This music blog analyzes rock music as a practice aiming at a utopian transfiguration of everyday life. Citing the reflections of Fredric Jameson and Ihab Hassan on (post) modernism, the argument places rock music among the movements of modernity that seek to counter alienation and reification.
From this premise, the article evaluates the impact that rock has had on cultural and social practices an impact that by definition cannot fulfill the promises of the initial project. This approach reveals that the Utopian dynamic of rock has had the residual consequence of the development of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a restricted production field: musicians, fans and journalists have defined the practices allowing to draw a perimeter of artistic autonomy separating rock from rock.
Commercial areas of mass culture
Then, the article focuses on a specific aspect of the process that leads from utopia to its social realization: it describes the role played by rock in the representation of forms of work that escape the alienation of professional life. In this perspective, rock has offered a valued representation of musical work that allows a critique of the roles imposed by the capitalist market.
Electro and Break beat are music that seems contemporary but has its origins in old rhythms. Nowadays widespread, this music develop across the planet music at high speed and seduce more and more amateurs.
Rock, Pop rock
More and more, rock and pop rock tend to be confused because they have common bases, both come from the Blues and are intended to release such energy that we always want to dance.
Should we still present rock?
It is a fairly mixed musical style that is inspired of course by Blues but also jazz, folk and country music.
Commonly, we can reduce rock to the presence of electric guitars, drums and sometimes a keyboard, one or more voices. The whole thing is then set on a rather rhythmic binary rhythm, which will differentiate it immediately from jazz, or other more marked music.
Rock music is also a very rich story, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that saw precursors such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry launching this musical movement. Rock, then, met other movements like Pop with the Beatles, but also folk with Bob Dylan, the psychedelic with Pink Floyd or what was then called as hard rock with Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple.
Today, rock has a multiple face and the genre has grown and evolved at an impressive speed through the Britpop (Blur, Oasis), the grunge with Nirvana or rock more mixed with Muse or Green Day.
Pop rock
It’s a genre that has phenomenal and automatic success in teenagers. It’s mostly a genre that exploded in the early 2000s, popular music for a general public, a kind of rock democratized for all. The most representative artists of this glorious era are: Placebo and their famous title “The bitter end”, MUSE and the song “Time is running out”, The Rasmus and the title “In the Shadows”, Linkin Park and the title “Numb”, The White Stripes with “Seven Nations Army” or The Strokes with “The End Has No End”.
