Rock Music Styles: A History​

Rock Music Styles: A History takes students on a musical journey through the development of rock music from its origins to its most contemporary styles. Charlton uses in-depth summaries and descriptions paired with a historical background to help immerse students in different musical genres. Learning from featured performers throughout the text and exploring important songs in new and revised Listening Guides, students will be able to draw connections between musical developments throughout the decades. The ninth edition of Rock Music Styles: A History provides students a deeper understanding and appreciation of rock music styles in the 20th century and beyond.

Rock Music Styles: A History is intended to be used as the text for a college-level course on the history of rock music. As a teacher and a writer, my primary concern has been to help students develop an understanding of both the musical and cultural roots of rock music and the ability to hear a direct relationship between those roots and currently popular music. To that end, I identify the various styles of music that influenced the development of rock and discuss the elements of those styles along with the rock music to which they relate. Careful listening is necessary in order to hear and identify those basic elements of music and then understand how they help define the characteristics of individual styles. The kind of listening I am asking students to do is not about deciding whether the music is pleasing, but is analytical so the student can separate one musical element from another.

Organization of the Text

This book is organized in chronological order by decade, rather than year by year. The decade approach helps to meet the overall goal of keeping general musical styles together even though there is a break from one decade to another. Each decade is introduced with some general information about events and trends important during that decade, most of which had significant influence on the music that was popular during that decade. A Chronology Chart that includes Historical Events and Musical Events of the decade follows the general discussion. Of course, one can use the book in ways other than its obvious historical survey. A reader who is interested in one particular style, the blues for example, could read about early blues styles in Chapter 1, then blues styles from the fifties discussed in Chapter 2, and then skip up to the blues revival in Chapter 8.

Reading Listening Guides

The listening guides to individual recordings in this book are intended to aid students in analytical listening. Each guide begins with the tempo of the recording. To identify hat basic beat in the recording all one has to do, in many cases, is look at the second hand on a clock while listening to the recording. We know that there are sixty seconds in a minute, so if the tempo is 120, the beats are the pulses in the music that are heard at the rate of two per second. Even if the tempo is 72, one can listen for pulses that are just a bit faster than the seconds to pick out the basic beat. Listening to the music is the most important part of this process, but many nonmusicians will need to force themselves to avoid the “tone bath” type of listening they may be used to so they can actually describe what they are hearing.

After discussing the tempo, the listening guides turn to the form of the recordings. Form in music is the overall structure as defined by repetition and contrast. A song like “Hound Dog,” for example, has lyrics in an AAB form. That is, we hear one line of lyrics, A (the first letter of the alphabet is used for the first section of music), and then we hear that line repeated. Those two A lines are followed by new lyrics, so we identify those new lyrics by a new letter, B. When we get into music analysis we will be outlining when melodies repeat or are contrasted with new melodies. With either lyrics or melody, when we listen for form we listen for a given musical element to repeat, or for a new and contrasting element to be introduced.

“Features” in the listening guides vary with the recording and are my way of describing other musical elements or characteristics that are special in a particular recording that help to define the general style of music. This presentation does not allow for the type of detail that a musician who notates and analyzes music note-by-note or chord-by-chord uses, but that type of analysis is not the subject of this book. As I said earlier, what I have tried to do here is teach interested students about the musical characteristics of many different types of rock music and help these students learn to listen critically so that they can make stylistic connections on their own.

Lyrics are very important in most rock music, and for that reason, each listening guide includes a simple explanation of the song’s lyrics. In some light pop songs that explanation may say as much as do the lyrics themselves, but in most cases lyrics contain complexities that are open to different interpretations that would go beyond the scope of this book. I hope that my summaries of lyrics will be used as a point of departure for further thought and discussion about the meaning(s) conveyed in each song.

For this edition, McGraw Hill Education has partnered with Spotify® to make songs from listening guides available online for FREE. Spotify is a digital music-streaming service that offers on-demand access to millions of songs on a variety of devices. Readers can access songs from listening examples by using Spotify directly and searching for the “Rock Music Styles” playlist, or by clicking on the Spotify play button on the Online Learning Center (more information about the OLC below). The Spotify icon will appear next to listening guides throughout the text to remind readers that they can listen to the featured song in Spotify. In cases where more than one recording of a song by the artist discussed in the book is available on Spotify, the recording that was used for the writing of the listening guide is given at the Spotify icon.

Questions for Class Discussions

This new feature includes fifty-seven questions, two or three per chapter. These new questions require more responses, sometimes repeated listening, and ask students to relate material in the chapter to more current attitudes about music and culture. This feature is intended to facilitate both live classroom and online teaching discussions.

Updates in the Ninth Edition

Most of the changes in this new edition are in the final chapter because much has happened since the eighth edition. First, the sections of the styles of music covered have been reordered to better fit former versions of those styles as they were presented earlier in the book. The ordering is now: Garage Rock, Singer/Songwriters, Alternative Metal, Pop Punk, British Alternative Rock, Emo, and Singer as Entrepreneur. Singer as Entrepreneur is an all new section because there are any number of artists who do much more than just sing, sing and dance, or sing and play an instrument. Like entrepreneurs in the business world such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, they have enormous talents in several areas and control and risk every aspect of their careers. Such performers include Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince who were covered earlier and Beyoncé is in that same category today. Her song “If I Were a Boy” is featured in a listening guide.

Some further changes in the last chapter include The Black Keys and their song “Lonely Boy” in the Garage Rock section (replacing The Kings of Leon), and a new Singer/Songwriter section that features Billie Eilish and her song “Bad Guy” (replacing the Progressive Rock section). Photos have been replaced and added to fit the performers discussed.

The new edition has updated careers as necessary to keep the book as current as possible, and the Chronology Charts have been updated as well. Given that so many classes are now being taught on line, the old “Discussion Questions” have been completely rewritten to facilitate both live classroom and online teaching situations. These new questions require more responses, sometimes repeated listenings, and ask students to relate material in the chapter to more current attitudes about music and culture. This new feature is now called “Questions for Class Discussions.”

The look of the book has changed in that we changed many of the photos. We also removed quotes from the beginnings of chapters and chronology charts as well as in some places in the text. The removals were necessary because of problems keeping permissions for use of some of the quotes. Once some very important quotes are removed, the remaining ones did not appropriately represent the balance of concerns of the times.

Supplementary Material

This text is accompanied by a wealth of resources to aid students and instructors. The Online Learning Center at mhhe.com/charltonrock8e offers an Instructor’s Manual, PowerPoint Presentations, and Test Bank. For the first time, the site also includes a Spotify play button for each Listening Guide song. For more about Spotify, see the “Listening Guides” section mentioned earlier.

Additionally, this text can be found on McGraw Hill’s custom publishing program, Create. With McGraw Hill Create™, instructors can easily arrange and rearrange material from a variety of sources, including their own. They can then build a Create book for use in their own classes.

About the Author

Katherine Charlton is a classically trained musician who has always loved rock music. She holds degrees in classical guitar performance and music history. As a music historian teaching at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, she proposed and developed a course in the history of rock music in the early 1980s. Not happy with books available as texts at that time, she decided to write Rock Music Styles: A History, the first edition of which was published in 1990. During a sabbatical in 1990, she taught music history and history of rock music at the American Institute for Foreign Study at the University of London. During that teaching experience, she researched many places in London that were important in rock music and took her students on various different tours to see places bands formed, recorded, and other parts of the city of interest to rock music lovers. Katherine Charlton also wrote a book on general music appreciation, Experience Music, published by McGraw Hill Education and currently in its sixth edition.

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my first husband, Andrew Charlton, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was only with his support and encouragement that I wrote the first three editions. Having lost him to cancer in 1997, I spent several years a grieving zombie. I finally met and married another wonderful man, Jeffrey Calkins, and it is with his patience and support that I have been able to dedicate myself to writing later editions. Jeff is an attorney with a master’s degree in political science, and his advice has been a tremendous help in writing the political and social background sections for this book. When my brother Richard Thomas French died, also of cancer, it seemed right to add his name because I miss him so very much.

I thank the many McGraw Hill editors and staff members who greatly helped with the development and production of this book, including Managing Director David Patterson, Content Project Manager Lisa Bruflodt, Product Developer Alexander Preiss, Content Licensing Specialist Brianna Kirschbaum, Associate Marketing Manager Nancy Baudean, Designer Debra Kubiak, freelance Full Service Project Manager Nikhil Rajender Kumar Meena, and freelance Project Manager Amy Oline.

Of course, I must remember that it has been the students in my own classes who have asked questions requiring me to look at rock music from many different perspectives who are really the only reason this book exists. I thank them all and hope that they continue to enjoy rock music all of their lives, as do I.