25 Facts About Rock music

Rock music 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 in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom.

Rock music has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the United Kingdom and the hippie counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s.

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, and percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals.

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.

Since the late 1950s, 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.

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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.

In contrast rock music was seen as focusing on extended works, particularly albums, was often associated with particular sub-cultures, 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.

Nevertheless, much pop and rock music has been very similar in sound, instrumentation and even lyrical content.

Some music historians have 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.

Rock music produced the regional hit "Let's Go Trippin'" in 1961 and launched the surf music craze, following up with songs like "Misirlou".

Surf Rock music achieved its greatest commercial success as vocal Rock music, particularly the work of the Beach Boys, formed in 1961 in Southern California.

Pepper was later regarded as the greatest album of all time and a starting point for the album era, during which rock music transitioned from the singles format to albums and achieved cultural legitimacy in the mainstream.

Rock music saw greater commodification during this decade, turning into a multibillion-dollar industry and doubling its market while, as Christgau noted, suffering a significant "loss of cultural prestige".

Rock music later released a series of four albums that all achieved gold status: Welcome, Borboletta, Amigos, and Festival.

The term was first used in Rock music in Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" and began to be associated with pioneer bands like San Francisco's Blue Cheer, Cleveland's James Gang and Michigan's Grand Funk Railroad.

Artists were largely confined to independent record labels, building an extensive underground Rock music scene based on college radio, fanzines, touring, and word-of-mouth.

Punk Rock music provided the inspiration for some California-based bands on independent labels in the early 1990s, including Rancid, Pennywise, Weezer and Green Day.

Second wave of pop punk was spearheaded by Blink-182, with their breakthrough album Enema of the State, followed by bands such as Good Charlotte, Simple Plan and Sum 41, who made use of humour in their videos and had a more radio-friendly tone to their Rock music, while retaining the speed, some of the attitude and even the look of 1970s punk.

Critics in the latter half of the decade took notice of the genre's waning popularity, citing the popularity of hip hop electronic dance Rock music, the rise of streaming and the advent of technology which has changed approaches toward Rock music creation as being factors.

At the start of the 2020s, recording artists in both pop and rap Rock music released popular pop-punk recordings, many of them produced or assisted by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.

Paradoxically, followers of rock music have often mistrusted the world of fashion, which has been seen as elevating image above substance.

Rock music has been associated with various forms of drug use, including the amphetamines taken by mods in the early to mid-1960s, through the LSD, mescaline, hashish and other hallucinogenic drugs linked with psychedelic rock in the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s; and sometimes to cannabis, cocaine and heroin, all of which have been eulogised in song.

Rock music has been credited with changing attitudes to race by opening up African-American culture to white audiences; but at the same time, rock has been accused of appropriating and exploiting that culture.

Rock music inherited the folk tradition of protest song, making political statements on subjects such as war, religion, poverty, civil rights, justice and the environment.

Since its early development, rock music has been associated with rebellion against social and political norms, most obviously in early rock and roll's rejection of an adult-dominated culture, the counterculture's rejection of consumerism and conformity and punk's rejection of all forms of social convention it can be seen as providing a means of commercial exploitation of such ideas and of diverting youth away from political action.

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