Avril Lavigne - Rock N Roll (Kan 2024)
Rock and roll, også kaldet rock 'n' roll eller rock & roll, stil med populær musik, der stammer fra USA i midten af 1950'erne, og som udviklede sig i midten af 1960'erne til den mere omfattende internationale stil kendt som rockmusik, selvom sidstnævnte også fortsat blev kendt som rock and roll.
Quiz
Musical Medley: Fact eller Fiction?
Ord sunget til musik håndteres af den samme del af hjernen, der behandler talte ord.
Rock and roll er blevet beskrevet som en fusion af countrymusik og rytme og blues, men hvis det var så enkelt, ville det have eksisteret længe før det brast ud i den nationale bevidsthed. Frøene fra musikken havde været på plads i årtier, men de blomstrede i midten af 1950'erne, når de blev næret af en flygtig blanding af sort kultur og hvid forbrugskraft. Sorte vokalgrupper som Dominoerne og spanierne begyndte at kombinere gospel-stilharmonier og call-and-response-sang med jordisk emne og mere aggressive rytme-og-bluesrytmer. Heralding af denne nye lyd var disc jockeys som Alan Freed of Cleveland, Ohio, Dewey Phillips fra Memphis, Tennessee og William ("Hoss") Allen fra WLAC i Nashville,Tennessee - der skabte rock-and-roll-radio ved at spille hårdkørende rytme-og-blues og raunchy blues-plader, der introducerede hvide forstæder teenagere til en kultur, der lød mere eksotisk, spændende og ulovlig end noget, de nogensinde havde kendt. I 1954 sammenklappede lyden sig omkring et billede: lyden fra en smuk hvid sanger, Elvis Presley, der lød som en sort mand.
Presley’s nondenominational taste in music incorporated everything from hillbilly rave-ups and blues wails to pop-crooner ballads. Yet his early recordings with producer Sam Phillips, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black for Sun Records in Memphis were less about any one style than about a feeling. For decades African Americans had used the term rock and roll as a euphemism for sex, and Presley’s music oozed sexuality. Presley was hardly the only artist who embodied this attitude, but he was clearly a catalyst in the merger of black and white culture into something far bigger and more complex than both.
In Presley’s wake, the music of black singers such as Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley, who might have been considered rhythm-and-blues artists only years before, fit alongside the rockabilly-flavoured tunes of white performers such as Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Jerry Lee Lewis, in part because they were all now addressing the same audience: teenagers. For young white America, this new music was a soundtrack for rebellion, however mild. When Bill Haley and His Comets kicked off the 1955 motion picture Blackboard Jungle with “Rock Around the Clock,” teens in movie houses throughout the United States stomped on their seats. Movie stars such as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) oozed sullen, youthful defiance that was echoed by the music. This emerging rock-and-roll culture brought a wave of condemnations from religious leaders, government officials, and parents’ groups, who branded it the “devil’s music.”
The music industry’s response was to sanitize the product: it had clean-cut, nonthreatening artists such as Pat Boone record tame versions of Little Richard songs, and it manufactured a legion of pretty-boy crooners such as Frankie Avalon and Fabian who thrived on American Bandstand and who would essentially serve as the Perry Comos and Bing Crosbys for a new generation of listeners. By the end of the 1950s, Presley had been inducted into the army, Holly had died in a plane crash, and Little Richard had converted to gospel. Rock and roll’s golden era had ended, and the music entered a transitional phase characterized by a more sophisticated approach: the orchestrated wall of sound erected by Phil Spector, the “hit factory” singles churned out by Motown records, and the harmony-rich surf fantasies of the Beach Boys. By the mid-1960s this sophistication allowed the music greater freedom than ever before, and it fragmented into numerous styles that became known simply as rock.
