Rock music emerged during the mid-1950s to become the major popular musical form of young audience in the United States and Western Europe. Its stylistic scope is too broad to be encompassed by any  single definition; the only feature common to all rock music is a heavy emphasis on the beat.

     It evolved from jazz and the blues.

    Rock ’n’ roll’s first superstar was Elvis Presley. With his country-and-western background, Presley led the way for other “rockabilly” (rock plus hillbilly) artists; with his spasmodic hip gyrations, he introduced a sexual suggestiveness that outraged conservative adults; with his legions of teenage fans, he brought to rock ’n’ roll the cult of personality and became the archetype of the rock star as cultural hero.

Since the 1950s rock music has come all the way through the renewal of rock’n’roll in the 1960s, the beatles from England, the rock music of the 1970s with much more subdivisions: hard rock (extremely loud and electronically amplified), mellow rock (softer, sometimes with acoustic instruments), folk rock, country rock (with the character of folk and country music), heavy metal rock (with something like acid rock), glitter rock (more of a theatrical approach), new wave rock (something of an old wave), etc., and then the eclectic 1980s when bands became production-oriented partly because of the sudden explosion of “videos” on TV screens.

The scope and significance of rock remains without precedent in the history of popular music. Beginning as a minority expression on the fringe of American society, it developed into a distinct counterculture during the 1960s, and a decade later had become a dominant cultural force, affecting and reflecting the moods of American youth and weaving itself into the very fabric of society.