List of rock genres

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This is a list of rock music genres consisting of subgenres of popular music that have roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, and which developed into a distinct identity as rock music in the 1960s, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom. [1] By the late 1960s, a number of identifiable rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, and jazz-rock fusion, [2] many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock influenced by the counter-cultural psychedelic scene. [3] New genres that emerged from this scene included progressive rock, which extended the artistic elements; [4] glam rock, which highlighted showmanship and visual style; [5] and the diverse and enduring major subgenre of heavy metal, which emphasized volume, power, and speed. [6] In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock both intensified and reacted against some of these trends to produce a raw, energetic form of music characterized by overt political and social critiques. [7] Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of other subgenres, including new wave, post-punk and eventually the alternative rock movement. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. [8] Further fusion subgenres have since emerged as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history.

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Rock is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles from the mid-1960s, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the blues and rhythm and blues genres of African-American music and from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a 4
4
time signature
using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political. Rock was the most popular genre of music in the U.S. and much of the Western world from the 1950s to the 2010s.

Hard rock or heavy rock is a heavier subgenre of rock music typified by aggressive vocals and distorted electric guitars. Hard rock began in the mid-1960s with the garage, psychedelic and blues rock movements. Some of the earliest hard rock music was produced by the Kinks, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In the late 1960s, bands such as Blue Cheer, the Jeff Beck Group, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Golden Earring, Steppenwolf, and Deep Purple also produced hard rock.

Indie rock is a subgenre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom, United States and New Zealand in the early to mid-1980s. Although the term was originally used to describe rock music released through independent record labels, by the 1990s it became more widely associated with the music such bands produced.

Electric blues is blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters in the 1940s. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, which differed from earlier, predominantly acoustic-style blues. By the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a little longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became widely used in electric blues.

British blues is a form of music derived from American blues that originated in the late 1950s, and reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1960s. In Britain, blues developed a distinctive and influential style dominated by electric guitar, and made international stars of several proponents of the genre, including the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music of Washington (state)</span>

The U.S. state of Washington has been home to many popular musicians and several major hotbeds of musical innovation throughout its history. The largest city in the state, Seattle, is known for being the birthplace of grunge as well as a major contributor to the evolution of punk rock, indie music, folk, and hip hop. Nearby Tacoma and Olympia have also been centers of influence on popular music.

Roots rock is a genre of rock music that looks back to rock's origins in folk, blues and country music. It is seen as responses to the perceived excesses of the dominant psychedelic and the developing progressive rock. Because roots music (Americana) is often used to mean folk and world musical forms, roots rock is sometimes used in a broad sense to describe any rock music that incorporates elements of this music. In the 1980s, roots rock enjoyed a revival in response to trends in punk rock, new wave, and heavy metal music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American rock</span> Overview of rock music in the United States

American rock has its roots from 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and country music, and also draws from folk music, jazz, blues, and classical music. American rock music was further influenced by the British Invasion of the American pop charts from 1964 and resulted in the development of psychedelic rock.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British rock music</span> Rock music from the United Kingdom

British rock describes a wide variety of forms of music made in the United Kingdom. Since around 1964, with the "British Invasion" of the United States spearheaded by the Beatles, British rock music has had a considerable impact on the development of American music and rock music across the world.

Popular music of the United Kingdom in the 1990s continued to develop and diversify. While the singles charts were dominated by boy bands and girl groups, British soul and Indian-based music also enjoyed their greatest level of mainstream success to date, and the rise of World music helped revitalise the popularity of folk music. Electronic rock bands like The Prodigy and Chemical Brothers began to achieve a high profile. Alternative rock reached the mainstream, emerging from the Madchester scene to produce dream pop, shoegazing, post rock and indie pop, which led to the commercial success of Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis; followed by a stream of post-Britpop bands like Radiohead and The Verve.

Psychedelic music is a wide range of popular music styles and genres influenced by 1960s psychedelia, a subculture of people who used psychedelic drugs such as 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms, to experience synesthesia and altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic music may also aim to enhance the experience of using these drugs and has been found to have a significant influence on psychedelic therapy.

Psychedelic pop is pop music that contains musical characteristics associated with psychedelic music. Developing in the mid-to-late 1960s, elements included "trippy" features such as fuzz guitars, tape manipulation, backwards recording, sitars, and Beach Boys-style harmonies, wedded to melodic songs with tight song structures. The style lasted into the early 1970s. It has seen revivals in subsequent decades by neo-psychedelic artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Orleans blues</span> Variation of Louisiana blues

New Orleans blues is a subgenre of blues that developed in and around the city of New Orleans, influenced by jazz and Caribbean music. It is dominated by piano and saxophone, but also produced guitar bluesmen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1960s in music</span> Music-related events during the 1960s

This article includes an overview of the events and trends in popular music in the 1960s.

Post-Britpop is an alternative rock subgenre and is the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following Britpop, when the media were identifying a "new generation" or "second wave" of guitar bands influenced by acts like Oasis and Blur, but with less overt British concerns in their lyrics and making more use of American rock and indie influences, as well as experimental music. Bands in the post-Britpop era that had been established acts, but gained greater prominence after the decline of Britpop, such as Radiohead and the Verve, and new acts such as Travis, Keane, Snow Patrol, Stereophonics, Feeder, and particularly Coldplay, achieved much wider international success than most of the Britpop groups that had preceded them, and were some of the most commercially successful acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Music of the United Kingdom developed in the 1960s into one of the leading forms of popular music in the modern world. By the early 1960s the British had developed a viable national music industry and began to produce adapted forms of American music in Beat music and British blues which would be re-exported to America by bands such as The Beatles, The Animals and the Rolling Stones. This helped to make the dominant forms of popular music something of a shared Anglo-American creation, and led to the growing distinction between pop and rock music, which began to develop into diverse and creative subgenres that would characterise the form throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music history of the United States in the 1960s</span>

Popular music of the United States in the 1960s became innately tied up into causes, opposing certain ideas, influenced by the sexual revolution, feminism, Black Power and environmentalism. This trend took place in a tumultuous period of massive public, unrest in the United States which consisted of the Cold War, Vietnam War, and Civil Rights Movement.

Psychedelic rock is a thriving music genre in Australia and New Zealand.

References

  1. F. Holt, Genre in Popular Music (University of Chicago Press, 2007), ISBN   0226350398, p. 56.
  2. R. Unterberger, "Garage Rock", in V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, eds, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), ISBN   0-87930-653-X, pp. 1320–1.
  3. R. Unterberger, "Psychedelic Rock", in V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, eds, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), ISBN   0-87930-653-X, pp. 1322–3.
  4. R. Unterberger, "Progressive Rock", in V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, eds, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), ISBN   0-87930-653-X, pp. 1330–1.
  5. R. Shuker, Popular Music: the Key Concepts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2nd edn., 2005), ISBN   0-415-34770-X, pp. 124–5.
  6. R. Walser, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), ISBN   0-8195-6260-2, p. 7.
  7. J. Dougan, "Punk Music", in V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, eds, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), ISBN   0-87930-653-X, pp. 1335–6.
  8. S. T. Erlewine, "American Alternative Rock / Post Punk", in V. Bogdanov, C. Woodstra and S. T. Erlewine, All Music Guide to Rock: the Definitive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 3rd edn., 2002), ISBN   0-87930-653-X, pp. 1344–6.
  9. Jameson, Neill (2017-10-16). "Mortiis: From Black Metal to Dungeon Synth and Beyond". Decibel Magazine. Retrieved 2023-07-12.