Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of
themes, including romantic love, sex, rebellion against "The Establishment", social
concerns, and life styles.[11] These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such
as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, and rhythm and blues.[18] Christgau
characterizes rock lyrics as a "cool medium" with simple diction and repeated refrains,
and asserts that rock's primary "function" "pertains to music, or, more
generally, noise."[19] The predominance of white, male, and often middle class musicians
in rock music has often been noted,[20] and rock has been seen as an appropriation of
Black musical forms for a young, white and largely male audience.[21] As a result, it has
also been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics.
[22]
Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll usually
implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression".[23]
Since the term "rock" started being used in preference to "rock and roll" from the late-
1960s, it has usually been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many
characteristics, but from which it is often distanced by an emphasis on musicianship,
live performance, and a focus on serious and progressive themes as part of an ideology
of authenticity that is frequently combined with an awareness of the genre's history and
development.[24] According to Simon Frith, rock was "something more than pop,
something more than rock and roll" and "[r]ock musicians combined an emphasis on
skill and technique with the romantic concept of art as artistic expression, original and
sincere".[24]
In the new millennium, the term rock has occasionally been used as a blanket
term including forms like pop music, reggae music, soul music, and even hip hop, which
it has been influenced with but often contrasted through much of its history. [25] Christgau
has used the term broadly to refer to popular and semipopular music that caters to his
sensibility as "a rock-and-roller", including a fondness for a good beat, a meaningful lyric
with some wit, and the theme of youth, which holds an "eternal attraction" so objective
"that all youth music partakes of sociology and the field report." Writing in Christgau's
Record Guide: The '80s (1990), he said this sensibility is evident in the music of folk
singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked, rapper LL Cool J, and synth-pop duo Pet Shop
Boys—"all kids working out their identities"—as much as it is in the music of Chuck
Berry, the Ramones, and the Replacements.[26]
1940s–1950s: Birth of rock and roll
[edit]
Rock and roll
[edit]
Main article: Rock and roll
See also: Origins of rock and roll and Rockabilly
Chuck Berry in a 1958 publicity photo
The foundations of rock music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States
during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and quickly spread to much of the rest of the
world. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various black musical genres of the time,
including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country and western.[27]
Elvis Presley in a promotion shot for Jailhouse Rock in 1957
Debate surrounds the many recordings which have been suggested as "the first rock
and roll record". Contenders include "Strange Things Happening Every Day" by Sister
Rosetta Tharpe (1944);[28] "That's All Right" by Arthur Crudup (1946),[29] which was
later covered by Elvis Presley in 1954; "The House of Blue Lights" by Ella Mae
Morse and Freddie Slack (1946);[30] Wynonie Harris' "Good Rocking Tonight" (1948);
[31]
Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" (1949);[32] Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949),
also covered by Bill Haley & His Comets in 1952;[33] and "Rocket 88" by Jackie
Brenston and his Delta Cats (in fact, Ike Turner and his band the Kings of Rhythm),
recorded by Sam Phillips for Chess Records in 1951.[34]
In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music
(then termed "race music") for a multi-racial audience, and is credited with first using the
phrase "rock and roll" to describe the music.[35] Four years later, Bill Haley's "Rock
Around the Clock" (1954) became the first rock and roll song to
top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide
for this new wave of popular culture.[36][37] Other artists with early rock and roll hits
included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis,
and Gene Vincent.[34] Soon rock and roll was the major force in American record sales
and crooners, such as Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, and Patti Page, who had dominated
the previous decade of popular music, found their access to the pop charts significantly
curtailed.[38]
