Heartland rock

From Freepedia

In the late 1970s and 1980s, one of the most popular forms of rock and roll was heartland rock. It was characterized by a straightforward musical style, a concern with the average American life, and a conviction that rock music had a social or communal purpose beyond just entertainment.

As with most popular music genres, the term is something of a catchall, covering artists with diverse styles and making an exact delineation difficult. However, most heartland rock shared some common characteristics:

Traditional instrumentation - Guitars (electric, acoustic, and bass), drums, and non-synthesizer keyboards (pianos and the Hammond B3 organ) predominate. This was very much in opposition to synthesizer pop, one of the other dominant styles of the same era, and was in common with roots rock, with which heartland had some overlap.
Influences - Heartland rock owed much to pre-1964 rock and rhythm and blues, and to a lesser extent country and western, rockabilly, the British Invasion, and the "White Soul" of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Van Morrison and Bob Dylan had wide influence.
Subject matter - Heartland rock was no less diverse than any other genre - but at its core tended to dwell on topics like the lives of average blue collar or lower middle class American life. In this sense, the genre owed a lot to country and western, but heartland added to that the notion that performer and listener shared common bonds, values, and goals.

By far the most prominent heartland artists, and the nucleus of the genre, were:

Bruce Springsteen - Bringing the influences of Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and pre-Beatles rock and roll to bear, the musical style and the lyrical themes of heartland were lurking in Springsteen's Jersey-flavored music from the start. But they really gelled on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and The River (1980), where songs such as "Badlands" and "The River" intertwined personal and economic concerns. The heartland genre reached the apex of its general popularity with Springsteen's massively-selling Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and his subsequent sold-out arena and stadium tour. These shows featured rock versions of Nebraska (1982)'s depressed heartland folk as well as Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the Steinbeck-influenced "Seeds", preceded and followed in best redemptive fashion by party songs from the early 1960s, all documented within the Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live/1975-85 album.
Bob Seger - More rooted in traditional, blues-based barroom rock than Springsteen, Michigan native Seger owed a lot more to Chuck Berry, Mitch Ryder, and The Rolling Stones. Some of Seger's early songs such as "Beautiful Loser" and "Turn the Page" were heartland antecedants, while his later classic heartland albums include Night Moves (1976), Stranger in Town (1978), and The Distance (1982). Generally acknowledged as the best singer of this group, Seger's voice could convey heartland sentiments ranging from the delicate time-spanning nostalgia of "Night Moves" to the powerless fury of "Feel Like a Number" to the uncertain maturity of "Against the Wind".
John Mellencamp - A reformed glitter-rocker, Mellencamp came to embrace and finally flaunt his small town Indiana roots in the early 1980s. "Jack and Diane" from 1982 and "Pink Houses" from 1983 were among the first hit singles directly identified with the genre, while his albums Uh-Huh (1984) and The Lonesome Jubilee (1987) were representative. Moreoever the quintessential work of the entire heartland rock genre was probably Mellencamp's 1985 album Scarecrow, with its depictions of struggling family farmers, odes to small town life, tales of the passing of generations, and tributes to the redemptive power of rock 'n' roll.
Tom Petty - Out of Gainesville, Florida and forthright about his debt to The Byrds, Petty's style was both more laconic and more experimental than most other heartland rockers. But "Refugee" and "Even the Losers" from Damn the Torpedoes (1979), "The Waiting" from Hard Promises (1980), and "I Won't Back Down" and "Runnin' Down a Dream" from Full Moon Fever (1989) all fit squarely in the genre, while the daring Southern Accents (1984) stretched the genre to its limits.

Both an antecedant and a heartland example was:

Creedence Clearwater Revival and John Fogerty - Creedence was the seminal proto-heartland band, a decade before the genre was popularly recognized. Former leader Fogerty revived his career in 1985 with the album Centerfield, which recapped and extended Creedence's themes. Fogerty's influence is widespread throughout the genre.

Lesser-known heartland artists included:

Michael Stanley - An obscure Cleveland-area rocker, Stanley's 1984 regional hit "My Town" captured many of the themes of the genre: blue-collar swagger, cocky regionalism (generally for places that the pop and entertainment establishments eschewed as "flyover land") combined with a dogged love of local themes, and a broad, muscular musical arrangement.
Red Rider - A Canadian band led by singer Tom Cochrane, Red Rider was an excellent example of the genre.
The Iron City Houserockers - A heavily Rolling Stones-influenced group from Pittsburgh, the Houserockers were an uncommonly kinetic group that garnered critical acclaim but little commercial success.
Joe Ely and Steve Earle - Ely and Earle are best known as country artists, but both were frequently associated with the Heartland Rock movement. Earle's "Copperhead Road", for instance, would fit right into a Springsteen or Seger album. As would, for that matter, country/Southern rocker Charlie Daniels' "Still In Saigon"; these songs together with Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." and a few others were part of a Vietnam veteran-sympathetic subgenre of heartland that had a several bursts of visibility during the 1980s.

In concert, heartland rock often took the form of crowd-rousing anthems, leading to comparisons with Midwestern arena rock groups such as REO Speedwagon and Head East, whose style however owed more to seventies pop rock.

Heartland rock faded away as a recognized genre by the early 1990s, as rock music in general lost influence with younger audiences and as heartland's artists turned to more personal works.

Rock and roll | Rock genres

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Heartland_rock.html"

Categories: Rock music genres

Heartland rock

From Freepedia

Views

Personal tools

Navigation

Search

Toolbox

In other languages

Similar Links