different types of music 1

 Everyone likes music...EVERYONE.  The definition of music is

Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll or rock ’n’ roll) is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States in the late 1940s after World War II, from a combination of the rhythms of the blues, from the African American culture, and from America's country music and gospel music scene. Though elements of rock and roll can be heard in country records of the 1930s, and in blues records from the 1920s, rock and roll did not acquire its name until the 1950s. An early form of rock and roll was rockabilly, which combined country and jazz, with influences from traditional Appalachian folk, and Gospel music. Rock and roll can trace one lineage to the Five Points, Manhattan district of mid-19th century in New York City, the scene of the first fusion of heavily rhythmic African shuffles and sand dances, and Italian jig. with melody-driven European genres, particularly the Irish

The immediate origins of rock and roll lie in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when various popular musical genres of the time - including blues, country music, rhythm and blues, folk music and gospel music - combined to give rise to the new style.

However, elements of rock and roll can be heard in many "hillbilly" and "race music" records of the 1920s and 1930s. This music was often relegated to "race music" outlets (as rhythm and blues stations were referred to at the time) and was rarely heard by mainstream white audiences. A few black rhythm and blues musicians, notably Louis Jordan, the Mills Brothers, and The Ink Spots, achieved crossover success; in some cases (such as Jordan's "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie") this was achieved with numbers composed by white songwriters. The Western swing genre in the 1930s, generally played by white musicians, also shared similarities with rock and roll, and in turn directly influenced rockabilly and rock and roll, as can be heard (for example) on Elvis Presley's rendition of "Jailhouse Rock" (1957).

There is much debate as to what should be considered the first rock & roll record. One leading contender is "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (which was, in fact, Ike Turner and his band The Kings of Rhythm recording under a different name), recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in 1951. Four years later, Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" (1955) became the first rock and roll song to top Billboard magazine's main sales and airplay charts, and opened the door worldwide for this new wave of popular culture. Rolling Stone magazine argued in 2004 that "That's All Right (Mama)" (1954), Elvis Presley's first single for Sun Records in Memphis, was the first rock and roll record^[24]. But, at the same time, Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle & Roll", later covered by Haley, was already at the top of the Billboard R&B charts.

Country music (or country and western) is a blend of popular musical forms originally found in the Southern United States and the Appalachian Mountains. It has roots in traditional folk music, Celtic music, gospel music, and old-time music and evolved rapidly in the 1920s.

The term country music began to be used in the 1940s when the earlier term hillbilly music was deemed to be degrading, and the term was widely embraced in the 1970s, while country and Western has declined in use since that time, except in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where it is still commonly used.

In the Southwestern United States a different mix of ethnic groups created the music that became the Western music of the term country and Western. The term "country music" is used today to describe many styles and sub-genres.

Country music has produced two of the top selling solo artists of all time. Elvis Presley, who was known early on as “the Hillbilly Cat” and was a regular on the radio program Louisiana Hayride, went on to become a defining figure in the emergence of rock and roll. Contemporary musician Garth Brooks, with 128 million albums sold, is the top-selling solo artist in U.S. history.

While album sales of most musical genres have declined, country music experienced one of its best years in 2006, when, during the first six months, U.S. sales of country albums increased by 17.7 percent to 36 million. Moreover, country music listening nationwide has remained steady for almost a decade, reaching 77.3 million adults every week, according to the radio-ratings agency Arbitro

Several rock and pop stars have ventured into country music. In 2000, Richard Marx made a brief cross-over with his Days In Avalon album, which features five country songs and several singers and musicians. Alison Krauss sang background vocals to Marx's single "Straight From My Heart." Also, Bon Jovi had a hit single, "Who Says You Can't Go Home," with Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland. Other rock stars who featured a country song on their albums were Don Henley and Poison.

One infrequent, but consistent theme in modern country music is that of proud, stubborn independence. "Country Boy Can Survive" and "Copperhead Road"^[51] are two of the more serious songs along those lines; while "Some Girls Do"^[52] and "Redneck Woman"^[53] are more light-hearted variations on the theme.

In 2005, country singer Carrie Underwood rose to fame as the winner of the fourth season of American Idol and became a multi-platinum selling recording artist and a multiple Grammy Award winner.

In 2008, Taylor Swift rose as a major pop country artist, with her single "Love Story" becoming the first country song to reach number one on the Nielsen BDS CHR/Top 40 chart. In the same year, Hootie & the Blowfish vocalist Darius Rucker released his second solo album, Learn to Live, which was his debut into country music.

In 2009, George Strait was named Artist of the Decade by the Academy of Country Music.

Jazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style's West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.

From its early development until the present, jazz has also incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music. The word jazz began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915; for the origin and history, see Jazz (word).

Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop. As the music has spread around the world it has drawn on local national and regional musical cultures, its aesthetics being adapted to its varied environments and giving rise to many distinctive styles.

Jazz can be hard to define because it spans from Ragtime waltzes to 2000s-era fusion. While many attempts have been made to define jazz from points of view outside jazz, such as using European music history or African music, jazz critic Joachim Berendt argues that all such attempts are unsatisfactory. One way to get around the definitional problems is to define the term “jazz” more broadly. Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"; he argues that jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time, defined as 'swing'", "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role"; and "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician"

By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and brought strong tribal musical traditions with them. Lavish festivals featuring African dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843, as were similar gatherings in New England and New York. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual, and included work songs and field hollers. The African tradition made use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, but without the European concept of harmony. Rhythms reflected African speech patterns, and the African use of pentatonic scales led to blue notes in blues and jazz.

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo "Rag Time Medley". Also in 1897, the white composer William H. Krell published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and Tom Turpin published his Harlem Rag, that was the first rag published by an African-American. The classically-trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in the following year, then in 1899 had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag." He wrote numerous popular rags, including, "The Entertainer", combining syncopation, banjo figurations and sometimes call-and-response, which led to the ragtime idiom being taken up by classical composers including Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. Blues music was published and popularized by W. C. Handy, whose "Memphis Blues" of 1912 and "St. Louis Blues" of 1914 both became jazz standards

In the 2000s, straight-ahead jazz continues to appeal to a core of listeners. Well-established jazz musicians whose careers span decades, such as Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, and Wayne Shorter continue to perform and record. In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of young musicians emerged including US pianists Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and Vijay Iyer, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard, and saxophonists Chris Potter and Joshua Redman. The more experimental end of the spectrum has included US trumpeters Dave Douglas and Rob Mazurek, saxophonist Ken Vandermark, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, the Swedish group E.S.T., and US bassist Christian McBride. Toward the more dance or pop music end of the spectrum are St Germain who incorporates some live jazz playing with house beats and Jamie Cullum who plays a particular mix of Jazz Standards with own more pop-oriented compositions.

Alternative rock (also called alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative; known primarily in the UK as indie) is a genre of rock music that emerged in the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s. Alternative rock consists of various subgenres that have emerged from the independent music scene since the 1980s, such as grunge, Britpop, gothic rock, and indie pop. These genres are unified by their collective debt to the style and/or ethos of punk rock, which laid the groundwork for alternative music in the 1970s. At times alternative rock has been used as a catch-all phrase for rock music from underground artists in the 1980s, and all music descended from punk rock (including punk itself, New Wave, and post-punk).

While a few artists like R.E.M. and The Cure achieved commercial success and mainstream critical recognition, many alternative rock artists during the 1980s were cult acts that recorded on independent labels and received their exposure through college radio airplay and word-of-mouth. With the breakthrough of Nirvana and the popularity of the grunge and Britpop movements in the 1990s, alternative rock entered the musical mainstream and many alternative bands became commercially successful.

The music now known as alternative rock was known by a variety of terms before "alternative" came into common use. "College rock" was used in the United States to describe the music during the 1980s due to its links to the college radio circuit and the tastes of college students. In the United Kingdom the term "indie" was (and still is) preferred; by 1985 the term "indie" had come to mean a particular genre, or group of subgenres, rather than a simple demarcation of status. "Indie rock" was also largely synonymous with the genre in the United States up until the genre's commercial breakthrough in the early 1990s, due to the majority of the bands belonging to independent labels.

By 1990 the genre was called "alternative rock". The term "alternative" had originated sometime around the mid-1980s; it was an extension of the phrases "new music" and "post modern", both for the freshness of the music and its tendency to recontextualize the sounds of the past, which were commonly used by music industry of the time to denote cutting edge music. Individuals who worked as DJs and promoters during the 1980s claim the term originates from American FM radio of the 1970s, which served as a progressive alternative to top 40 rock radio formats by featuring longer songs and giving the DJs more freedom in their song selections. One former DJ and promoter has said, "Somehow this term 'alternative' got rediscovered and heisted by college radio people during the 80s who applied it to new post-punk, indie, or underground-whatever music . . ." Thus the original use of the term was often broader than it has come to be understood, encompassing punk rock, New Wave, post-punk, and even pop music, along with the occasional "college"/"indie" rock, all music found on the American "commercial alternative" radio stations of the time such as Los Angeles' KROQ-FM. The use of the term "alternative" gained popular exposure during 1991 with the implementation of alternative music categories in the Grammy Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards, as well as the success of Lollapalooza, where festival founder and Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell coined the term "Alternative Nation".

Defining music as "alternative" is often difficult because of two often conflicting applications of the word. "Alternative" can describe music that challenges the status quo and that is "fiercely iconoclastic, anticommercial, and antimainstream," but the term is also used in the music industry to denote "the choices available to consumers via record stores, radio, cable television, and the Internet."

"Alternative rock" is essentially an umbrella term for underground music that has emerged in the wake of the punk rock movement since the mid-1980s. Throughout much of its history, alternative rock has been largely defined by its rejection of the commercialism of mainstream culture. Alternative bands during the 1980s generally played in small clubs, recorded for indie labels, and spread their popularity through word of mouth. As such, there is no set musical style for alternative rock as a whole, although The New York Times in 1989 asserted that the genre is "guitar music first of all, with guitars that blast out power chords, pick out chiming riffs, buzz with fuzztone and squeal in feedback." Sounds range from the dirty guitars of grunge to the gloomy soundscapes of gothic rock to the guitar pop revivalism of Britpop to the shambolic performance style of twee pop. More often than in other rock styles, alternative rock lyrics tend to address topics of social concern, such as drug use, depression, and environmentalism. This approach to lyrics developed as a reflection of the social and economic strains in the United States and United Kingdom of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Although alternative artists of the 1980s never generated spectacular album sales, they exerted a considerable influence on later alternative musicians and laid the groundwork for their success. The popular and commercial success of Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind took alternative rock into the mainstream, establishing its commercial and cultural viability. As a result, alternative rock became the most popular form of rock music of the decade and many alternative bands garnered commercial and critical success. However, many of these artists rejected success, for it conflicted with the rebellious, DIY ethic the genre had espoused before mainstream exposure and their ideas of artistic authenticity. As many of the genre's key groups broke up or retreated from the limelight, alternative rock declined from mainstream prominence.

In the first decade of the 21st century, mainstream rock has largely moved beyond alternative's 1980s roots and low-fidelity ethos. In 2004, alternative rock received renewed mainstream attention with the popularity of indie rock and post-punk revival artists such as Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand, respectively.

Pop music is a music genre that developed from the mid-1950s as a softer alternative to rock 'n' roll and later to rock music. It has a focus on commercial recording, often orientated towards a youth market, usually through the medium of relatively short and simple love songs. While these basic elements of the genre have remained fairly constant, pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, particularly borrowing from the development of rock music, and utilizing key technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.

The term "pop song" is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal". From the 1950s the term "pop music" began to be used to to describe a distinct genre, initially to distinguish it in the newly emerging charts of record sales, but with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950s, pop became identified with music aimed at a youth market, often as a softer alternative. In the aftermath of the British Invasion, from about 1967, it was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, to describe a form that was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible. Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts, as a genre it is not the sum of all chart music, which have always contained songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs, while pop music as a genre is usually seen as existing and developing separately.

The major medium of pop music is the song, often only between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, with a simple structure generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and traditional structure. Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, and a chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the verse. Typically the beat of the music and the melodies tend to be very simple and "catchy" with limited harmonic accompaniment. Modern pop music differs from popular songs that preceding it in its overwhelming focus on love and romantic relationships, although there are notable exceptions.

Heavy metal (often referred to simply as metal) is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in England and the United States. With roots in blues-rock and psychedelic rock, the bands that created heavy metal developed a thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness. Heavy metal lyrics and performance styles are generally associated with masculinity and machismo.

Early heavy metal bands such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple attracted large audiences, though they were often critically reviled, a status common throughout the history of the genre. In the mid-1970s, Judas Priest helped spur the genre's evolution by discarding much of its blues influence; Motörhead introduced a punk rock sensibility and an increasing emphasis on speed. Bands in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal such as Iron Maiden followed in a similar vein. Before the end of the decade, heavy metal had attracted a worldwide following of fans known as "metalheads" or "headbangers".

In the 1980s, glam metal became a major commercial force with groups like Mötley Crüe. Underground scenes produced an array of more extreme, aggressive styles: thrash metal broke into the mainstream with bands such as Metallica, while other styles like death metal and black metal remain subcultural phenomena. Since the mid-1990s, popular styles such as nu metal, which often incorporates elements of funk and hip hop; and metalcore, which blends extreme metal with hardcore punk, have further expanded the definition of the genre.

Heavy metal is traditionally characterized by loud distorted guitars, emphatic rhythms, dense bass-and-drum sound, and vigorous vocals. Metal subgenres variously emphasize, alter, or omit one or more of these attributes. New York Times critic Jon Pareles writes, "In the taxonomy of popular music, heavy metal is a major subspecies of hard-rock—the breed with less syncopation, less blues, more showmanship and more brute force." The typical band lineup includes a drummer, a bassist, a rhythm guitarist, a lead guitarist, and a singer, who may or may not be an instrumentalist. Keyboard instruments are sometimes used to enhance the fullness of the sound; early heavy metal bands typically used a Hammond organ, while synthesizers are now more common.