You can’t see it, but I’m making devil horns and sticking my tongue out like Gene Simmons.
I agree with most of this, but musicologically speaking, jazz and rock have little to no common ground until Fusion, generally accepted to begin with Miles’ Bitches’ Brew.
Bop, Hard Bop, Post Bop, Cool Jazz, Latin Jazz and Modal Jazz - the sequential lineage of major jazz styles post-big bad is directly descended from Big Band and Dixieland, but next to no commonality with popular rock music in terms of harmonic structures, form, melodic and motivic developments and performance conventions, with the exception of elements that both included that derived directly from blues - shout choruses, turnarounds, motivic development - in certain blues-derived work.
Generally speaking the later the evolution, the more likely some of those elements exist, but in almost all cases the jazz versions included more complex iterations and a different performance ethos and framework.
[cynic]
Music turned retro somewhere in the late 60s and early 70s, and we’ve just been re-hashing different micro-eras/genres with contemporary production aesthetics since then.
[/cynic]
People’s parents, and even The Man, have been into rock since long before their kids were born for around forty years now.
“It’s rhythm that “gets you” heart and soul
Let me tell you Baby; It’s called rock’n’roll.
They say, it’s gonna die: Oh honey please let’s face it;
They just don’t know what’s-a goin’ to replace it.”
Cliff Richard,* Move It!, 1958.
And people have been saying that rock is dead, or about to die (and others have been denying it), almost since it began. However, as Cliff said (this is back in that very short window of time when he was actually good), it is the rhythm, the beat (as The Beatles also knew). Some stuff without the beat gets to be classified as rock by association.
*Song actually by Ian Samwell, and there seems to be some disagreement, on lyric sites, as to the exact wording of the last half of the third quoted line. It makes no difference to the point, however.
Scottish? I’d say “Anglo-Celtic” would be be a better description. Plenty of it wasn’t Scottish at all, and there were certainly influences from beyond the British Isles, too. “European folk music meets African folk music” is the way I’d describe it.
In terms of diversity and complexity, I could make the same argument for folk music, especially if “world” music is included - which it should be, as it’s just non-European folk music. I’d also consider country and blues to be subsets of folk music, but YMMV.
The styles of music I know much about - folk, rock, metal, and classical - are all deep, diverse, and complex, and all overlap to a large extent.
Which may explain why you think rock is special in this way.
I wouldn’t necessarily say rock is dead (anymore than I’d say jazz is dead or classical is dead). But it’s not really the most innovative music around. It’s long past its sell by date when it comes to impact on the culture. And I’m far from someone stuck in the era when of the rock they listened to when they came of age ( i suppose that that would be the end of classic rock/punk/new wave). My most listened to genre at the moment is probably EDM.
Not that there aren’t great rock bands around now. I don’t know that rock will every die, but it doesn’t have the social relevance that it used to. And once the baby boomer finish dying off…
For people like me it’s very much the opposite: I don’t like it because the new stuff sounds exactly like the old stuff.
But I get pretty cynical about the matter also, and tend to believe rock is more a marketing term than a meaningful musical term.
I don’t know enough about Ragtime to dispute this. My gut feeling was that Ragtime was on a branch with popular music, vocals played around the family piano. I can see how it influenced jazz but to this point I believed that it had more in common with modern classical music. I’ll have to go back and read my source material.
In any case, I was trying to trace the birth of rock and not jazz. But I appreciate you mentioning it. Ragtime was important to the growth of music in America and I need to find a place to slot it into my views.
Rock is NOT dead. It just has tribute bands, museums and halls of fame, high-priced auctions of relics - stuff that comes along with moving from innovative to canonized. It is not a problem and it isn’t a bad thing - it just is.
I listen to and enjoy a lot of rock music coming out today. It is not front and center in the media, but it is pretty easy to find and check out. It’s all good.
Rock is great music and will endure. But what “Rock” is will become increasingly fixed in definition over time, near as I can tell from what I have seen so far.
ETA: Just remembered this - here is a linkto an old thread I had started about Rock music 100+ years from now…
Oh, I’m just a Ragtime Cowgirl Jo!
“Rock is Dead” by Tenacious D.
Now let’s light something on fire!
I find it amusing that the “Is rock dead?” discussion is happening now - when an indie rock song (Somebody That I Used To Know) is #1 in America after having spent several weeks trading the top spot back and forth with another indie rock song (We Are Young) which has now settled at #4, with a pop-rock song (Payphone) at #3, and John Mayer has the #1 album in America.
Rock is doing better in the charts right now than it has in quite some time.
Give any teen-aged boy a guitar, three chords and a beer and you have rock. What they do afterwards gives us a great variety of music with a good beat that you can dance to.
Give any teen-aged girl a guitar, three chords and a beer and you have a pretty good start on a bass player. I kid because I love.