Portal:Rock music

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The Rock Music Portal

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

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The Clash were an English rock band that formed in London in 1976 and were key players in the original wave of British punk rock. Billed as "The Only Band That Matters", they used elements of reggae, dub, funk, ska, and rockabilly, and they contributed to the post-punk and new wave movements that followed punk. For most of their recording career, the Clash consisted of lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Joe Strummer, lead guitarist and vocalist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon, and drummer Nicky "Topper" Headon.

The Clash achieved critical and commercial success in the United Kingdom with the release of their debut album The Clash (1977) and their second album Give 'Em Enough Rope (1978). Their experimental third album London Calling, which was released in the UK in December 1979, earned them popularity in the United States, where it was released the following month. A decade later, Rolling Stone named London Calling the best album of the 1980s. Following continued musical experimentation on their fourth album Sandinista! (1980), the band were more successful with the release of Combat Rock (1982), which includes the US top-10 hit "Rock the Casbah", helping the album to achieve a 2× platinum certification there.

In 1982, Headon left the band due to internal friction surrounding his increasing heroin addiction, and Jones departed the following year. With a new lineup, the band released their final album Cut the Crap in 1985 before disbanding a few weeks later.

In January 2003, shortly after the death of Joe Strummer, the band, including original drummer Terry Chimes, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked the Clash number 28 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". (Full article...)

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Sir George Ivan Morrison OBE (born 31 August 1945) is a singer-songwriter and musician from Northern Ireland whose recording career spans seven decades.

Morrison began performing as a teenager in the late 1950s, playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Known as "Van the Man" to his fans, Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Belfast R&B band Them, with whom he wrote and recorded "Gloria", which became a garage band staple. His solo career started under the pop-hit oriented guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single "Brown Eyed Girl" in 1967.

After Berns's death, Warner Bros. Records bought Morrison's contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks (1968). While initially a poor seller, the album has come to be regarded as a classic. Moondance (1970) established Morrison as a major artist, and he built on his reputation throughout the 1970s with a series of acclaimed albums and live performances.

Much of Morrison's music is structured around the conventions of soul music and early rhythm and blues. An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream of consciousness narrative, such as the album Astral Weeks. The two strains together are sometimes referred to as "Celtic soul", and his music has been described as attaining "a kind of violent transcendence". (Full article...)

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The Basement Tapes is the sixteenth album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and his second with the Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records. Two-thirds of the album's 24 tracks feature Dylan on lead vocals backed by the Band, and were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, in the lapse between the release of Blonde on Blonde and the subsequent recording and release of John Wesley Harding, during sessions that began at Dylan's house in Woodstock, New York, then moved to the basement of Big Pink. While most of these had appeared on bootleg albums, The Basement Tapes marked their first official release. The remaining eight songs, all previously unavailable, feature the Band without Dylan and were recorded between 1967 and 1975.

During his 1965–1966 world tour, Dylan was backed by the Hawks, a five-member rock group who would later become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, four members of the Hawks came to Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was out of the public's eye during an extended period of recovery in 1967, he and the members of the Hawks recorded more than 100 tracks together, incorporating original compositions, contemporary covers, and traditional material. Dylan's new style of writing moved away from the urban sensibility and extended narratives that had characterized his most recent albums, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, toward songs that were more intimate and which drew on many styles of traditional American music. While some of the basement songs are humorous, others dwell on nothingness, betrayal and a quest for salvation. In general, they possess a rootsy quality anticipating the Americana genre. For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music in the late sixties.

When Columbia Records prepared the album for official release in 1975, eight songs recorded solely by the Band—in various locations between 1967 and 1975—were added to 16 songs taped by Dylan and the Band in 1967. Overdubs were added in 1975 to songs from both categories. The Basement Tapes was critically acclaimed upon release, reaching number seven on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape album chart. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan's best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock. (Full article...)

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"Hungry Like the Wolf" is a song by English new wave band Duran Duran. Written by the band members, the song was produced by Colin Thurston for the group's second studio album, Rio (1982). The song was released on 4 May 1982 as the band's fifth single in the United Kingdom, and 8 June 1982 in the United States. It reached No. 5 on the UK Singles Chart, and received a platinum certification from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

The music video for "Hungry Like the Wolf" was directed by Russell Mulcahy and filmed in Sri Lanka. Although the band initially failed to break into the US market, MTV placed the "Hungry Like the Wolf" video into heavy rotation. Subsequently, the group gained much exposure; the song peaked at the No. 3 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1983, and Duran Duran became an international sensation. The video won the first Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video in 1984.

The 2015 song "Hey Everybody!" by 5 Seconds of Summer contains elements from "Hungry Like the Wolf", who were given a writing credit on the song. (Full article...)

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Credit: Sven-Sebastian Sajak

Mike Dirnt, singer and bassist of Green Day, stands on the Centerstage during Rock im Park ("Rock in the Park") Festival 2013.

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Viking metal is a subgenre of heavy metal music characterized by a lyrical and thematic focus on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age. Viking metal is quite diverse as a musical style, to the point where some consider it more a cross-genre term than a genre, but it is typically seen as black metal with influences from Nordic folk music. Common traits include a slow-paced and heavy riffing style, anthemic choruses, use of both sung and harsh vocals, a reliance on folk instrumentation, and often the use of keyboards for atmospheric effect. (Full article...)