It has its roots in 1940's and 1950's rock and rock n'roll, it self heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music.
Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other music sources.
Musically, rock has centered on the eletric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with eletric bass and drums.
Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse.
Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis.
The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music.
Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
By the late 1960's referred to as the golden age or classic rock period, a number od distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hydrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, raga rock and jazz-rock, many of wich contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, wich was influenced by the countercultural psychedelic scene.
New genres that emerged from this scene included progressive rock, wish extended the artistic elements.
In the second half of the 1970's, punk rock reacted against the perceived overblown, inauthentic and overly mainstream aspects of these genres to produce a stripped-down, energetic form of music valuing raw expression and often lyrically characterised by social and political critiques.
Punk was influence into the 1980's on the subsequent development of other subgenres, including new wave, post-punk, and eventually, the alternative rock movement.
From the 1990's, alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, britpop, and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop punk, rap rock, and rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-rock and andsynthpop revivals at the beginning of the new millennium.
Rock music has also embodied and served as the vehicle for culture and social movements, leading to major sub-cultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippie culture, that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960's.
Simiarly, 1970's punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures.
Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race, sex and drugs use, and is often seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.
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