Talk:Rock and roll

Move to Rock music?

I started this article as "Rock and roll", because this was the title of the redlink at Wikivoyage:Requested articles. Nevertheless, the name w:Rock music would be a better one, because that's the name on Wikipedia for "rock music in its many variants from the 1950s until the present day", and I think readers would also be interested in attractions, events etc. related to newer forms of rock. ϒpsilon (talk) 17:56, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Or w:Rock and Roll Music? ;-) Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure the title matters much, though. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

In the most technical of senses, the preferred use of "rock and roll" is in reference specificially to the early, pre-British Invasion era of the genre. My mild preference would be to change the title to "Rock music", but in popular usage, the two terms are effectively synonymous and as Ikan said, I don't think it makes much difference one way or the other. - AndreCarrotflower (talk) 04:39, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

American Popular Music

Swept in from the pub

I just had a thought of perhaps creating an article on this. The U.S. is most certainly the world's main centre of pop culture, and I bet many tourists will want to visit the U.S. to make pilgrimages to sites connected to their favourite singers. And of course, we could cover all the different music styles that have influenced American popular music. For instance, country music is an obvious influence, but there's also genres such as jazz, blues and soul, and most recently, even influences from Latin America and the Caribbean. So there is a wealth of stuff we could cover. Of course, the main stumbling block is that I'm no expert on this, so help from someone who is well-versed in the history of American pop music would be most appreciated if this article goes ahead. The dog2 (talk) 02:10, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

This is an article with potentially thousands of POI listings. Best to split it up by genre or maybe even by individual artist. -- AndreCarrotflower (talk) 03:43, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

There are already genre-based articles on Jazz and Rock and roll and I'm also inclined to continuing that pattern. Nurg (talk) 08:45, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

But rock 'n' roll is part of popular music. I agree with Andre here. Define the genre more narrowly. Ikan Kekek (talk) 09:40, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, I guess the step forward would be to create more articles about different genres of American popular music then. Some that I guess we could cover would be "blues", "R&B", "country music" and "hip hop", if someone has enough expertise to expand on them. The dog2 (talk) 15:09, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Yes, something like that. R&B is a very problematic category, though, because of its history. Originally, the category was simply the new, post-WWII name for "race records" - in other words, music performed by black musicians and intended for black audiences. This started to break down in the 50s, but I don't think it was until the late 60s that R&B was actually stylistically different from rock 'n' roll, and it took quite a while for it to become widely accepted for white artists to be R&B performers as such. Rock 'n' roll was to my knowledge originally just a new name given to R&B records by Alan Freed, a DJ in Cleveland, in order to better sell it to his young white audiences ("rock 'n' roll" previously just meant to have sex, but the white folks who weren't hip to black slang didn't know that; many of the white young people probably did, making it even more titillating and appealing for them). But the first R&B style was the jump blues of people like Louis Jordan, which is really a kind of sung boogie-woogie with a group and not just a piano soloist behind it. And at least until pretty recently, even styles like hip hop were subsumed under R&B in the Grammys, if I remember correctly. So I would counsel treading very carefully with that particular diffuse, race-based category. Ikan Kekek (talk) 17:20, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

While what you said is true, since the late 1970s there have also been cases of white artistes like Teena Marie crossing over onto the R&B charts and achieving massive popularity with black audiences, and you have many black artistes like Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson who achieved massive popularity with white audiences, and made millions of dollars in the process. So I would say that while the racial origins of different musical genres can be mentioned, we should also be careful not to overstate the role of race in the different genres. Sure, I'm aware of the exploitation of black artistes by the white-dominated recording industry in the 1950s and 1960s, but these days a talented black or Latino singer can make millions of dollars, just as a talented white singer can, and there is so much crossover between genres that they are no longer strictly segregated by race. The dog2 (talk) 19:23, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm of course quite aware of all of this, but the term R&B has quite a murky history, and also, there are huge differences style between jump blues, 1950s R&B, Motown, and 70s/80s soul/R&B, for example - all of which and more are subsumed under the term R&B. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:40, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

I've had Blues on my watchlist for a while, so that I'll become aware if someone creates it. Nurg (talk) 02:20, 13 April 2019 (UTC)