Rock: A Critical Introduction – Paperback

Rock: A Critical Introduction traces the musical, cultural, and institutional processes that transformed popular music’s value system and made rock an autonomous art in the mid-20th century. How did rock come to be understood not merely as popular entertainment but as a serious, autonomous art form? Rather than treating rock as a self-evident musical style or a simple outgrowth of rock ‘n’ roll, this book – aimed at students, practitioners, and curious readers – shows how it emerged through a historically specific alignment of sounds, practices, institutions, and beliefs that reshaped the cultural value of popular music. Focusing on the US and UK of the 1960s, David Brackett traces how musicians, critics, audiences, and industry figures came to share the idea that rock deserved sustained listening, interpretation, and evaluation on aesthetic grounds. Drawing on musical analysis and cultural theory, the convergence of folk revival ideology, British rhythm and blues, studio experimentation, and new forms of authorship are selected areas of examination. Figures such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones are treated as nodal points within a broader formation that included underground scenes, emerging rock criticism, new media formats, and shifting generational identities. Central to this account are the racialized histories of blues and rock ‘n’ roll, the gendered norms of authorship and virtuosity, and the ways sexuality shaped rock’s claims to transgression and seriousness. In putting together this map of rock history, Rock: A Critical Introduction offers a new account of why rock acquired unprecedented symbolic capital, how a rock canon took shape, and why rock’s claims to autonomy would later come under strain.