Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated in the United States as "rock and roll" in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of styles from the late 50s to mid-1960s, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom. It has its roots beginning as classic rock and roll, a style that drew from the African-American musical genres of blues and rhythm and blues, as well as from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other styles. Rock is typically centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with an electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers.
Usually, rock is song-based music with a time signature and using a verse–chorus form; however, 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 1960s up 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" period, a few 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, which extended artistic elements, heavy metal, which emphasized an aggressive thick sound, and glam rock, which highlighted 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 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 and 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 the greasers in the U.S. during the 1950s to mid 1960s, with also the teddy boys 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 conformity. At the same time, it has been commercially highly successful, leading to accusations of selling out.
Characteristics
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.J.M. Curtis, Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954–1984 (Madison, WI: Popular Press, 1987), , pp. 68–73. It was also greatly influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists. The sound of an electric guitar in rock music is typically supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered jazz music in the same era,R.C. Brewer, "Bass Guitar" in , p 56. and by percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals.R. Mattingly, "Drum Set" in , p 361. 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.P. Théberge, Any Sound you can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1997), , pp. 69–70. The basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic electric blues band instrumentation (prominent lead guitar, second chordal instrument, bass, and drums). A group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock band or a rock group. 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 another instrumentalist.D. Laing, "Quartet" in , p 56.
Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple syncopated rhythms in a meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four.C. Ammer, The Facts on File Dictionary of Music (New York: Infobase, 4th edn., 2004), , pp. 351–352. Melodies often originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as the major and minor scales. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s, and particularly from the mid-1960s onwards, rock music often used the verse–refrain structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model.J. Covach, "From craft to art: formal structure in the music of the Beatles", in K. Womack and Todd F. Davis, eds, Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), , p. 40. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock.T. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock, (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), , p. xi. 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."P. Wicke, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), , p. x. In 1981, music journalist Robert Christgau said, "the best rock jolts folk-art virtues—directness, utility, natural audience—into the present with shots of modern technology".
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. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, and rhythm and blues. 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." The predominance of white, male, and often middle class musicians in rock music has often been noted, and rock has been seen as an appropriation of Black musical forms for a young, white and largely male audience.S. Waksman, Instruments of Desire: the Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), , p. 176. As a result, it has also been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression".
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. However, rock is often distanced from pop: the former has 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.T. Warner, Pop Music: Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), , pp. 3–4. According to Simon Frith, rock was "something more than pop, something more than rock and roll" and "rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and sincere".
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 the latter's history.R. Beebe, D. Fulbrook and B. Saunders, "Introduction" in R. Beebe, D. Fulbrook, B. Saunders, eds, Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), , p. 7. 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."
1940s–1950s: Birth of rock and roll
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; the genre spread to much of the rest of the world. Its origins lay in a melding of various black musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western.R. Unterberger, "Birth of Rock & Roll", in Bogdanov et al., 2002, pp. 1303–1304.
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); "That's All Right" by Arthur Crudup (1946), which was later covered by Elvis Presley in 1954; "The House of Blue Lights" by Ella Mae Morse and Freddie Slack (1946); Wynonie Harris' "Good Rocking Tonight" (1948);Will the creator of modern music please stand up? Alexis Petridis The Guardian 16 April 2004 Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" (1949);Robert Palmer, "Church of the Sonic Guitar", pp. 13–38 in Anthony DeCurtis, Present Tense, Duke University Press, 1992, p. 19. Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), also covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952; 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 Chess Records in 1951.