Beat / British Invasion, from the outside in. Each step is a genre and the single record this encyclopedia would put on first. Play them in this order and the last one should sound like a next step rather than a wall.
- 1 The way in
Rock 1954
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.
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
Put on
The Beatles - Revolver, if you want to understand why everything branched so fast.
The Beatles, Revolver (1966) - 2 Then
Rock and roll 1954
Ground zero: twelve-bar blues sped up, piano hammered hard, lyrics about cars and girls. It made the electric guitar the defining instrument of the century.
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
Put on
Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode. That opening riff is the DNA of the entire tree.
Chuck Berry, Chuck (2017) - 3 What you asked about
Beat / British Invasion 1963
The British took American rock and roll, added vocal harmony and shipped it back across the Atlantic. Both hard rock and pop-rock start here.
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
Put on
The Kinks - You Really Got Me. The first genuinely distorted riff on record.
The Kinks, Kinks (1964) - 4 Where to go next
New wave 1978
Post-punk's commercial face: synthesizers, hooks and jerky rhythms. Punk without the rage, but with the same ideas.
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
Assembled from the tree: every genre Beat / British Invasion descends from, in order. Beat / British Invasion has no subgenres, so the last step is the genre that rates closest to it by sound.