Portal:Rock music

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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.

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. Their contributions lent the genre a cultural legitimacy in the mainstream and initiated a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. By the late 1960s "classic rock" period, a number of 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, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene. New genres that emerged included progressive rock, which extended artistic elements, and glam rock, which highlighted showmanship and visual style. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on 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. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop-punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal. Some movements were conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk revival in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, rock has lost its position as the pre-eminent popular music genre in world culture, but remains commercially successful. The increased influence of hip-hop and electronic dance music can be seen in rock music, notably in the techno-pop scene of the early 2010s and the pop-punk-hip-hop revival of the 2020s. (Full article...)

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various rock music-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1The Who on stage in 1975 (from Hard rock)
Image 2Rush on stage in Milan, Italy, 2004 (from Hard rock)
Image 3Bill Haley and his Comets performing in the 1954 Universal International film Round Up of Rhythm (from Rock and roll)
Image 4Chuck Berry in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 5Golden Earring receives a gold record in 1970. (from Hard rock)
Image 6Foo Fighters performing an acoustic show in 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 7Aerosmith performing at Quilmes Rock in Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 15, 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 8Tommy Steele, one of the first British rock and rollers, performing in Stockholm in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 9Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson's record "Roll 'Em Pete" is regarded as a precursor to rock and roll. (from Rock and roll)
Image 10Poison, seen here in 2008, were among the most successful acts of the 1980s glam metal era. (from Hard rock)
Image 11Led Zeppelin live at Chicago Stadium, January 1975 (from Hard rock)
Image 12Drum notation for a backbeat (from Hard rock)
Image 13Nirvana were at the forefront of the 1990s grunge era. (from Hard rock)
Image 14Sign commemorating the role of Alan Freed and Cleveland, Ohio, in the origins of rock and roll (from Rock and roll)
Image 15"There's No Romance in Rock and Roll" made the cover of True Life Romance in 1956. (from Rock and roll)
Image 16Elvis Presley in a promotion shot for Jailhouse Rock in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 17Little Richard in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 18Original member Izzy Stradlin' on stage with Guns N' Roses in 2006 (from Hard rock)
Image 19Kiss onstage in Boston in 2004 (from Hard rock)
Image 20Wolfmother, 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 21Buddy Holly and his band, the Crickets (from Rock and roll)
Image 22Baker, Bruce and Clapton of Cream, whose blues rock improvisation was a major factor in the development of the genre (from Hard rock)

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Big Star was an American rock band formed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1971 by Alex Chilton (vocals, guitar), Chris Bell (vocals, guitar), Jody Stephens (drums), and Andy Hummel (bass). They have been described as the "quintessential American power pop band", and "one of the most mythic and influential cult acts in all of rock & roll". In its first era, the band's musical style drew influence from 1960s pop acts such as the Beatles and the Byrds, producing a style that foreshadowed the alternative rock of the 1980s and 1990s. Before they broke up, Big Star created a "seminal body of work that never stopped inspiring succeeding generations" according to Rolling Stone. Three of Big Star's studio albums are included in the Rolling Stone list of the Top 500 Albums of All-Time.

Big Star's debut album, 1972's #1 Record, was met by enthusiastic reviews, but ineffective marketing by Stax Records and limited distribution stunted its commercial success. Frustration took its toll on band relations: Bell left not long after the first record's commercial progress stalled, and Hummel left to finish his college education after a second album, Radio City, was completed in December 1973. Like #1 Record, Radio City received excellent reviews, but label issues again thwarted sales—Columbia Records, which had assumed control of the Stax catalog, likewise effectively vetoed its distribution.

After a third album, recorded in the fall of 1974, was deemed commercially unviable and shelved before receiving a title, the band broke up late in 1974. Four years later, the first two Big Star LPs were released together in the UK as a double album. The band's third album was finally issued soon afterward; titled Third/Sister Lovers, it found limited commercial success, but has since become a cult classic. Shortly thereafter, Chris Bell was killed in a car accident at the age of 27. During the group's hiatus in the 1980s, the Big Star discography drew renewed attention when R.E.M. and the Replacements, as well as other popular bands, cited the group as an influence. In 1992, interest was further stimulated by Rykodisc's reissues of the band's albums, complemented by a collection of Bell's solo work.

In 1993, Chilton and Stephens reformed Big Star with recruits Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, and gave a concert at the University of Missouri. The band remained active, performing tours in Europe and Japan, and released a new studio album, In Space, in 2005. Chilton died in March 2010 after suffering from heart problems. Hummel died of cancer four months later. These deaths left Stephens as the sole surviving founding member. Big Star was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2014. Since December 2010, several surviving members have appeared in a series of live tribute performances of the album Third/Sister Lovers, under the billing "Big Star's Third". , that project has remained active. (Full article...)

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James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as the greatest and one of the most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music."

Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville, then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with his band the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his only number one album. The world's highest-paid rock musician, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.

Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."

Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023. (Full article...)

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Zooropa is the eighth studio album by Irish rock band U2. Produced by Flood, Brian Eno, and the Edge, it was released on 5 July 1993 on Island Records. Inspired by the band's experiences on the Zoo TV Tour, Zooropa expanded on many of the tour's themes of technology and media oversaturation. The record was a continuation of the group's experimentation with alternative rock, electronic dance music, and electronic sound effects that began with their previous album, Achtung Baby, in 1991.

U2 began writing and recording Zooropa in Dublin in February 1993, during a six-month break between legs of the Zoo TV Tour. The record was originally intended as an EP to promote the "Zooropa" leg of the tour that was to begin in May 1993, but during the sessions, the group decided to extend the record to a full-length album. Pressed for time, U2 wrote and recorded at a rapid pace, with songs originating from many sources, including leftover material from the Achtung Baby sessions. The album was not completed in time for the tour's resumption, forcing the band to travel between Dublin and their tour destinations in May to complete mixing and recording.

Zooropa received generally favourable reviews from critics. Despite none of its three singles—"Numb", "Lemon", and "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)"—being hits consistently across regions, the record sold well upon release, charting in the top ten of 26 countries. The album's charting duration and lifetime sales of 7 million copies, however, were less than those of Achtung Baby. In 1994, Zooropa won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. Although the record was a success and music journalists view it as one of the group's most creative works, the band regard it with mixed feelings. (Full article...)

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"A Day in the Life" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the opening and closing sections of the song were mainly written by John Lennon, with Paul McCartney primarily contributing the song's middle section. All four Beatles played a role in shaping the final arrangement of the song.

Lennon's lyrics were mainly inspired by contemporary newspaper articles, including a report on the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne. The recording includes two passages of orchestral glissandos that were partly improvised in the avant-garde style. In the song's middle segment, McCartney recalls his younger years, which included riding the bus, smoking, and going to class. Following the second crescendo, the song ends with one of the most famous chords in music history, played on several keyboards, that sustains for over forty seconds.

A reputed drug reference in the line "I'd love to turn you on" resulted in the song initially being banned from broadcast by the BBC. Jeff Beck, Barry Gibb, the Fall and Phish are among the artists who have covered the song. The song inspired the creation of the Deep Note, the audio trademark for the THX film company. It remains one of the most influential and celebrated songs in popular music history, appearing on many lists of the greatest songs of all time, and being commonly appraised as the Beatles' finest song. (Full article...)

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Credit: Beni Köhler

Patti Smith performing at Provinssirock festival in Seinäjoki, Finland, June 2007.

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Did you know (auto-generated)

... that Dutch radio and TV presenter Hanneke Kappen presented the second Dutch radio show dedicated to heavy metal music?
... that Greg Cooper based the character of suffragist Kate Sheppard in punk-rock musical That Bloody Woman on Bette Midler in concert in Cleveland?
... that before charting on the UK Albums Chart with Are We There Yet?, the indie rock musician James Marriott had made a career of mocking other YouTubers' music?
... that when rock musician Warren Zevon received a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, he learned to "enjoy every sandwich"?
... that heavy metal band Judas Priest took their name from Bob Dylan's song "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"?
... that the Liverpool Echo described British rock and roll star Tommy Steele as "quite unable to sing and play the guitar at the same time" when reviewing his first album?

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Garage rock (sometimes called garage punk or '60s punk) is a raw and energetic style of rock and roll that flourished in the mid-1960s, most notably in the United States and Canada, and has experienced a series of subsequent revivals. The style is characterized by basic chord structures played on electric guitars and other instruments, sometimes distorted through a fuzzbox, as well as often unsophisticated and occasionally aggressive lyrics and delivery. Its name derives from the perception that groups were often made up of young amateurs who rehearsed in the family garage, although many were professional. (Full article...)