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To enable a journey through a musical history of rock whilst avoiding the pitfalls, this short glossary will briefly present certain of the most influential genres over the past fifty years.

Britpop: At the turn of the 1980s-1990s, there was, notably thanks to an unprecedented media based synergy, a globalisation of commercial music and the emergence of the awareness of music as belonging to a global village. In reaction there would appear more regional, more nationalist movements, such as Britpop, which would draw directly from its cultural heritage (particularly from the fresh music of the Beatles) and which would be singled out by a general aesthetic (from clothing to haircuts in passing through the sounds used, the ideas, lifestyle, etc.). The movement’s key groups have massively inspired English and international music over the past twenty years. Amongst them are Pulp, the Smiths, Oasis and Blur.

Disco: At the dawn of the 1980s there appeared a polished music openly tailor-made to please the ear through commercial means of composition and production, in other words Disco music. The aim was to get the youth dancing on the dance floors. The texts were as hedonistic as possible, boasted of the advantages of youth, and the music, binary in form, based on a straightforward drumming which alternated the bass drum and the snare drum, intercut with sharp blows on the Charleston cymbal, with a heightened rhythm, got a whole generation dancing. If the music was quickly criticised, it imposed its style and at the time infected nearly other musical genre, supposedly more ‘authentic.’

Doo-wop: Doo-wop is a music contemporaneous with Rock ‘n’ Roll and is often characterised by an a cappella quartet. As an example we still remember the Platters and their famous Only You.

Electropop: With the expansion of digital synthesisers and their costs becoming more generally affordable, a current emerged in the middle of the 1980s with the aim of making young people dance to a fresh and poppy music. The instruments were replaced by machines, and a music group could be limited to two members to ensure the whole of the sound spectrum habitually used by popular modern music genres. But electropop was quickly decried, for its absence of authenticity and the absence of a groove due to the fact that the sounds were played by machines which were not yet very developed. Groups would rapidly reintegrate instruments side by side with these machines and would experience planetary success, as was the case with Duran Duran.

Folk and Folk Rock: Folk was initially a music which came from white American rural communities a    nd had no intention of entering mainstream music before the 1960s. The music remained confined to the provinces. A singer, accompanied by his guitar and less cumbersome instruments, such as the harmonica, gave voice to everyday life. But at the beginning of the 1960s folk music integrated the urban environment, notably with an anti-establishment youth concentrated in a New York neighbourhood, Greenwich Village. There emerged Joan Baez, who took under her wing Robert Zimmerman, a young man from the sticks freshly arrived in the area and who had an incredible power in terms of writing and interpretation. Under the name of Bob Dylan, the young singer led folk as far as it could go, before integrating the electric guitar into his albums half a decade later, and thus inaugurating a new movement, folk rock.

Funk: This music comes essentially from the Afro-American community and is a mix of jazz, hard bop, soul, blues, rock and rhythm and blues. Funk is characterised by a rhythmic syncopated music and a sustained and dancy tempo. In addition to guitars, bass, drums and singing, a brass section is generally found in funk groups. Influential artists were Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, and, later, Kool and the Gang and George Clinton.

Grunge: Grunge appeared at the end of the 1980s and experienced global success during the first half of the 1990s. It emerged in the cold and industrial region of Seattle, with groups such as Mudhoney as forerunners, but it was Nirvana who made it a genuine fashion phenomenon. The songs were cynical, the voice hoarse, and the guitars saturated, and the exploration of new sound spectrums descended into lower and lower pitched sounds, notably in tuning the guitars a pitch lower (for some songs the major chord shifting from D to E).

Hard rock: Hard rock was born with a hardening of the rock sound and blues rock. It was born in the wake of progressive music, over the course of the 1970s. The guitars had heavy sound saturated with distortion, and a new instrument made its entrance: the piano, and more specifically the Hammond organ. The major hard rock groups were either quartets or quintets with a piano or two electric guitars. The movement’s key groups were the English Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne, and the Australians of ACDC.

Metal: A toughening up of hard rock music, notably in making systematic the distorting of the guitar sound and solos intercrossed by two guitarists, the search for deeper sounds, and a heavy and shouted singing. By way of example let’s cite the Scorpions and Metallica.

New-Wave: A genre which appeared immediately after the early death of punk (end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s), with maybe Joy Division as a precursor. The movement perpetuated the breach opened up by punk even if it was radically different from a musical point of view. New-Wave in particular integrated synthesisers, following influential artists such as David Bowie, Brian Eno and Kraftwerk. Amongst the sub-genres of new-wave are post-punk and cold-wave. The synthesisers give these genres a very cold, mechanical and industrial aspect. Amongst the most influential groups were Soft Cell, New Order (former members of Joy Division), The Cure and Depeche Mode.

Psychedelic music: Psychedelic music appeared in the second half of the 1960s and was very associated with the mass consumption of LSD by musicians. The musical inspirations of psychedelic music are extremely varied. It was one of the first rock genres to exploit new sound universes and go beyond the traditional structures of modern popular music (alternating verse and chorus). Two main geographical sites can be distinguished regarding the emergence of this music: California (San Francisco with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin or Jefferson Airplane and Los Angeles with the Doors) and London (with mainly Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, the first group to mix rock, blues and jazz).

Progressive rock: Progressive rock appeared at the end of the 1960s and experienced its apogee in the first half of the 1970s. Albums such as the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ and the Beatles’ ‘Sergeant Pepper’ heralded the movement. There is in this music a desire for reflection and virtuosity, to master your instrument and sound. In the studio, layer upon layer were added, and the musicians called upon institutionally recognised forms of music, in using the repertoire of classical music and jazz. The songs were long, the structures surprising, the rhythms convoluted and the melodic themes complex. Amongst the movement’s key groups were King Crimson, Yes and Genesis.

Punk: Punk appeared in New York (with the Ramones) and London (with the Sex Pistols and the Clash) in the second half of the 1970s. The genre marked an exasperation with progressive music which, according to the punks, was too elitist and complicated. With these wrong turns down cul-de-sacs rock had lost the notions of democracy and spontaneity. Everybody should be able to play rock. In the opinion of the most fundamentalist amongst them, it was necessary to wipe the slate clean with what had been produced up until this period. And mediocrity is the guarantor of the authenticity of music and its ideas. It gives way to anger and revolution.

Rap: Initially born in the Afro-American ghettos of New York and then Los Angeles, rap, a music which carried the strong social demands of poor ethnic minorities, became one of the major movements of popular music at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium. The genre today takes every shape and form, and is used by every community and social class. With rap appeared new technologies and new instruments. The rapper doesn’t sing but instead declaims a text, and the rhythm creates the musicality of song. An MC mixes the music on his or her decks. Also involved is the notion of sampling (the MC integrates samples of already existing music) and ‘scratching’ (the MC moves the vinyl on the turntable, creating a rhythm with a high-pitched sound, the turntable becoming an instrument.

Reggae: Reggae is played at a pretty slow tempo and, as an offshoot of ska, comes from Jamaica. It is a music of the people which is influenced by Caribbean forms of music, such as Calypso, by African music, the Rasta movement, but also by popular American music such as rhythm and blues. This music is characterised by a rhythm section (bass and drums) which marks the upbeat (first and third beat) and a syncopated guitar which plays the downbeat (second and fourth beat). Reggae gained international success with a figure who has today become almost mythical: Bob Marley. But European artists such as Eric Clapton or Serge Gainsbourg contributed to aiding this genre impose itself in our regions.

Rock: This term is today more or less a catch-all with various accepted definitions. In its widest sense it designates almost the totality of recorded music aimed at teenagers and young adults, but can take the form of almost as many sub-categories as there are music groups. In the strictest sense it designates a music played essentially by a quartet or quintet of young, white, male, Anglo-Saxon musicians, a group composed of a guitarist or two guitarists, a bassist, a drummer and a singer (often also a guitarist). In this strictest definition, its golden age is situated between 1964 and 1977, in other words from the first English scene with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the twilight of progressive, hard rock and psychedelic music, with groups such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Yes, or the first Genesis line-up.

Rockabilly: Rockabilly is one of the forms of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It is directly inspired by Hillbilly, a popular white music brought over from Europe with the first colonists and particularly played in the region of the Appalachian mountain chain. We can cite as influential musicians of the Rockabilly movement Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison (today known by the general public for his song ‘Pretty Woman,’ taken up by the film of the same name at the beginning of the 1990s).

Rock ‘n’ Roll: Rock ‘n’ roll is the first genuine rock movement in its widest sense. Its golden age is situated in the second half of the 1950s and is marked by the emergence and the success of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins, by way of example. The hierarchical arrangement often places on the front stage or at the forefront of an album a personality who sings, with in the background a group which accompanies the main singer. Rock ‘n’ roll draws its roots from both black and white popular American music, such as blues, gospel, country, folk and the crooner music of the Broadway comedy musicals of the 1930s. Its rapid rhythm, which pounds out an upbeat, in other words the first and the third beat with a measure of four beats, had American youth dancing enthusiastically at the end of the 1950s and the
beginning of the 1960s.

Rhythm and Blues (R&B): The roots of Rhythm and Blues are plunged into Afro-American music. Appearing already in the 1940s, it is a mix of Gospel, Blues and Jazz. The themes are happier than the blues, and the music is played at a quicker tempo. Its main representative remains without a doubt Ray Charles. The initial R&B must not be confused with the R&B which mainstream American producers have been serving up on a continuous loop since the 1990s and has more in common with sung rap than with the roots of the movement.

Ska: Ska is a music with Jamaican origins and which inspired reggae. The rhythm is similar to reggae in that the bass and drums mark the upbeat, and that the rhythm guitar responds to them on the offbeats. Beyond the singing, ska groups integrate other instruments, such as brass sections or an organ. The pioneers of the genre were the Skatalites and Desmond Dekker and the Aces. The genre became more widespread in the 1980s, particularly in England, with the group Madness.

Soft Rock: Soft Rock is a contemporary genre of Rock ‘n’ Roll and, as its name indicates, is a calmer form of music. It enables, in alternating with the latter’s increased rhythms, to calm down the youth who would end up having a heart attack if they had to pass a whole evening dancing to a tempo as rapid as that of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It is the emergence of slow dances and more intimate moments between two people who want to get closer by dancing on nights out.

Surf: This musical current emerged at the beginning of the 1960s and remained restricted to the state of California. Hedonistic, this light and sunny music contributed to giving a distilled vision of life under the balmy skies of the American West coast. It advocated the simple values of an epicurean life by the beach. A daily life astutely mixing surfing, parties and carefree sex. The movement’s best known group remains the Beach Boys. Even if surf music also had musicians gifted with a certain virtuosity, such as Dick Dale and Duane Eddy, who inspired the first guitar heroes.

Techno: Techno (as in technology) and all its forms are musical genres devoted to dance and appeared at the end of the 1980s, mainly in the United States (Chicago and Detroit, for examples) and certain European towns such as Ibiza and Berlin. This music was made possible with the development and the democratisation of digital instruments. Here the musician is a Disc-Jockey. He or she creates electronic sounds, or picks them up from other songs (s/he is said to sample them), rearranges them and reuses them in a logic of repetition to facilitate dance. The disc-jockey, today, is single or works as a duo. Techno music has enabled people to go further in the search for electronic sounds, particularly the more low-pitched sounds, the infrabass notes. The genre moved from the underground into the mainstream during the 1990s with groups such as the Chemical Brothers or the Berliner Ellen Allien.