WHAT IS ROCK?
A bastard child of blues and pop, rock makes its way with gusto.
It is not shy music -– even when its head is cast diligently shoewards.
In fact, nothing is more indulgent than purposefully employing low production
values. And rock, from its inception, has indulged itself with glorious abandon.
As if shooting out directly from the swaying hips of Elvis, the sexy bravado
of Bill Haley, the showmanship of Chuck Berry, rock has soared through the
decades, a phallus in flight.
Now, this is not meant as either a gender claim (although rock is conspicuously
male dominated) or a political claim. No, here the phallic nature of rock
music is its aesthetic prediliction. Rock is extended music, if not in length,
than in composition. It is rarely discrete the way pop is. That is to say,
if pop offers up tightly wound nuggets which swirl back on themselves, rock
is expansive. And it doesn’t like to be caught swirling back on itself.
Rock prefers to shoot its energy forward in a sprawling jam à la Allman
Brothers or in forceful decadence à la Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix or in
the chaotic white boy blues of The Rolling Stones.
Needless to say, rock and pop overlap just as blues and rock
at times overlap. Led Zeppelin rages through a searing noise melange; the
structure of the song is often classically blues. When Pavement’s lo-fi
rock pulls a fancy little riff out of its pocket then swirls back around itself,
rock finds itself in the realm of pop. But between these zones of blues and
pop, rock makes its own offering: a steady, more or less linear surging.
Courtesy artandculture.com
80's POP ROCK
80's Pop Rock is essentially Hard Rock that is largely image-driven (such as pop music is). Bands such as Bon Jovi and Def Leppard are bands that fit into this category. 80's Pop-Rock has also been known as Hair Metal, Arena Rock, and even Glam Rock. With artists coming out with new albums constantly, as well as their attemps to develop 'new' sounds, a rock band is able to cross the line into multiple sub-genres of Rock music making it ever so difficult to classify them.
