Although it is only one genre of music, there are many different types of Rock and Roll. Rock origi-nated in a conservative time period when blues and gospel were popular, the 50’s. Artists like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley used the electric guitar and on-stage showmanship to start a revolution. In 1964, the Beatles came to America, and it didn’t take long before the American youth turned the musicians into rock-stars. During the next few decades, Rock musicians began to define their own sub-genres including blues-rock, pop rock, and folk rock. But arguably, the most unique of these sub-genres are psychedelic rock and punk rock.

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Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, Nothing can define the period of psychedelic rock better. During the mid 1960’s, musicians attempted to rec-reate, through music, the ex-periences of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and peyote mushrooms. Bands like the Beatles, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane paired surreal lyrics with eccen-tric musical effects to create a completely new sound. To demonstrate their drug ex-periences, artists performed long, freeform jams without lyrics. This contradicted the unspoken “four-minute rule” in early music. In 1967, the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which is regarded as the definitive psychedelic rock album. Unfortunately, psychedelic rock had a short life-span, along with many of its leading musicians. Famous psychedelic artists Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all died from drug overdoses at the age of 27. By the end of the decade, the pieces of psychedelic rock that had not faded away moved into Progressive rock in the 70’s.

PSYCHEDELIC

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PUNK Punk Rock beganin the early 1970’s with bands like The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. It was characterized by fast music and anti-authoritarian ideals. Many early punk bands lacked serious tal-ent compared to other famous mu-sicians of the time, but this didn’t stop them from getting their point across. The punk movement became widely popular with America’s youth because it encouraged rebellious be-havior and rejected maturity. In 1975, the punk rock movement exploded in London after the Sex Pistol’s first live performance. In the next few years London’s punk scene formed a new sound, American Hard-core. This included new bands like The Misfits and Black Flag. By the early 80’s punk started to fade into other genres like pop-punk, alt rock and new wave.

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