A term used to denote a particular category of pop music. A contraction of Rock and roll, it first appeared in the 1960s, when it was used to describe certain new pop music styles developing after about 1965 in North America and Britain. These styles were mostly associated with young, white audiences and musicians: for example, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Britain, and bands based in California such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. The governing principles that were felt to underlie these styles were their seriousness and commitment. These qualities were the basis of a contrast made by rock fans and musicians between their music and contemporary popular music styles considered to be more commercially orientated, by now often described pejoratively as ‘pop’. Subsequently ‘rock’ was applied to music thought to display the same sense of commitment or to derive stylistically from rock of the late 1960s. The rock–pop contrast became a staple of critical and historical discourse. However, even in the 1960s the sociological and stylistic distinctions between rock and pop were often blurred, and this was increasingly so from the 1970s on, especially after punk rock (c1976–8). For this reason this article concentrates on the terminological dispute itself. For a detailed discussion of the full range of pop/rock styles, see Pop; for individual rock styles see Classic rock, Country rock, Glam rock, Grunge, Hard rock, Heavy metal, Krautrock, Progressive rock, Psychedelic rock, Punk rock, Soft rock, Thrash metal and Band (i), §VI, and for instrumentation see below.
Rock can be defined along three dimensions. Sociologically, it is a commercially-produced popular music aimed at an exclusionary youth audience of a type characteristic of late-capitalist societies. Musically, it tends to be highly amplified, with a strong beat and rhythmic patterns commonly considered erotic, and to draw heavily on proto-folk (especially African-American) musical sources from Southern USA. Ideologically, it is associated with an aesthetic programme of ‘authenticity’, developing elements from discourses around folk-revival (‘community’, ‘roots’) and art music (‘originality’, ‘personal expression’, ‘integrity’). The sociological and musical elements are so variable, however, that the ideological dimension is the strongest factor. It can be observed organizing the other two in Friedlander's delineation of the whole spectrum of what he calls ‘rock/pop’ (1996, p.3): ‘This reflects a dual nature: musical and lyrical roots that are derived from the classic rock era (rock), and its status as a commodity produced under pressure to conform by the record industry (pop).’ It is also clear in Harron (1990, pp.209–10):
Pop stands for mutability and glitter … and its value is measured by record sales and the charts. Pop is about dreams and escapism and ecstatic moments; it believes in cliches and its philosophy is ‘give the people what they want.’ It is egalitarian by nature … Rock is about the search for permanence within the freefloating values of the marketplace. It is about tradition (blues, country, and folk roots), and it is hierarchical in that it believes in geniuses and heroes … originality and self-expression in defiance of crass commercialism.
When the British government decided (1990) to license three new national commercial radio stations, they stipulated that one should be ‘other than pop’. A bid from Rock FM produced consternation. Using terms similar to Harron's, Rock FM put the representative view of the music industry: that pop and rock were different. The government disagreed, and changed the legislation to define what they wanted to exclude simply with reference to strong rhythm and amplification. In ideological terms, the music industry was right; in musical terms, however, the government had a good case. Stylistic distinctions were unreliable by this stage: fans would disagree, for instance, over whether Prince's music was ‘pop’ or ‘rock’. Such distinctions also changed over time, and particular music might migrate; thus Meat Loaf's heavy metal songs might be regarded as turning into pop as a result of heavily, and perhaps ironically, romanticized presentation. Moreover, the ‘authenticity’ often drained out of rock songs as they were used for commercial purposes, such as in TV advertisements.
From the 1970s on, the pop–rock distinction came under attack from several directions. Punk's often parodic use of rock conventions implied that rock, no less than pop, was knowingly constructed and, moreover, was frequently the vehicle of commercial calculation and manipulation. Feminists criticized the masculinist assumptions of rock self-expression. Dance music practice suggested that, in the world of collective production that actually obtained in popular music, rock's ideology of self-authorship was a fabrication and also boringly egotistical. New production technology – especially sampling, digital storage of musical data and computer-sequenced assembly of compositions – weakened the connection, insisted on by rock, between musical value on the one hand and instrumental and vocal performance skill on the other.
Thus understandings of both rock and pop are best if traced historically. A rock discourse came into being in the late 1960s, in association with a changing musical audience (more educated and middle-class), and emergent interests in countercultural community, radical politics and a more theorized aesthetic. The ‘heavy’ and ‘progressive’ styles of that period, linked to these ideological and social interests, generated a rock lineage, which can be followed through such performers as Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and the many heavy metal bands. From the 1970s, though, rock was only part of the pop music field and was distinguished tendentially from pop in programme and audience (on the whole, older for rock). Subjected to deconstruction from various quarters, the idea of rock still had some weight in the 1990s (for example, in the context of the British movement of Britpop, it was possible to talk of Oasis as being nearer to rock and Blur closer to pop traditions), but it was now heavily qualified. Such an approach to the relationship between pop and rock also enables historians to connect them to pre-1950 popular music history, rock to American folk ‘roots’ (blues, country music and folk-revival), pop to Tin Pan Alley traditions of songwriting craftsmanship and show business presentation.
C. Belz: The Story of Rock (New York, 1969, 2/1972)
J. Eisen: The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Revolution (New York, 1969)
R. Melzer: The Aesthetics of Rock (New York, 1970)
J. Landau: It's Too Late to Stop Now: a Rock and Roll Journal (San Francisco, 1972)
G. Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (New York, 1975, 4/1991)
S. Frith: ‘The Magic that Can Set You Free: the Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community’, Popular Music, i (1981), 159–68
S. Frith: Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (London, 1983)
A. Durant: ‘Rock Today: Facing the Music’, Conditions of Music (London, 1984), 167–233
L. Grossberg: ‘Is there Rock after Punk?’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, iii/1 (1986), 50–74
D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester, 1987)
R. Pattison: The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York, 1987)
M. Harron: ‘McRock: Pop as a Commodity’, Facing the Music: Essays on Pop, Rock and Culture, ed. S. Frith (London, 1990), 173–220
P.H. Ennis: The Seventh Stream: the Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH, 1992)
P. Tagg: ‘From Refrain to Rave: the Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground’, Popular Music, xiii (1994), 209–22
J. Fornas: ‘The Future of Rock: Discourses that Struggle to Define a Genre’, Popular Music, xiv (1995), 111–25
P. Friedlander: Rock and Roll: a Social History (Boulder, CO, 1996)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford, 1996)
T. Gracyk: Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock (London, 1996)
RICHARD MIDDLETON