I suspect that the best way of defining “rock” and/or “rock & roll” is either with a “family resemblance”-style definition a la Wittgenstein, or with a “family lineage”-style definition: rock and roll is that music which can be traced back to Chuck Berry and the other artists mentioned earlier by cjepson, rather than by giving a list of characteristics that rock music must or must not have.
Well, R&R is a rather subjective and personal thing, but I will give you examples that I use when the subject comes up.
There is a lot of rock, but not so much R&R. Rock breaks down into a lot more sub-genres that R&R.
Originally, R&R had to be rhythm based, raw, contain a bit of the animal side of humanity, and a sprinkling of sexual imagery. They may not be obvious, but compared to earlier music, they were there.
To me, R&R was basically two separate parts; hard R&R and rhythm & blues. I could not do justice to what I feel those exactly are without a lot of description, so I will offer this instead.
If you take hard R&R, and reduce it down, distill it until it is as pure as palatable, you would have The Ramones. It isn’t pretty, its loud, fast, youthful and in-your-face, but it is 200-proof R&R.
If you take the rhythm & blues element, the part that infused influential black race music, country music undertones, and a bit of jazz, you get Creedence Clearwater Revival. A slower rolling beat, chords and playful guitar play and lyrics, but a definite groove.
One man’s opinion and definition.
My sainted mom used to define it as “jungle music.” Alternatively, “the devil’s music.”
That was pretty much why we parted company, and I never looked back.
You know what, she was probably right about RnR. At least, when it’s being the pure, strange, dangerous thing I think of when I think of it. The Cramps were probably the band that made the most definitive declarations of music that would fit both descriptions. That’s the remaining Rock 'n Roll dare in my mind - try to come up with a more pure Rock 'n Roll band than The Cramps.
Rock and roll can be easily danced to. It’s got a beat that you can bop your head to, and clap along with. It’s got a catchy hook. The vocals are soulful.
Rock is guitar riff. It’s screaming and wailing more than sanging. You can move your body to rock music, but not in a way that will get you on Soul Train. Rock music is more about the guitar solo than the vocals.
Rock and roll came first, so in my mind rock is a subset of rock and roll.
ETA: R&B and rock and roll are pretty much the same thing, in my mind. The Isley Brothers and Motown are straight-up rock and roll. But because these artists are black, we tend to view them separately from, say, the Beatles or Elton John. That don’t make no kinda sense.
Amen! The only kind of “sense” it used to make was in record stores where you’d find certain customers heading to the R&B section and certain other customers favoring the Rock ‘n’ Roll section. Rarely would one group venture into the other section. I know a bit about this kind of thing from working in a record (LP’s – before much else was around except maybe cassettes) shop in the early 60’s.
There’s a fair amount of snobbishness involved in music genre classification.
It’s snobbish, but ultimately beneficial. How many Jazz or Folk musicians would have a career if they had to list on the same charts as Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift?
Sure. To be clear: Rock n’ Roll in the 50’s was called something other than R&B to make it more marketable to white audiences. But during the 60’s Motown was definitely considered Rock n’ Roll. The first-gen, Twist and Shout Isleys were, too. The Beatles and Elton might be considered different from them simply because it was a few years later, the Beatles and Elton were writing their own songs (while Motowners wrote brilliant songs, it was limited to a few writers, not all performers).
By the time Rock n’ Roll blew up, and took over the boogie-oriented songs, the phrase R&B continued to evolve. By the time you get to the 70’s, where a combination of amazing singers (Al Green!), singer-songwriters making profound statements (Marvin, Stevie) and the emergence of Philly Soul and the arrangements and political commentary (For the Love of Money; Backstabbers), R&B developed a strong identity away from Rock.
The 60s-70s divide between Rock and Soul was mostly racial, but Jimi Hendrix was called Rock in a way that, say, Curtis Mayfield was not. There were some stylistic boundaries as well.
Some interesting ideas here. For the formal scientific definition you’d probably have to also add its US origin and continuing relationship with, mainly borrowing, from different black music styles over time.
I have heard that one of the objectives of Krautrock was to develop a form of music that wasn’t stolen from someone else. A noble idea perhaps but not always a compelling result.
Roughly the same? Jazz and Folk charts didn’t create the market for these genres, did they?
That’s pretty much where I’m at with definitions. While “rock” is a a shortening of “rock & roll,” I do think of them as two separate kinds of sounds, with “rock and roll” being the earlier, Chuck Berry type of blues-based rock fused with country (and the other styles mentioned.) What is known as “rockabilly,” and is still played today, comes under the umbrella of “rock and roll” to me.
“Rock” is a more expansive outgrowth of the above. Originally blues-based (think Stones, Zeppelin, etc), it eventually expanded beyond that, with instrumentation heavily based on guitars (often overdriven), drums, electric bass. The timing is generally 4/4, not swung, with a heavy emphasis on beats two and four (the back beat). But there’s many exceptions to this.
“Pop” is a nebulous term that means many things to many people. Some use it to differentiate from blues- and country- based rock (like the Stones) from music with a rock beat and instrumentation that draws from other influences (like mid- to late-career Beatles), or as a pejorative term for music “without balls”/an edge or something like that (so far as I can tell.) To me, “pop” simply means “popular music” and it can be rock, it can be country, it can be R&B, it can be disco, it can be house–just whatever is dominating the Top 40 charts.
No, they just maintained the availability of these markets. Most music stores–and I haven’t been to an American one in years, the arrangement may have changed–have a section dedicated to “Rock, Pop, R&B,” one for Country, one for Jazz/Blues, one for Soundtracks and one for Classical, and maybe a niche for World Music, Spoken Word and Folk. If they didn’t have niches set aside for less-commercial genres and instead just listed the top 500 artists and acts alphabetically by name (and it would make a lot of sense to do precisely this), no Folk, World or Jazz musician would be displayed. The only Classical CD sold would be that one by Billy Joel.
Music specialty stores have a cultural commitment (God knows they don’t have a financial one) to making lesser-known genres available. Without these snobby classifications, a lot of these artists would simply disappear.
I have an old friend who self-produced a crappy album and marketed it via the International Underground Music Archive (IUMA) online. Instead of listing it as “Rock” or “Pop” he listed it under every genre listing they had, including World music, Country, and Children’s music even though it obviously wasn’t any of these things. I lost more respect for him over that than over the generally crappy content of the album.
What does this have to do with the charts? There would still be a market for these genres, wouldn’t there? If there’s a market for them, wouldn’t record stores still have these sections without charts?
Here is a great rock and roll song:
If I have a music store (Are they still called “record stores”?) and I decide what Jazz CDs to stock, I might have an idea of what I can reasonably expect to sell by looking at a chart of what the top-selling Jazz albums are, relative to other Jazz albums. If I just look at a genre-blind listing of the top 500-selling albums of the week, Jazz, Folk, Classical and Spoken Word artists likely will not be represented on such a list. Also, Country albums get a different kind of chart action than Rock/Pop. Rock/Pop albums usually peak the month they are released and then do a slow fade. Country albums, unless they have a big crossover appeal, peak maybe six months after they are released and stay on the charts for years (or they did in the 90s when the clerk at Tower Records explained this to me; it could be all different now).
Would record stores still have these sections without charts? Hard to say. I notice a lot of truck stops sell CDs out of a single bin where the Beach Boys are vying for display space against Jeff Foxworthy and Insane Clown Posse, so possibly not.
Record stores, like bookstores and for that matter clothing stores, have large selections, in the thousands or tens of thousands of items. A large selection appears to be the best way to lure the most people interested in that product into the store. Supersized record stores, like supersized bookstores and supersized clothing stores, tend to do better business than smaller stores because they draw customers who wouldn’t otherwise appear and wring more sales out of each customer. Stores that lure customers for other reasons, like discount chains, can have smaller and more bestseller-oriented selections because they are not the main draw.
There are obviously drawbacks to being supersized or else every store would be one. The amount of inventory is large and expensive, turnover is slower, clerks need special training, costs of overhead and taxes increase, and retail trends change. Bookstores were hurt not by the Internet, as is usually thought, but by the takeover of the industry by bestsellers. Bestseller sales used to run to the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands. When they started selling in the millions and tens of millions everybody got into the act. It’s estimated that the books on the bestseller list during a year outsell all other books combined. Walmart started cream-skimming, selling just bestsellers at giant discounts, helped by bulk purchases at greater discounts than an individual bookstore could get. Without those sales and the other sales that getting those buyers into the store meant, bookstores vanished by the thousands. I’m not as familiar with record stores, but they were hurt in a similar way when albums were first cream-skimmed and then stopped being the main driver of purchases.
Charts are helpful to stores, but stores are much larger than charts. Tastes and types of music, just as with books and clothing, vary tremendous from state to state, and even from city to city and store to store. Good management pays attention to its individual customer base and skews merchandise to it. For many years national chains have tried to apply rigid buying and display policies across all stores only to have to rescind them because of local variations. Charts are a rigid national demand that fail on local levels for the same reasons. Good stores use them as one factor in their decision-making but nothing more.
I sense that the definition of “rock” has changed since the 1970s-1980s, and has become more narrow. I remember when “rock” was basically a synonym for most pop music - anything from Cyndi Lauper and Lionel Ritchie to Van Halen to Iron Maiden to the Clash to Billy Joel to Air Supply was “rock.”
An example was MTV’s news had “The Week in Rock” in the 1980s - this encompassed everything from Guns N’ Roses and Prince to NWA. The World Book Encyclopedia’s 1992 article on “Rock Music” has pictures of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,…and Madonna!
When one hears “rock” as a label today, it is usually more specific to what was traditionally termed “hard rock,” and forms that emerged with “alternative rock” after the late 1980s. This may not even include heavy metal, which seems to be completely on its own as a genre now. “Soft rock” or MOR has been expunged from the rock canon, along with most African American music after 1970.
It took a hit when MTV first came into existence as well.
Originally, MTV was modeled after FM rock radio. They played mostly guitar oriented rock bands.
Well, there aren’t many black artists in the FM rock radio format. As such, though the idea that early MTV never played videos by black artists is false (they most certainly did), this led to charges that the network was “too white”.
Now, having a diverse offering of musical styles is fine. However, in my opinion, MTV seems to have overreacted to the charges of not playing enough “black music” and started promoting hip hip excessively whilst simultaneously phasing out guitar oriented rock music. Towards the end of the period when they actually played music it seemed to me all they played was hip hop, bubble gum dance pop, and boy band music.
With the exception of a few token rock acts (e.g. The Foo Fighters), after the grunge movement of the early 90s MTV more or less ceased promotion of rock music.
Now they don’t really play music of any sort; it’s really a reality TV network. Or something.
The term “rock” has always been applied, in some contexts, quite broadly and applied to artists who aren’t really “rock”. Rock music is generally guitar oriented and typically features a 4 piece band (singer, lead guitar, bass guitar, drums). The band can be “hard” or “soft” and still be unambiguously rock.
There are exceptions to this of course. Billy Joel and Elton John are definitely considered rock musicians even though there is nary a guitar to be heard in their music.
Dance pop artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson are most decidedly not rock and the fact that they were covered on “The Week in Rock” is not a reason to imagine these artists were ever considered rock acts.
Heavy Metal is pretty much a dead genre these days but it would unquestionably fall under the umbrella of rock music.
I would say that a rough rule of thumb so far as distinguishing rock music from non-rock forms of pop music is that rock is usually (but not always) guitar oriented and is not made to dance to. Rap and hip hop are definitely not forms of rock music.