Rock music

Rock music, the dominant popular music since the late 1950s. Rock music first emerged in the mid-1950s as rock 'n' roll, a hybrid evolving from a sophisticated blues style called rhythm and blues, which often used amplified instruments to produce a heavy beat. The first national rock 'n' roll hit—and the one that probably gave the genre its name—was “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and His Comets (1955). Rock 'n' roll's first superstar, Elvis Presley, hit on a riveting combination of harddriving rhythm and blues with country and western music. Other important performers includeed Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. Rock 'n' roll, with its exciting beat and lyrics about school, cars, and love, was especially popular with adolescents. The impetus for the transformation of rock 'n' roll into rock music came from England, where, in the early 1960s, bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones remixed the original ingredients, adding new musical textures, forms, and rhythms and more sophisticated lyrics. The 1960s also saw the emergence of soul music, a product of rhythm and blues and gospel styles, which would add its sound to rock; folk rock, as in the later work of Bob Dylan; and acid rock, an attempt to reproduce musically the hallucinogenic drug experience. In the 1970s acid rock was followed by hard rock or heavy metal, wich was louder and more repetitive and by eclectic mixtures of the rock sound with country, jazz, calypso, and other styles. Another 1970s innovation was disco, repetitive dance music with a rock beat. In the mid-1970s punk rock, an angry, harsh, sometimes violent style, emerged out of the postindustrial despair of working-class youth in England. Punk rock, also reflected young people's disillusionment with the so-called rock establishment and the overcommercialization of what had been a rebellious art form. The 1980s and 1990s were dominated by rock videos, short films that feature acting, dancing, and effects as well as music.