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.
Dinosaurs Adapt and Thrive
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來自 University of Rochester 的課程
摇滚史，第二部分
232 個評分
從本節課中
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.]
與講師見面
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We now turn to the discussion of what happened, to those rock dinosaurs from
then end of the nineteen seventies, those musicians who had their great careers in
the nineteen seventies who may be coming out of their nineteen sixties, but it was
a new generation MTV, young people, video visual, these old guys are just going to
crawl off into a corner and die or go back to their castle and just sort of
enjoy their retirement or whatever. Well, not so much.
A lot of 70s bands continued to have great success into the 1980s.
We don't focus on that much when we tell stories about histories- the history of
rock. In fact, it's fairly typical of Of
histories of music to only follow the new innovations as they occur in every era.
So if you don't know the backstory on all of this you would assume that when we
talk about Michael Jackson and Madonna and Prince and Janet Jackson, people like
that. That's all that people were listening to.
But in fact on MTV when you were seeing those videos in the middle of the decade,
you were also seeing videos by a whole host of other artists who were also
having tremendous success at the same time, so the scene is a lot more varied
than just following the newest innovations and newest things to come
along, might suggest, so I'm going to try and provide a little bit of that
background of groups who had success earlier.
And now also had success, in some cases even more success in the 1980s than they
had before. I'll first talk about the Prog Rock
dinosaurs. These are the guys who in the 1970s had
done all of that kind of what a lot of people would think of as pretentious and
overblown progressive rock music that really was totally passe by the end of
the decade. These are members of groups like Genesis
and Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer. Palmer and King Crimson.
I mean, nobody could ever want to hear from these guys again in the 1980s,
right? Well, as it turns out, some of 'em
actually have more success in the 1980s. Especially Genesis in fact, trying to,
trying to be funny, I suppose. I labeled a little paragraph, a series of
paragraphs on Genesis in the 80s from Genesis to Corporation because these
guys. Really brought it, in terms of record
sales in the 1980s, exceeding anything that any of them had ever seen in their
wildest dreams in the 1970s. The band Genesis, now down to just thee
guys, Tony Banks on keyboards, Phil Collins on drums and lead vocals.
Remember, he took over From Peter Gabriel about halfway through the 70's, and then
Micheal Rutherford on guitar and bass. These guys had fantastic success
throughout the 80's. one hit record after another.
One hit single, maybe the best representative example of that, is the
1986 album "Invisible Touch". Which was a number three record, the song
Invisible Touch and number one record. The same time as all that was happening,
Phil Collins was having a solo career throughout the '80's.
He was a big artist in his own rite. A good example of that is his 1985 album
No Jacket Required which went to number one along with a two number one singles
One More Night" and Sussudio. The singer who had left the group in
1974, Peter Gabriel, also started to have big albums in the 1980's.
He had solo albums right after he left Genesis, the whole of them but the album
So from 1986 went to number two in the charts in that year, with the number 1
hit Sledgehammer and the number 8 hit Big Time.
The video to Sledgehammer is often as a kind of breakthrough video, because of
the kind of claymation, stop action animation that they use in it.
If you've never seen it on video. You should seek it out on YouTube or
wherever you go on the Internet to see these videos.
It's a fantastic in it's time, people were just amazed that you could do such a
thing. And here's where the Michael Nesmith idea
of MTV being used to kind of open up new kinds of artistic horizons.
Really begins to take hold. We've already talked about Michael
Jackson and the Thriller video. Peter Gabriel with the Sledgehammer
video. The Big Time video is pretty good, too.
You're really starting to see in the 2nd half of that decade.
MTV start, some of these videos start to become much more ambitious, much more
interesting now than they had originally been.
In addition to Genesis, Phil Collins' solo, Peter Gabriel's solo, the bass
player guitar player in the group, Michael Rutherford, had a group called
Mike and the Mechanics. And they had a whole series of, of videos
that were in heavy rotation on MTV. Maybe the most representative of their
albums being The Living Years from 1988 at number 13 album with a number 1 single
on it; The Living Years. So, Genesis A very good group from the
70s. Now when they're thought of by rock
historians, people focus almost entirely on the output in the 70s.
In the 80s, they were major hit-makers, some of the most successful artists,
rivaling the Madonnas and the Michael Jacksons of the world for chart success.
Members of Yes came back in 1983 with the album 90125.
A number five album for them, and their first and only ever number one hit
single, Owner of a Lonely Heart. Course the guys that came back with Yes
were not all of the guys who'd ever been in Yes.
Two of the guys that had previously been in the band, the guitarist Steve Howe and
a keyboard player named Geoff Downes, who'd also been in the Buggles, remember
Video Killed the Radio Star, came back with a group called Asia.
Teamed with the bass player and vocalist from King Crimson, John Wenton and the
drummer from Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Carl Palmer.
They released an album in 1982 simply called Asia, was number one on the US
charts for nine Weeks. Songs like Heat of the Moment, a number
four hit, and Only Time Will Tell, a number 17 hit.
So far from going away, these prog rockers ended up turning to a more
streamlined, mainstream rock sound. You could still hear the prog elements in
it. But they really adapted their music to
the times, and had fantastic success, and in fact continued to have their videos
played in every rotation on MTV, in addition to dominating FM rock radio
during the decade. Here are some other acts from the 1970s
That had great success in the 80s. I'm just going to sort of blow through
these pretty quickly. Just to give you a sense of, give us a
sense that, that the 80s were populated, as I said before, by groups that had
previous success but we don't often talk about the success they had in the 80s
because we've already sort of dealt with them earlier on.
But they were very much a presence and have to be figured into the picture.
Foreigner, Agent Provocateur that album, #4 album from 1984.
Styx, their number three album Kilroy was here from 1983.
Boston, their number one album Third Stage from 1986.
David Bowie, his number three album from 1983, Let's Dance.
Billy Joel, his number four album, An Innocent Man...
Paul McCartney, number one album in the pop in the UK charts in 1982, Tug of War.
That's 20 years after Love Me Do. And then the Rolling Stones, 1989, the
number three album Steel Wheels, almost 25 years after I Can't Get No
Satisfaction. Well as we look back now, on the weeks
worth of videos and what we've talked about this week.
let's review a bit of what we've been talking about.
The first important point is that MTV channel, some rock values, through the
rise of visuals. And the questions we need to ask, you
need to ask, and think about, I won't give you my answers.
you should develop your own, is, do the visuals overwhelm the music?
Would the music itself, would the music itself still be interesting without the
visuals? Should that matter?
I mean, is it okay, that music, and visuals should work together in such an
intricate way that they cannot be separated outright?
Now, some people would say. That, the if the music doesn't stand on
it's own, it's not really music, it's something else, it's some other form of
entertainment. But again, these are, these are certainly
debatable points and people will have their own approaches to it.
The other point to under, underline with regard to this MTV generation, we're
talking about the 80s is that some of the ambitious videos extend the hippie
aesthetic. I spent so much time talking about these
hippie aesthetics before as pulling together music from the mid 60s all the
way through the 1970s. We thought that it had been eradicated
and pushed back on by new wave and punk and disco, and by the time we got to the
80s all that big sort of progressive big idea stuff was over with.
But as videos start to become increasingly more developed, we start to
see this ambition start to creep back in, and the hippie aesthetic, far from going
away Kind of migrates to the video. Kind of migrates to the stage show.
Because after people have seen these videos, they expect the stage shows to
look like these videos. So the staging of a lot of these acts
gets increasingly complicated to create a kind of live version of things that
people have seen on the videos. The last point we should think about is,
how old... Is too old.
Earlier in this, in this particular video, I talked about all these groups
from. Some going back to the 60's.
The Stones, the Beatles, Paul McCartney. Certainly, many of them going back to the
70's and now in the 80's, are having careers.
That, that extend beyond the usual three or four year window that a lot of groups
previously had careers. We're talking about something like Paul
McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel.
These groups continued to have work that spans decades.
Used to be, I won't trust anybody over the age of 30, now half the artists on
the charts are over the age of 30. And now we look at our present and we can
say That, unless something changes between now, the time I'm filming this
and the time you're watching it some point in the future, Paul McCartney is
still going strong. I mean some 50 years after The Beatles
first successes. And so, what does this mean about the
history of rock music as we tell it? Rather than sort of thinking about the
youth music of each generation as it comes along, and that displacing The
music so that we have a kind of series of, of new things happening every three
or four years. It's more like things are beginning to
stack up [LAUGH]. So music from the 60s continues on into
the 70s with those artists, and a new bunch come along, and a lot of that bunch
continue on to the 80s. And a new stack comes on top of that.
Sometimes people are listening to it based on what their own demographic is.
So if you came into it with the music of the 60s, you follow those groups, but
basically ignore some of the others. If you came in the 70s You follow those
group, and ignore the others. But sometimes as we get to the present
day, we've got people, young people, who are discovering 60's and 70's music as if
it was their own music. We have this accumulation of historical
music in the history of rock that's now starting to look more like a repertoire
You know, that a hit parade. And, I can, I, I can say that we, already
started to see that in the 1970's but in the 80's with the presence of so many
different sort of generations of musicians on the charts, on MTV, at the
same time, we're really starting to see the rock tradition, the rock history, the
rock repertoire, begin to take on a kind of multi-decade kind of complexion going
all the way back to To the music of going all the way back to the music of Elvis in
the 1950s. We'll talk about that in the last video.
What happens with the sort of historitization of rock music and rock
music history. The kind of thing that would lead to us
even having a class like the one that you're watching now.
for now, let's look forward to next week. We'll talk about the rise of heavy
metal... Rap and alternative rock.
See you then.
