POINTS ABOUT ROCK

From: Arnold Shaw Twentieth-century Views of Music History.

The phrase Rock Revolution may sound like a metaphor or hyperbole. It is neither a figure of speech nor a rhetorical exaggeration. It quite literally characterizes what has happened to American music in the 1960s – a complete upending of the pop music scene.

When it first manifested itself in the mid-50s, rock was dismissed as an aberration and an abomination. Before the Presley rockabilly movement subsided, there was a rising tide of Negro rhythm-and-blues. Then came Bob Dylan and folk rock. Beatlemania took England and Europe by storm and proceeded to inundate American teenagers. Today, we have soul, raga rock, psychedelic rock and an influx of exotic instruments, electronic sounds and magnetic-tape music that is rattling the rafters of the entire music world, art as well as pop.

The year of Dylan’s embrace of the electric guitar and the Big Beat, 1965, was the year in which the teenage rebellion matured into full-scale musical revolution. By then it was clear that the old days of so-called good music were not coming back. The era of the Big Bands, the Big Ballads and the Big Baritones was gone, along with crew-cuts. Rock was not just a passing fad, but the sonic expression of the Now, the turned-On, the Hair Generation. Literature had the antinovel and antihero. The stage had its Theatre of the Absurd. In pop, it was rock.

The main features of the overthrow of the older generation’s popular music culture may be listed as follows:

1. The guitar and other plucked picked and strummed string instruments have superseded bowed instruments (violin), blown instruments (reeds and brass) and the piano as vocal accompaniment.

2. Control of pop has been taken out of the hands of major record companies, staff Artist and Repertoire (A&R) executives and Broadway-Hollywood publishing companies. The choice and character of material are now dictated by under-thirty artist-writers and independent record producers, and no major record company is today without a “house hippie” in search of rock artists.

3. Established song forms, like the 32-bar chorus-cum-bridge, have given way to new forms characterized by odd-numbered formations, shifting meters, radical stanza patterns and changing time signatures.

4. The traditional division of labour among performer, writer and record producer has broken down. Instrumentalist’s sing and singers play instruments. Originators of material tend to account for the total product. “The medium is the message”, and the record is the song.

5. Just as blues singers treated their voices as musical instruments, and balladeers of the 1940s handled the microphone as if it were an instrument, rock artists have made the recording studio their instrument and the amplifier their tool.

6. We are in the midst of an electrical explosion of sound. Magnetic tape and electronics have made the 1960s an era of echo chambers, variable speeds, and aleatory (chance) and programmed (computer) composition. New procedures include manipulation of texture as a development technique, “wall-of-sound” density and total enveloping sound. Philosophical as well as esthetic concepts underlie these developments: a concern with sensory overload as a means of liberating the self, expanding consciousness and rediscovering the world.

7. New subject matter includes an exploration of the cosmos of strange experiences, from the psychedelic expansion of the mind back into the world of medievalism and beyond time into transcendental meditation. We are in an era of meaningful lyrics, protesting, probing and poetic.

8. But we are also in a period when sound itself, as in jazz but in a more complex way, frequently is theme and content. If the folk orientation of rock emphasizes meaning, the psychedelic stresses tone colour, texture, density and volume.

9. Superalbums represent a new driving force, with outrageous sums of money being lavished not only on recording but on packaging.

10. Rock groups are concerned not merely with uniqueness of sound, long for a requirement of singing and instrumental success, but with total image. Hair styles, wardrobe, LP liners, and even the styling of promotion matter are no longer left to professionals but are the subject of personal and group expression.

11. The discotheque, a melange of vibrating colours, blinding images and deafening sound, has superseded the night club, cocktail lounge and jazz club as after-hour pads for teenagers.

12. For the first time in the history of popular music, we are developing canons of criticism. Just as there has long been a phalanx of concert and jazz critics, we now have an under-thirty group of reviewers whose work appears regularly in rock publications like Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone, Cheetah and Eye and is beginning to find space in The New Yorker, Esquire, Life, Vogue and other periodicals.

13. Rock has brought a renaissance of the bardic tradition. Like the medieval troubadours, Celtic bards and epic Homers, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and John Lennon are poets, singing rather than reciting or just printing their verses.

14. Rock is a collage, capable of absorbing the most diverse styles and influences: folk, blues, bluegrass, jazz, soul, country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues, motion picture themes, Broadway show tunes, Indian ragas, baroque, tape, computer and chance music. There is an increasing crossover between popular songwriting and serious composition.

15. In the outlook of the under-thirty generation, as reflected in rock, romanticism is dead. Realism, naturalism, mysticism and activism are the new acceptable and conflicting ideologies. Young people appear restless, tough, alienated, hostile, defiant, aggressive, frustrated, and vaccilating between the hippie withdrawal from society and the yippie assault on it.

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