A somewhat pedantic distinction…

When we use the term “rock” or “metal” to describe a genre, we’ve already stirred up a million different sound ideals in our heads. All of these ideals are comprised of experiences and prejudices we have when engaging with music. For example, one may define rock simply as any song that has a strong metric emphasis on beats 2 + 4, a traditional rock groove. This becomes useless very quickly when you look at the sub-genre of prog-rock, which rarely has those metric emphases. Another may describe metal as a specific collection of timbres focused around aggression - a “you know it when you hear it” kind of description. Yet another may define most pop music as rock or interchange metal and rock altogether.

Deciding on any one of these distinctions is exhausting. So, for the purpose of this module, we will do our best to identify distinct techniques and styles of the broad rock and metal genres while setting aside the unnecessary debate of labeling with extreme specificity. With all of that said, let’s look at a brief history of rock and metal.

A breif history

Starting in the late 1940s and into the 50s, rock and roll was coming up as the next big music phenomenon in the United States. Early rock and roll was an evolution of jazz and the rhythm and blues of the 40s. Keep in mind, early rhythm and blues were quite a bit different than the contemporary R&B we are familiar with today. Early R&B essentially consisted of a percussion set, guitars, bass which made up the rhythm section. A varied wind section that featured saxophones, trumpets, and other wind instruments. Gospel-like vocal harmonies are another key trait of early R&B that would also be found in early rock & roll. This entire instrumentation would essentially be derived into the rock and roll instrumentation, whose modern counterpart still consists of drum sets, string instruments, and usually a singer.¹ Two groups that epitomized these genres can be seen here below in Billy Ward & The Dominoes and Bill Haley & His Comets.

You may now be wondering; “What is the difference between R&B and Rock and Roll at this point in time?” Frankly, the question warrants an incredibly nuanced distinction that is informed not only by instrumentation, but also technical styles, geography, and segregation in the United States. Providing this context is useful as we continue on this timeline, so check out this Rolling Stone feature that addresses several of these nuances and several other artists of the time before moving on.

The mid-50s saw the rise of another rock icon as well, Elvis Presley, who has been unequivocally considered the “king of rock.” Elvis’ musical style was the definitive fusion of folk-country music and R&B, finally creating an audible and stylistic distinction between the two genres. This style consisted of a straightforward (as opposed to swinging) and insistent backbeat that would go on to define the genre for the next several decades and what is most apparent in modern rock too. With new advancements in media sharing such as television and radio, Elvis was also able to bring a certain celebrity culture to the masses and subsequently benefit from superstardom. This included a positive shift in public perspective towards a more liberal and sexual culture in music, but would also fuel his opioid use and abuse of minor-aged girls.² Despite this, Elvis is considered to be the third best-selling artist of all time after The Beatles and Micheal Jackson.³

Speaking of which, the 60s, saw the rise of several derivations of the broader rock genre, as well as the decline of rock and roll as it was originally conceived. For a couple of examples, look no further than the aforementioned names; The Beatles and The Jackson 5.

The Jackson 5 is ostensibly a pop group rather than a rock group. However, their style shows an evolution of the early R&B genre while also adopting some characteristics from rock and roll. Further derivatives of this style of music include funk and disco of the 70s, but one can also hear elements of modern pop and R&B in the sound as well. This is especially evident in the career of one of the performers of the group, Micheal Jackson, who would go on to be coined as the “king of pop.” These kinds of rock-pop groups were actually quite popular at the time and also consisted of artists such as Tina Turner of Ike and Tina.

The Beatles are merely emblematic of the rock and beat music that was the main cultural export of the United States to the United Kingdom. Other artists include The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, among others which started the British Invasion here in the states. Ever evolving, these groups defined their style through increased use of electronic instruments (such as electric guitars and effects) and an experimental approach to composing and performing. This period was also defined by the counter-culture movement that was sweeping across most of the western world. In the United States, this cultural moment is epitomized in the Civil Rights Movement and the disastrous intervention in the Vietnam War.

The 70s and 80s saw the evolution of rock and pop and its derivations into multiple sub-genres. Pop-rock (Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell) emerged as the lighter alternative to hard-rock counterparts. These hard-rock alternatives included progressive-rock (Rush, Yes) glam-rock (David Bowie, Van Halen, Queen), and punk-rock (Blondie, Patti Smith). Further derivations of the hard-rock genres would create what we know today as metal.

Deep Purple and Black Sabbath are just two examples of transformative early metal bands, taking the aesthetic of rock from the 60s and 70s and adding additional processing effects, such as distortion, as well as adopting grittier vocal inflections. Bands would also continue to experiment with things such as new chord progressions and rhythmic ideas that would be codified into what we now consider traditional to early metal. One such development is the use of chord progressions in Phrygian pitch collections - which is the same collection we learned about at the end of Module 4! A key sub-genre within metal is thrasher metal which served as an even more aggressive counterpart to mainstream metal, and served as its own counter-culture movement to the far-right political conservatism of the 1980s. The thrasher genre is best exemplified by what fans consider “The Big Four:” Metallica, Megadeath, Anthrax, and Slayer.

The iterations of new genres and derivative art forms continued through the 1990s creating several notable genres in of themselves, including alternative rock (Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge), grunge (Nirvana, Courtney Love), and many modern genres that are still heard today. However, the closer we get to the present day, the less popular and more niche these subgenres have become. Additionally, the explosion of hip-hop and pop completely dominated the commercial music industry throughout the 2000s, putting rock and metal to the side. However, these genres are seeing a resurgence in popularity today as musicians continue to evolve and adopt modern music sensibilities. We’ll take a look at some of this music soon, but first, let’s take a look at a couple of new techniques that have been introduced in rock and metal.

Some new techniques just for fun

As mentioned before, new performance/compositional techniques would also be found in the evolution of rock and metal, especially with guitarists. You may have heard the term power chord used before, and it refers to a chord that only has 2 distinct pitches. When looking back at our neatly stacked triads, we can create power chords by removing the middle note of the triad, creating just an interval of a fifth. When played on a guitar, the bottom of these notes is usually repeated at the octave to beef up the sound - which is also supported by how easily the hand position is formed by these types of chords. An extremely popular song (at least in terms of rock) represents the use of the power chord. Listen to this snippet of Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple below.

Another technique frequently implemented in metal is the pedal point. Pedal point refers to a repeated or sustained pitch that persists throughout a length of music, usually while other music is performed “over top of it.” The pedal point is by no means a new technique, as it has been used in all kinds of music from baroque chamber music to Duke Ellington jazz piano tunes. However, its use was sort of revitalized in electric guitars and bass guitars in metal music. A bass guitar may sustain a pedal point while the guitar riffs above it, or a guitar alone can create a sort of fake pedal point by pivoting between the pedal pitch and other notes in the riff. These two examples are actually both represented in the verse of Crazy Train by Ozzy Osborne, a former member of the aforementioned Black Sabbath. The pedal tone as the pitch ‘A’ which grounds us in the key of this section, ‘A major.’

 Rock, and then some

Let’s start our listening with a Canadian indie-rock band, Mother Mother. Indie-genres have historically been used to describe artists who publish and produce their music under independent labels. Like most genres, the musical aesthetics associated with indie-rock began to define the genre itself, rather than record company affiliation. As an off-shoot of alternative-rock, some qualities of the indie-rock style may include a low fidelity production and experimental compositional techniques not found in mainstream music. I think you can find some of these qualities in the following 2021 song by Mother Mother, Forgotten Souls. As you are listening think about what elements of the song would be considered indie in aesthetic, as well as its rock roots.

The core elements that help us define the genre as rock include a steady and straightforward beat with metric emphases on the second and fourth beat of each measure. Instrumentation is another clue, as most self-described rock groups include some combination of guitars, percussion, and vocals. Speaking of which, the song also features some more experimental compositional choices that sort of define Mother Mother’s indie sound. For me, it all lies in the vocal talents of Molly Guldemond, Ryan Guldemond, and Jasmin Parkin. These members often employ 3-part harmonies that seem to be intentionally light in timbre that blends well together, as well as a certain amount of pitch-shifting applied to one or more of the voices. The use of electronically processed vocals is not uncommon, but the band edges on the experimental by pushing the familiarity of the timbre of the voice into something distant and unnatural, perhaps most noticeably at the last chorus of the song. We’ll explore pitch-shifting and other forms of electronic processing in a future module, but for now, let’s move on to a couple more rock songs.

If our job is to just identify or define a song as rock, it would be pretty simple from here on out. By now, you should all have a pretty decent sound ideal for what rock sounds like, informed by our listening and discussion so far, as well as by your previous listening experiences. So let’s take our analysis a couple steps further with t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l by WILLOW. I’m going to pose a couple of questions without answering them, and I want to consider both what an answer to them might be, and why I am asking: Who is Willow Smith and Travis Barker - what are their backgrounds? What other songs does this artist perform and in what style/genre?

By knowing who Travis Barker is, a key connection to him and the drumset performance may be made. By getting a feel for WILLOW’s discography, we can better position our expectation of their sound, both where it converges with and diverges from other songs. These are relatively extramusical questions whose answers help us inform our listening of the piece. This kind of analysis is the next step in understanding the music we consume Let’s get even more critical in our analyses with our next listening.

 Metal, and then some

Let’s dive into our metal listening with the nu-metal band, Architects. Nu-metal is a derivative of metal that incorporates all kinds of stylistic aesthetics from modern genres, including but not limited to rock, pop, and hip-hop. This sub-genre seems to be by far the most commercially successful as well when compared to other modern metal sub-genres. We’ll be looking at the more experimental side of this genre in the next module, but for now get a feel for what metal is all about these days with Dead Butterflies.

Chances are most of you are not immediate fans of metal or have never really come across the genre. By listening to the example above, and keeping in mind the brief history of the genres we talked about earlier, you should have a good foundation of what metal consists of stylistically. The percussion here is heavier and seems to be much more active than in the rock counterparts we’ve listened to so far. We also have far more distortion and other processing effects between the guitars and vocals. Additionally, we have sections of the song that are held in complete juxtaposition to each other, as seen in the lightly orchestrated verses that feature soft synths and vocals to the more percussion-driven choruses. Don’t hold onto this ideal to closely, as these are just observations I happened to make and by no means define the genre. However, let’s continue to consider the similarities and differences across the next two songs.