For the last half century, little Britain has remained the number one country in the world of popular music. The number of rock icons per capita here seems implausible.
There is a paradox that says that rock ‘n’ roll originated in the United States, but rock music originated in Great Britain. How is this to be understood? In the middle of the 20th century, the UK and the States entered into a kind of cultural symbiosis: in the US, a new genre would emerge, which often came from the African-American culture and was somewhat adapted, while in England that same genre would become a work of underground art, which could then be imported back to America already as a commercially successful product.
This was the case with disco, which became new wave in England, with house and techno; this was also the case with rock and roll. African-American culture has for decades been a source of borrowings for most music – borrowings that are strange, dangerous, but very appealing and fashionable. And British society, which is extremely favorable to the development of underground subcultures of all kinds, hones its mastery of creating masterpieces on American genres.
Ku Klux Klan vs. dance
Originally, rock ‘n’ roll was almost exactly what is known as rhythm and blues, one of the styles of African-American music that everyone started playing in the 1950s. Before rock ‘n’ roll came to Britain, it was a mass genre without much arthouse ambition. Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Little Richard and their colleagues wanted to play music that white teenagers would enjoy dancing to.
In turn, teenagers who contrasted their fathers’ military past with strict military discipline wanted to dance like their black ghetto peers – with plasticity, groove (a particular vibe traditionally associated with African and African American dance) and some sexual energy.
At the same time, listening to overtly “black” music and partying to it was unseemly and dangerous: it was not approved by the parents of these teenagers or many of them themselves. In the United States at that time the Ku Klux Klan was still rampant. But when almost the same music started to be played by white musicians, diluting country music a bit, it became more acceptable. So out of latent social and repressed carnal desires, rock and roll emerged.
Skiffle and the Two Cities with an “L.”
Over time, rock ‘n’ roll records began to make their way to Britain: mostly brought by sailors to port cities on the west coast. Chief among these cities was Liverpool; it was no coincidence that the Beatles appeared there.
At the time, one of the previous imports from “black” America was on the rise in England: skiffle, of which no one in the United States remembered for a long time. Skiffle was 1920s jazz, simplified to the extreme, played with acoustic guitars and improvised instruments like a washboard or an empty suitcase. By the end of the 50s, there were more than 30,000 skiffle bands in Britain, and guitar sales never stopped growing.
John Lennon’s first band, The Quarrymen, was like that. Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and David Gilmore also played skiffle. And the main popularizer of skiffle in England was a musician named Lonnie Donegan, and he, unlike the others, remained faithful to skiffle until his death in 2002. At the junction of skiffle and rhythm and blues/rock and roll emerged the great British rock generation of the 1960s.
The two most important centers of musical life in England at that time were London and Liverpool. The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and The Animals emerged from the underground blues culture in the capital. The Rolling Stones quickly became the “main” London band. The Yardbirds were the most experimental of them all, with the greatest guitarists in the history of rock music – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page (Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were the founders of Cream and Led Zeppelin respectively) honing their skills.
Liverpool’s underground scene, better known as the center of commercial music, was not as prominent as London’s. But Liverpool is a port city, and musical influences from across the ocean could easily reach there. In the early 1960s, these influences were reworked in an English way and formed into beat music, or the so-called Merseybeat (the Mersey is the river that connects Manchester and Liverpool), a fusion of rock and roll, skiffle and several other genres with a “black” past.
Merseybeat is characterized by simple guitar parts, easy-to-remember melodies, harmonious polyphony, clear percussion rhythm and major chords. In general, it is easy guitar music, which was enjoyed by teenagers. The Beatles in terms of music in the beginning were just a typical beat ensemble. But knowledgeable people gradually realized that their potential was much greater. First of all, all the band members were very good musicians, although at first it was not so obvious behind the genre restrictions of mercsibit. Secondly (and the role of this factor should not be underestimated), they were good-looking guys. Girls in the early 1960s were quick to appreciate.
Producer George Martin was in charge of commercial music in Liverpool. He met The Beatles, and everything spun. The band was nicknamed “The Fab Four”, and the Beatlemania era began. In 1963 the single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released in the US, and it suddenly topped the US charts.
“The Beatles toured the US as the first British band in a long time. They were followed by The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and dozens of other bands who toured the States. This began the era of the “British Invasion”: British bands dominated both the national and international charts, and every other American played rock with friends in his garage.
Other than the Beatles
If the Beatles are Britain’s number one rock band, then of course they are followed by The Rolling Stones. They deliberately built their image on contrasts: the Beatles were the “good boys,” dancing on stage in suits and ties, while the Rolling Stones played harder music, wore long hair and absurd clothing, behaved “like animals” on stage. If melody was most important to the Beatles’ music, the Rolling Stones were all about drive, style of behavior, even lifestyle. Interestingly, the Beatles broke up relatively quickly, while the Rolling Stones are still giving concerts to this day.
Many of the bands that are commonly considered part of the “British Invasion” briefly lingered in the history of rock music (for example, Gerry and The Pacemakers, The Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann and The Searchers remained single hit songwriters). The ones who got into the future were those who composed more complex songs on more serious themes, not just commercial hits.
For example, The Who started in 1965 with the rebellious anthem “My Generation” (and anticipated punk by being the first to destroy the guitar on stage), and soon moved on to composing more unpredictable and diverse music. The Kinks also started out as a beat band and managed to stay in history, too.
The beat quickly exhausted itself, and in the mid-1960s, psychedelic rock emerged – a kind of rock symbolism, complex music with lyrics on the verge of nonsense, trying to influence the listener with unexpected images and intricate harmonies. But perhaps the most important impetus for the emergence of psychedelic rock was George Harrison’s fascination with Indian philosophy.
New bands emerge – Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Moody Blues – which are characterized by unusual harmonies and unusual instruments, such as brass and strings. The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), often referred to as the first “concept album,” the kind of album that the listener sees not as a collection of individual songs, but as a complete work of art. For a rock concert, the element of improvisation, of theater, becomes important.
As a result of psychedelic experiments gradually formed several new styles with the prefix “rock”, which will determine the development of rock music in the 1970s. One of them is hard rock. The main representatives and actual founders of the genre were Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath (before that, for example, Eric Clapton’s band Cream flirted with heavier rock music).
One of the main melodic techniques of hard rock is the technique of riffs, i.e. short repetitive guitar parts.
Other new movements are art-rock and close to it progressive rock (prog-rock). In addition to the techniques of beat and psychedelic rock, these genres use elements of classical music, jazz, and folk. We can say that all prog-rock bands are united by the desire to complicate the musical form in comparison with classic rock (note: in rock music for only 10 years has already managed to appear its own classic), as well as with hard rock, rockabilly and other new trends.
Prog-rock is characterized by long compositions with complex melodies and harmonies, cyclic forms taken from academic music, and conceptual albums. Within prog-rock there are many of their own trends, such as Canterbury, Symphoprog in the UK; mat-rock, progressive-metal in the US, and, for example, the so-called zeuhl in France. King Crimson, Genesis, and Yes are often referred to as the main representatives of classic progressive rock, all English bands. Other subgenres of rock music are also emerging, such as glam rock. Glam rock includes T. Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music. Glam rock is, roughly speaking, rock plus wild costumes and makeup. Jazz-rock, blues-rock, and folk-rock are also emerging.
In the second half of the 1970s, rock music comes to a turning point: the basic techniques of hard rock and progressive rock are exhausted, many famous bands break up, others are finally commercialized. Incidentally, the decade itself began precisely with the breakup of the Beatles in 1970. By the end of the 1970s, disco was taking over the world, and almost simultaneously in England and in the States punk appeared – music of deliberate simplification of rock standards, rejection of the complexity of prog-rock, an attempt to find energy that is not yet corrupted by the power of money. Of the English punk rock bands, the Sex Pistols and The Clash are worth mentioning.
By the 1980s, punk, disco and shards of rock music were giving birth to new wave, postpunk and alternative rock.
To simplify, new wave is punk turned pop music. In the UK, new wave was played, for example, by The Police, The Pretenders, and Elvis Costello. Around new wave there is “new romance” (Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Culture Club), but it is not quite rock music: the synthesizer in their tunes often replaces all other instruments. MTV appears, and with it comes the “second British invasion” – British bands are again very much in demand in the US.
Postpunk, on the contrary, is a kind of avant-garde punk with very cold melodies and man-hating lyrics. Postpunk bands include Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall. There is also alternative rock, which does not fit into the existing categories. These bands, for the most part, recorded on independent labels and were closely associated with the underground scene. They didn’t embrace the dominant synth sound, but rather wanted to return to the classic rock band structure organized around one or two guitars. In the UK, alternative rock was played by New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and The Smiths.
The Cure’s “Fire in Cairo” has one of the most amazing choruses in the history of rock music: only three words – “fire in Cairo” – spelled out into the most powerful glossolalic nonsense.
Although early alternative rock bands were generally not commercially successful (except, perhaps, The Cure and The Smiths), gradually alternative rock, after a series of transformations, reached it by the 1990s. In the second half of the 80s, it branches out into subgenres: there are so-called jungle-pop, Dream-pop, and shoegaze.
Britpop and others
Alternative rock becomes mainstream and gets the name “Britpop” in Great Britain. The most famous artists of this genre are Oasis, Blur, Suede and Pulp, they are sometimes even called “the big four”. Britpop is the national answer to American grunge, Britpop musicians try to remember the guitar music of the old times (i.e. the 60s) and fill their songs with pure English themes and experiences. Britpop is associated with another surge in the popularity of British culture across the ocean – it became part of the Cool Britannia movement.
At this point, the history of rock music is formally over (although there have been many great bands and albums after Britpop): the name Britpop no longer even has the prefix “-rock” as it used to have until now. From now on, there will only be various “-post” and “-postpost”. In addition, the advent and widespread spread of the computer and the technical possibilities it gives each of us, in a sense, contradict the very essence of rock music in the classical sense. It’s no coincidence that one of the first great albums of the 21st century is called “OK Computer.
Rock was born with one guitar: English teenagers could buy a cheap acoustic guitar (and find a washboard in a landfill), and that was enough to show their parents that they are not like that, that they want to build the future, to express some ideas. But to build a future, they needed a past, and that past was African-American music: New Orleans jazz, American folk, blues, and so on. British culture was in crisis after the war, and the birth of rock was the impetus to get out of it.
By the end of the century, rock itself was in crisis, and not for the first time in its history. And the way out again was found in the past: the so-called indie-rock of the early 2000s once again tried to leave one or two guitars and simple drums in rock bands and go back to the roots of the early 1960s. But that’s another story altogether.