Is it possible that I don't like rock?

[Soandso]

Black American recording artists' Rhythm and Blues was being played on the radio by Alan Freed, a White man, in the early 1950s. His career moved him out of Cleveland and his White audience expanded. To make the music seem socially proper for White Americans to be listening to it Freed called it "Rock and ['n] Roll."

Freed said: "Rock 'n Roll is really swing with a modern name ... and features blues and rhythm.... It's the rhythm that gets to the kids...."

 

[G|force]

Yep >>>> Fast forward to the 70's when record executives would say to progressive rock artists "What?? No! So you want to put one 22 minute long song on the B side of your new record?!?
Rush ELP Yes etc...

 

[Ron Party]

Prog Rock, which I liken to Rock for trained Musicians

Very much enjoyed reading your historical takes on music genres in this thread and agree with you in almost every respect..., well, except that I never listened to Debbie Gibson

Yep, color me a prog head for this very reason, i.e., musicianship. Certainly while not all prog is technically sophisticated, a lot is most definitely intricate. I think of Supper's Ready, Apocolypse with a 9/8 time signature. Heck, even Money or Solsbury Hill with 7/4 time signatures.

 

[G|force]

 

[G|force]

When you are sort of being shown the bird and being ignored at the same time.

 

[Prana Ferox]

There was also another black alt-rock artist, in addition to Darius and Fishbone, who was briefly popular around the late 80's or 90's as I recall. But I'm flaking on his name and songs, and Google isn't helping much. I remember seeing some of his vids on MTV though.

Also since I haven't seen him mentioned

It's worth noting too, when talking about how most people are mentioning English language stuff, until rather recently people's exposure was very much geared towards who was touring (and promoting tours on radio / TV) fairly locally. You just generally don't have a lot of foreign-language touring, especially in the US - so there wasn't that much exposure. Radio didn't play it, TV shows didn't have the bands on, even up to MTV the videos didn't play. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist - it just means on a forum primarily of English speaking Americans it's probably not going to jump to mind. There were plenty of big name British bands that just never made it to the US, and a thriving rock scene in Australia / NZ that practically no one in the Western Hemisphere has ever heard of, simply because touring was impractical.

(Metal is a bit of an exception, perhaps because guttural screams are universal, but even the international metal scene is a fairly recent phenomenon.)

Of course another factor is your non-English rock that did make it internationally is stuff like this:

 

[ADU]

Funk IS Rock. Without Rock, you never get Funk. (Unfortunately, the same is true for Disco.)

This was part of the point of my overly long post before...

Still workin on that one.

If you haven't looked at the early work of Sister Rosetta, you may also want to check some of that out. She was an extremely popular gospel singer beginning in the 1930's. And both her singing and style of guitar-playing influenced alot of early rock and rollers.

PBS did a very nice documentary on her in 2013 for their American Masters series, which is well worth the watch if they ever rerun it.

Hootie- Darius Rucker? You can't possibly be putting him in the same sentence as Fishbone!?!!

My apologies to the Fishbone, and Hootie fans for that.

 

[ADU]

There was also another black alt-rock artist, in addition to Darius and Fishbone, who was briefly popular around the late 80's or 90's as I recall. But I'm flaking on his name and songs, and Google isn't helping much. I remember seeing some of his vids on MTV though.

Yes! Corey Glover of Living Colour is precisely who I was thinking of. And "Cult of Personality" was in heavy rotation on MTV around that time in the later 80's/early 90's.

Thanks for finding that.

 

[Soandso]

1922 record of Rock with Roll:

"I looked at the clock
and the clock struck one.
...
I looked at the clock
and the clock struck six.
...
I looked at the clock
and the clock struck ten...."

 

[ADU]

Some new Liz Phair.

 

[ADU]

 

[Axo1989]

Just scratching the surface really but his may help sort out some genres (48 of them give or take, overlapping around half of @Martin 's great list back on the first page ... not all genres are rock )

 

[Axo1989]

For those of you pondering the white-ness, blues-ness or otherwise of rock, this is an interesting read: Rock ‘n’ Roll & The European Soul.

(No, it's not a neo-Nazi piece, in case you were worried).

 

[bluefuzz]

I thought about folks like Chaka Kahn and George Clinton as well. But I think of them more as funk artists (with some influences from rock).

And as the great Funkadelic song goes: 'Who Says a Funk Band Can't Play Rock?' Eddie Hazel was certainly a great rock guitarist. I also seem to remember Chaka Khan was never happy being pigeonholed as a funk singer. And so it goes ... ;-)

One black artist of the 'Classic Rock' period who tends to get forgotten nowadays is Joan Armatrading. I would definitely put her in the rock category, albeit in the pop end of things. She was one of Britain's finest (and most successful) songwriters of the period (mid 70s - mid 80s) and no mean guitarist to boot.

And in almost the opposite end of the rock scale was Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex who were IMO the most enjoyable of the first wave of British punk bands.

 

[Killingbeans]

And as the great Funkadelic song goes: 'Who Says a Funk Band Can't Play Rock?' Eddie Hazel was certainly a great rock guitarist.

The title track on Maggot Brain is pretty much as rock as it gets, that's for sure.

 

[Timcognito]

Some new FUNK

" title=" Lettuce - House of Lett (Official Audio)"

 

[ryanosaur]

The title track on Maggot Brain is pretty much as rock as it gets, that's for sure.

I love the story behind that session. Clinton is said to have been on Acid. He instructed Eddie Hazel to imagine everything about the day he would hear his Mom was dead...
From guitar.com:

The legend of how Clinton conjured the performance from Hazel has been told countless times but once more can’t hurt: it’s said that he told him to play as if he had just found out that his mother had died. The more intense version of the legend asserts that Clinton did actually tell Hazel that his mother had died, before revealing that she hadn’t, and then hitting record. All while tripping on LSD.

I've heard this story, in some version or another, too many times. Like all such stories, I can't help but wonder where truth and fantasy collide. I certainly don't disbelieve that this could be the case, but there are only a couple people that could really tell the story and I've yet to see one of them say "Yeah, that's how it happened."

Great cut to be certain!

 

[ADU]

And as the great Funkadelic song goes: 'Who Says a Funk Band Can't Play Rock?' Eddie Hazel was certainly a great rock guitarist. I also seem to remember Chaka Khan was never happy being pigeonholed as a funk singer. And so it goes ... ;-)

It goes both ways though. Because there were plenty of rock bands that wanted to play funk. Some tried, with limited success. And a few actually succeeded.

I don't think there are many artists with Chaka's skills who want to be limited to just one thing though.

 

[Timcognito]

Some more good Funk. This time from Japan, and of course from Japan these guys can't get too loose, but they are a tight, bright and funky big band.

" title="Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro - The Bunch (2009)

 

[bluefuzz]

Because there were plenty of rock bands that wanted to play funk

Which brings us back to genre definitions again. I would still argue that rock has subsumed pretty much every other genre (including funk) and is an essentially meaningless definition without qualification. Most interesting artists have experimented with different genres either within a single album or progressively morphing between 'genres' throughout their careers ...

Were Average White Band a funk band? Little Feat? Obviously the answer is yes and no, maybe and sometimes ;-)