Heartland rock is a genre of rock music characterized by a straightforward, often roots musical style, often with a focus on blue-collar workers, and a conviction that rock music has a social or communal purpose beyond just entertainment.
The genre is exemplified by singer-songwriters Tom Petty, Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and John Mellencamp and country music artists, including Steve Earle and Joe Ely.[1] The genre developed in the 1970s and reached its commercial peak in the 1980s when it became one of the best-selling genres in the United States. In the 1990s, many established acts faded and the genre began to fragment, but the major figures have continued to record with commercial success.
Verses in heartland rock songs often tell stories. In some songs, those stories are about people undergoing hard times; choruses are often anthemic in tone.[7] The genre is associated with working-class regions of the Midwest and the Rust Belt.[8] It has been characterized as a predominantly romantic genre, celebrating "urban backstreets and rooftops",[9] and its major themes include alienation, despair, "unemployment, small-town decline, disillusionment, limited opportunity and bitter nostalgia".[7][10]
History
Origins
Many major heartland rock artists began their careers in the 1960s, as with Bob Seger, or the 1970s, as with Springsteen and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; the former after two critically highly regarded but modestly selling albums with the E Street Band, he achieved his breakthrough in 1975 with Born to Run,[11] which presented stories of loss, betrayal, defeat and escape in the context of his native New Jersey shoreline, with songs influenced by 50s rock and roll, Dylan and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.[12] While Springsteen struggled for three years with legal disputes, other artists in a similar vein came to the fore. These artists included Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and fellow Jersey Shore residents Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.[11]
In 1978, Springsteen returned with Darkness on the Edge of Town, which reached the top ten in the US and then the number one album The River (1980), which continued the themes of economic and personal dissolution, produced a series of hit singles,[11] and has been seen as "getting the heartland rock bandwagon rolling", together with the stripped-down sound and darker themes of his next album Nebraska (1982).[7]
Peak
John Mellencamp, shown in 2007, among the most successful of the "second generation" of acts in the genre
In the 1990s, many artists who would have been heartland rockers in the 1980s chose to pursue the recently emerged genre of Americana,[19] and heartland rock dwindled to a few stalwart artists.[20]
Influence and legacy
Melissa Etheridge, the first significant female figure in the genre, performing live in 2010
British band Dire Straits and English singer-songwriter Sam Fender are known to have established their "British version" of the heartland rock genre.[25]
1 2 J. A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (University of California Press, 2005), ISBN0-520-21587-7, p. 137.
↑ T. Weschler and G. Graff, Travelin' Man: On the Road and Behind the Scenes with Bob Seger (Wayne State University Press, 2009), ISBN0-8143-3459-8, p. xvi.
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