Portal:Rock music

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...)

Originally named the New Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin signed a deal with Atlantic Records that gave them considerable artistic freedom. Initially unpopular with critics, they achieved significant commercial success with eight studio albums over ten years. Their 1969 debut, Led Zeppelin, was a top-ten album in several countries and featured such tracks as "Good Times Bad Times", "Dazed and Confused" and "Communication Breakdown". Led Zeppelin II (1969) was their first number-one album, and yielded "Whole Lotta Love" and "Ramble On". In 1970, they released Led Zeppelin III which featured "Immigrant Song". Their untitled fourth album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV (1971), is one of the best-selling albums in history with 37 million copies sold. The album includes "Black Dog", "Rock and Roll" and "Stairway to Heaven", with the latter being among the most popular and influential works in rock history. Houses of the Holy (1973) yielded "The Song Remains the Same" and "Over the Hills and Far Away". Physical Graffiti (1975), a double album, featured "The Rover" and "Kashmir".

Page composed most of Led Zeppelin's music, particularly early in their career, while Plant wrote most of the lyrics. Jones's keyboard-based compositions later became central to their music, which featured increasing experimentation. The latter half of their career saw a series of record-breaking tours that earned the group a reputation for excess and debauchery. Although they remained commercially and critically successful, their touring and output, which included Presence (1976) and In Through the Out Door (1979), grew limited, and the group disbanded following Bonham's death in 1980, feeling that they would not be "Led Zeppelin" without him. Since then, the surviving former members have sporadically collaborated and participated in one-off concerts. The most successful of these was the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in London, with Bonham's son Jason Bonham on drums.

Led Zeppelin are one of the best-selling music artists of all time; their total record sales are estimated to be between 200 and 300 million units worldwide. They achieved eight consecutive UK number-one albums and six number-one albums on the US Billboard 200, with five of their albums certified Diamond in the US by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Rolling Stone magazine described them as "the heaviest band of all time", "the biggest band of the Seventies", and "unquestionably one of the most enduring bands in rock history". They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995; the museum's biography of the band states that they were "as influential" during the 1970s as the Beatles were during the 1960s. (Full article...)

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Bowie developed an interest in music from an early age. He studied art, music and design before embarking on a professional career as a musician in 1963. He released a string of unsuccessful singles with local bands and a solo album before achieving his first top-five entry on the UK Singles Chart with "Space Oddity" (1969). After a period of experimentation, he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant and androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The character was spearheaded by the success of "Starman" and album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which won him widespread popularity. In 1975, Bowie's style shifted towards a sound he characterised as "plastic soul", initially alienating many of his UK fans but garnering his first major US crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the album Young Americans. In 1976, Bowie starred in the cult film The Man Who Fell to Earth and released Station to Station. In 1977, he again changed direction with the electronic-inflected album Low, the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno that came to be known as the Berlin Trilogy. "Heroes" (1977) and Lodger (1979) followed; each album reached the UK top five and received lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had three number-one hits: the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes", its album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) and "Under Pressure" (a 1981 collaboration with Queen). He achieved his greatest commercial success in the 1980s with Let's Dance (1983). Between 1988 and 1992, he fronted the hard rock band Tin Machine before resuming his solo career in 1993. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including industrial and jungle. He also continued acting; his roles included Major Jack Celliers in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Jareth the Goblin King in Labyrinth (1986), Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat (1996), and Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), among other film and television appearances and cameos. He stopped touring after 2004 and his last live performance was at a charity event in 2006. He returned from a decade-long recording hiatus in 2013 with The Next Day and remained musically active until his death from liver cancer in 2016. He died two days after both his 69th birthday and the release of his final album, Blackstar.

During his lifetime, his record sales, estimated at over 100 million records worldwide, made him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Often dubbed the "chameleon of rock" due to his constant musical reinventions, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Rolling Stone ranked him among the greatest artists in history. As of 2022, Bowie was the best-selling vinyl artist of the 21st century. (Full article...)

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Tommy is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Who, first released on 19 May 1969. Primarily written by guitarist Pete Townshend, Tommy is a double album and an early rock opera that tells the story of the fictional Tommy Walker.

Townshend came up with the concept of Tommy after being introduced to the work of Meher Baba, and he attempted to translate Baba's teachings into music. Recording of the album began in September 1968, but took six months to complete as material needed to be arranged and re-recorded in the studio. The Who promoted the album's release with an extensive tour, including a live version of Tommy, which lasted throughout 1969 and 1970. Key gigs from the tour included appearances at Woodstock, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the University of Leeds, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The live performances of Tommy drew critical praise and revitalised the band's career.

Upon its release, Tommy was acclaimed by critics, who hailed it as the Who's breakthrough. Its critical standing diminished slightly in later years; nonetheless, several writers view it as an important and influential album in the history of rock music. In 1998, Tommy was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Subsequently, the rock opera was developed into other media, including a Seattle Opera production in 1971, an orchestral version by Lou Reizner in 1972, a film in 1975, and a Broadway musical in 1992. Tommy has been reissued several times on CD, including a remix by Jon Astley in 1996, a deluxe Super Audio CD in 2003, and a super deluxe box set in 2013, including previously unreleased demos and live material. (Full article...)

"Live Forever" is a song by English rock band Oasis. Written by Noel Gallagher, the song was released as the third single from their debut album Definitely Maybe (1994) on 8 August 1994, just prior to that album's release. Gallagher wrote the song in 1991, before he joined Oasis.

Inspired by the Rolling Stones' "Shine a Light", "Live Forever" features a basic song structure and lyrics with an optimistic outlook that contrasted with the attitude of the grunge bands popular at the time. The song was the first Oasis single to enter the top ten in the United Kingdom, and garnered critical acclaim. In 2017, lead singer Liam Gallagher declared the song his favourite Oasis song. The British Phonographic Industry certified the song double platinum in August 2021. (Full article...)

Patti Smith performing at Provinssirock festival in Seinäjoki, Finland, June 2007.

• ... that heavy metal band Judas Priest took their name from Bob Dylan's song "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"?
• ... that the heavy metal band Cradle of Filth released a T-shirt that was so offensive that several people were arrested for wearing it?
• ... that Desulfovibrio vulgaris can remove toxic heavy metals from the environment?
• ... that when rock musician Warren Zevon received a terminal diagnosis of lung cancer, he learned to "enjoy every sandwich"?
• ... that the Diaspora Yeshiva Band infused rock and bluegrass with Jewish lyrics, creating a music style it called "Hasidic rock" or "Country and Eastern"?
• ... that during his tenure as Governor of Central Java, Muhammad Ismail banned rock music concerts and car rallies?

Chamber pop (also called baroque pop and sometimes conflated with orchestral pop or symphonic pop) is a music genre that combines rock music with the intricate use of strings, horns, piano, and vocal harmonies, and other components drawn from the orchestral and lounge pop of the 1960s, with an emphasis on melody and texture. (Full article...)

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• WikiProject Rock music (Main rock project)
• WikiProject Metal
• WikiProject Black Metal
• WikiProject Alternative music
• WikiProject Punk music
• WikiProject Progressive Rock
• WikiProject Music Directory

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