Rock Music: Rock, a shortened term for “rock-and-roll”, is a form of popular music characterized by a pronounced, amplified beat. Electric guitars are the main instrumental sound source; today electronic synthesizers are increasingly used.
    Rock comes out of five traditions in American music: rhythm and blues, country and western music, folk music, white popular music, and jazz. Elements of these forms of music in rock distinguish its five variations—soul rock, country rock, folk rock, pop rock and soft rock—the former being hard-driving and played with a regular beat, and the latter, a low-keyed, rhythmically free, sophisticated form of rock.
    Rock was formerly rhythm and blues. R&B was rural music urbanized for blacks. In the mid-1950s, white performers adopted this form and blended their popular music with rhythm and blues. A new name—rock and roll—was given. For the first time, a music, addressed specially to young people, both black and white, came into being.
    The first white superstar of rock and roll was the late Elvis Presley. The period from 1956 to 1958 was the “age of Elvis”. Greasy-looking, he wriggled his hips as he sang, which horrified adult Americans who were accustomed to the rather bland style of the 1940s and early 1950s. one writer put it this way: Presley was “young, private and unsharable—exclusive teenage property.”
    In the 1960s, the most influential superstars were the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The Beatles were a quartet of English performers, who became popular in England in 1962, and in the United States the following year, and remained popular until they dissolved their group in 1970. They reached one of rock’s highest artistic summits in June 1967 when their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was released. They influenced a wide range of rock groups.
    Bob Dylan was noted for his lyrics which covered a wide range of social issues in the 1960s. He introduced folk rock in 1965. After the release of his first album “Bob Dylan” in 1962, his music career began to be prosperous. Bob Dylan enjoys his never ending tour, dancing, cracking jokes, engaging in guitar performances with his band, then standing at solemn attention. And he bent in a deep bow before leaving the stage, with his suit coat soaked with sweat. In contrast to his 60s image of the intellectual cynic, Dylan has a young heart, and his audience has grown younger over the years, more of his crowds are filled with people under 30. On stage, Dylan looks like a 1920s undertaker or a farmer all dressed for a trip to town. He’s just there with his band, playing his music, winning his Grammy, his Oscar, moving on to the next town. “I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity.” The Grammy-winner said.
     (1) Other representatives of Rock music includes Alice Cooper, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, John Denver, etc. Among them, John Denver is most familiar to Chinese. John Denver is a rock superstar in the 1970s. His songs are a mixture of country and western music with the musical drive and power of folk rock. This mixture, in a strict sense, is called country rock. His “Country Road” has remained popular in China for years. He ever visited China in 1992 and he composed a song for China called “Shanghai Breezes”. Unfortunately, he died in an air crash in 1997. But people will not forget him and his songs, especially his “Country Road”.