Rock Music

Highlights everything needed to learn about rock music.

Pop music and rock music are often treated as separate genres but the distinction has always been blurred. Motti Regev argues that pop-rock is best understood as a single musical form defined by the use of electric and electronic instruments, amplification and related techniques. The history of pop-rock extends from the emergence of rock'n'roll in the 1950s to a variety of contemporary fashions and trends – rock, punk, soul, funk, techno, hip hop, indie, metal, pop and many more. This book offers a highly original account of the emergence of pop-rock music as a global phenomenon in which Anglo-American and many other national and ethnic variants interact in complex ways. Pop-rock is analysed as a prime instance of 'aesthetic cosmopolitanism' – that is, the gradual formation, in late modernity, of world culture as a single interconnected entity in which different social groupings around the world increasingly share common ground in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms and cultural practices. Drawing on a wide array of examples, this path-breaking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in cultural sociology, media and cultural studies as well as the study of popular music.

From the late-1970s to the late-1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important social and political purpose of providing a popular cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of life in Yugoslav society. The three music movements that emerged in this period - New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans - employed the understanding of rock music as the 'music of commitment' (i.e. as socio-cultural praxis premised on committed social engagement) to articulate the critiques of the country's 'new socialist culture', with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This book offers an analysis of the three music movements and their particular brand of 'poetics of the present' in order to explore the movements' specific forms of socio-cultural engagement with Yugoslavia's 'new socialist culture' and demonstrate that their cultural praxis was oriented towards the goal of realizing the genuine Yugoslav socialist-humanist community 'in the true measure of man'. Thus, the book's principal argument is that the driving force behind the music of commitment was, although critical, a fundamentally constructive disposition towards the progressive ideal of socialist Yugoslavia.

The history of rock and roll music can be seen in a long arc of Western civilization's struggle for both greater individual expression and societal stability. In the 1960s, the West's relationship with authority ruptured, in part due to the rock revolution. The lessons and implications of this era have yet to be fully grasped. This book examines the key artists, music, and events of the classic rock era--defined here as 1964 to 1980--through a virtual psychoanalysis of the West. Over these years, important truths unfold in the stories of British Invaders, hippies, proto-punks, and more, as well as topics to include drugs, primal scream therapy, the occult, spirituality, and disco and its detractors, to name just a few. Through a narrative that is equal parts entertaining, scholarly, and even spiritual, readers will gain a greater appreciation for rock music, better understand the confusing world we live in today, and see how greater individuality and social stability may be better reconciled moving forward.

"There's a moment in Janis Joplin's rendition of "Piece of My Heart" that anyone who has heard the song even once will recall vividly. I'm referring of course to Joplin's explosive cry of "take it!" about a minute in, right at the beginning of the chorus. This moment seems to embody all of rock's essential elements: freedom, power, personal expression, heartache, rebellion, etc. But that moment, iconic as it is, is more than a moment. Its strength is completely lost if we remove it from its musical context. Imagine playing someone just that second or two of music and expecting an emotional reaction you will more likely be met with bewilderment than excitement. The powerful effect of Joplin's cry derives as much from the material surrounding it as from what happens at that particular point in time. To understand that moment we must therefore consider it in relation to the song's organization as a whole. That central question how a song is organized in time underlies the concept of musical form. Form is often presented in opposition to content, the latter referring to more tangible musical elements such as notes and rhythms. The two are not so easily separated, though; as the "Piece of My Heart" example attests, we perceive content through the lens of form, each moment's meaning dependent on its role within the song's temporal organization. Music builds its communicative capacity upon its formal foundation; studying form is thus not a matter of zooming in on one particular musical aspect, but rather sets the stage for understanding all of a song's various expressive elements. Form, in other words, is the gateway to interpretation. This book offers a comprehensive theory of form in rock music. My basic premise is that rock songs are cohesive entities, gradually unfolding through time a unified musical structure. Their formal components are not merely discrete elements arranged in succession but interdependent, dialogic utterances, each fulfilling a particular role in relation to the whole. Seen this way, rock form is inherently a process, an active, temporal journey, not a series of musical containers; "a self-realizing verb, unspooling itself through time, not a static noun," as James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy put it (2006, 616). In other words, form is something a song does, not something it is. A conception of form as process underlies much contemporary discussion of classical form (Schmalfeldt 2011, Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, Caplin 1998); discussions of form in rock, though, tend toward an object-oriented approach, focusing on dividing a song into labeled sections rather than describing its temporal development.1 Rock-oriented studies that reflect a more processual approach, such as Robin Attas's 2015 article on buildup introductions and Allan Moore's 2012 monograph Song Means, generally eschew large-scale thinking in favour of moment-to-moment interpretations; Moore specifically states that he \see[s] little to be gained from [discussing more global formal terms] . . . it implies a `god's-eye perspective,' which does not seem to be part of the popular song experience, where what matters is exactly where one is at a particular point in time" (84). I do not believe a focus on process is incompatible with large-scale thinking, though. My aim in this book is to bring a process-based approach to the study of rock's large-scale structures"--

This volume gathers together twenty articles from among the best scholarly writing on rock music published in academic journals over the past two decades. These diverse essays reflect the wide range of approaches that scholars in various disciplines have applied to the study of rock, from those that address mainly the historical, sociological, cultural and technological factors that gave rise to this music, to those that focus primarily on analysis of the music itself. This collection of articles, some of which are now out of print or otherwise difficult to access, provides an overview of the current state of research in the field of rock music, and includes an introduction which contributes to the ongoing debate over the distinction (or lack thereof) betweenrock andpop.

The migration of cynical academic ideas about postmodernism into music journalism are traced in this book. The result of this migration is a widespread fatalism over the ability of the music industry to absorb any expression of defiance in popular music. The book synthesizes a number of fields: American and British academic and journalistic music criticism; aesthetic and literary history and theory from romanticism through postmodernism; alternative music such as feminist punk and grunge; political economy, which has fueled the obsession with commercial incorporation; and subcultural sociology.

The author presents a cultural history of popular Viennese electronic music from 1990 to 2015, from the perspectives of production, scene and national and international reception. To illustrate this history in depth, a number of case studies of the most successful and distinguished musicians are explored, such as Kruder and Dorfmeister, Patrick Pulsinger, Tosca, Electric Indigo and Sofa Surfers. The author draws on research about electronic music, the relationship between music and the urban environment, the history of Austria and Vienna, music scenes and fandom, the digital shift , stardom in popular music (especially electronic music), as well as theories of postmodernism. Chapters 4 and 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.