rock music

(noun)

A genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in 1950s America and developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and later. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Rock has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements.

Related Terms

Examples of rock music in the following topics:

  • Rock and Roll

    • The rock music of the 1960s had its roots in rock and roll, but also drew strongly on genres such as blues, folk, jazz, and classical.
    • Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States.
    • Rock music also drew strongly from other genres such as blues and folk, and was influenced by jazz, classical and other musical sources.
    • By the late 1960s, a number of distinct rock music sub-genres emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, and jazz-rock fusion.
    • Rock music of the 1960s also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements.

  • Art and Music

    • Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States.
    • Rock music also drew strongly from other genres such as blues and folk, and was influenced by jazz, classical, and other musical sources.
    • Rock placed more emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
    • By the late 1960s, a number of distinct rock music sub-genres emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, and jazz-rock fusion.
    • During the 1960s, psychedelic visual arts were often a counterpart to psychedelic rock music.

  • Counterculture

    • The counterculture lifestyle integrated many of the ideals of the time, including peace, love, harmony, music, and mysticism.
    • Rejection of mainstream culture was best embodied in the new genres of psychedelic rock music, pop-art, and new explorations in spirituality.
    • New forms of musical presentation also played a key role in spreading the counterculture, mainly large outdoor rock festivals.
    • During this weekend festival, 32 of rock and psychedelic rock's most popular acts performed live outdoors to an audience of half a million people.
    • This photo was taken near the Woodstock Music Festival in August, 1969.

  • Theatre and Novels

    • It was influenced by, and in turn influenced, the sexual revolution, issues around censorship, the demystification of cannabis and other drugs, the musical evolution of rock and roll, the spread of ecological consciousness, and opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization.
    • For example, rock music was used in several Broadway musicals.
    • This trend began with the musical "Hair," which featured not only rock music, but also nudity and controversial opinions about the Vietnam War, race relations, and other social issues.
    • The musical "West Side Story" also spoke a message of racial tolerance.
    • The music of the era was represented by films such as 1970's "Woodstock," a documentary of the music festival of the same name.

  • Desegregation in Little Rock

    • The Little Rock Nine was a group of African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
    • The Little Rock Nine were a group of African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
    • Little Rock was located in the relatively progressive Southern state of Arkansas.
    • In Little Rock, the capital city of Arkansas, the Little Rock School Board agreed to comply with the high court's ruling.
    • Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort the Little Rock Nine students into the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  • Youth Culture and Delinquency

    • San Francisco was the center of the hippie revolution; during the Summer of Love, it became a melting pot of music, psychedelic drugs, sexual freedom, creative expression, new forms of dress, and politics.
    • As members of the hippie movement grew older and moderated their lives and their views, and especially after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended in the mid-1970s, the counterculture was largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on philosophy, morality, music, art, alternative health and diet, lifestyle, and fashion.
    • Experimentation with LSD, Peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, MDA, marijuana, and other psychedelic drugs became a major component of 1960s counterculture, influencing philosophy, art, music, and styles of dress.
    • Leary as well as psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Beatles—soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD.

  • The White City, Chicago and the World Columbian Exposition

    • This area, developed by a young music promoter, Sol Bloom, concentrated on Midway Plaisance and introduced the term "midway" to American English to describe the area of a carnival or fair where sideshows are located.
    • Nearby, "The Cliff Dwellers" featured a rock and timber structure that was painted to recreate Battle Rock Mountain in Colorado, a stylized recreation of American Indian cliff dwelling with pottery, weapons and other relics on display.

  • American Modernism

    • It may include visual art, literature, music, film, design, and other forms of art.
    • According to Lawrence Levine, "Jazz was, or seemed to be the product of a new age…raucous, discordant…accessible, spontaneous…openly an interactive, participatory music. " Players drew influences from everyday street talk in Harlem, as well as from French Impressionist paintings.
    • She is chiefly known for paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes in which she synthesized abstraction and representation.

  • Television

    • Musical programs distinguished the decade.
    • The Broadway musical Peter Pan was televised in 1955 on NBC with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard in their original roles as Peter Pan and Captain Hook.
    • Dinah Shore, Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Lawrence Welk as well as other stars had popular weekly musical variety shows.
    • The quiz show scandals of the period rocked the nation and were the result of the revelation that contestants were secretly given assistance by the producers to arrange the outcome of a supposedly fair competition.

  • The Beats

    • The adjective beat could colloquially mean tired or beaten down, but Kerouac expanded the meaning to include the connotations upbeat, beatific, and the musical association of being on the beat.
    • The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form (as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians who were influenced in the late fifties and sixties by Beat generation's poets and writers);