Art rock
Art rock is a subgenre of rock music that aims to separate the genre from popular entertainment, with the term typically being applied as the middle ground between mainstream and experimental rock. Art rock primarily draws influences from the wider art world and academia; which includes contemporary art, art music, avant-garde art, experimental music, avant-garde music, alongside classical music and jazz.
Critics have defined art rock as a "rejection" of rock music intended solely for the purpose of popular entertainment or dancing. The term was closely associated with a specific period beginning in 1966–67, which became influential to the development of progressive rock.
Etymology
Critic John Rockwell described the term art rock as referring to wide-ranging and eclectic tendencies in rock music. In the rock music of the 1970s, the application of the "art" descriptor by music critics and journalists was taken derogatorily, understood by musicians and fans as meaning that it was "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". "Art rock" has sometimes been used synonymously with progressive rock. Historically, the term has been used to describe at least two related, but distinct, types of rock music. The first is progressive rock, while the second usage refers to experimental rock groups who rejected psychedelia and the hippie counterculture in favour of a modernist, avant-garde approach defined by the Velvet Underground. Essayist Ellen Willis compared these two types:File:DarkSideOfTheMoon1973.jpg|thumb|right|Pink Floyd performing their concept album The Dark Side of the Moon
Art rock has been described as emphasizing Romantic and autonomous traditions, in distinction to the aesthetic of the everyday and the disposable embodied by art pop. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman's American Popular Music defines art rock as a "form of rock music that blended elements of rock and European classical music", citing the English progressive rock bands King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Pink Floyd as examples. Common characteristics include album-oriented music divided into compositions rather than songs, with usually complicated and long instrumental sections and symphonic orchestration. Its music was traditionally used within the context of concept records, and its lyrical themes tended to be "imaginative" and politically oriented. Art rock has also been noted for frequently intertwining with "serious music".
Art rock has been described as "more challenging, noisy and unconventional" and "less classically influenced", with more of an emphasis on avant-garde music, depending on what was considered avant-garde at the time of the term's use. Similarities between it and progressive rock are that they both describe a mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility, and became the instrumental analogue to concept albums and rock operas, which were typically more vocal oriented.
Art rock can also refer to either classically driven rock, or to a progressive rock-folk fusion. Bruce Eder's essay The Early History of Art-Rock/Prog Rock states that progressive rock,' also sometimes known as 'art rock,' or 'classical rock is music in which the "bands playing suites, not songs; borrowing riffs from Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner instead of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley; and using language closer to William Blake or T. S. Eliot than to Carl Perkins or Willie Dixon."
History
1960s
Background
In the academic perspective of music critics, such as those for The New York Times, high art and pop music increasingly engaged with each other throughout the second half of the 20th century. The first usage of the term "art rock", according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, was in 1968. As pop music's dominant format transitioned from singles to albums, many rock bands created works that aspired to make grand artistic statements, where art rock would flourish. As it progressed in the late 1960s – in tandem with the development of progressive rock – art rock acquired notoriety alongside experimental rock.Proponents
The earliest figure of art rock has been assumed to be record producer and songwriter Phil Spector, who became known as an auteur for his Wall of Sound productions that aspired to a "classical grandiosity". According to biographer Richard Williams, " created a new concept: the producer as the overall director of the creative process, from beginning to end. He took control of everything, he picked the artists, wrote or chose the material, supervised the arrangements, told the singers how to phrase, masterminded all phases of the recording process with the most painful attention to detail, and released the result on his own label." Williams also says that Spector transformed rock music from a performing art into an art that could only exist in the recording studio, which "paved the way for art rock".The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is also cited as one of the first examples of the auteur music producer. Like Spector, Wilson was known as a reclusive studio obsessive who laboriously produced fantastical soundscapes through his mastery of recording technology. Biographer Peter Ames Carlin wrote that Wilson was the forerunner of "a new kind of art-rock that would combine the transcendent possibilities of art with the mainstream accessibility of pop music". Drawing from the influence of Wilson's work and the work of the Beatles' producer George Martin, music producers after the mid-1960s began to view the recording studio as a musical instrument used to aid the process of composition. Critic Stephen Holden says that mid-1960s recordings by the Beatles, Spector and Wilson are often identified as marking the start of art pop, which preceded the "bombastic, classically inflected" art rock that started in the late 1960s.
Many of the top British groups during the 1960s and 1970s – including members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, 10cc, the Move, the Yardbirds and Pink Floyd – came to music via art school. This institution differed from its US counterpart in terms of having a less industry-applicable syllabus and in its focus on furthering eccentric talent. By the mid-1960s, several of these acts espoused an approach based on art and originality, where previously they had been absorbed solely in authentic interpretation of US-derived musical styles, such as rock 'n' roll and R&B.
According to journalist Richard Goldstein, many popular musicians from California desired to be acknowledged as artists, and struggled with this aspiration. Goldstein says that the line between violating musical conventions and making "truly popular music" caused those who lacked self-confidence to be "doomed to a respectful rejection, and a few albums with disappointing sales usually meant silence.... They yearned for fame, as only needy people can, but they also wanted to make art, and when both of those impulses couldn't be achieved they recoiled in a ball of frantic confusion."
Author Matthew Bannister traces "the more self-conscious, camp aesthetic of art rock" to pop artist Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, who emulated Warhol's art/pop synthesis. Accordingly, "Warhol took Spector's combination of the disembodiment, 'distance' and refinement of high culture with the 'immediacy' of mass cultural forms like rock and roll several stages further... But Warhol's aesthetic was more thoroughly worked out than Spector's, which represented a transitional phase between old-fashioned auteurism and the thoroughly postmodern, detached tenets of pop art.... Warhol's approach reverberates throughout art rock, most obviously in his stance of distance and disengagement."
Influential albums
1965–66
In 1965, Bob Dylan shifted from the folk music of the American folk revival movement, which he had spearheaded in Greenwich Village, towards that of contemporary rock music, a style described by the press as "folk rock". This event was met with controversy, though marked the beginning of a sequence of influential albums later dubbed the "Electric Trilogy": Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and later Blonde on Blonde. Writing in 1972, Nat Freedland of Billboard magazine, stated "during the golden period of the mid '60s, Bob Dylan and the Beatles led the way to an expansion of rock into an area of art songs with a beat".The December 1965 release of the Beatles' Rubber Soul has been regarded as signifying a watershed for the form of the pop album. The album garnered recognition for the Beatles as artists from the American mainstream press due to the use of unconventional studio techniques and instruments which were not popular in rock music at the time. Writing in 1968, Gene Sculatti of Jazz & Pop recognised Rubber Soul as "the definitive 'rock as art' album" and "the necessary prototype" that major artists such as the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys had felt compelled to follow.
Academic Michael Johnson associates "the first documented moments of ascension in rock music" to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. Released in May 1966, Pet Sounds came from Wilson's desire to make a "complete statement", as he believed the Beatles had previously done with Rubber Soul. In 1978, biographer David Leaf wrote that the album heralded art rock, while according to The New York Observer, "Pet Sounds proved that a pop group could make an album-length piece comparable with the greatest long-form works of Bernstein, Copland, Ives, and Rodgers and Hammerstein." Pet Sounds is also noted as the first rock concept album. In 1971, Cue magazine described the Beach Boys as having been "among the vanguard" with regard to art rock, among many other aspects relating to the counterculture, over the period up to late 1967.
The period when rock music became most closely aligned with the contemporary art world began in 1966 and continued until the mid-1970s. Jacqueline Edmondson's 2013 encyclopaedia Music in American Life states that, although it was preceded by earlier examples, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's debut album Freak Out! came to be seen as "the first successful incorporation of art music in a pop context". With Los Angeles as his base since the early 1960s, Zappa was able to work in an environment where student radicalism was closely aligned with an active avant-garde scene, a setting that placed the city ahead of other countercultural centres at the time and would continue to inform his music. Writer and pianist Michael Campbell comments that the album "contains a long noncategorical list of Zappa's influences, from classical avant-garde composers to obscure folk musicians".
By August, the Beatles' Revolver furthered the rock album-as-art perspective and continued pop music's evolution. Led by the art-rock single "Eleanor Rigby", it expanded the genre's scope in terms of the range of musical styles, which included Indian, avant-garde and classical, and the lyrical content of the album, and also in its departure from previous notions of melody and structure in pop songwriting. According to Rolling Stone, "Revolver signaled that in popular music, anything – any theme, any musical idea – could now be realized." As with Rubber Soul, the album inspired many of the progressive rock artists of the 1970s, and each of its songs has been recognised as anticipating a new subgenre or style.