Music Genres

Pop. Blues. Jazz. Hip Hop, Rap. Soul. Country. Rock. There are lots of music genres in the musical world, and many of them have a rich history or geographical significance, a cult following or music roots that go far beyond the 20th century.  In my opinion everybody should experiment with more than one genre. If not, I will most definitely judge you. With jazz, pop and rock there are oodles of subgenres:

 

Rock and Pop are probably the two most popular genres of music, below you will find some characteristics of each genre, which show how they are similar and how they differ:

Where did Rock music originate?

It originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the 1950s, and developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and later, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues, and country music.

 

In terms of instruments, rock has centred on the electric guitar, usually as part of a group joined with drums and the electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time structure using a verse-chorus form. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis - sex, drugs, anger etc. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music, e.g. Elvis Presley. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music. Above all this, the genre has become extremely diverse - which brings us back to the different subgenres. By the late 1960s, a number of distinct music subgenres emerged,  including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, raga rock, and jazz-rock, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, which was influenced by the countercultural psychedelic scene.

 

Rock music has served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements; leading to major sub-cultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippie counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US and to music festivals like Woodstock during the Vietnam War. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex and drug use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.