Art rock

Subgenre of rock musicTemplate:SHORTDESC:Subgenre of rock music[[Category:**Script error: No such module "pagetype".** with short description]]**Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".****Expression error: Unexpected < operator.****Script error: No such module "SDcat".**

**Script error: No such module "Distinguish".**
**Script error: No such module "Unsubst".**
**Script error: No such module "Unsubst".**

**Art rock** is a subgenre of rock music that generally reflects a challenging or avant-garde approach to rock, or which makes use of modernist, experimental, or unconventional elements. Art rock aspires to elevate rock from entertainment to an artistic statement,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** opting for a more experimental and conceptual outlook on music. Influences may be drawn from genres such as experimental rock, avant-garde music, classical music, and jazz.

Its music was created with the intention of listening and contemplation rather than for dancing, and is often distinguished by the use of electronic effects and easy listening textures far removed from the propulsive rhythms of early rock.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** The term may sometimes be used interchangeably with "progressive rock", though the latter is instead characterized in particular by its employment of classically trained instrumental technique and symphonic textures.

The genre's greatest level of popularity was in the early 1970s through British artists. The music, as well as the theatrical nature of performances associated with the genre, was able to appeal to artistically inclined adolescents and younger adults, especially due to its virtuosity and musical/lyrical complexity. Art rock is most associated with a certain period of rock music, beginning in 1966–67 and ending with the arrival of punk in the mid 1970s.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** After, the genre would be infused within later popular music genres of the 1970s–90s.

<templatestyles src="Template:TOC limit/styles.css" />

## Definitions

**Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote".**
**Script error: No such module "labelled list hatnote".**

 File:Velvet Underground 1968 by Billy Name.png
Critic John Rockwell says that art rock is one of rock's most wide-ranging and eclectic genres with its overt sense of creative detachment, classical music pretensions, and experimental, avant-garde proclivities.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** In the rock music of the 1970s, the "art" descriptor was generally understood to mean "aggressively avant-garde" or "pretentiously progressive". "Art rock" is often used synonymously with progressive rock.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".****Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Historically, the term has been used to describe at least two related, but distinct, types of rock music.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** The first is progressive rock, while the second usage refers to groups who rejected psychedelia and the hippie counterculture in favor of a modernist, avant-garde approach defined by the Velvet Underground.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Essayist Ellen Willis compared these two types:

<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />

> From the early sixties … there was a counter-tradition in rock and roll that had much more in common with high art—in particular avant-garde art—than the ballyhooed art-rock synthesis [progressive rock]; it involved more or less consciously using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material (much as pop artists used mass art in general) and refining, elaborating, playing off that material to produce … rockand-roll art. While art rock was implicitly based on the claim that rock and roll was or could be as worthy as more established art forms, rock-and-roll art came out of an obsessive commitment to the language of rock and roll and an equally obsessive disdain for those who rejected that language or wanted it watered down, made easier … the new wave has inherited the counter-tradition.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**
>
>

**Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

 File:DarkSideOfTheMoon1973.jpg
Art rock emphasizes Romantic and autonomous traditions, in distinction to the aesthetic of the everyday and the disposable embodied by art pop.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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 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, symphonic orchestration. Its music was traditionally used within the context of concept records, and its lyrical themes tended to be "imaginative" and politically oriented.

Differences have been identified between art rock and progressive rock, with art rock emphasizing avant-garde or experimental influences and "novel sonic structure", while progressive rock has been characterized as putting a greater emphasis on classically trained instrumental technique, literary content, and symphonic features. Compared to progressive rock, art rock is "more challenging, noisy and unconventional" and "less classically influenced", with more of an emphasis on avant-garde music. Similarities are that they both describe a mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility, and became the instrumental analog to concept albums and rock operas, which were typically more vocal oriented.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

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 [are] 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**Script error: No such module "anchor".**

#### Background

**Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote".**

<templatestyles src="Template:Quote\_box/styles.css" />

>
> In the late sixties and early seventies, rock both co-opted and challenged the prevailing view of musical art, often at the same time. This is evident in a diverse body of music that includes the Beach Boys' *Pet Sounds* and the Beatles' *Sgt. Pepper*; Frank Zappa's *Freak Out* ... the Who's rock opera *Tommy*; Pink Floyd's technologically advanced concept album *Dark Side of the Moon*; and Miles Davis's jazz/rock fusion.
>
>
>
>

—Michael Campbell, *Popular Music in America*, 2012**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

**Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

The boundaries between art and pop music became increasingly blurred throughout the second half of the 20th century.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

#### Proponents

 File:Phil Spector with MFQ 1965.png
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".**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** According to biographer Richard Williams: "[Spector] created a new concept: the producer as 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."**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Williams also says that Spector transformed rock music as a performing art into an art that could only exist in the recording studio, which "paved the way for art rock".**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

 File:Brian Wilson 1976 crop.jpg
The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is also cited as one of the first examples of the auteur music producer.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Like Spector, Wilson was known as a reclusive studio obsessive who laboriously produced fantastical soundscapes through his
mastery of recording technology.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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 – 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".****Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** This institution differed from its US counterpart in terms of having a less industry-applicable syllabus and in its focus on furthering eccentric talent.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

According to journalist Richard Goldstein, many popular musicians from California (like Wilson) 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 did not have "strong enough egos" (in contrast to Bob Dylan and the Beatles) 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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."**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** In 1969, the Doors also explored art rock genre on their fourth album, *The Soft Parade*.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

#### Influential albums

##### 1965–66

The December 1965 release of the Beatles' *Rubber Soul* signified a watershed for the pop album,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** transforming it in scope from a collection of singles with lesser-quality tracks to a distinct art form, filled with high-quality original compositions.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** The album garnered recognition for the Beatles as artists from the American mainstream press,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** anticipating rock music's cultural legitimization as an art form.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Writing in 1968, Gene Sculatti of *Jazz & Pop* recognized *Rubber Soul* as "the definitive 'rock as art' album" and "the necessary prototype" that major artists such as the Rolling Stones (with *Aftermath*) and the Beach Boys had felt compelled to follow.

The period when rock music became most closely aligned with art began in 1966 and continued until the mid 1970s.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Academic Michael Johnson associates "the first documented moments of ascension in rock music" to the Beach Boys' *Pet Sounds* and the Beatles' *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band* (1967). 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*.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** In 1978, biographer David Leaf wrote that the album heralded art rock,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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.

 File:Frank Zappa Mothers of Invention 1971.JPG
Jacqueline Edmondson's 2013 encyclopedia *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!* (June 1966) 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.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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".**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

The Beatles' *Revolver* (August 1966) furthered the album-as-art perspective**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** and continued pop music's evolution.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Led by the art-rock single "Eleanor Rigby",**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** and also in its departure from previous notions of melody and structure in pop songwriting.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** 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,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** and each of its songs has been recognised as anticipating a new subgenre or style.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".**

##### 1967

**Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote".**

*Clash Music* names the Velvet Underground's debut March 1967 album *The Velvet Underground & Nico* "the original art-rock record". Bannister writes of the Velvet Underground: "no other band exerted the same grip on the minds of 1970s/1980s art/alternative rock artists, writers and audiences."**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** Their influence would recur from the 1970s onwards to various worldwide indie scenes,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** and in 2006, *The Velvet Underground & Nico* was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, who commented: "For decades [it] has cast a huge shadow over nearly every sub-variety of avant-garde rock, from 70s art-rock to no-wave, new-wave, and punk."**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** However, when the Velvet Underground first appeared in the mid 1960s, they faced rejection and were commonly dismissed as a "fag" band.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** In 1982, musician Brian Eno famously stated that while *The Velvet Underground & Nico* initially sold just 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band."

The Beatles' Paul McCartney deemed *Pet Sounds* "the record of the time", and in June 1967, the band responded with their own album: *Sgt. Pepper's*,**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** which was also influenced by *Freak Out!***Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** AllMusic states that the first wave of art rock musicians were inspired by *Sgt. Pepper's* and believed that for rock music to grow artistically, they should incorporate elements of European and classical music to the genre. Many British groups flowered in the album's wake; those who are listed in *Music in American Life* include the Moody Blues, the Strawbs, Genesis, and "most notably", Pink Floyd.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** The band's Roger Waters later stated that both *Sgt. Pepper* and *Pet Sounds* "completely changed everything about records" for him.

## 1970s–1990s

**Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote".**
**Script error: No such module "Unsubst".**

Art rock's greatest level of popularity was in the early 1970s through British artists including King Crimson and Queen.

 File:David Bowie 1975.jpg
Enthusiasm for art rock explorations waned in the mid 1970s.**Script error: No such module "Footnotes".****Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".** From then to the 1990s, art rock was infused within various popular music genres. *Encyclopædia Britannica* states that its genre's tendencies were continued by some British and American hard rock and pop rock artists, and that Brian Eno's late 1970s and early 1980s collaborations with David Bowie and Talking Heads are exemplary of "the successful infusion of art rock tendencies into other popular music genres". Bowie and Eno collaborated on a series of consecutive albums called the "Berlin Trilogy", characterized as an "art rock trifecta" by *Consequence of Sound*, who noted that at the time of their release, "The experimental records weren’t connecting with audiences on the scale Bowie was used to. ... New Wave had exploded, and a generation of Bowie descendants had taken the stage."

In the 1980s, a new generation of English art rockers took the place of 1970s bands such as Roxy Music, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Journalist Roy Trakin says: "Of course, these stalwarts can still fill Madison Square Garden and sell a great many records, as they always have, but their days of adventurous risk-taking and musical innovation are long gone – replaced by the smug satisfaction of commercial success."

## Notes

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
2. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 "Art Rock". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 15 December 2011.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Art-Rock". Merriam Webster. Retrieved 15 December 2011.
5. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
6. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
7. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
8. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**.
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
10. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
11. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
12. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
13. ↑ **Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".**
14. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
15. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
16. ↑ **Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".**
17. ↑ **Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".**
18. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
19. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
20. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
21. ↑ **Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".**
22. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
23. ↑ **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
24. ↑ "Roxy Music > Biography". Stephen Thomas Erlewine. Allmusic. Accessed 12 February 2020.
25. ↑ **Script error: No such module "Citation/CS1".**

## Bibliography

<templatestyles src="Refbegin/styles.css" />

* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**
* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**

## Further reading

* **Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".**

Template:Rock
Template:Progressive music
Template:Electronic rock
Template:Experimental music genres

Cite error: `<ref>` tags exist for a group named "nb", but no corresponding `<references group="nb"/>` tag was found