What Makes Rock Music Rock?

Genres have been a source of frustration for me since the beginning of my Music journey. Since I have mainly been a recording artist, my journey has closely paralleled the development of the internet. I've been uploading songs online since the late 90s and have watched many platforms come and go but what has been consistent for me is the problem of how best to categorise my music online. Most sites will offer you Rock, Pop, Folk, Jazz, Classical, etc as a starting point. Some will have an endless list of subgenres. It's not natural for me to put Music into boxes. I don't think of it that way while listening or creating. It's a well-known cliche that all indie artists say their music can't be described easily or put into genres. In my case, that is a reality. Even people around me have had difficulty in describing it to others when asked. This isn't an affectation on my part. I don't particularly think of my Music as innovative or ground-breaking. It is Rock of some sort but I can also hear there are elements in it which don't make it easily fit with Rock of the past or present.

By the mid-2000s I thought I'd cracked the genre thing. "Adult Alternative" was often a subgenre of Rock on the platforms I uploaded to. It seemed to be the right category for Rock music that was softer, deeper, more meaningful and introspective. Not poppy enough for Pop but not in-your-face enough for standard Rock. My debut album 'One Way Ticket', released in 2006, seemed apt for this category. At this time artists such as Neil Finn, Travis, Keane and so on represented that sound and were still getting reasonable recognition within the industry. From around 2007 onwards I noticed a change. As the dominance of guitar music began to wane everything became either modern, manufactured Pop or heavier, less melodic Rock. As more of the younger generations began exploring the Golden Age of Rock & Pop (1960s to 1990s), I noticed a trend. Certain Classic Rock acts were highlighted - Queen, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Fleetwood Mac, Oasis, etc - while other equally great artists were surprisingly ignored. The pattern to me looked like all the big obvious riff bands were hailed and the more subtle, melodic ones were forgotten. I rarely see younger generations talking about T. Rex, R.E.M, Neil Finn/Crowded House, Travis, Edwyn Collins/Orange Juice, Del Amitri, Grant Lee Buffalo, Simon & Garfunkel. That gentler side of Rock seemed to be getting pushed out of the way. In this culture of 'binary thinking' (0's and 1's), Rock now seemed to mean Hard Rock. Past generations would embrace the whole umbrella of Rock, switching between David Bowie or Fleetwood Mac to equally liking something like Grant Lee Buffalo, Gerry Rafferty or Mazzy Star. It was all viewed as Rock.

Now it seems as though there's a big hole where a certain kind of melodic Rock has disappeared, leaving only Hard Rock and Heavy Metal bands to represent Rock with everything else being thought of as Pop. It's something I've noticed for years now and the categories on upload sites have changed to match the times. Rock is less represented overall. Hip-Hop and Chill-Beats along with EDM now dominate. Pop has moved further away from Rock to the point where Pop/Rock no longer seems to be a genre.

This was all confirmed to me in a recent discussion I had in the YouTube comments section of a U2 & Phil Collins clip. Somebody raised the point they couldn't understand why U2 were classed as a Rock band. This person (younger than me) saw them as Pop. To them Rock was Guns N' Roses. When some U2 fans stepped up to put forward song examples of why they are Rock, they were brushed aside. This person began insisting the criteria for coming under the Rock genre was either distorted guitars or heavy drums. I pointed out how ludicrous this way of thinking is and how it is not the way Rock music was viewed until recent times. We went back and forth in detail but could not see eye to eye on this. They were reclassifying songs that had always been seen as Rock ballads as Pop ballads because they didn't have a distorted guitar on them. It confirmed what I'd suspected for years... many younger people today think of Rock as basically Hard Rock/Heavy Metal and anything outside of that is deemed too poppy to be in the Rock category.

This is crazy when you trace back the lineage of Rock music. Rock developed out of Rock'n'Roll, which was the original form that came in the 1950s. Rock'n'Roll itself came from Blues and Country music. It was upbeat and could be raucous but was still pretty lightweight, certainly "distortion" was not a requirement. Somewhere in the mid-1960s as the music developed and became more sophisticated, it began incorporating influences from other genres like Folk and Jazz. So Folk-Rock and Jazz-Rock were born. The simple upbeat boogie-woogie swing of early Rock'n'Roll was replaced by more sombre and atmospheric straight grooves - Rock lost it's Roll for better and for worse. The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Beatles & Jimi Hendrix all played their part in this development. New categories were created to accommodate these variations - Prog Rock, Hard Rock, Psychedelic Rock... The umbrella term for it all was simply Rock. Bear in mind, in the 1960s it was not yet possible to achieve the hard, heavy sound which came later and would define the Hard Rock/Heavy Metal scene of the 1980s. So the idea that Rock music requires distorted guitars to be classed as such is clearly false.

Rock music can be acoustic (Tom Petty, Neil Young, The La's), it can be psychedelic (Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd), it can be poppy (early Beatles, Oasis, Crowded House, T. Rex), it can be jangly and folky (The Byrds, The Smiths, R.E.M.), it can be ethereal and moody (Mazzy Star, Remy Zero, Ride), it can be hard (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Motorhead) and it can be straightforward no-nonsense (Status Quo, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Slade) and everything in between.

As with so many other things in the culture today, it seems all the subtlety is being lost, the grey areas, which is a shame because that's where some of the best things exist. I have a theory about this, that it's to do with the shift from an analogue world to a digital world. In an analogue world things blur, the lines between one thing and another are not so apparent. As computers have taken over more and more elements of life, the binary nature of them is influencing human thinking, making us more 'digital' in our way of seeing the world. That's why everything is more extreme and polarised today. We're either 'on' or 'off'. Something is either 'this' or 'that'.

Between the 60s and 90s my Music could probably come under Rock or Pop. Whether you called it Pop/Rock, Indie Rock, Adult Alternative or Soft Rock didn't seem to matter because listeners would intuitively pick up where it sat and fill in the gaps themselves. It has some elements of the classic Pop songs of the 60s or the 80s so would not be lost whether classed as Pop or Rock. Yet it bears little resemblance to modern Pop. So where do I categorise my Music now? If the Rock audience is expecting big, bombastic riffs like Queen or Guns N'Roses and the Pop audience is either into manufactured reality show artists or electronic, synthesised sounds then neither of those categories fit. I have some folky elements to some of my songs but it's not pure enough Folk to be put there. As it is, I mostly settle for the general Rock category when I can but I never write with genres in mind and I don't think people naturally hear music this way. It's like when you look at a tree and you immediately label it a 'tree', you no longer see what is actually there, you see and relate to the label.

So I will continue to do what I've always done and simply make the Music I love making, the Music I wish to hear (which I feel is grossly under-represented in these times) and let it find it's natural audience. There will always be people searching for melodic guitar songs with a more natural, less processed, sound and lyrical themes not generally covered by current trends, whatever genre you want to call that.