Portal:Rock music

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The Rock Music Portal

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 genres of blues, rhythm and blues, 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, which extended artistic elements, and glam rock, which highlighted 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...)

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The following are images from various rock music-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Kiss onstage in Boston in 2004 (from Hard rock)
Image 2Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson's record "Roll 'Em Pete" is regarded as a precursor to rock and roll. (from Rock and roll)
Image 3Chuck Berry in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 4Sign commemorating the role of Alan Freed and Cleveland, Ohio, in the origins of rock and roll (from Rock and roll)
Image 5Wolfmother, 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 6Buddy Holly and his band, the Crickets (from Rock and roll)
Image 7The Who on stage in 1975 (from Hard rock)
Image 8Rush on stage in Milan, Italy, 2004 (from Hard rock)
Image 9Tommy Steele, one of the first British rock and rollers, performing in Stockholm in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 10"There's No Romance in Rock and Roll" made the cover of True Life Romance in 1956. (from Rock and roll)
Image 11Little Richard in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 12Bill Haley and his Comets performing in the 1954 Universal International film Round Up of Rhythm (from Rock and roll)
Image 13Foo Fighters performing an acoustic show in 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 14Original member Izzy Stradlin' on stage with Guns N' Roses in 2006 (from Hard rock)
Image 15Elvis Presley in a promotion shot for Jailhouse Rock in 1957 (from Rock and roll)
Image 16Baker, Bruce and Clapton of Cream, whose blues rock improvisation was a major factor in the development of the genre (from Hard rock)
Image 17Led Zeppelin live at Chicago Stadium, January 1975 (from Hard rock)
Image 18Nirvana were at the forefront of the 1990s grunge era. (from Hard rock)
Image 19Aerosmith performing at Quilmes Rock in Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 15, 2007 (from Hard rock)
Image 20Golden Earring receives a gold record in 1970. (from Hard rock)
Image 21Poison, seen here in 2008, were among the most successful acts of the 1980s glam metal era. (from Hard rock)
Image 22Drum notation for a backbeat (from Hard rock)

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Tool is an American rock band from Los Angeles. Formed in 1990, the group consists of vocalist Maynard James Keenan, guitarist Adam Jones, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor, who replaced founding member Paul D'Amour in 1995. Tool has won four Grammy Awards, performed worldwide tours, and produced albums topping the charts in several countries.

To date, the band has released five studio albums, one EP and one box set. It emerged with a heavy metal sound on their first studio album, Undertow (1993), and became a dominant act in the alternative metal movement with the release of their follow-up album Ænima in 1996. The group's efforts to combine musical experimentation, visual arts, and a message of personal evolution continued with Lateralus (2001) and 10,000 Days (2006), gaining critical acclaim and international commercial success. Its fifth studio album Fear Inoculum was released on August 30, 2019, to widespread critical acclaim. Prior to its release, the band had sold more than 13 million albums in the US alone.

Due to Tool's incorporation of visual arts and very long and complex releases, the band has been described as a style-transcending act and part of progressive rock, psychedelic rock, and art rock. The relationship between the band and the music industry is ambivalent, at times marked by censorship, and the band's insistence on privacy. (Full article...)

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Michael Kenji Shinoda (/ʃɪˈnoʊdə/; born February 11, 1977) is an American musician, songwriter, rapper, singer, record producer and graphic designer. He co-founded the rock band Linkin Park in 1996 and is the band's co-lead vocalist, as well as rhythm guitarist, keyboardist, primary songwriter and producer. Shinoda later created a hip-hop-driven side project, Fort Minor, in 2004. He has also served as a producer for tracks and albums by artists such as Lupe Fiasco, Styles of Beyond, and the X-Ecutioners.

Born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Agoura Hills, Shinoda formed Xero, which later became Linkin Park, with two of his high school friends: Brad Delson and Rob Bourdon in 1996, later joined by Joe Hahn, Dave Farrell, and Mark Wakefield. Chester Bennington joined Linkin Park in 1999, replacing Wakefield as lead vocalist. The band later signed a record deal with Warner Bros Records.

Shinoda is also the co-founder of Machine Shop Records, a California-based record label. Outside of music, Shinoda is an artist and graphic designer. He has painted several pieces of artwork, some of which have been featured in the Japanese American National Museum. In 2018, Shinoda released his debut solo album Post Traumatic, which consists of 18 songs about his feelings following the death of Chester Bennington. (Full article...)

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Join Hands is the second studio album by English rock band Siouxsie and the Banshees, released on 7 September 1979 by Polydor Records. Upon its release, it was praised by the British press, including Melody Maker, Sounds, NME and Record Mirror.

Join Hands took the topic of the First World War as its inspiration. Musically, it is darker than the band's debut album The Scream: it sounds more claustrophobic and more haunting. It was the last album with the band's first recorded line-up, as guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris quit the group after a disagreement at the beginning of the British Join Hands tour, on the day of the album's release.

The record peaked at No. 13 on the UK Albums Chart. "Playground Twist" was the only single released from the album. Join Hands was reissued on vinyl in 2015, along with the very first artwork that the band had presented to Polydor in 1979. (Full article...)

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"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is a song written by Paul McCartney, credited to Lennon–McCartney, released in 1967 on the album of the same name by the Beatles. The song appears twice on the album: as the opening track (segueing into "With a Little Help from My Friends"), and as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)", the penultimate track (segueing into "A Day in the Life"). As the title song, the lyrics introduce the fictional band that performs on the album.

Since its original album release, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" has also been released on various Beatles singles and compilation albums. The song has also been performed by several other artists, including Jimi Hendrix, U2, and a comic interpretation by Bill Cosby, using the opening to John Philip Sousa's Washington Post March as the instrumental bridge. (Full article...)

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Credit: Ines Zgonc

Watercolour portrait of David Bowie by Ines Zgonc.

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Did you know (auto-generated)

... that the heavy metal musician Leah has sometimes been called "the metal Enya"?
... 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 before charting on the UK Albums Chart with Are We There Yet?, the indie rock musician James Marriott had made a career of mocking other YouTubers' music?
... that raw material waste from the West influenced a generation of rock music in China?
... that Desulfovibrio vulgaris can remove toxic heavy metals from the environment?
... that Dutch radio and TV presenter Hanneke Kappen presented the second Dutch radio show dedicated to heavy metal music?

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Progressive rock (shortened as prog rock or simply prog) is a broad genre of rock music that primarily developed in the United Kingdom through the mid- to late 1960s, peaking in the early 1970s. Initially termed "progressive pop", the style was an emergence of psychedelic bands who abandoned standard pop traditions in favour of instrumentation and compositional techniques more frequently associated with jazz, folk, or classical music. Additional elements contributed to its "progressive" label: lyrics were more poetic, technology was harnessed for new sounds, music approached the condition of "art", and the studio, rather than the stage, became the focus of musical activity, which often involved creating music for listening rather than dancing. (Full article...)