Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study

Abstract

Music has rarely exerted such positively hypnotic fascination on such masses of listeners as it has since the meteoric rise of the English group, the Beatles, at the begining of the 1960s. Under this influence the leisure behaviour of young people began to undergo lasting change, focusing around music to an extent that no one — despite the periodically recurring waves of enthusiasm for specific vogues within dance music — would have thought possible. Young people in their thousands took up music making as a leisure activity once again, to say nothing of the masses that a single rock concert was capable of mobilising. At the same time, music has become a sociopolitical problem on a scale never seen before, concerning teachers, sociologists and psychologists equally — and it has become so in both capitalist and socialist societies, even though with quite different emphases. Evidently, then, for a whole age group with a lower age limit of about twelve (and steadily falling) and an upper limit of between twenty and twenty-five (when family responsibilities intrude — see Dollase, Riisenberg and Stollenwerk 1978), the process of attainment of selfhood within society is being realised, essentially, with reference to the assimilation of this kind of music.

Pixies and Sexuality: The (Literary) Analysis of the Lyrics of an Alternative Rock Band

“…2a) Annotations on rock music Račić (1981) affirms that the studies of rock music have been more from a sociological standpoint than from an aesthetic one (p. 199), which makes sense; rock music emerged as a cultural phenomenon forged by youths without any artistic training, neither in music nor in literature. In this sense, Wicke and Deveson (1982) state that rock music in general is not rational like traditional European (classical) music; rock music is more connected to the body and to its movement (p. 231). It is irrational because it appeals to the core rhythm of humanity, and this creates a problem: art and classical music are rational and can be analyzed while rock music is irrational and is seen like a tribal ritual David Boza Méndez that should be studied as an anthropological phenomenon.…”

Acting up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and Their Metaphors of Technology

“…The electric guitar has become the icon of rock. Tied broadly to rock and popular musics within the United States and beyond, the guitar acts as an aural and visual standard that embodies musics ranging from that of swaggering heavy metal guitarists with their emphasis on power and control (Walser 1993) to the extremes of many punk rock musicians and their intentionally "incompetent" anarchic guitar sound and riotous performance (Laing 1985;Wicke 1987) all within a interpretive dialectic with experiences of earlier guitarists, especially African-American blues and rhythm and blues performers. Most local New York guitarists reject extremes of guitar performance and simplistic reductions that equate rock music with the guitar alone.…”

Articulating musical meaning/re-constructing musical history/locating the ‘popular’

“…Nevertheless, this should not lead to an underestimate of the conflicts involved in establishing the new system, now admittedly sited almost entirely at the point of consumption (since the productive apparatus was increasingly in the hands of the large industrial concerns). As has often been pointed out, from Walter Benjamin onwards (see Wicke 1982, for example), the emergence of 'the mass' itself as a qualitatively new factor in the musical process raises the possibility of new political dimensions to musical meaning; moreover, many of the novel musical elements incorporated at this time from black American sources carry the potential for subverting ruling musical norms and entering into new articulatory alliances -with the 'collective variative' techniques of many older workers' traditions, for instance. Still, by the late 1920s or early 1930s the relative settlement of the social crisis, in the establishment of fascism or, elsewhere, more liberal-reactionary regimes, is paralleled by the widespread assimilation of Afro-Americanisms into a synthesis ruled by older bourgeois musical traditions and the articulation of their meanings to an ideology of consumerist escapism (the crooners, large dance-bands, etc.).…”