This course, part 2 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. This course covers the music of Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Carole King, Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Metallica, Run-DMC, and Nirvana, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Emerging out of the experimental and ambitious years of late-60s psychedelia, rock splintered into a variety of styles in the 1970s as the music business continued to expand. By the end of the decade, punk and disco had challenged the excesses of the hippie aesthetic, as rock became more commercially streamlined and radio friendly. The emergence and rise of MTV transformed pop music and propelled the careers of Michael jackson and Madonna, while heavy metal and hip hop dominated the late 1980s. Nirvana leads alt-rock's return to simplicity in the early 1990s.
New Traditionalists and New Wave
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part Two
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From the lesson
I Want My MTV (1980-89)
MTV emerges from a developing cable television industry. Michael Jackson and Thriller. The rise of Madonna, Prince, and Janet Jackson. Does MTV make music more visual than aural? Mainstream rockers continue thrive. [Read Chapter 11 and work through listening guides and dedicated video.]
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
You'll remember that the rise of New Wave at the end of the 1970s was a really
signal event in the sense that it helped really define the end of the decade as
one that was pushing back and maybe even rejecting the values of the hippies that,
that I've argued. Really sort of unifies a lot of rock
music from about the mid-60s to the end of the 1970s.
So the question would be What happens with new wave as it works its way into
the Nineteen eighties. Well, it turns out that a lot of groups
who've used. New Wave was defined in many ways not
only of turning to the past. What I termed as a kind of ironic way or
maybe a detached way what may be a better way of thinking of it, that is turning to
the past not because you want to go back to the past, but because you're using the
past because you know your audience understands what that is, so it's all
kind of in quotation marks and distanced from your own personal values or
intentions, that kind of thing. So whenever we saw these artists at the
end of the 1970's using music of the kind of pre-hippie era, they all kind of
got lumped in together as kind of New Wave.
and so some artists were not using the past ironically at all.
They weren't you know, maybe reminding people that are trying to disabuse them
of the notion because that's kind of what was selling at the time, but as the 80's
unfolded, you really get a lot of these artists kind of separating out into a
continuation of the new wave, which by the time you get to the early 80's, new
wave really sort of blended in. To mainstream rock and was no longer such
a, rebellious thing. I mean, it had its moment of negative
definition, here's what we aren't. But after sort of going a couple of years
of that it really pretty much got to the point where you could hear the cars.
In foreign, in Boston in talking heads all pretty much together in classic rock
radio in 1990's there wasn't seem to be lot of difference may be difference in
emphasis that difference in kind when they came at the start, so you cause
those groups which start in continuation that the ones who had be using the past
not in a ironic way really where celebrating earlier music, because they
thought the hippy thing had gone to far it got to complex it was time to get back
to roots and really get make the music more authentic and more real cause it got
back to it's roots again and I'm going to call these groups the new traditionalist
that is a kind of return to the past. Return to the tradition in the same ways
that you have jazz traditionalist or folk traditionalist or country traditionalist.
people who want to get back to the roots and have respect for the tradition.
And leading the parade, I think with, with the new traditionalist is Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers. Tom Petty, as I said when we were talking
about new wave really always wanted his group to sound like, pretty much like an
updated version of the Byrds. he wasn't doing it ironically.
He wasn't doing it to make some sort of, you know, critical statement about cider
anything like that, that's just the way he felt good music should sound.
So he delivers a vocal his vocal styles is very much influenced by Dylan and
there's allot of sort of jingly jangly guitars, pop hooks, three, four minute
songs. He really believed in the tradition of
mid 60s American Rock N Roll and so that's really kind of what he goes back
to. representative recordings to hear this
are the album Hard Promises from 1981, featuring the song, The Waiting.
there southern accents from 1985 which figure which a features the song don't
come around here no more and then Tom's first solo album Full Moon Fever from
1989. Which features the song Free Falling, you
literally can not go to see Tom Petty live these days without hearing at least
two of those three songs, they're such iconic tunes for Tom Petty in the 1980s.
And, and having videos for going along with them in fact in one of the videos
Tom Petty is dressed as the Mad Hater, and he's cutting a cake, where Alice,
from Alice in Wonderland, is the cake. And he's cutting the cake, it's very sort
of surrealistic and people would come up to him, come up to them in airports and
say, hey, I know you, I saw you on MTV. And Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at
that point were like, MTV? What's this MTV?
They had a video on TV on MTV, they'd never even seen MTV so those early days
of MTV there were a lot of artists who were being even started being promoted on
MTV who had still hadn't even seen the channel yet.
This gets back to our idea of the spread of MTV according to the spread of the
cable. television industry.
Another guy who has to be thought of as a new traditionalist, an important one, is
Bruce Springsteen. Bruce we talked about as a singer
songwriter in the early seventies, but as it goes on it turns out that Bruce really
is kind of a rootsy, new traditionalist kind of guy.
into the 1980s and above. He really is a return to simplicity,
return to the past, maybe even a kind of, in some ways a kind of a romantic view of
what authenticity was, to be somebody in the 60s growing up in New Jersey and this
kind of thing. The image of an average working class guy
who just talks good sense, this kind of image.
the big album for him in the 70s we talked about before was Born to Run from
1975. in 1980 there, albums in between but, the
big number one album from 1980 was The River which features the song Hungry
Heart, but the big one from the 1980s is this album born in the USA.
Number 1 in 1984, six top ten hits, including Born in the U.S.A.
and Glory Days. Both of those tunes become radio staples
and Bruce Springsteen becomes one of the biggest bands Of the 1980's again with
tons of video on MTV to support it. Interesting between Tom Petty and Bruce
Springsteen Tom Petty, I think it was the live aid concert said that he was going
and they were going on just before Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty who's pretty,
got a very sort of sardonic sense of humor, said that it was Bob Geldorff came
to him backstage and said if you hear them.
When you're playing if you hear people saying, you think they're booing you,
they're not booing you they're just yelling Bruce, because Bruce Springsteen
was going to come after them. And Tom Petty says, well, what's the
difference? [LAUGH] Right?
So again, there kind of biting irony coming from Tom Petty but, that Anyway
this, this gives us some sense of, of the, the new traditionalists sort of
thing. We'll talk a bit more about that with
regard to groups on both sides of the Atlantic now, that were not only new
traditionalists but sort of really embraced a kind of an Americana.
americana the sort of idealistic idea of what america is and what some people
would call fly over country kind of basic sort of good sense wheat fed,you know
idea of america that may be some ways doesn't probably exist its just an idea
Like the idea of New York City as being the films that we see and the Woody Allen
movies. That New York is, doesn't really exist
when you go to New York. You're bound to be a little bit
disappointed in some ways because it doesn't appear just the way it's
romanticized in those films. But let's talk a little bit about some of
these Americana groups. we're going to talk about John
Mellencamp, who went under the name of John Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp, and
then finally John Mellencamp coming out of Indiana.
really projects the image of a small town midwesterner had a, a hit in 1979 with I
Need A Lover, at least it was a radio hit, was covered by Pat Benatar, she had
a hit with it but a representative example for John Cougar Mellencamp would
be his album American Fool Fool a number one album from 1982 and the two songs
Hurts So Good the number two hit and Jack and Diane, a number one hit.
In many ways John Cougar Mellencamp, we talk about them in terms of Americana in
the eighties,. but it might be just as easy to think
about him as a kind of singer-songwriter fronting a band in that kind of way but
here. I'm thinking of him as a kind of a, a
traditionalist embracing older values as we get farther and farther away from the
60s and the hippie thing. now it's about, it's about returning to
the the values of good simple direct music.
Now coming from the UK another group that was doing that kind of things is Dire
Straits. fronted by Mark Knopfler, a great guitar
player and a wonderful singer. Voice sounding very much in the kind of
Bob Dylan tradition in the way that he kind of intones the lyrics.
And using what was at the end of the 70's kind of a novel approach.
He was playing Fender Stratocastor guitar.
A particular kind of guitar with a very clean kind of sound that really
emphasized the Stratocastor sound. Anybody hearing that, a guitar player
hearing that would say, they would know exactly what kind of guitar that was.
It was so different Then the cranked up distorted Marshall Stacks and various
kinds of things that were happening in Rock.
To hear this very clean, guitar sound on a song like 1978's Sultans of Swing,
really defined Dire Straits as a group that was really going back more to roots
and bypassing a lot of the sort of heavy Rock of today.
Well, they didn't bypass it forever. The album Brothers in Arms, number one
album from 1985 features the song Money for Nothing which has got plenty of
distorted guitar but still a, a kind of an embrace of not only American roots
music but also a kind of a a criticism of music merchandising which ironically the
video for this song that was criticizing music merchandising went into heavy
rotation on MTV, which of course at that time was all about music merchandising.
it features Sting. On background vocals at the very begging
saying I want my MTV. And then they launch the song as some pop
music merchandising which seems to be criticism of merchandising groups through
MTV and it becomes a hit on MTV and gets played over and over again.
To continue to discover new wave and how it merged in to mainstream rock in the
1980's we continue the story of the police we talked about them.
In the last video there's sophisticated musical arrangements to choose poetic and
intellectual lyrics. Maybe the best representative example of
the period in the first half of the 1980's is the single synchronicity, a
number 1 album in 1983 taking its title from.
The philosophic, or the psychological quasi philosophical quasi sometimes
mystical writing of Carl Jung. the two big songs off that album Every
Breath You Take, a number one hit, and King of Pain, a number three hit.
following as, as the career of The Police is begin to, beginning to die down you
get the rise of the career of a young group from Dublin called U2.
Again, simple songs, but simple songs arranged in very innovative kind of ways,
featuring Bono. On lead vocals whose since become a
fantastic celebrity in his own right. A real pursuer of social causes and a, a
voice of I think he would say a voice of conscious, conscience in the world.
Trying to use his fame to, to create positive change.
And the distinctive guitar sounds of the Edge who in many ways created a kind of
guitar sound that became the signature for a lot of that first batch of u2
music. Not unlike the way Andy Summers created a
particular kind of guitar sound for so much of the Police music that preceeded
it. So in many ways I see the movement from
The Police to U2 as being kind of stage one and stage two of very similar Kinds
of approaches to their music even though they're very distinctive bands and you
would never confuse the music of one for the music of another.
The big U2 album from the 1980's has to be the Joshua tree.
A number one album in 1987 produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
It's the interesting thing about U2. their producers had a lot of control over
how the music would go. But that wasn't because they were bring
dominated by the producers. It's because that's the way.
U2 liked to work. Lots of times they would go in the
studio. They would jam.
They would come up with ideas. They would leave.
The producers would go through the ideas. They would find the best ones.
They would edit them together. The group would come in and say, how did
you like this? Oh, that sounds pretty good, let's do it
this way, let's try it another way or something like that.
And so it was a real interaction between the group providing a lot of kind of raw
material you know in the studio, and the producers going back and sorting through
sort of putting it together and helping to sort of craft it into the tunes as
they, as they develope. And so again, a very influential group
who's come, who, who went on after the 80s to be one of the biggest rock bands
in the in the world. maybe the most important song from that
album The Joshua Tree is with or Without You, a Number One hit, again, for U2 in
1987. In the next video, let's turn our
attention to new acts that used old styles, and also to blue eyed soul, to
help round out a bit of our discussion of some of the MTV bands from the 1980s.
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