Rock music: How the world fell in love with distortion
These amps go to 11.
For most of its history, music was a relatively polite means of creative expression. It existed in parallel with poetry, aiming to be beautiful, stirring, romantic and expressive of the deepest desires of the human heart. Then rock came along.
The advent of the electric guitar, and the realization soon after of just what kind of hell-raising noise can be made with one, essentially invented the possibility of music expressing impolite sentiments in a decidedly impolite manner. Angry young people suddenly had their medium, and the tool with which to send that medium across the globe.
Eighty or so years later, it's hard to imagine a world without rock music. The genre and its various sub-genres are a fundamental tenet of modern culture, responsible for quite a hefty chunk of the defining cultural artefacts of the 20th and 21st centuries, and probably more teenage voyages of self-discovery and anti-parental rebellion than any other. Angst, lust, heartbreak, anger: they all existed well before rock music, but they'd never been expressed in quite the way that rock seems so perfectly designed to express them.
The history of rock music
Rock emerged from rock 'n' roll, which emerged from a confluence of the blues and country music being played by the black musicians of the American south in the 1940s. When white musicians began taking an interest in the genre, white audiences soon followed, paving the way for commercial success for artists like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino in the mid-1950s.
Then British musicians got involved – most famously in the shape of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, the latter of whom are perhaps most clearly representative of the moment when rock dropped its roll. Theirs was an angrier, snarlier sound, and alongside The Kinks and The Yardbirds, it plugged the blues into an amplifier and said "see what you think of this."
The Kinks became the first example of the traditional rock band setup: drummer, electric guitarist, bass guitarist and a singer. But it was arguably The Yardbirds whose members went on to have the most influence in the establishment of rock as a genre all of its own. Two of them (Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck) became defining rock guitarists of their era. Another (Jimmy Page) evolved the band into The New Yardbirds, which he soon re-christened Led Zeppelin. They were probably the first rock band to fully and unambiguously fulfill our contemporary sense of what it means to be one.
Sub-genres of rock and the scene today
Rock might've grown out of blues and country music – and indeed, through Jimi Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Fleetwood Mac, the intermingling between those genres continued and continues to produce a formidable cache of albums – but it soon began mingling with other genres, mutating into new ones, and initiating a whole subsection of music that continues to develop today.
Folk rock
The gentle communality of folk music wasn't the most obvious pairing for the verve and vigor of rock music. But then a man called Bob Dylan played an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (an incident so influential it's had a whole film made and several books written about it) and the union was born. Neil Young appeared on the scene not long after.
Then in the 1970s, we got Bruce Springsteen – who was initially encouraged to posit himself as a more muscular, brawny Dylan, and sort of was that for a while, but then ended up developing a whole sub-sub-genre of his own that paired rock stylings with a concern for the daily struggles of working people, and was christened heartland rock. Folk rock is about as clam an iteration of rock as you're going to find, though heartland rock adds a little upbeat 80s energy to proceedings.
Progressive rock
Progressive rock was a reaction against rock's burgeoning commercial success and the crystallization of the formula that had generated it. It was made by people who might've been more likely to have gone to art school instead of music school, and it was consequently less wedded to the developed conventions of the genre.
As with so many things, progressive rock arguably started with The Beatles and the more experimental phase they moved through on albums like Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), but groups like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Jethro Tull can be considered most clearly emblematic of the prog rock sound, which can perhaps best be described as like rock but if you put it in space.
Glam rock
Kind of excitingly, glam rock can (in the opinion of many) be traced to a specific moment: T. Rex's performance of their single "Hot Love" (1971) on the BBC's Top of the Pops, during which lead singer Marc Bolan was clad in a plethora of satins and glitter. That same year, David Bowie invented his Ziggy Stardust persona, and other acts like Roxy Music and Slade, along with some of the work Queen and Elton John were doing at the time, helped to solidify a sense of a British rock movement that was all about big hair, big clothes and big, pop-y noise.
This didn't take off so much across the pond, but what did arguably develop from the embers of American attempts at glam rock was the hair metal genre, represented by the likes of Guns n' Roses, Bon Jovi and Alice Cooper. Think "Livin' on a Prayer" (1986), "Welcome to the Jungle" (1987), etc.
Punk rock
Punk music is sort of like, what if we made rock even angrier? Arguments rage to this day about who exactly started it. You had MC5 and The Stooges as your sort of proto-punk pioneers in Michigan in the late 1960s, but arguably the first definitively punk act didn't come along until Ramones in New York in 1974 or Sex Pistols in London in 1975. But then if you listen back to what the New York Dolls were doing in New York in 1971… you can see how this gets out of hand.
What we can say now is that it became one of the defining not just sounds but cultural movements of the 1970s, loaded as it eventually was with any and all of the anti-establishment sentiment so heavily adopted by the youth of the time.
Post-punk
Kind of like what progressive rock was to the first wave of rock music, post-punk emerged from a resistance to the dominant mores of punk music.
Post-punk affected a more ethereal, disorientating sound pioneered by the likes of Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nick Cave and Suicide, many of whom seemed to take a determinedly disinterested approach to the audience's experience of their music. Post-punk bands often experimented with many of the more industrial and electronic sounds that would later come to characterise much of electronic and DJ-led music.
Alternative and indie rock
If one of the avenues post-punk went down was electronic music, the other was a pivot back toward the guitar but with many of the identifying characteristics of post-punk still present, in alternative and indie rock. The earliest American iteration of alternative rock gave us R.E.M., Sonic Youth and the Pixies. Later waves gifted us the Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Linkin Park. It was characterized by tinnier guitar sounds and pronounced teenage angst.
In the UK, it produced The Smiths, The Cure and later The Stones Roses. The British alt-rock scene eventually served up Britpop icons Blur and Oasis, the earlier efforts of whom went similarly heavy on the teenage angst before making way for a more loutish, shouty antagonism and swagger.
Rock music today
So, where are we now? What are young rock fans listening to these days? Well because they now have access to almost all music ever recorded, a lot of them are actually listening to the bands described above and not so much to new ones. "The band" as a concept is in a bit of a tricky spot at the moment: between 1980 and 1994, bands held the top spot in the UK singles charts for a total of 287 weeks, but in the first half of the 2020s, they only managed a total of three weeks (one of which was a posthumous release by The Beatles).
That said, there are some green shoots appearing: Irish band Fontaines D.C. have built a genuine cult following with a post-punk blend of erudite talk-sing vocals and energetic guitar work, and more recently Geese from New York have seemingly revived some of the American version of the post-punk sound.
Featured rock playlists on Soundtrack
Rock Hits
A mix of some of the best-known hits across the aforementioned genres and more, plus some curveballs to keep things interesting.
Classic Rock
From the "ain't broke, don't fix" school of rock.
Family-friendly Rock
All of the attitude, a little less of the having to cover your kids' ears.
Summer Rocks
Feel-good fun that'll put a little extra pep in everyone's step.
Brand New Rock
Keep things fresh with a wide selection from the forefront of the genre.
Folk Rock Haven
If you'd like your rock a little gentler, a little cozier, this is the one.
Garage Rock
If you're going for that rough-and-ready, DIY vibe, this could be the one for you.
Explore more rock music
As you can see, the world of rock music is an ever-unfurling tapestry of different styles, movements, moments and trends. It has space for every mood you can imagine, but it's always going to bring a streak of rebellion.
Explore Soundtrack's rock playlists to see more of the music that only knows how to do things its own way.
