It really depends on whether you tend towards combining or splitting definitions.
At its most basic rock and roll is simple three chord blues, with a beat on 2 and 4, usually - but not always - using a pentatonic scale. There’s a hell of a lot of variation in there, of course, but that’s the basics. In particular, during the 50s, the switch from beat on 1 and 3 to 2 and 4 was a defining characteristic of the genre.
At this point, though, it’s all over the place. While I’ve disagreed with pretty much everything said in the ‘is rock dead?’ thread without wanting to get involved, there’s so much variety that it’s impossible to truly define it without getting lost in a definitional maze.
Elvis and Chuck Berry?
The Beatles and Herman’s Hermits?
Rush and Queen?
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Heart?
Nirvana and Everclear?
All very, VERY different musical experiences but also all clearly falling under the banner of ‘Rock and Roll’. To say they weren’t would be to reject the very concept of rock and roll. But it’s also possible to include Weird Al, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, ABBA and Blondie and many many other acts that might otherwise be classified as ‘pop’.
I’m not even sure I’d go so far as to say it usually uses a pentatonic scale. It’s certainly not uncommon, but most rock and roll songs I can think of go outside vanilla pentatonics. Even straight-up blues is usually at least hexatonic, with the sharp-4/flat-5 added to the minor pentatonic scale. I’d say the defining melodic and harmonic characteristics of straight-up rock and roll is the use of 7th chords (even on the tonic), a tension between the major and minor third (especially in piano parts, where a “slide” from the minor to major third is quite common.) In many ways, I think of early rock and roll as a cross between blues and country, so, I guess in a way, it’s major and minor pentatonics mixed together. If I’m doing a solo on something like Johnny B Goode or Rock Around the Clock on piano, I’m generally choosing among the tonic, the second, the minor third, the major third, the fourth, the flat five, the five, the sixth, and the dominant seventh.
Yeah. Weather Report and Return to forever was the definition of fusion. Steely Dan were the opposite of that. (They actually hated it by the way.) They wrote songs, with sophisticated harmonies from jazz, but it was not improvisational by nature. I call them rock just because it’s what they called themselves and they were IMO a couple of the greatest composers of the 20th century.
If they weren’t rock that would be OK. It’s rocks loss.
“Rock” means several different things. I’m more of an inclusionist.
To me, “rock” can be used to describe all music descended from rock and roll, the 1950s invention that Jonathan Chance describes pretty well. From that came hard rock, rockabilly, rap, disco, pop, synthpop, and so on and so forth. There are several records on “Sgt. Pepper” that don’t use guitars and are as different from a conventional rock song as you can possibly imagine, but those songs are rock, to me, because they are descendants of rock and roll; you can trace the lineage of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” back to rock and roll pretty easily. But Id also include, say, Public Enemy or Madonna as, in a general sense, rock music. They are specifically hip hop and pop, but it’s all rock to me. (Run-DMC, who anyone would describe as rap, often liked to call themselves a rock band, and I agree.)
“Rock” also specifically can mean music that is primarily driven by electric guitars; so, in that sense, The Tragically Hip were a rock band, as are the White Stripes or Paramore; conversely, in that sense, Daft Punk is not a rock band, and the Beastie Boys usually weren’t. But that’s using “rock” as a descriptor of the specific kind of rock music, if you see what I mean. One could further subdivide; Fleetwood Mac is soft rock, Nirvana grunge rock, Led Zeppelin classic hard rock, Tragically Hip bar rock, and on and on. You can start to get further and further away as you go; Steve Wonder was in his magnificent prime a soul artist, but “Superstition” is simply one of the best rock songs ever made.
Jessie’s Girl (1981) is a really strange example since it’s remembered partly because of its inclusion in the Boogie Nights soundtrack (1997). Having Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina) emphatically rock out to the most cynical manufactured radio-freindly pop product of the time works to underline his soulless “American Psycho” quality.
Calling hip-hop a direct descendant of rock would be a hard sell to me. Early hip-hop was based on percussive breaks from various popular songs, of all genres, taking from R&B, jazz, disco, rock. It’s definitely not what I would call a type of rock music. I might say that rock can be and is an influence in a lot of hip hop, but hip hop can exist without any rock influence whatsoever.
When I was young and stupid, I used to wish that Frank Sinatra had done more jazz-oriented stuff with small combos. Now that I am old and omniscient, I realize that he was really a pop singer and did his best (transcendent) stuff with orchestras like Nelson Riddle’s. Sorry, Tommy Dorsey.
The live concerts from Paris and Australia, out on CDs, accompanied by Red Norvo’s excellent small group, are interesting…but not nearly th’ Chairman’s best work.
…although Sinatra probably would have sounded GREAT with the Marty Paitch Dektette, who were the best backing band for Mel Torme (who was a REAL jazz singer).
Southern California 1950s “cool” jazz group, with enough variation in timbre (alto, tenor, & baritone saxes; trumpet, valve trombone, F horn, tuba; plus rhythm section) to hug n’ cuddle Frank’s voice.
I think power pop fans of the time would have (Actually they did) hated it. Power pop was located around Badfinger, Rundgren, Raspberries and some more. It might have been a sonic watering down of it for the teenyboppers.
Oddly enough, I’ve come to an opposite conclusion. I never heard his live and/or smaller set stuff until a few years ago, and it’s the only stuff by him that I like. His pop and/or orchestral stuff doesn’t suit his style well, and to the extent that I like 30s-50s-style pop, others have done it much better. But his style suits the immediacy and rawness of a live band.
I define pop as the most popular style(s) during a period. Calling Mozart the first pop star seems a bit of a stretch, but most of the names mentioned so far, from Sinatra to Beyoncé, are what I would consider to be pop (during their heyday).
Since the beginning of this thread, I’ve been wondering whether Rick Springfield in general, and “Jessie’s Girl” in particular, could be classified as “power pop,” and I’ve been leaning toward yes.
I agree that it doesn’t make it to power pop territory. To me, power pop is…powerful in some way. There’s nothing powerful about Jessie’s Girl. It’s just a fun rock song with broad appeal.
(When I think “power pop,” I think of Cheap Trick first)
Power pop needed to have a post-beatles edge on it. If it didn’t it was fluff (made for the kids who had never heard the beatles yet.)
The bands I cited, and Big Star, were proto power pop. Cheap Trick is probably the epitomy of it. But then again they had loud distorted guitars. They rocked louder and impoliter than some power pop. I used to subscribe to trouser press. Petty, and Greg Kihn, were power pop cover stories. The Rubinoos were an early attempt to reach the audience. Springfield was considered bubblegum at the time, although I had remembered him playing “Speak to the Sky” on the piano in 1972.
