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...)

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

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

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Alice in Chains (often abbreviated as AIC) is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1987. Since 2006, the band's lineup has comprised vocalist/guitarists Jerry Cantrell and William DuVall, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Sean Kinney. Vocalist Layne Staley and bassist Mike Starr are former members of the band, having died in 2002 and 2011, respectively. The band took its name from Staley's previous group, Alice N' Chains. Often associated with grunge music, Alice in Chains' sound and style is deeply rooted in heavy metal music. The band is known for its distinctive vocal style, which often included the harmonized vocals between Staley and Cantrell (and later Cantrell and DuVall), making Alice in Chains a two-vocal band.

Alice in Chains rose to international fame as part of the grunge movement of the early 1990s, along with other Seattle bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. They achieved success during the era with the albums Facelift (1990), Dirt (1992) and Alice in Chains (1995), as well as the EP Jar of Flies (1994). The band was plagued by extended inactivity from 1996 onward, largely due to Staley's substance abuse, which resulted in his death in 2002 and caused the band to go on hiatus. Alice in Chains regrouped in 2005, with DuVall joining in 2006 as rhythm guitarist and later sharing lead vocal duties, and the band has since released three more albums: Black Gives Way to Blue (2009), The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here (2013) and Rainier Fog (2018).

Since its formation, Alice in Chains has released six studio albums, three EPs, three live albums, four compilations, two DVDs, 43 music videos and 32 singles. The band has sold more than 30 million records worldwide, and over 20 million records in the US alone. The band has had 18 Top 10 songs on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and 5 No. 1 hits, and has received eleven Grammy Award nominations. The band was ranked number 34 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock and as the 15th greatest live band by Hit Parader. (Full article...)

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Randolph Peter Best (né Scanland; born 24 November 1941) is an English musician who was the drummer for the Beatles from 1960 to 1962. He was dismissed immediately before the band achieved worldwide fame and is one of several people who have been referred to as a fifth Beatle.

Best's mother, Mona Best (1924–1988), opened the Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the Bests' house in Liverpool. The Beatles (at the time known as the Quarrymen) played some of their first concerts at the club. The Beatles invited Best to join the band on 12 August 1960, on the eve of the group's first Hamburg season of club dates. Ringo Starr eventually replaced Best on 16 August 1962 when the group's manager, Brian Epstein, fired Best at the request of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison following the band's first recording session. Over 30 years later, Best received a major monetary payout for his work with the Beatles after the release of their 1995 compilation of their early recordings on Anthology 1; Best played the drums on 10 of the album's tracks, including the Decca auditions.

After working in several commercially unsuccessful groups, Best gave up being in the music industry to work as a civil servant for 20 years before starting the Pete Best Band. (Full article...)

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El Camino is the seventh studio album by American rock duo the Black Keys. Co-produced by Danger Mouse and the duo, the album was released on Nonesuch Records on December 6, 2011. It is the band's follow-up to their commercial breakthrough, Brothers (2010), and was their third collaboration with Danger Mouse. El Camino draws from popular genres of the 1950s to the 1970s, such as rock and roll, glam rock, rockabilly, surf rock and soul. Danger Mouse contributed as a co-writer on each of the 11 songs alongside guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney.

The album was recorded from March to May 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, at Easy Eye Sound Studio, which Auerbach opened the year prior. The band approached writing and recording differently than on previous albums, as they entered the studio without having written any material and deliberated longer on how to structure songs. After struggling to translate the slower songs from Brothers to a live setting, the band wrote more uptempo, hook-laden tracks for El Camino. The album's cover art depicts a minivan similar to one the group toured in early in their career, but in an inside joke, they named the record after the El Camino muscle car. A faux newspaper advertisement and parody car commercial playing on this joke were used to promote the record prior to release.

Lead single "Lonely Boy" became the group's highest-charting single in several countries, including the United States, Australia, and Canada. The album was acclaimed by critics and was ranked in many publications' year-end lists of the best albums of the year. It debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 and reached the top five of the album charts in Australia, Canada, Belgium (Flanders), and New Zealand. The album was certified multi-platinum in the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as platinum in the United Kingdom, France, and Ireland. The Black Keys supported the album with the El Camino Tour, their first headlining arena tour. Four additional singles were released, including "Gold on the Ceiling" and "Little Black Submarines", which were rock radio successes. El Camino won the award for Best Rock Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, while "Lonely Boy" received honors for Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song. (Full article...)

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"Tomorrow Never Knows" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was released in August 1966 as the final track on their album Revolver, although it was the first song recorded for the LP. The song marked a radical departure for the Beatles, as the band fully embraced the potential of the recording studio without consideration for reproducing the results in concert.

When writing the song, Lennon drew inspiration from his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. The Beatles' recording employed musical elements foreign to pop music, including musique concrète, avant-garde composition and electro-acoustic sound manipulation. It features an Indian-inspired modal backing of tambura and sitar drone and bass guitar, with minimal harmonic deviation from a single chord, underpinned by a constant but non-standard drum pattern; added to this, tape loops prepared by the band were overdubbed "live" onto the rhythm track. Part of Lennon's vocal was fed through a Leslie speaker cabinet, normally used for a Hammond organ. The song's reverse guitar parts and effects marked the first use of reversed sounds in a pop recording, although the Beatles' 1966 B-side "Rain", which they recorded soon afterwards using the same technique, was issued over two months before the release of Revolver.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" was an early and highly influential recording in the psychedelic and electronic music genres, particularly for its pioneering use of sampling, tape manipulation and other production techniques. It also introduced lyrical themes that espoused mind expansion, anti-materialism and Eastern spirituality into popular music. On release, the song was the source of confusion and ridicule by many fans and journalists; it has since received praise as an effective representation of a psychedelic experience. Pitchfork placed the track at number 19 on its list of "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s", and Rolling Stone ranked it at number 18 on the magazine's list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs. (Full article...)

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Credit: AngMoKio

Rock 'n' Roll singer Johnny Trouble of Johnny Trouble Trio.

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Glam metal (also known as hair metal or pop metal) is a subgenre of heavy metal that features pop-influenced hooks and guitar riffs, upbeat rock anthems, and slow power ballads. It borrows heavily from the fashion and image of 1970s glam rock.

Early glam metal evolved directly from the glam rock movement of the 1970s, as visual elements taken from acts such as T. Rex, the New York Dolls, and David Bowie (and to a lesser extent, the punk and new wave movements taking place concurrently in New York City) were fused with the decidedly more heavy metal leaning and theatrical acts such as Alice Cooper and Kiss. The first examples of this fusion began appearing in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, particularly on the Los Angeles Sunset Strip music scene. Early glam metal bands include Mötley Crüe, Hanoi Rocks, Night Ranger, Ratt, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, and Dokken. Glam metal achieved significant commercial success from approximately 1983 to 1991, bringing to prominence bands such as Poison, Skid Row, Cinderella and Warrant. From a strictly visual perspective, glam metal is defined by flashy and tight-fitting clothing, makeup, and an overall androgynous aesthetic in which the traditional "denim & leather" aspect of heavy metal culture is replaced by spandex, lace, and usually heavy use of bright colours. (Full article...)