“Nary a guitar”? Upon reading this sentence, I immediately began hearing the guitar part to “The Stranger” in my mind.
And, piano/keyboards have been a prominent feature of some rock since the days of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
And here’s where it gets not so cut-and-dried. Are you sure it’s fair to rule out “Beat It” (with its Eddie Van Halen guitar solo) or “Black or White” (guitar-riff driven as it is)?
This is wrong on both counts. Metal is as active a genre as it’s ever been, and the vast majority of it doesn’t qualify as rock by any reasonable standard.
Except for the very reasonable standard that uses “rock” to stand for the whole spectrum of that type of music (including the sub-genre itself known as rock), an archetypal example of synecdoche.
Is 43% Burnt rock?
Why isn’t it?
I think you’re going to have to explain what that “reasonable standard” is, since I, and I’m sure many people, think of heavy metal as a type of rock. (Not that it’s authoritative, but the Wikipedia article starts out “Heavy metal (or simply metal) is a genre of rock music…”
Let’s not confuse “rock” with “whatever I like this year.” I like Terence Blanchard and Dirks Bentley just fine and not calling them “rock and roll” is hardly a slur.
I’m not a fan of Motley Crue or Poison, but they are undeniably rock and roll.