Rock Facts

Origins and early development

Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated in the United States as "rock and roll" in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of styles from the mid-1960s, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom. It has its roots in rock and roll, a style that drew from the African-American musical genres of blues and rhythm and blues, as well as from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other styles.

Evolution or diversification

Rock musicians in the mid-1960s began to advance the album ahead of the single as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, with the Beatles at the forefront of this development. By the late 1960s a few distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, and jazz rock, which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock. New genres that emerged included progressive rock, heavy metal, and glam rock. In the second half of the 1970s punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down energetic social and political critiques and influenced new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, britpop, and indie rock, and further subgenres have since emerged including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal.

Cultural or musical significance

Rock was the most popular genre of music in the U.S. and much of the western world from the 1960s up to the 2010s. Rock has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers, the hippie movement and the wider western counterculture, and later subcultures from punk such as goth, punk, and emo. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism and changes in social attitudes to race, sex, and drug use and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt, while also being commercially successful. Since the 2010s rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture but remains commercially successful.