The Rock Music Portal
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the blues and rhythm and blues genres of African-American music and from country music. Rock music also drew strongly from a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical, and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a 4
4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political.
Rock musicians in the mid-1960s began to advance the album ahead of the single as the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption, with the Beatles at the forefront of this development. Their contributions lent the genre a cultural legitimacy in the mainstream and initiated a rock-informed album era in the music industry for the next several decades. By the late 1960s "classic rock" period, a number of distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, and jazz rock, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, which was influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene. New genres that emerged included progressive rock, which extended the artistic elements, glam rock, which highlighted showmanship and visual style, and the diverse and enduring subgenre of heavy metal, which emphasized volume, power, and speed. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and eventually alternative rock.
From the 1990s, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop, and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop punk, electronic rock, rap rock, and rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and techno-pop revivals in the 2000s. The 2010s saw a slow decline in rock music's mainstream popularity and cultural relevancy, with hip-hop surpassing it as the most popular genre in the United States. (Full article...)
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Deftones have released nine albums since their inception. After the lineup settled in 1993, the band secured a recording contract with Maverick Records, and subsequently released their debut album Adrenaline in 1995. Promoting the album by touring exhaustively with other bands in the scene, Deftones managed to gain a dedicated fan base through word of mouth. Their second album Around the Fur was released in 1997, reached chart positions along with its singles, and became the band's first to receive certification from the RIAA. The band found even further success with their third album White Pony (2000), which saw a transition away from their earlier, more aggressive sound into a more experimental direction. Its lead single "Change (In the House of Flies)" is the band's most commercially successful single, and the track "Elite" won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance; it was also the band's first of three albums to be certified platinum in the United States. Their self-titled fourth album was released in 2003. While the group's critical success continued, sales proved to be lackluster compared to White Pony.
Deftones' fifth studio effort, Saturday Night Wrist, was released in 2006. While critically acclaimed, the album’s production was marred by creative tensions and personal issues within the band, some of which influenced its material. In 2008, while Deftones were working on an album tentatively titled Eros, Cheng was involved in a traffic collision. As a result, he was left in a minimally conscious state until his death in 2013 of cardiac arrest. After Cheng's accident, Deftones halted production on Eros. Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega, who had filled in as a touring member to replace Cheng, later became his permanent replacement, though Vega alleges he was never an official member.
The band released Diamond Eyes in 2010 and embarked on a triple-headline tour with Alice in Chains and Mastodon throughout North America. Their seventh and eighth albums, Koi No Yokan (2012) and Gore (2016) respectively, saw the band continue to move in an increasingly experimental direction and were released to critical acclaim. Their latest album, Ohms, was released on September 25, 2020, receiving significant critical praise for its return to the band's heavier sound. In March 2022, it was announced that bassist Sergio Vega had left the band in early 2021. They have sold more than 10 million albums worldwide. (Full article...)
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Perry rose to fame with her second album and major label debut, One of the Boys (2008), a pop rock record containing her debut single "I Kissed a Girl" and follow-up single "Hot n Cold", which respectively reached number one and three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The disco-influenced pop album Teenage Dream (2010) spawned five U.S. number one singles—"California Gurls", "Teenage Dream", "Firework", "E.T.", and "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)"—becoming the first album by a solo female artist to do so. A reissue titled Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection (2012) subsequently yielded the U.S. number one single "Part of Me". Her fourth album Prism (2013) has themes of self-empowerment and relationships. With the music videos for its U.S. number one singles "Roar" and "Dark Horse", Perry became the first artist to have multiple videos reach one billion views on YouTube. Witness (2017) featured an electropop sound with themes of liberation and a political subtext, while Smile (2020) featured themes of motherhood and self-help. She later embarked on her first concert residency titled Play in Resorts World Las Vegas, selling out multiple shows and receiving critical acclaim.
Perry is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold over 143 million records worldwide. All of her studio albums released under Capitol have individually surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. She has nine U.S. number one singles, three U.S. number one albums and has received various accolades, including four Guinness World Records, five Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, a Brit Award, and a Juno Award. Perry has been included in the annual Forbes lists of highest-earning women in music from 2011 to 2019. Her critically acclaimed Super Bowl halftime show performance is the most watched in history. Outside of music, she released an autobiographical documentary titled Katy Perry: Part of Me in 2012, voiced Smurfette in The Smurfs film series, and launched her own shoe line Katy Perry Collections in 2017. Perry began serving as a judge on American Idol during its sixteenth season in 2018. She is also the most-followed woman on Twitter, with over 100 million followers. (Full article...)
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The Pale Emperor is the ninth studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on January 15, 2015, through lead singer Marilyn Manson's Hell, etc. label, and distributed in the United States by Loma Vista Recordings and internationally by Cooking Vinyl. The album was issued in standard and deluxe editions on CD and double LP vinyl, and as a limited edition box set. The standard version of the album contains ten tracks; the deluxe edition includes three acoustic versions as bonus tracks.
Produced by Manson and newcomer Tyler Bates, who Manson met through their mutual involvement in the TV series Californication, The Pale Emperor eschews the band's usual industrial rock style in favor of a sparser, blues rock-influenced sound. The album features drummer Gil Sharone, formerly of Stolen Babies and The Dillinger Escape Plan. It was the first album since his return to the band in 2008 to not include songwriting or performance contributions from bassist Twiggy Ramirez, who was busy with his own projects. The album is dedicated to Manson's mother, who died of Alzheimer's disease during production.
The album was released to positive reviews from music critics. Several writers referred to it as the band's best album in over a decade, and multiple publications ranked it as one of the best albums of 2015. It was also a commercial success, debuting at number eight on the Billboard 200 with the band's highest opening week sales since Eat Me, Drink Me (2007). It topped Billboard's Hard Rock Albums chart, as well as the national albums chart in Switzerland, and peaked within the top ten in fifteen other countries.
Three official singles were released, "Third Day of a Seven Day Binge", "Cupid Carries a Gun" and "Deep Six"; the latter became the band's highest-peaking single on Billboards Mainstream Rock Chart; "The Mephistopheles of Los Angeles" and "The Devil Beneath My Feet" have been released as promotional singles. The album was supported by The Hell Not Hallelujah Tour, which was interspersed with two co-headlining tours: The End Times with The Smashing Pumpkins, and a summer 2016 tour with Slipknot. ('Full article...)
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"It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is a power ballad written by Jim Steinman. According to Steinman, the song was inspired by Wuthering Heights, and was an attempt to write "the most passionate, romantic song" he could ever create. The Sunday Times posits that "Steinman protects his songs as if they were his children". Meat Loaf had wanted to record the song for years, but Steinman saw it as a "woman's song". Steinman won a court movement preventing Meat Loaf from recording it. Girl group Pandora's Box went on to record it and it was subsequently made famous through a cover by Celine Dion, which upset Meat Loaf because he was going to use it for a planned album with the working title Bat Out of Hell III. Alternately, Meat Loaf has said the song was intended for Bat Out of Hell II and given to the singer in 1986, but that they both decided to use "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" for Bat II, and save this song for Bat III.
The song has had three major releases. The first version appeared on the concept album Original Sin, recorded by Pandora's Box. It was then recorded by Celine Dion for her album Falling into You, and her version was a commercial hit, reaching No. 2 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 (behind Los del Río's "Macarena" and Blackstreet's "No Diggity") and No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart. Meat Loaf eventually recorded it as a duet with Norwegian singer Marion Raven for Bat III and released it as a single in 2006. This version reached No. 1 in Norway and No. 2 in Scotland.
A music video was produced for each of the three versions; death is a recurring theme in all of these videos, fitting in with the suggestion in Virgin Records' press release for Original Sin that "in Steinman's songs, the dead come to life and the living are doomed to die". This is particularly evident when the dead characters seem to be resurrected in the memories of the main vocalist—although in the case of Celine Dion's video, the theme is less about the living being doomed and more about a lost love. (Full article...)
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Amparo Llanos of Spanish band Dover in 2014 during their Dover came to me tour.
Did you know (auto-generated)
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- ... that Greg Cooper based the character of suffragist Kate Sheppard in punk-rock musical That Bloody Woman on Bette Midler in concert in Cleveland?
- ... that Japanese-American hard rock band Crush 40 created music for a number of Sonic the Hedgehog games?
- ... that Dutch radio and TV presenter Hanneke Kappen presented the second Dutch radio show dedicated to heavy metal music?
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Chamber pop (sometimes called ork-pop, short for "orchestral pop") is a music genre that combines rock music with the intricate use of strings, horns, piano, and vocal harmonies, and other components drawn from the orchestral and lounge pop of the 1960s, with an emphasis on melody and texture. Artists such as Burt Bacharach and the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson (especially the band's 1966 album Pet Sounds) were formative acts during the genre's original wave in the 1960s. (Full article...)
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Meshuggah (/məˈʃʊɡə/) is a Swedish extreme metal band formed in Umeå in 1987. The band's current lineup consists of lead vocalist Jens Kidman, guitarists Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström, drummer Tomas Haake and bassist Dick Lövgren. Since its formation, the band has released nine studio albums, six EPs and eight music videos. Their latest studio album, Immutable, was released on 1 April 2022 via Atomic Fire Records.
Meshuggah has become known for their innovative musical style and their complex, polymetered song structures and polyrhythms. They rose to fame as a significant act in extreme underground music, became an influence for modern metal bands, and gained a cult following. The band was labelled as one of the ten most important hard rock and heavy metal bands by Rolling Stone and as the most important band in metal by Alternative Press. In the late 2000s, the band was an inspiration for the djent subgenre. (Full article...)More did you know...
- ... that David Bowie's first gig as lead singer was at the Green Man, Blackheath?
- ... that Carlton le Willows Academy alumni include cricketer Mark Footitt, Air Supply singer/guitarist Graham Russell, and balloonist Janet Folkes?
- ... that the video for Marilyn Manson's soft-rock ballad "Running to the Edge of the World" was widely condemned for its depiction of violence against women?
- ... that Susan Beschta was a punk rocker and federal judge?
- ... that the FM Non-Duplication Rule adopted by the FCC 57 years ago led to the creation of the album-oriented and classic rock radio formats?
- ... that The Elvis Dead, a retelling of Evil Dead II in the style of Elvis Presley, features songs such as "Standing in a State of Shock", "I've Been Possessed", and "Wrapped Up in Vines"?
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