk rock
Punk rock started off as a reaction to the lush, producer-driven sounds of disco, and against the perceived commercialism of progressive rock that had become arena rock. Early punk borrowed heavily from the garage band ethic: played by bands for which expert musicianship was not a requirement, punk was stripped-down, three-chord music that could be played easily.
Punk developed as more than an aesthetic movement in America, with artists Richard Hell, Television (with whom Hell briefly played), Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads and others of CBGB's taking the stage and changing music for years.
As the Pistols toured America, they spread their music as the first wave of Punk had been spread in theirs.
It was also through punk, and to an extent, New Wave, that Australia made its first major impacts on the global popular music scene. Bubbling beneath the surface, however, was a group of pioneering bands like the surf band The Atlantics, but it was not until the late 1970s, with acts like The Birthday Party, INXS, SPK, and Midnight Oil offering an energetic experimentalism that the country's role in pop music became manifest.
New Wave and post-punk
Punk rock attracted devotees from the art and collegiate world and soon bands sporting a more literate, arty approach, such as the Talking Heads and Devo, began to infiltrate the punk scene;
If punk rock was a social and musical phenomenon, it garnered little in the way of record sales (small specialty labels such as Stiff Records had released much of the punk music to date) or American radio airplay, as the radio scene continued to be dominated by mainstream formats such as disco and album-oriented rock. Record executives, who had been mostly mystified by the punk movement, recognized the potential of the more accessible New Wave acts and began aggressively signing and marketing any band that could claim a remote connection to punk or New Wave. Many of these bands, such as The Cars and The Go-Go's were essentially pop bands dressed up in New Wave regalia;
Between 1982 and 1985, influenced by Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, New Wave went in the direction of such New Romantics as Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Psychedelic Furs, Talk Talk and the Eurythmics, sometimes using the synthesizer entirely in place of other instruments. Although many "Greatest of New Wave" collections feature popular songs from this era, New Wave more properly refers to the earlier "skinny tie" rock bands such as The Knack or Blondie.
Alongside New Wave, post-punk developed as an outgrowth of punk rock. Predominantly a British phenomenon, the genre continued into the 1980s with some commercial exposure domestically and overseas, but the most successful band to emerge from post-punk was Ireland's U2, which by the 1980s had become one of the biggest bands in the world.
Rock diversifies in the 1980s
In the 1980s, popular rock diversified. The early part of the decade saw Eddie Van Halen achieve musical innovations in rock guitar, while vocalists David Lee Roth (of Van Halen) and Freddie Mercury (of Queen as he had been doing throughout the 1970s) raised the role of frontman to near performance art standards. American heartland rock gained a strong following, exemplified by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, John (Cougar) Mellencamp and others. Led by the American folk singer-songwriter Paul Simon and the British former prog rock star Peter Gabriel, rock and roll fused with a variety of folk music styles from around the world; this fusion came to be known as "world music", and included fusions like Aboriginal rock.
Hard rock, glam metal and instrumental rock
See also: Hard rock, Heavy metal music, and Instrumental rockHeavy metal languished in obscurity until the mid- or late 1970s. A few hard rock bands maintained large followings, like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and there were occasional mainstream hits, like Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper". However this changed in 1978 with the release of the hard rock band Van Halen's eponymous debut, which ushered in an era of widely popular, high-energy rock and roll, based out of Los Angeles, California.
The most popular rock genre of the 1980s, was that of group of glam metal.
By the mid 1980s, a formula developed in which a glam metal band had two hits -- one a "power ballad" (slow-dance tempo, but just as loud and driving as anything else by the group), and the other a hard-rocking anthem. Until glam metal's demise in the early-1990s, Guns N' Roses were hard rock's standard-bearers, and influenced its sound by incorporating influences from punk rock, and blues.
Instrumental Rock was also popularised during this period with Joe Satriani's release of "Surfing with the Alien".
Alternative music and the indie movement
The term alternative music (also often known as alternative rock) was coined in the early 1980s to describe bands which didn't fit into the mainstream genres of the time. Notable styles of alternative rock during the 80s include jangle pop, gothic rock, college rock, and indie rock. The next decade would see the success of grunge in the US and Britpop in the UK, bringing alternative rock into the mainstream.
Alternative goes mainstream (the 1990s)
Grunge
By the late 1980s rock radio was dominated by hard rock artists, slick and glam metal; Disaffected by this, some young musicians began to reject glam metal and arena rock, created instead angst-ridden music.
A few grunge bands, such as Mudhoney and early Nirvana, were very much inspired by garage rock/punk rock.
Nirvana whetted the public's appetite for more direct rock music, leading to the success of bands like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden who took a somewhat more traditional rock approach than other grunge bands but shared their passion and rawness. many artists who were similarly disaffected with commercial rock music suddenly found record companies and audiences willing to listen, and dozens of disparate acts positioned themselves as alternatives to mainstream music; thus alternative rock emerged from the underground.
By 1994 grunge rock and its bands had become some of the most famous bands and genre of the 20th centry.
Britpop
While America was full of grunge, post-grunge, and hip hop, Britain launched a 1960s revival in the mid-90s, often called Britpop, with bands like Suede, Oasis, The Verve, Radiohead, Pulp and Blur. These bands drew on myriad styles from the 80s British rock underground, including twee pop, shoegazing and space rock as well as traditional British guitar influences like the Beatles and glam rock. with their progressive rock music, manifested in Radiohead's most famous album, OK Computer. These bands became very successful, and for a time Oasis was given the title "the biggest band in the world" thanks to an album selling some 14 million copies worldwide but slowed down after band breakups, publicity disasters in the United States and slightly less popular support.
Indie rock
By the mid-90s, the term "alternative music" had lost much of its original meaning as rock radio and record buyers embraced increasingly slick, commercialized, and highly marketed forms of the genre. At the end of the decade, hip hop music had pushed much of alternative rock out of the mainstream, and most of what was left played pop-punk and highly polished versions of a grunge/rock mishmash.
Many acts that, by choice or fate, remained outside the commercial mainstream became part of the indie rock movement. Indie rock acts placed a premium on maintaining complete control of their music and careers, often releasing albums on their own independent record labels and relying on touring, word-of-mouth, and airplay on independent or college radio stations for promotion. Linked by an ethos more than a musical approach, the indie rock movement encompasses a wide range of styles, from hard-edged, grunge influenced bands like Superchunk to do-it-yourself experimental bands like Pavement to punk-folk singers such as Ani DiFranco.
Currently, many countries have an extensive local indie scene, flourishing with bands with much less popularity than commercial bands, just enough of it to survive inside the respective country, but virtually unknown outside them.
Stoner rock
With some influences of Psychedelic Rock and riff orientated structure of early Heavy Metal, stoner rock emerged in the late 1980s. Characterised by sludgy sounding, heavily distorted amps and detuned guitars, stoner rock tries to simulate the experience of an LSD trip or smoking marijuana. Many stoner rock bands can often play one song for up to 20 minutes with incredible variation in emotion, speed and genre.
Stoner rock remains exclusive to the independent recording industry, with few mainstream exceptions.
Post-grunge and pop punk (1995-2000)
With the death of Kurt Cobain, rock and roll music searched for a new face, sound, and trend. A second wave of alternative rock bands began to become popular, with grunge declining in the mid-90s. Green Day, Foo Fighters, Radiohead, and Creed spearheaded rock radio, and 311 and Rage Against the Machine brought a fresh rap/rock hybrid sound. The success of Jagged Little Pill spawned a wave of popularity in the late 90s of confessional rock releases by female artists including Jewel, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Liz Phair. Many of these artists drew on their own alternative rock heroes from the 1980s and early 90s, including the folksy Tracy Chapman and various Riot Grrrl bands. The use of introspective lyrics bled into other styles of rock, including those dubbed alternative.
Present day (2000-Present)
In the early 2000s the entire music industry was shaken by claims of massive theft of music rights using file-sharing tools such as Napster, resulting in lawsuits against private file-sharers by the recording industry group the RIAA.
After existing in the musical underground, garage rock saw a resurgence of popularity in the early 2000s, with the garage rock revival. Currently popular rock trends include a style of pop-punk that is often referred to as emo (though some disagree with that label), which draws its style from softer punk and alternative rock styles from the 1980s. however, this subgenre has come to be frequently maligned by many rock enthusiasts.
The biggest factor that has contributed to the resurgence of rock music is the rise of paid digital downloads in the 2000s.
Meanwhile, "Top 40" music today is largely dependent on either synthesizer orchestration or sampling, prominent in such pop artists like Gwen Stefani, Ashlee Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson.
During much of the 2000s, hip hop music dominated the US single charts, with artists such as 50 cent, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Nelly, Eminem and Jay Z. R&B acts like Mariah Carey , Usher and Alicia Keys are very popular on the pop charts, although with the exception of Carey, none of these acts, rap or R&B, sell as many albums as rock did. Nearly all of the best selling albums of all time are still rock.
In many other nations, such as the UK and Australia, rock figures much more prominently in album sales than in the US. American bands such as The White Stripes, The Killers and The Strokes have more success in the UK than in the USA, and British bands such as The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Coldplay, Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, Gorillaz, and Arctic Monkeys are still the UK's biggest selling artists. Australia enjoys a thriving modern rock scene, home to successful modern rock acts such as Eskimo Joe, Tenpenny Joke and Wolfmother.
Social impacts
The influence of rock and roll is far-reaching, and has had significant impact worldwide on fashion, film styles, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality and use of drugs and alcohol. This impact is broad enough that "rock and roll" may also be considered a life style in addition to a form of music.
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