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Main Entry: 2rock
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Date: 1823
1 : a rocking movement
2 : popular music usually played on electronically amplified
instruments and characterized by a persistent heavily accented beat, much
repetition of simple phrases, and often country, folk, and blues elements
Main Entry: rock and roll
Function: noun
Date: 1954
: 2ROCK2
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
ROCK, also called ROCK AND ROLL, ROCK ROLL, or ROCK 'N' ROLL form of popular
music that emerged in the 1950s.
It is certainly arguable that by the end of the 20th century rock was the
world's dominant form of popular music. Originating in the United States in the
1950s, it spread to English-speaking countries and across Europe in the '60s,
and by the '90s its impact was obvious globally (if in many different local
guises). Rock's commercial importance was by then reflected in the organization
of the multinational recording industry, in the sales racks of international
record retailers, and in the playlist policies of music radio and television.
If other kinds of music--classical, jazz, easy listening, country, folk,
etc.--are marketed as minority interests, rock defines the musical mainstream.
And so over the last half of the 20th century it became the most inclusive of
musical labels--everything can be "rocked"--and in consequence the
hardest to define. To answer the question What is rock? one first has to
understand where it came from and what made it possible. And to understand rock's
cultural significance one has to understand how it works socially as well as
musically.
1. What is rock?
The difficulty of definition
Dictionary definitions of rock are problematic, not least because the term
has different resonance in its British and American usages (the latter is
broader in compass). There is basic agreement that rock "is a form of
music with a strong beat," but it is difficult to be much more explicit.
The Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, based on a vast database of
British usage, suggests that "rock is a kind of music with simple tunes
and a very strong beat that is played and sung, usually loudly, by a small
group of people with electric guitars and drums," but there are so many
exceptions to this description that it is practically useless.
Legislators seeking to define rock for regulatory purposes have not done
much better. The Canadian government defined "rock and rock-oriented
music" as "characterized by a strong beat, the use of blues forms and
the presence of rock instruments such as electric guitar, electric bass,
electric organ or electric piano." This assumes that rock can be marked
off from other sorts of music formally, according to its sounds. In practice,
though, the distinctions that matter for rock fans and musicians have been
ideological. Rock was developed as a term to distinguish certain
music-making and listening practices from those associated with pop; what was
at issue was less a sound than an attitude. In 1990 British legislators defined
pop music as "all kinds of music characterized by a strong rhythmic
element and a reliance on electronic amplification for their performance."
This led to strong objections from the music industry that such a definition
failed to appreciate the clear sociological difference between pop
("instant singles-based music aimed at teenagers") and rock
("album-based music for adults"). In pursuit of definitional clarity,
the lawmakers misunderstood what made rock music matter.
Crucial rock musicians
For lexicographers and legislators alike, the purpose of definition is to
grasp a meaning, to hold it in place, so that people can use a word
correctly--for example, to assign a track to its proper radio outlet (rock,
pop, country, jazz). The trouble is that the term rock describes an
evolving musical practice informed by a variety of nonmusical arguments (about
creativity, sincerity, commerce, and popularity). It makes more sense, then, to
approach the definition of rock historically, with examples. The following
musicians were crucial to rock's history. What do they have in common?
Elvis Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee,
personified a new form of American popular music in the mid-1950s. Rock and
roll was a guitar-based sound with a strong (if loose) beat that drew equally
on African-American and white traditions from the southern United States, on
blues, church music, and country music. Presley's rapid rise to national
stardom revealed the new cultural and economic power of both teenagers and
teen-aimed media--records, radio, television, and motion pictures.
The Beatles, from Liverpool, England (via Hamburg, Germany), personified a
new form of British popular music in the 1960s. Mersey beat was a British take
on the black and white musical mix of rock and roll: a basic lineup of lead
guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and drums (with shared vocals) provided
local live versions of American hit records of all sorts. The Beatles added to
this an artistic self-consciousness, soon writing their own songs and using the
recording studio to develop their own--rather than a commercial
producer's--musical ideas. The group's unprecedented success in the United
States ensured that rock would be an Anglo-American phenomenon.
Bob Dylan, from Hibbing, Minnesota (via New York City), personified a new
form of American music in the mid-1960s. Dylan brought together the amplified
beat of rock and roll, the star imagery of pop, the historical and political
sensibility of folk, and--through the wit, ambition, and obscurity of his
lyrics--the arrogance of urban bohemia. He gave the emerging rock scene
artistic weight (his was album, not Top 40, music) and a new account of youth
as an ideological rather than a demographic category.
Jimi Hendrix, from Seattle, Washington (via London), personified the
emergence of rock as a specific musical genre in the late 1960s. Learning his
trade as a guitarist in rhythm-and-blues bands and possessing a jazzman's
commitment to collective improvisation, he came to fame leading a trio in
London and exploring the possibilities of the amplifier as a musical instrument
in the recording studio and on the concert stage. Hendrix established
versatility and technical skill as a norm for rock musicianship and gave shape
to a new kind of event: the outdoor festival and stadium concert, in which the
noise of the audience became part of the logic of the music.
Bob Marley from Kingston, Jamaica (via London), personified a new kind of
global popular music in the 1970s. Marley and his group, the Wailers, combined
sweet soul vocals inspired by Chicago groups such as the Impressions with rock
guitar, a reggae beat, and Rastafarian mysticism. Marley's commercial success
established Jamaica as a major source of international talent, leaving a reggae
imprint not just on Western rock but also on local music makers in Africa,
Asia, and Australia.
Madonna, from suburban Detroit, Michigan (via New York City), personified a
new sort of global teen idol in the 1980s. She combined the sounds and
technical devices of the New York City disco-club scene New York City disco-club
scene with the new sales and image-making opportunities offered by video
promotion--primarily by Music Television (MTV), the music-based cable
television service. As a star Madonna had it both ways: she was at once a
knowing American feminist artist and a global sales icon for the likes of
Pepsi-Cola.
Public Enemy, from New York City, personified a new sort of African-American
music in the late 1980s. Rap, the competitive use of rhyming lines spoken over
an ever-more-challenging rhythmic base, had a long history in African-American
culture; however, it came to musical prominence as part of the hip-hop
movement. Public Enemy used new digital technology to sample (use excerpts from
other recordings) and recast the urban soundscape from the perspective of
African-American youth. This was music that was at once sharply attuned to
local political conditions and resonant internationally. By the mid-1990s rap
had become an expressive medium for minority social groups around the world.
What does this version of rock's history--from Presley to Public
Enemy--reveal? First, that rock is so broad a musical category that in practice
people organize their tastes around more focused genre labels: the young
Presley was a rockabilly, the Beatles a pop group, Dylan a folkie, Madonna a
disco diva, Marley and the Wailers a reggae act, and Public Enemy rappers. Even
Hendrix, the most straightforward rock star on this list, also has a place in
the histories of rhythm and blues and jazz. In short, while all these musicians
played a significant part in the development of rock, they did so by using
different musical instruments and textures, different melodic and rhythmic
principles, different approaches to song words and performing conventions.
Musical eclecticism and the use of technology
Even from a musicological point of view, any account of rock has to start
with its eclecticism. Beginning with the mix of country and blues that
comprised rock and roll (rock's first incarnation), rock has been essentially a
hybrid form. African-American musics were at the centre of this mix, but rock
resulted from what white musicians, with their own folk histories and pop
conventions, did with African-American music--and with issues of race and race
relations.
Rock's musical eclecticism reflects (and is reflected in) the geographic
mobility of rock musicians, back and forth across the United States, over the
Atlantic Ocean, and throughout Europe. Presley was unique as a rock star who
did not move away from his roots; Hendrix was more typical in his restlessness.
And if rock and roll had rural origins, the rock audience was from the start
urban, an anonymous crowd seeking an idealized sense of community and
sociability in dance halls and clubs, on radio stations, and in headphones.
Rock's central appeal as a popular music has been its ability to provide
globally an intense experience of belonging, whether to a local scene or a
subculture. Rock history can thus be organized around both the sound of cities
(Philadelphia and Detroit, New York City and San Francisco, Liverpool and
Manchester) and the spread of youth cults (rock and roll, heavy metal, punk,
and grunge).
Rock is better defined, then, by its eclecticism than by reference to some
musical essence, and it is better understood in terms of its general use of
technology rather than by its use of particular instruments (such as the
guitar). Early rock-and-roll stars such as Presley and Buddy Holly depended for
their sound on engineers' trickery in the recording studio as much as they did
on their own vocal skills, and the guitar became the central rock instrument
because of its amplified rather than acoustic qualities. Rock's history is tied
up with technological shifts in the storage, retrieval, and transmission of
sounds: multitrack tape recording made possible an experimental composition
process that turned the recording studio into an artist's studio; digital
recording made possible a manipulation of sound that shifted the boundaries
between music and noise. Rock musicians pushed against the technical limits of
sound amplification and inspired the development of new electronic instruments,
such as the drum machine. Even relatively primitive technologies, such as the
double-deck turntable, were tools for new sorts of music making in the hands of
the "scratch" deejay, and one way rock marked itself off from other
popular musical forms was in its constant pursuit of new sounds and new sound
devices.
Rock and youth culture
This pursuit of the new can be linked to rock's central sociological
characteristic, its association with youth. In the 1950s and early 1960s this
was a simple market equation: rock and roll was played by young musicians for
young audiences and addressed young people's interests (quick sex and puppy
love). It was therefore dismissed by many in the music industry as a passing
novelty, "bubblegum," akin to the yo-yo or the hula hoop. But by the
mid-1960s youth had become an ideological category that referred to a
particular kind of hedonism, individualism, and modernism. Whereas youth
once referred to high-school students, it came to include college students.
Moreover, rock became multifunctional--dance and party music on the one hand, a
matter of serious attention and intimate expression on the other. As rock
spread globally this had different implications in different countries, but in
general it allowed rock to continue to define itself as youthful even as its
performers and listeners grew up and settled down. And it meant that rock's
radical claim--the suggestion that the music remained somehow against the
establishment even as it became part of it--was sustained by an adolescent
irresponsibility, a commitment to the immediate thrills of sex 'n' drugs 'n'
outrage and never mind the consequences. The politics of rock fun has its own
power structure, and it is not, perhaps, surprising that Madonna was the first
woman to make a significant splash in rock history. And she did so by focusing
precisely on rock's sexual assumptions.
Authenticity and commercialism
Madonna can be described as a rock star (and not just a disco performer or
teen idol) because she articulated rock culture's defining paradox: the belief
that this music--produced, promoted, and sold by extremely successful and
sophisticated multinational corporations--is nonetheless somehow noncommercial.
It is noncommercial not in its processes of production but in the motivations
of its makers and listeners, in terms of what, in rock, makes a piece of music
or a musician valuable. The defining term in rock ideology is authenticity.
Rock is distinguished from pop as the authentic expression of a performer's or
composer's feelings and the authentic representation of a social situation.
Rock is at once the mainstream of commercial music and a romantic art form, a
voice from the social margins. Presley's first album for RCA in 1956 was just
as carefully packaged to present him as an authentic, street-credible musician
(plucking an acoustic guitar on the album cover) as was Public Enemy's classic It
Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, issued by the CBS-backed Def
JamDef Jam in 1988; Madonna was every bit as concerned with revealing her
artifice as art in the 1980s as Dylan was in the '60s.
Rock, in summary, is not just an eclectic form musically but also a
contradictory form ideologically. In making sense of its contradictions, two
terms are critical. The first is presence. The effect of rock's musical
promiscuity, its use of technology, and its emphasis on the individual voice is
a unique sonic presence. Rock has the remarkable power both to dominate the
soundscape and to entice the listener into the performers' emotional lives. The
second is do-it-yourself (DIY). The credibility of this commercial music's
claim to be noncommercial depends on the belief that rock is pushed up from the
bottom rather than imposed from the top--hence the importance in rock mythology
of independent record companies, local hustlers, managers, and deejays,
fanzines, and pirate radiopirate radio broadcasters. Even as a multimillion-dollar
industry, rock is believed to be a music and a culture that people make for
themselves. The historical question becomes, What were the circumstances that
made such a belief possible?
2. Rock in the 1950s
The development of the new vocal pop star
If rock music evolved from 1950s rock and roll, then rock and roll
itself--which at the time seemed to spring from nowhere--evolved from
developments in American popular music that followed the marketing of the new
technologies of records, radio, motion pictures, and the electric microphone.
By the 1930s their combined effect was an increasing demand for vocal rather
than instrumental records and for singing stars such as Bing Crosby and Frank
Sinatra. Increasingly, pop songs were written to display a singer's personality
rather than a composer's skill; they had to work emotionally through the
singer's expressiveness rather than formally as a result of the score (it was
Sinatra's feelings that were heard in the songs he sang rather than their writers').
By the early 1950s it was clear that this new kind of vocal pop star needed
simpler, more directly emotional songs than those provided by jazz or
theatre-based composers, and the big publishers began to take note of the blues
and country numbers issued on small record labels in the American South. While
the major record companies tried to meet the needs of Hollywood, the national
radio networks, and television, a system of independent record
companiesindependent record companies (such as AtlanticAtlantic, SunSun, and
ChessChess), local radio stations, and traveling deejayslocal radio stations,
and traveling deejays emerged to serve the music markets the majors ignored:
African-Americans, Southern whites, and, eventually, youth.
Rural music in urban settings
Selling rural American musics (blues, folk, country, and gospel) had always
been the business of small rather than corporate entrepreneurs, but World War
II changed the markets for them--partly because of the hundreds of thousands of
Southerners who migrated north for work, bringing their music with them, and
partly because of the broadening cultural horizons that resulted from military
service. Rural music in urban settings became, necessarily, louder and more
aggressive (the same thing had happened to jazz in the early 1920s).
Instruments, notably the guitar, had to be amplified to cut through the noise,
and, as black dance bands got smaller (for straightforward economic reasons),
guitar, bass, and miked-up voice replaced brass and wind sections, while
keyboards and saxophone became rhythm instruments used to swell the beat
punched out by the drums. Country dance bands, emerging from 1940s
jazz-influenced western swing, made similar changes, amplifying guitars and
bass, giving the piano a rhythmic role, and playing up the personality of the
singer.
Such music--rhythm and blues and honky tonk--was developed in live
performance by traveling musicians who made their living by attracting dancers
to bars, clubs, and halls. By the late 1940s it was being recorded by
independent record companies, always on the lookout for cheap repertoire and
aware of these musicians' local pulling power. As the records were played on
local radio stations, the appeal of this music--its energy, humour, and
suggestiveness--reached white suburban teenagers who otherwise knew nothing
about it. Rhythm-and-blues record retailers, radio stations, and deejays (most
famously Alan Freed) became aware of a new market--partying teenagers--while
the relevant recording studios began to be visited by young white musicians who
wanted to make such music for themselves. The result was rock and roll, the
adoption of these rural-urban, black and white sounds by an emergent teenage
culture that came to international attention with the success of the film Blackboard
Jungle in 1956.
Marketing rock and roll
Rock and roll's impact in the 1950s reflected the spending power of young
people who, as a result of the '50s economic boom (and in contrast to the
prewar Great Depression), had unprecedented disposable income. That income was
of interest not just to record companies but to an ever-increasing range of
advertisers keen to pay for time on teen-oriented, Top 40 radio stations and
for the development of teen-aimed television showsteen-aimed television shows
such as American BandstandAmerican Bandstand. For the major record
companies, Presley's success marked less the appeal of do-it-yourself musical
hybrids than the potential of teenage idols: singers with musical material and
visual images that could be marketed on radio and television and in motion
pictures and magazines. The appeal of live rock and roll (and its predominantly
black performers) was subordinated to the manufacture of teenage pop stars (who
were almost exclusively white). Creative attention thus swung from the
performers to the record makers--that is, to the songwriters (such as those
gathered in the Brill BuildingBrill Building in New York City) and producers
(such as Phil Spector) who could guarantee the teen appeal of a record and
ensure that it would stand out on a car radio.
3. Rock in the 1960s
A black and white hybrid
Whatever the commercial forces at play (and despite the continuing industry
belief that this was pop music as transitory novelty), it became clear that the
most successful writers and producers of teenage music were themselves young
and intrigued by musical hybridity and the technological possibilities of the
recording studiotechnological possibilities of the recording studio. In the
early 1960s teenage pop ceased to sound like young adult pop. Youthful crooners
such as Frankie Avalon and Fabian were replaced in the charts by vocal groups
such as the Shirelles. A new rock-and-roll hybrid of black and white music
appeared: Spector derived the mini-dramas of girl groups such as the Crystals
and the Ronettes from the vocal rhythm-and-blues style of doo-wop, the Beach
Boys rearranged Chuck Berry for barbershop-style close harmonies, and in
Detroit Berry Gordy's Motown label drew on gospel music (first secularized for
the teenage market by Sam Cooke) for the more rhythmically complex but equally
commercial sounds of the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. For the new
generation of record producer, whether Spector, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson,
or Motown's Smokey Robinson and the team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the
commercial challenge--to make a record that would be heard through all the
other noises in teenage lives--was also an artistic challenge. Even in this
most commercial of scenes (thanks in part to its emphasis on fashion), success
depended on a creative approach to technological DIY.
The British reaction
Rock historians tend to arrange rock's past into a recurring pattern of
emergence, appropriation, and decline. Thus, rock and roll emerged in the mid-1950s
only to be appropriated by big business (for example, Presley's move from the
Memphis label Sun to the national corporation RCA) and to decline into
teen pop; the Beatles then emerged in the mid-1960s at the front of a British Invasion that
led young Americans back to rock and roll's roots. But this notion is
misleading. One reason for the Beatles' astonishing popularity by the end of
the 1960s was precisely that they did not distinguish between the
"authenticity" of, say, Chuck Berry and the "artifice" of
the Marvelettes.
In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, rock and roll had an immediate youth
appeal--each country soon had its own Elvis Presley--but it made little impact
on national music media, as broadcasting was still largely under state control.
Local rock and rollers had to make the music onstage rather than on record. In
the United Kingdom musicians followed the skiffle group model
of the folk, jazz, and blues scenes, the only local sources of American music
making. The Beatles were only one of many provincial British groups who from
the late 1950s played American music for their friends, imitating all kinds of
hit sounds--from Berry to the Shirelles, from Carl Perkins to the Isley Brothers--while
using the basic skiffle format of rhythm section, guitar, and shouting to be
heard in cheap, claustrophobic pubs and youth clubs.
In this context a group's most important instruments were their voices--on
the one hand, individual singers (such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
developed a new harshness and attack; on the other hand, group voices (vocal
harmonies) had to do the decorative work provided on the original records by
producers in the studio. Either way, it was through their voices that British
beat groups, covering the same songs with the same lineup of instruments,
marked themselves off from each other, and it was through this emphasis on
voice that vocal rhythm
and blues made its mark on the tastes of "mod" culture (the
"modernist" style-obsessed, consumption-driven youth culture that
developed in Britain in the 1960s). Soul singers such as Ray Charles and Sam
Cooke were the model for beat group vocals and by the mid-1960s were joined in
the British charts by more intense African-American singers such as Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. British
guitarists were equally influenced by this expressive ideal, and the loose
rhythm guitar playing of rock and roll and skiffle was gradually replaced by
more ornate lead playing on electric guitar as local musicians such as Eric Clapton sought
to emulate blues artists such as B.B. King. Clapton took
the ideal of authentic performance from the British jazz scene, but his pursuit
of originality--his homage to the blues originals and his search for his own
guitar voice--also reflected his art-school education (Clapton was one of many
British rock stars who engaged in music seriously while in art school). By the
end of the 1960s, it was assumed that British rock groups wrote their own
songs. What had once been a matter of necessity--there was a limit to the
success of bands that played strictly cover versions, and Britain's
professional songwriters had little understanding of these new forms of
music--was now a matter of principle: self-expression onstage and in the studio
was what distinguished these "rock" acts from pop "puppets"
like Cliff Richard.
(Groomed as Britain's Elvis Presley in the 1950s--moving with his band, the Shadows, from skiffle
clubsskiffle clubs to television teen variety shows--Richard was by the end of
the 1960s a family entertainer, his performing style and material hardly even
marked by rock and roll.)
Folk rock,
the hippie movement, and "the rock paradox"
The peculiarity of Britain's beat boom--in which would-be pop stars such as
the Beatles turned arty while would-be blues musicians such as the Rolling Stones turned
pop--had a dramatic effect in the United States, not only on consumers but also
on musicians, on the generation who had grown up on rock and roll but grown out
of it and into more serious sounds, such as urban folk. The Beatles' success
suggested that it was possible to enjoy the commercial, mass-cultural power of
rock and roll while remaining an artist. The immediate consequence was folk rock. Folk
musicians, led by Bob
Dylan, went electric, amplified their instruments, and sharpened their
beat. Dylan in particular showed that a pop song could be both a means of
social commentary (protest) and a form of self-expression (poetry). On both the
East and West coasts, bohemia started to take an interest in youth music again.
In San Francisco, for example, folk and blues musicians, artists, and poets
came together in loose collectives (most prominently the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane) to
make acid rock as an unfolding psychedelic
experience, and rock became the musical soundtrack for a new youth culture, the
hippies.
The hippie movement of the late 1960s in the United States--tied up with Vietnam War service and
anti-Vietnam War protests, the Civil Rights Movement,
and sexual liberation--fed back into the British rock scene. British beat
groups also defined their music as art, not commerce, and felt themselves to be
constrained by technology rather than markets. The Beatles made the move from
pop to rock on their 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
symbolically identifying with the new hippie era, while bands such as Pink Floyd and Cream
(Clapton's band) set new standards of musical skill and technical imagination.
This was the setting in which Hendrix became the
rock musician's rock musician. He was a model not just in his virtuosity and
inventiveness as a musician but also in his stardom and his commercial
charisma. By the end of the 1960s the great paradox of rock had become
apparent: rock musicians' commitment to artistic integrity--their disdain for
chart popularity--was bringing them unprecedented wealth. Sales of rock albums
and concert tickets reached levels never before seen in popular music. And, as
the new musical ideology was being articulated in magazinesnew musical ideology
was being articulated in magazines such as Rolling Stone, so it was
being commercially packaged by emergent record companies such as Warner
BrothersWarner Brothers in the United States and IslandIsland in Britain. Rock
fed both off and into hippie rebellion (as celebrated by the Woodstock festival
of 1969), and it fed both off and into a buoyant new music business (also
celebrated by Woodstock). This music and audience were now where the money lay;
the Woodstock musicians seemed to have tapped into an insatiable demand,
whether for "progressive"
rock and formal experiment, heavy metal and a bass-driven blast of
high-volume blues, or singer-songwriters
and sensitive self-exploration.
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