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

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A Perfect Circle is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles, California in 1999 by guitarist Billy Howerdel and Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan. A Perfect Circle released three of their four studio albums in the early 2000s: their debut Mer de Noms in 2000, a follow-up, Thirteenth Step in 2003; and an album of radically re-worked cover songs, Emotive, in 2004. Shortly after Emotive's release, the band went on hiatus; Keenan returned to Tool and started up solo work under the band name Puscifer, while Howerdel released a solo album, Keep Telling Myself It's Alright, under the moniker Ashes Divide. Band activity was sporadic in the following years; the band reformed in 2010, and played live shows on and off between 2010 and 2013, but fell into inactivity after the release of their greatest hits album, Three Sixty, and a live album box set, A Perfect Circle Live: Featuring Stone and Echo in late 2013. The band reformed in 2017 to record a fourth album, Eat the Elephant, which was released in 2018. After spending the rest of the year touring in support of the album, the band fell into inactivity until 2024 for a brief tour and one-off song "Kindred".

Prone to downtime due to Keenan's other musical commitments, the band has featured a variety of musicians throughout alternating periods of activity and inactivity, and has changed line-ups on each album, leaving Keenan and Howerdel the only constant members. The original incarnation of the band included Paz Lenchantin on bass, Troy Van Leeuwen on guitar, and Tim Alexander on drums. Alexander, however, only performed a handful of live shows and appeared on one song on the group's debut album before being replaced by Josh Freese. Band collaborator and producer Danny Lohner and bassist Jeordie White were also members for a short period in the early 2000s. The band's current lineup features Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, bassist Matt McJunkins, and drummer Jeff Friedl, the latter two also being contributors to the related Puscifer and Ashes Divide projects. Despite the varied cast and numerous lineup changes, the primary roles of creating A Perfect Circle's songs has remained consistent with Howerdel as music composer, and Keenan writing lyrics and vocal melodies. The band's studio albums have been generally well received critically and commercially, with their first three studio albums selling 4 million copies collectively as of 2005. (Full article...)

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W. Axl Rose (born William Bruce Rose Jr.; born February 6, 1962) is an American singer and songwriter. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist of the hard rock band Guns N' Roses, and has been the band's sole constant member since its inception in 1985. Possessing a distinctive and powerful wide-ranging voice, Rose has been named one of the greatest singers of all time by various media outlets, including Rolling Stone, NME and Billboard.

Born and raised in Lafayette, Indiana, Rose moved in the early 1980s to Los Angeles, where he became active in the local hard rock scene and joined several bands, including Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns. In 1985, he co-founded Guns N' Roses, with whom he had great success and recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their first album, Appetite for Destruction (1987), has sold in excess of 30 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling debut album of all time in the U.S. with 18 million units sold. Its full-length follow-ups, the twin albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II (1991), were also widely successful; they respectively debuted at No. 2 and No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and have sold a combined 35 million copies worldwide.

After 1994, following the conclusion of their two-and-a-half-year Use Your Illusion Tour, Rose disappeared from public life for several years, while the band disintegrated due to personal and musical differences. As its sole remaining original member, he was able to continue working under the Guns N' Roses banner because he had legally obtained the band name. In 2001, he resurfaced with a new line-up of Guns N' Roses at Rock in Rio 3, and subsequently played occasional concert tours to promote the long-delayed Chinese Democracy (2008), which undersold the music industry's commercial expectations despite positive reviews upon its release. In 2012, Rose was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Guns N' Roses, though he declined to attend the event and requested exclusion from the Hall. In 2016, the same year as he toured with AC/DC, Rose partially reunited the "classic" lineup of Guns N' Roses and has since toured the world as part of the Not in This Lifetime... Tour. (Full article...)

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Too Much Too Soon is the second album by the American hard rock band New York Dolls. It was released by Mercury Records on May 10, 1974, and recorded earlier that year at A&R Studios in New York City. Dissatisfied with the recording of their 1973 self-titled debut album, the Dolls' lead singer David Johansen enlisted veteran producer Shadow Morton to produce the sessions. Morton, who had been disenchanted by the music industry, found renewed motivation in the band's energy and undertook the project as a challenge.

Although the Dolls shared an affinity for Morton, they produced little original material with him. To complete Too Much Too Soon, they covered older songs and re-recorded their past demos. Johansen impersonated different characters while singing some of the novelty covers, and Morton incorporated many studio sound effects and female backing vocals in his production. For the album, lead guitarist Johnny Thunders wrote and recorded "Chatterbox", his first recorded performance singing lead.

Too Much Too Soon sold poorly and only charted at number 167 on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape. After a problem-ridden national tour, the New York Dolls were dropped by Mercury and disbanded a few years later. The album received positive reviews from most critics, some of whom felt Morton's production highlighted the group's raw sound and made it a better record than their first. Like their debut album, Too Much Too Soon became one of the most popular cult records in rock music and has since been viewed by music journalists as a precursor to punk rock. (Full article...)

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"You Know My Name" is the theme song of the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, performed by American musician Chris Cornell, who wrote and produced it jointly with David Arnold, the soundtrack's composer. The film producers chose Cornell because they wanted a strong male singer. Cornell and Arnold tried to make the song a replacement theme for the character instead of the "James Bond Theme" reflecting the agent's inexperience in Casino Royale, as well as an introduction to Daniel Craig's grittier and more emotional portrayal of Bond.

The track was leaked onto the Internet on September 20, 2006, and later released as an official single on November 13, 2006 through Interscope Records. It charted in many countries, notably peaking at No. 7 on the UK singles chart. It sold 148,000 copies in 2006 in the UK, and has sold 323,000 digital copies and garnered 3.5 million streams in the U.S. as of 2017. Reviews of the song were positive; it won the Satellite Award and the World Soundtrack Award, and was nominated for a Grammy Award. It was not included in the Casino Royale soundtrack, but appeared on Cornell's second solo album, Carry On. (Full article...)

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Credit: Ollie Atkins

Elvis Presley meeting with US President Richard Nixon. On December 21, 1970.

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Chamber pop (also called baroque pop and sometimes conflated with orchestral pop or symphonic pop) is a music genre that combines rock music with the intricate use of strings, horns, piano, and vocal harmonies, and other components drawn from the orchestral and lounge pop of the 1960s, with an emphasis on melody and texture. (Full article...)