Rock branch Full entry · 1954
Rock
Heaviness 4
Speed 6
Melody 8
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
The whole family: guitar, bass, drums and a beat borrowed from blues and rhythm and blues. Every branch below grows out of this trunk, metal included.
How it sounds
- The core trio: electric guitar, bass and drums with vocals on top. Everything follows from the blues twelve-bar and the backbeat on two and four.
- The default format is a three-minute verse-chorus song, though every branch has broken that rule in its own way.
- Guitar distortion — originally the accident of a broken amp — became the genre's signature sound.
History
Rock emerged in the mid-1950s, when Black rhythm and blues and white country music collided in studios in Memphis and Chicago. Within fifteen years it was the dominant music on earth, and by 1970 it had already split into dozens of branches that no longer spoke to one another. Everything else in this tree is a consequence of that explosion.
Branches into
Siblings on this branch