Back To Basics
Where It First Started
Rock first hit the mainstream music scene way back in the 1940's and is a type of music that evolved in the United States and quickly spread to the rest of the world.
Classic rock and roll is played with one electric guitar or two electric guitars (one lead, one rhythm), a string bass or (after the mid-1950s) an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit. In the earliest rock and roll styles, the piano or saxophone was often the lead instrument. Guitars didn't become the lead instrument until the 1950's.
The beat behind classic rock and roll is essentially a blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, the latter almost always provided by a snare drum.
The massive popularity and eventual worldwide scope of rock and roll gave it an unprecedented social impact. Far beyond simply a musical style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and in the new medium of television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language. It later spawned the various sub-genres of what is now called simply 'rock music'.
However that is too simplistic in description. One of the first mainstream rock and roll records repeatedly mentioned the phrase "rock and roll". The song was "Rock And Roll Blues," recorded in 1949 by Erline "Rock And Roll" Harris.
.The description "rock and roll" can actually be traced all the way back to the 1920's and was a term to describe swing black music of a raunchy or sexually explicit nature.
Perhaps then the underlying rebellious nature of rock music is therefore not a creation of musicians who played rock and roll and wished to demonstrate for their fans and the media that they really had no care in the world but that in fact the very nature of rock music itself, stemming from its black origins and typified by "My Man Rocks Me With One Steady Roll" (a popular 1920's black song) only demonstrates that the nihilistic approach by rock musicians is in fact a parody of existing responses and that their portrayal was nothing more than a stereotype of the roots of rock music.