Get a boom of house music this time....

History of Chicago House Music
MUSIC IS THE KEY....
"The beat won't stop with the JM Jock. If he jacks the box and the partyrocks. The clock tick tocks and the place gets hot. So ease your mind and set yourself free. To that mystifying music they call the key". -Music Is The Key, JM Silk, 1985 House is as new as the microchip and as old as the hills. It first came to widespread attention in the summer of 1986 when a rash of records imported directly from Chicago began to dominate the playlist of Europe's most influential DJs. Within a matter of months, with virtually no support from the national radio networks, Britain's club scene voted with its feet, three house records forced their way into the top ten. Farley "Jackmaster" Funk "Love Can't Turn Around", Raze's "Jack The Groove", and Steve "Silk" Hurley "Jack Your Body", gave the club scene a new buzz-word, jacking, the term used by Chicago dancers to describe the frantic body pace of the House Sound. Whole litany of Jack Attacks beseiged the music scene. Bad Boy Bill's "Jack It All Night Long", Femme Fion's "Jack The House", Chip E's "Time To Jack", and Julian "Jumpin" Perez "Jack Me Till I Scream".
House music takes its name from an old Chicago night club called The Warehouse, where the resident DJ, Frankie Knuckles, mixed old disco classics, new Eurobeat pop and synthesised beats into a frantic high- energy amalgamation of recycled soul. Frankie is more than a DJ, he's an architect of sound, who has taken the art of mixing to new heights. Regulars at the Warehouse remember it as the most atmospheric place in Chicago, the pioneering nerve-center of a thriving dance music scene where old Philly classics by Harold Melvin, Billy Paul and The O'Jays were mixed with upfront disco hits like Martin Circus' "Disco Circus" and imported European pop music by synthesiser groups like Kraftwerk and Telex.
One of the club's regular faces was a mysterious young black teenager who styled himself on the eccentric funk star George Clinton. Calling himself Professor Funk, he would dress to shock, and stay at the Warehouse through the night, until the very last record was back in Frankie's box. Professor Funk is now a recording artist. He appears on stage dressed in the full regalaia of an old world English King singing weird acidic house records like "Work your Body" and "Visions". The Professor believes that the excitement of house music can be traced back to the creativity of The Warehouse. The Professor's memories carry a hidden truth.
The decadent beat of Chicago House, a relentless sound designed to take dancers to a new high, it has its origins in the gospel and its future in spaced out simulation(techno). In the mid 1970's, when disco was still an underground phenomeon, sin and salvation were willfully mixed together to create a sound which somehow managed to be decadent and devout. New York based disco labels, like Prelude, West End, Salsoul, and TK Disco, literally pioneered a form of orgasmic gospel, which merged the sweeping strings of Philadelphia dance music with the tortured vocals of soul singers like Loleatta Holloway. Her most famous releases, "Love Sensation" and "Hit and Run" became working models for modern house records. After an eventful career which began in Atlanta and the southren gospel belt, Loleatta joined Salsoul Records during the height of the metropolitan disco boom, before returning to her hometown of Chicago.
According to Frankie Knuckles, house is not a break with the black music of the past, but an extreme re-invention of the dance music of yesterday. He sees House music with a very clear tradition, a kind of two-way love affair with the city of New York and the sound of disco. If he were to list his favorite records, they would be a reader's guide to disco, including Colonel Abrams "Trapped", Sharon Redd's "Can You Handle It", Fat Lerry's "Act Like You Know", Positive Force "You Got The Funk" Jimmy Bo Horn "Spank", D-Train "You're The One". But most of all he relishes the sound where the church and the dancefloor are thrown together with a willful disregard for religious propriety. Religion weaves its way through the house sound in ways that would confound the disbelievers.
Most Chicago DJ's admit a debt to the underground 1970's underground club scene in New York and particulary the original disco-mixer Walter Gibbons, a white DJ who popularised the basic techniques of disco-mixing, then graduated to Salsoul Records where he turned otherwise unremarkable dance records into monumental sculptures of sound. It was Gibbons who paved the way for the disc-jockey's historical shift from the twin-decks to the production studio. But ironically, at the height of his cult popularity, he drifted away from the decadent heat of disco to become a "Born Again Christian", having created a space which was ultimately filled by subsequent DJ Producers like Jellybean Benitez, Shep Pettibone, Larry Levan, Arthur Baker, Francois Kervorkian, The Latin Rascals, and Farley "Jackmaster" Funk.
Most people believed that Walter Gibbons was a fading legend in the early history of disco, then in 1984 he resurfaced, and had a new and immediate impact on the development of Chicago House Sound. Gibbons released an independent 12" record called "Set It Off" which started to create a stir at Paradise Garage, the black gay club in New York, where Larry LeVan presided over the wheels of steel. Within weeks a "Set It Off" craze spread through the club scene, including new versions by C.Sharp, Masquerade, and answer versions like Import Number 1's "Set It Off(Party Rock)". The original record had been "mixed with love by Walter Gibbons" and was released on the Jus Born label, a tongue in cheek reference to Walter's christianity. Gibbons had set the tone again, the "Set It Off" sound was primitive House, haunting, repetitive beats ideal for mixing and extending. It immediately became an underground club anthem, finding a natural home in Chicago, where a whole generation of DJ's including Farley and Frankie Knuckles, rocked the clubs and regularly played on local radio stations.
For major house stars like Frankie Knuckles, the disco consul is a pulpit and the DJ is a high priest. The dancers are a fanatical congreation who will dance until dawn, and in some cases demand that the music goes on in an unbroken surge for over 18 hours. Mixing is a religion. Old records like First Choice's "Let No Man Put Asunder" and Candido's "Jingo" , Shirley Lites "Heat You Up(Melt You Down)", Eurobeat dance records by Depeche Mode, The Human League, BEF, Telex, and New Order, the speeches of Martin Luther King, and the sound effects of speeding express trains were all used when Frankie Knuckles controlled the decks. And the high priest of house had many desciples.
On the southside of Chicago, a young teenager called Tyree Cooper, was intrigued by Frankie's use of the speeches of Martin Luther King. He raided his mother's record collection and discovered a record by local preacher, The Rev. T.L. Barrett Jr. whose choir at the Chicago Church of Universal Awareness were the pride of the city. Tyree began using the record at local House parties and within a few months, sermon mixing, the art of splicing short gospel speeches over frantic dance music, became an established part of the Chicago DJ's art. It didn't end there.Tyree Cooper joined DJ International Records, ultimately releasing "I Fear The Night", and back home at his mother's church, the choir were beginning to excited about one of their featured vocalists
. A gigantic college trained vocalist, Darryl Pandy was boasting about his new record. He had left the choir a few weeks before to sing lead vocals on Farley "Jackmaster" Funk's "Love Can't Turn Around", which against all odds was racing to the number 1 spot on British charts. House had its roots in gospel and its future mapped out. The international success of House came against all known odds. New York and Los Angeles were firmly established as the music capitals of the USA and there was virtually no room for small regional records to make a national impact. According to Keith Nunnally of JM Silk, Chicago turned their limitations into an advantage, turning the poverty of resources into a richness of musical experiment.
Despite technical drawbacks, a whole wave of new independent dance labels sprung up in Chicago. The declaration of independence was led by Rocky Jones DJ International label, a relatively small company which grew out of a DJ Record distribution pool spreading from a small warehouse near Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, to become one of the trans- national dance scene's most influential labels. At the 1986 New Music seminar in New York, DJ International roster of artists stole the show, as every major label made frantic bids to buy a piece of the house action. Within a matter of a few days, records by the diminutive House DJ Chip E, the sophisticated gospel singer Shawn Christopher and the outrageous Daryl Pandy were sold round the world.
At the height of the bidding, JM Silk signed to RCA records for an undisclosed fortune. The commercial evidence of tracks like "Music Is The Key" and "Shadows of Your Love" proved that House music had the energy and excellence to move from being a regional cult to a modern international success. Within a matter of months every music paper in the world was praying at the feet of Chicago House. Although the first wave of interest focused on the DJ International label and particulary the unlikely duo of Farley, a legendary Chicago DJ, and his opera trained vocalist Daryl Pandy, it soon became apparent that their hit "Love Can't Turn Around" was only the peak of mid-Western iceberg. Chicago was alive with musicians. Local radio stations like WGCI and WBMX rocked to the music of the "Hot Mix 5", a group of DJ's who mixed whole nights of dance music without uttering a word and clubs like The Power Plant stayed open all-night carrying the torch once held by The Warehouse.
Locked in local competition with DJ International were a hundred other labels. The most important was Trax on North Clark Street, a label which ultimately went on to release some of house music's recognised classics. Marshall Jefferson gave Trax two of its most important records, the hectic 120 BPM "Move Your Body" and the follow up "Ride The Rhythm". His reputation was rivalled by Adonis, who released "No Way Back". The second biggest selling record Trax has ever issued, a record which reportedly sold over 120,000 copies, a staggering number for an independent record which received very little air play.
Behind the visible success story of DJ International, Underground, Trax, were countless smaller labels like Jes Say, Chicago Connectinon, Bright Star, Dance Mania, Sunset, House Records, Hot Mix 5, State Street, and Sound Pak. And behind the stars like Farley and Frankie Knuckles are numerous other musicians, like Full House, Ricky Dillard, Fingers Inc. and Farm Boy. House music has spread throughout the world. It has spread to Detroit where Transmat Records released Derrick May's Rhythim Is Rhythim record at the Metroplex Studio laying down post-Kraftwerk tracks like "Nude Photo" and "Strings".
It has spread to New York, where the respected club producer Arthur Baker has been given a new lease on life, recording unapologetic dance records like Criminal Elements "Put The Needle To The Record" and Jack E. Makossa. It has spread to London where a gang of renegade funk boys called M/A/R/R/S took the British charts by storm, climbing to Number 1 with the brillant collage record "Pump Up The Volume". It has spread into the very heart of pop music, encouraging Phil Fearon, Kissing The Pink, Beatmasters and Mel and Kim to turn the beat around. And it has infilitrated into already dynamic cultures like the Latin and Hispanic dance scene creating new possibilites for Kenny "Jammin'" Jason, Ralphi Rosario, Mario Diaz, Julian "Jumpin" Perez, Mario Reyes and Two Puerto Ricans, A Blackman, and A Dominican.
Chicago house has become everyones House. House music is a universal language. Given the undoubted international popularity of the Chicago sound, it would have been easy for the producers of House music to rest on their laurels and continually reproduce more of the same. For a while the city stuck firmly to its identifiable beat - hardcore on the one - but the experimentation which gave birth to House inevitably wanted to change it. By 1987 a new style of House music began to escape from Chicago's recording studios. It was a "deep", highly sophisticated sound, which evoked strange, almost drug-induced images.
The second generation House sound probably began with the international success of Phutures's "Acid Tracks" a hugely influential record, which captured the extreme spirit of the House scene's most ardent adherents, the hardcore dancer in Chicago, who variously experimented with LSD, acid psychedelia and new designer drugs like Ectasy. Frankie Knuckles has been careful not to sensationalise the influence of drugs. "Today there is more psychedlic sound. Acid is probably the most prevelant drug on the scene, but House is no druggier than any other scene".
None of House music's prominent performers have advocated drug abuse nor set out to glorify chemical stimulation, but an increasing number of Chicago records have controversially referred to acid tracking, the estranged synthesiser sound you can hear on several house releases. These Acid Tracks have taken house music into a new phuturism, a modern uptempo psychedelia that London club DJ's call Trance Dance. The roots of Trance Dance are not to be found in the more established traditions of 60's psychedelic rock but ironically in 1970's Europe, through highly synthesised records like Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" and "Numbers".
The trance-dance sound is only beginning to establish on the Chicago Scene but it has already been adopted in British Clubs and will undoubtedly shape the new phuture of house. But beneath the abstract surface of acid-track house records is the same compulsive dance command. Frankie Knuckles is sure of that. "When people hear house rhythms they go freak out. It's an instant dance reaction. If you can't dance to House you're already dead" -Stuart Cosgrove for The History of House Sound of Chicago 12 record set on BCM records, Germany, Out of Print Inevitably, it was the restless London club scene and the illegal pirate radio stations of urban Britain that seized on the real potential of house.
The relatively cheap and do-it-yourself ethics which governed house production meant that young DJ's with inexpensive equipment could make records that were fresher and faster than the more institutionalized major labels. A series of sampled and stolen sounds, released on small scale British independent labels took the popcharts by storm, suprising the record industry and demonstrating that the house sound had a commercial appeal beyond even the wild imagination of the London club scene. In the spring of 1988 a small group of London based DJ's traded their turntables for the recording studios. Tim Simenon, working under the club pseudonym Bomb The Bass and Mark Moore using the band name S-Express had unexpected pop hits with sampled house rhythms. "Beat Dis" and "The Theme From S-Express" were charateristic of the sound that creative theft and sampling could achieve.
DJ's with huge record collections and a catalogue knowledge of breaks, beats, bits and pieces could string together an entirely new record concocted out of barely rememberal records. The masters of the London sampling scene were two unlikely DJ's, Jonathan Moore and Matt Black, who played under the name DJ Coldcut and devastated London's pirate airwaves with imaginative record choices, crazy mixes and a wilful disregard for what made musical sense.
When Coldcut's remix of Eric B and Ra-Kim rap hit "I Know You Got Soul" took the ungrateful New Yorkers to Number 1 in the pop charts in Europe it became obvious that sampling and the spirit of "Pump Up The Volume" was here to stay. The Coldcut rap mix was closely followed by the more house orientated "Doctorin The House" which featured Yazz and The Plastic People, than a cover version of Otis Clay's "The Only Way Is Up", an obscure soul sound which was big on Britain's esoteric northern soul scene. By a strange twist of history, and old Chicago soul singer from the 60's had his career momentarily revitalised by the fallout of the modern Chicago house sound.
By the summer of 1988, the British charts and teh over zealous tabloid press were over-run with acid. The music had clearly touched a raw pop nerve as one by one underground acid-house records stormed into the pop press. But their unexpected commercial success was pursued by controversy and daily press reports that the acid-house scene was a dangerous focus for drug abuse. Each new day brought increased public panic about the abuse of the synthetically compounded Ecstasy drug and by October 1988, acid house and its casual catch phrases "get on one matey", "can you feel it", and "we call it acieeeeed" were in everyday conversation.
The controversy reached its head in the autumn of press overkill when "We Call It Acieed" by D. Mob reached number 1 on the British pop charts. Radio stations were reluctant to play the record, BBC's phone in program, "daytime" had a nationwide debate on the acceptability of the song, and in a fit of moral outrage, the Burton's clothes chain withdrew smiley tee-shirts from their stores and refused to participate in the acid epidemic. Behind the hype and the press hostility the music continued its journey of unparalled progress.
If acid house had troubled the mainstream press it had also advanced the creativity of music introducing the remarkable and prodigious talent of Brooklyn's Todd Terry to the forefront of the underground dance music scene. Todd Terry is a child of house. His whole life spent buried in club culture and experimenting with the extremes of hi-tech music. Under the pseudonym Swan Lake, Martin Luther King's spiritual dream is turned into a dance floor drama, as Royal House's "Can You Party" and The Todd Terry Project "Just wanna Dance" catches the garage spirit of modern house.
-Stuart Cosgrove for The History of House Sound of Chicago The Story Continues... BCM Records, Germany Out OF Print

Rock band

Rock band

Rock group (or later rock band) is a generic name to describe a group of musicians specializing in a particular form of electronically amplified music. Deriving its name from the musical style which was its immediate progenitor, rock and roll, the type of music played by rock groups has its roots deeply steeped in both rock and roll, and its immediate forebear, rhythm and blues. In Britain of the early 1960s the term rock group was in universal use, but as psychedelia approached the name band came into vogue, typified by the Band. A rock group or band tends to have a heavy focus on certain instruments principally electric guitar, bass guitar, and drums (prime examples of this are The Who, Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, or more recently U2), with electric organs being featured from the outset by groups such as Manfred Mann and the Animals. Later in the 1960s, rock bands such as The Who, Pink Floyd and Hawkwind experimented with electric organs and synthesisers. Other instruments deployed within the context of a rock band include the electric violin, as used by Curved Air and the flute played by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Another instrument common in some rock bands is the musical keyboard, as pioneered by The Doors, Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Many early rock groups or bands were in the vanguard of psychedelic music and the complexities arising largely led to rock music becoming a generic term broader than "rock and roll".
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Structure
A rock group or band usually consists of at least four musical roles:
A lead singer.
A guitarist.
A bass guitarist.
A drummer or percussionist.
These four may be joined by other instrumentalists, limited only by the creativity of the band; most popular are the addition of a keyboardist or rhythm guitarist. More experimental bands might try instruments from other ares of music; stringed instruments like a violin or cello, or horns like trumpets or trombones. When a band is seen as diverging too far from the main four roles, there is a tendency to classify the group not as a rock band, but with a genre seen as more specific than "rock" (e.g. ska or prog rock).
The lead singer may also play an instrument while singing, most commonly the guitar or bass. When the lead singer role is taken by one of the above instrumentalists, the group is termed a power trio. Some bands may have multiple lead singers (such as Pink Floyd and The Beatles). Still others will add background vocals, sung by other instrumentalists or dedicated singers.
While some rock bands may add several additional singers and instrumentalists, they hardly ever lose the four primary roles.
Many rock bands include two types of guitar players, a rhythm guitarist and a lead guitarist. The rhythm guitarist often plays chords and works closely with the bassist and the drummer as they drive both the beat and rhythm. The lead guitarist plays the second accompaning melody and plays most of the solos.






Fabulous Five Lipstick Conspiracy aspires to rock stardom, but that's a tough sell when you can't even tell your co-workers you're a tranny




Shawna Love has an enviable talent for driving in stiletto heels. On a recent Saturday, she's driving through a quiet, suburban neighborhood in South Hayward that looks as if it burst out of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue and hasn't been touched in fifty years: All the houses are squat, ticky-tacky things with manicured lawns, window boxes, and identical American flags hanging in the windows. She squints out her passenger-side window, skeptical that one of these stucco boxes actually belongs to her friend Kari, who fronts the all-tranny-girl rock outfit Trans Central Station -- a spinoff of Shawna's own band. Kari is hosting a barbecue and jamboree, and Shawna is dressed for the occasion: dark, smoky pantyhose, a black sequined dress to go with her heels, lipstick the color of cabernet.
She parks in front of a Pepto-Bismol-pink house whose only distinguishing features are the plastic flamingos on its front lawn. A cat jumps on the roof of the car and climbs through the window onto Shawna's lap, trying to claw at her stockings. A woman with poofy hair and culottes scurries over to scoop the critter up, apologizing profusely. Her eyes widen a little when she sees Shawna. "Oh, you must be a friend of Kari," she stutters.
"Yeah," Shawna laughs later, "another man in a fucking dress."
By now Shawna is used to the stir she creates when she hits the streets in all her finery. Driving home recently, she says, she peered in her rearview mirror at the Bay Bridge toll plaza to see a car slink up behind her. She could hear two guys talking in the backseat: "Yo, I think that's a dude. Eh, for real -- that's a dude!" The driver rolled down his window and hissed at her: "Eh, eh yo, dude!" When she turned to look at him, he added, "Yo, where'd you get your weave at?"
Shawna works as a maintenance man by day -- she is reluctant even to whisper her employer's name. She likes her job; the work is fun and fulfilling, and she gets benefits. The catch is that she has to work with a bunch of homophobes. And she can't be Shawna; she has to dress and act like one of the guys. She predicts that if she came out as a tranny at work her co-workers would ostracize her and make the job a living hell. "They'd probably go to my boss and say, 'I'm not working with him or it, or whoever the fuck he thinks he is; I'm not working with a fucking faggot,'" she says. Shawna recalls the time someone at her job started gossiping about another co-worker, saying that the co-worker went to parties "where there's all these punks and motherfuckers wearing wigs and shit." Then the guy telling the story "made the symbol of having a gun in his hand and shooting people."
In her private life Shawna plays guitar and bass for Lipstick Conspiracy, a rock band that features frontwoman and guitarist Sarafina Maraschino, with Marilyn Mitchell holding down guitar and bass duties, Tori Tait on keyboards, and Emme Yarwood on drums. Since its genesis in a San Francisco Victorian in 2003, the five-tranny band has played some 55 gigs -- including two San Francisco Gay Pride festivals -- toured the West Coast, self-released a five-song EP, garnered a Bay Guardian write-up as "Best Girl Band," and built up a cult of adoration in the trans and SOMA bobo communities. After the Lipsticks adopted Martuni's Piano Bar and Cocktail Lounge as their unofficial headquarters, on the far fringes of the city's Castro district, Sarafina says the Zagat Survey published a blurb describing it as a place where you can catch the occasional tranny. One of the joint's bartenders says he's naming a drink after the band. Sarafina says there's even a major label "sniffing around."

The history of rave culture

What is a rave?
A rave is an all night event, where people go to dance, socialise, get high and generally have fun in an uninhibited way with other likeminded people. Some say it's about the creation of a community and re-connecting with something perceived as lost. Others just say it's about necking loads of pills and getting wasted with your mates in a field.
Where?
Usually in a derelict warehouse, a club, a beach, a field, an aircraft hangar or a sports arena - anywhere you could fit a massive sound system and a lot of people. In the rave heydays of the late '80s, the larger events attracted tens of thousands of people. The venue would often remain secret up until hours before the party was to begin as a way of keeping the police away. Organisers would even sometimes have backup sites in mind in case the cops sniffed them out - which they did more and more often.
Origins?
The term rave first came into use in Britain in the late 50's referring to the wild bohemian parties of the time. It was then briefly revived by the mods, but didn't come back into fashion until the illegal London warehouse party scene in the mid eighties. However it is likely that the term 'rave' came from Jamaican usage rather than a revival of any previous usage in Britain.
Who?
Rave crowds were and still are mostly (but not exclusively) young from all sections of society .
What is rave music?
Rave music is what most people now call 'dance' music, or as some government wonk put it, music with a distinctive 'series of repetitive beats'. Early ravers discovered that the combination of ecstasy and music with fast, repetitive beats was a marriage made in disco heaven. The big raves have a line-up of bigtime DJs as well as some live performances by dance music bands.
Why did rave culture take such a hold of the UK in the 1980s?
There are many theories why the UK went nuts for raving in the late 80s and beyond. It happened during a period of major consumerism and individualism. Margaret Thatcher was telling everybody to look after number one (famously saying there was "no such thing as society"). There was bound to be a reaction to this and it helped that a bunch of English DJs had just got back from Ibiza where they had experienced ecstasy and rave culture first hand. They brought it to the young people of Britain and within a year rave culture had flourished. Instead of money and power, rave called for empathy, intimacy, spirituality and the joy of losing yourself in the crowd.
Some other random thoughts: Doug Rushkoff, author of Ciberia, observed that the majority of house music runs at the speed of 120 bpm (the rate of the foetal heartbeat), while Simon Reynolds has noted that raves mimic the atmosphere of a nursery with its use of kids' TV themes, sampled baby vocals, dummies, baggy unisex clothes, and the camouflaging of drugs as sweets. Think about that next time you go dancing.
And then came the end
By the early '90s, the Tory government, the police, the tabloid press and middle England had all had enough of rave culture. The government acted, passing the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994).
Sections 63, 64 & 65 addressed the issue of raves:
A 'rave' is defined as a gathering of 100 plus people, at which amplified music is played which is likely to cause serious distress to the local community, in the open air and at night. These sections give the police the power to order people to leave the land if they're believed to be:
Preparing to hold a rave (two or more people)
Waiting for a rave to start (10 or more)
Actually attending a rave (10 or more)
Ignoring this direction, or returning to the land within the next week, are both offences, liable to 3 months' imprisonment and/or a #2,500 fine. Section 65 lets any uniformed constable who believes a person is on their way to a rave within a 5-mile radius to stop them and direct them away from the area - failure to comply can lead to a maximum fine of #1000.
The Act effectively killed off free parties or events not licensed through local government. Aciiid is dead, long life Aciiid.

History of Rock Music

Rock music,

type of music originating in the United States in the mid-1950s and increasingly popular throughout much of the world.
Origins of Rock
Essentially hybrid in origin, rock music includes elements of several black and white American music styles: black guitar-accompanied blues; black rhythm and blues, noted for saxophone solos; black and white gospel music; white country and western music; and the songs of white popular crooners and harmony groups. Emerging in 1954–55, rock music was initially referred to as “rock 'n' roll.” After 1964 it was simply called “rock music.” The change in terminology indicates both a continuity with and a break from the earlier period; rock music was no longer just for dancing. After 1964 the music was influenced by British groups such as the Beatles.
The 1950s—Bill Haley and Rock 'n' Roll
The first rock 'n' roll record to achieve national popularity was “Rock Around the Clock” made by Bill Haley and the Comets in 1955. Haley succeeded in creating a music that appealed to youth because of its exciting back beat, its urgent call to dance, and the action of its lyrics. The melody was clearly laid down by electric guitar; the lyrics were earthy and simple. Haley abruptly ended the ascendancy of the bland and sentimental ballads popular in the 1940s and early 50s. He also succeeded in translating black rhythm and blues into a form that adolescent white audiences could understand.
Blues, and rhythm and blues, were too adult, sexual, angry, and solely identified with black culture to be acceptable either emotionally or commercially without adaptation. Major record companies had for years been producing records for black audiences called “race records.” The emergence of rock 'n' roll signified a slight weakening in resistance to black culture. The unadulterated black rock 'n' roll that Haley transformed can be heard in the sexually adult work of such artists as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters (“Work with Me, Annie”) or “Big” Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”), the latter song adapted by Haley for white audiences and the former transformed into “Dance with Me, Henry.”
Rock 'n' roll was for and about adolescents. Its lyrics articulated teenage problems: school, cars, summer vacation, parents, and, most important, young love. The primary instruments of early rock 'n' roll were guitar, bass, piano, drums, and saxophone. All aspects of the music—its heavy beat, loudness, self-absorbed lyrics, and raving delivery—indicated a teenage defiance of adult values and authority. Influential performers of the 1950s include Chuck Berry (“Johnny B. Goode”), Little Richard (“Good Golly Miss Molly”), Sam Cooke (“You Send Me”), Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Jerry Lee Lewis (“Great Balls of Fire”), and Carl Perkins (“Blue Suede Shoes”).
The Late 1950s and Early 60s—Elvis, Motown, and the British Invasion
The greatest exponent of rock 'n' roll from 1956 to 1963 was Elvis Presley, a truck driver and aspiring singer from Tupelo, Miss., whose plaintive, wailing, dynamic delivery and uninhibited sexuality appealed directly to young audiences while horrifying older people. As rock 'n' roll became a financial success, record companies that had considered it a fad began to search for new singers; they generally succeeded in commercializing the music, robbing it of much of its gutsy, rebellious quality. In the late 1950s, for example, there was a fad for sentimentally morbid songs such as “Laura” and “Teen Angel.”
At the turn of the decade Detroit became an important center for black singers, and a certain type of sound known as “Motown” [motor town], named for Motown Records, developed. The style is characterized by a lead singer singing an almost impressionistic melody story line to the accompaniment of elegant, tight, articulate harmonies of a backup group. Popular exponents of this style are the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Rock music again surged to popularity in 1962 with the emergence of the Beatles, a group of four long-haired lads from Liverpool, England. They were initially acclaimed for their energy and appealing individual personalities rather than for any innovations in their music, which was derived from Berry and Presley. Their popularity inevitably produced other groups with unusual names. One of the most important of these was the Rolling Stones, whose music derived from the black blues tradition. These British bands instigated a return to the blues orientation of rock 'n' roll, albeit in ever louder and more electric reincarnations.
The Late 1960s and Early 70s—Rock's Golden Age
Folk Rock
An important transformation of rock occurred in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan, noted as a composer and writer of poetic folk songs and songs of social protest like “Blowin' in the Wind,” appeared, playing electric guitar and backed by an electrified rock band. A synthesis of the folk revival and rock subsequently took place, with folk groups using rock arrangements and rock singers composing poetic lyrics for their songs (e.g., the Beatles' “Norwegian Wood,” “Eleanor Rigby”). The Byrds' arrangement of Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a folk-rock classic. Performers like the Mamas and the Papas; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Donovan; and the Lovin Spoonful sang a kind of music designated “folk rock.”
Protest Songs and the Drug Culture
In the 1960s music mirrored the tensions of the Vietnam War era and played an important role in American culture. The verbal content of rock songs turned toward rebellion, social protest, sex, and, increasingly, drugs. Many groups, among them Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, tried to approximate in music the aural experience of psychedelic drugs, producing long, repetitive, occasionally exquisite songs with surreal lyrics (known as “acid rock” or “hard rock”).
In 1967 the Beatles again made history with their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in addition to including drug-oriented songs, presented a body of interrelated pieces that constituted an organic whole. This is considered the first “concept album.” Subsequent products of this trend were rock musicals such as Hair (1968) and rock operas like Tommy, composed and sung by the Who.
Rock Comes of Age
By the late 1960s rock was widely regarded as an important musical form. Musicians such as Miles Davis and John McLaughlin and groups like Traffic or Blood, Sweat, and Tears tried to fuse rock and jazz, while such disparate artists as Leonard Bernstein and Frank Zappa attempted to connect rock and classical music. Groups featuring virtuoso guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, and Jimmy Page continued to perform variations on classic blues themes using the traditional instruments of rock 'n' roll.
From 1967 onward, the rock festival was regarded as the ideal context in which to hear rock music, and thousands of fans attended. The most successful and peaceful rock festival, Woodstock, was held near Bethel, N.Y., in Aug., 1969. Later, however, a similar event, featuring the Rolling Stones, was held at Altamont, Calif., and was marked by several violent incidents caught on film, including a murder. By 1970 several of rock's top performers—Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix—were dead from substance abuse. The dangerous, androgynous quality projected by the Rolling Stones was taken to extremes by performers such as Alice Cooper and David Bowie, who were perhaps as famous for their sexual ambiguity and outrageous behavior as for their music.
The Late 1970s to the Present—Punk Rock, the Music Video, and Middle-aged Rockers
A turning point in rock music occurred in the mid-1970s in the form of punk rock, which was a response to the stagnation of the genre and a nihilistic political statement. The music was filled with contempt for previous styles; its fast-tempoed songs, usually propelled by electric guitar, featured irreverant lyrics often obscured by the clangerous music. Evident in Great Britain, performed by such bands as the Sex Pistols and the Clash, punk also quickly became popular in the United States, played by the Ramones and other American groups. By the early 1980s, it had changed rock music considerably as Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, and other groups adopted political protest themes as the core of their music.
During the 1980s music videos became a popular form of promotion and entertainment. In the late 1980s, however, several bands, including Nirvana and Pearl Jam, continued to follow the path of early punk rock by focusing on political themes and celebrating their own lack of technical virtuosity. Punk persisted into the 1990s with such bands as Green Day and the Offspring. Also in the 90s the continuing popularity of older bands, such as the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones, bore witness to the enduring appeal of this form among both the young and the increasingly middle-aged. The appeal of older and past rock bands was also evident in the fanfare surrounding the opening (1995) of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Meanwhile, a young audience made rap music, with its pounding rhythms and strong, sometimes shocking spoken lyrics, a popular phenomenon, and other young rockers, largely club-goers, made the dance-based, electronically sophisticated techno another, though less pervasive, popular form.
Bibliography
See C. Gillett, The Sound of the City (1970); C. Belz, The Story of Rock (2d ed. 1972); M. Jahn, Rock (1973); A. DeCurtis, ed., Rock and Roll and Culture (1992); P. Romanowski et al., ed., The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (rev. ed. 1995); P. Friedlander, Rock and Roll: A Social History (1996); F. Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill (1997); B. Ward, Just My Soul Responding (1998); D. Clarke, ed., The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (rev. ed. 1999); J. Miller, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977 (1999); J. Stuessy and S. Lipscomb, Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (4th ed. 2003).