Rock

Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the
1950s, and developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and later, particularly in the United
Kingdom and the United States.
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It has its roots in 1940s' and 1950s' rock and roll, itself heavily
influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of
other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other
musical sources.
Musically, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass
guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music usually 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 in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the
key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on
musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
By the late 1960s, referred to as the "golden age"
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or "classic rock"
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period, a number of distinct
rock music sub-genres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock,country rock,
and jazz-rock fusion, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, which was
influenced by the countercultural psychedelic scene. New genres that emerged from this scene
included progressive rock, which extended the artistic elements; glam rock, which highlighted
showmanship and visual style; and the diverse and enduring major sub-genre of heavy metal, which
emphasized volume, power, and speed. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock both intensified
and reacted against some of these trends to produce a raw, energetic form of music characterized
by overt social and political critiques. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent
development of other sub-genres, including new wave, post-punk and eventually the alternative
rock movement. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break through
into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further fusion sub-genres have
since emerged, including pop punk, rap rock, and rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit
rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and synthpop revivals at the beginning of the new
millennium.
Rock music has also embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading
to major sub-cultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippiecounterculture that spread
out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually
distinctive goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has
been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex and drug
use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.