Hard-rock

Definition of the term hard rock

Hard rock ("tough rock") is a genre straddling the border between rock and blues music, created in the late Sixties in England (and, in a less programmatic way, in America too) and marked by aggressive sonorities, obtained by pushing to the extreme the devices and instruments of early-20th-century American rhythm and blues and of the early-Sixties English rhythm and blues that drew on it. Formally, hard rock cannot be reduced to rock, because it isn't made exclusively with what would become rock's canonical instruments (guitar, bass, drums); regularly added to these are instruments of clear blues derivation: harmonica and piano/keyboards above all. Hard rock is hard blues. The mistaken definition is due to those who failed to grasp the essential, defining differences between rhythm and blues, rock'n'roll and rock in the history of the creation of the third, starting from the negation-and-overcoming of the first. The years in which hard rock would find its greatest consensus and expressive power were the Seventies.

In terms of content, hard rock is nothing but the utterly unoriginal repetition — yet one capable, precisely through this, of consolidating its own identity — of the three programmatic concepts of American popular music of the Fifties: sex, drugs and rock'n'roll (it's well known, after all, that sex, drugs and music excite the very same areas of the brain: evidently hard rock holds greater power over simpler minds, or those less schooled in other music). Indeed, it could be said that three decades of hard rock supplied the collective imagination, through a mythologized rereading of the past, with the very standards that would come to define the American Fifties.

Hard rock is the musical and existential creed of the worker-warrior who, in the setting of the industrial metropolis, relives the crudest, most grandiloquent and superficial feelings inherited from the most degraded strain of Romanticism, the same feelings with which that Romanticism had once interpreted the whole past history of man and, time after time, the present history of the individual.

Hard rock is neither blues (too hard) nor metal (too bluesy): it is precisely this mediocrity and immediacy (as well as predictability), both sonic and thematic, that will make it the most popular of all consumer music genres, rivalled only by pop in the stylistic sense, that is, by the more traditional easy-listening song. For the average listener, popular music ("popular" as opposed to "classical") will thus appear almost exclusively split between pop and hard rock. The "ballad" (often acoustic), present on every self-respecting hard rock album and steeped in the mawkiest, most tear-jerking themes of some misfortune between lover and beloved (he leaves her or she leaves him, but the memory will last forever), is the tribute that hard rock (which sees itself as music for men) pays to pop (seen as music for women), with which it goes hand in hand; that is, with which it converses: like the ballad written by the hard rocker for his own Her, which she will then have to listen to.

Sexist, patriarchal, uncultured, fetishistic, devoid of any horizon beyond dancing and orgasm, hard rock is the only rock subgenre to programmatically banish women from its own interpretation. In thirty years of hard rock, one cannot cite a single notable all-female band, nor even a single female singer who had any meaningful involvement in the genre. This doesn't mean women are confined to pop: individual musicians and all-female bands have been fundamental to both punk and metal, two genres far more violent, extreme and powerful than hard rock. The reason lies in the content of this style: it is the vocal or expressive form of the laborer or dockworker who wants to carnally possess — maybe for just one night, and maybe as brutally and bestially as possible — a woman whose only worth lies in long, sinuous legs, a high backside and a full bosom. A female hard rock would be a contradiction in terms: again, not because there is some difference between a man's sexual attraction to a woman and a woman's to a man, nor because the effects of alcohol and drugs differ by sex rather than by individual, but because this rock style was born and, historically, has remained fixed in the single direction of man toward woman, never the reverse.

While the average length of a classic-rock track (in the vein of Velvet Underground or Creedence Clearwater Revival) can be said to run 3-4 minutes, that of a hard rock track sits around 5-6. It's as if, through its sheer bulk, the hard rock track absorbed and dosed to taste — yet according to recurring standards — a slow rock track (or rather, an early-20th-century blues) and a driving rock track (or rather, a Fifties rock'n'roll one). It's worth reading the length of a track metaphorically too: just as punk tracks, and hard-core ones even more so, last barely 1-2 minutes in keeping with the moral law of "Live fast, die young," hard rock tracks last a very long time to make plain the ideal lifespan the hard rocker envisions for himself — one who wants a rough, unruly life (for fun) but a long one (every form of appreciation of pleasure betrays an attachment to living). Rock sits in between punk and hard rock: let's say 20 years, 40 and 60. For metal the matter is more complex and depends on its subcategories.

Unlike many metal bands and especially punk ones, most hard rock acts, like most pop acts, tend to enjoy long or very long careers. Hard rock and pop albums, moreover, unlike metal and punk ones, are not conceived on a level or democratic basis, that is, globally or as a whole, but rather as a collection of more or less numerous singles meant to be sold to the charts. This is an indirect cause of the objective fact that there exist excellent or terrible metal or punk albums, as against, typically, mediocre hard rock or pop ones. While a classic hard rock or pop act, accustomed as it is to focusing its attention on "the song," will almost always deliver at least one decent track per album, it can happen that classic metal or punk acts produce entirely worthless albums. Because the former operate on a scale of mediocrity, the latter on one of maximum and minimum.

There is perhaps no hard rock (or pop) classic act with one or two essential albums followed by others so qualitatively incomparable as to be forgettable. Conversely, a great many metal and punk classics earned that status on the strength of a single album. Furthermore: hard rock and pop bands undergo no fundamental evolution, nor involution: they remain kings of their own limbo; metal and punk bands (if they don't split up first) systematically undergo an evolution that (unfortunately) often translates into involution (that is, they prove incapable of writing good "soft" songs). For pop and hard rock it makes sense to speak of classic bands rather than classic albums; something to be avoided at all costs when it comes to punk and metal. Indeed, with the former it's a matter of quantity, with the latter one of quality.

History and sociology of hard rock

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, popular music was reshaped and upended almost exclusively by the Black population of the American South: rhythm and blues was born around the mid-1940s in California, out of the influence of jazz (which had emerged at the start of the century) and gospel music (popular 19th-century evangelical singing), building on the harmonic structures of the blues (a form of folk song marked by slow rhythm and melancholy subject matter, born between the late 19th and early 20th century). This kind of popular music spread rapidly across the United States, remaining by definition "Black music," until it was itself translated by Black artists for white use and consumption: hence American rock'n'roll of the Fifties.

In England in the Fifties, aside from folk and "light" song (later termed "pop," partly under the influence of Andy Warhol's artistic hermeneutics, though at the time it was simply identified with pop-ular song tout court), there was nothing. In London (jazz aside), only at the start of the Sixties — while vocal groups like the Beatles kept the masses fossilized in the half-century of European popular music just gone by (which was, in the end, little more than a more or less updated version of the traditional European song that had existed for centuries) — was the idea entertained of appropriating the revolutionary African-American musical heritage.

Rolling Stones, Animals, Kinks, Yardbirds, Them, Who: while in America, after the electric outburst of rock'n'roll, things lingered in the acoustic blues-folk of New York's Greenwich Village, where Dylan was starting to reign supreme, almost skipping over the rocking Fifties, these English acts reconnected with the American rhythm and blues of the Forties, or reinterpreted the former through the forms of the latter.

1964 is the year of the debut records of the leading English rhythm and blues bands, who offered up their own interpretations (covers) of the great African-American heritage. Since each of these seminal bands had a fairly well-defined personality, it's possible, in hindsight, to see in embryo, within their early work, some of what would later become the fully realized outcomes of rock (whose parentage, along with that of the electric guitar, America would reclaim from '67 onward). From the booming rhythm sections of Kinks and Who would spring first garage rock and then punk; on the near-free-form solos of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck (guitarists of the Yardbirds) the many guitar virtuosos of Seventies hard rock and beyond would build their style (the electric guitar, with its granite riff and accompanying solo, is the very essence of hard rock). The Rolling Stones, however, offered the strand of rhythm and blues most distinctly inspirational to hard rock (which can also be defined as the genre born from the exasperation, trivialization and vulgarization of the music, attitudes and worldview of the Rolling Stones — a claim that holds true given the very identity of Rolling Stones with rhythm and blues).

Meanwhile Cream (which Clapton had joined) had carried out the first shift from rhythm and blues toward "something else," that "something else" which would shortly come to be called hard rock: the London-based Cream established, for the first time in the history of popular music, what would become the classic three-piece lineup (guitar, bass, drums, with vocals handled by one of the three instrumentalists or by a fourth dedicated member); they extended the length of the rhythm and blues song (from 2-3 minutes to 4-5 or more); they began systematically writing their own songs; they slowed down, thinning out, the tempo of their tracks, thereby granting each individual instrument its own moment in the spotlight (the famous solo), a space in which Clapton's (radically bluesy) guitar would reign supreme; the vocals rose in pitch, reaching here and there for the high note (all of which would become hallmarks of hard rock).

In 1966, "Fresh Cream" was released in London; in America, alongside Hendrix's first singles, there was "Blonde On Blonde" by Dylan, "Freak Out" by Zappa, "The Psychedelic Sound Of" by the 13th Floor Elevators, "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, "Fifth Dimension" by the Byrds, and the self-titled debut by Buffalo Springfield. None of these albums, admittedly, could be called fundamental to hard rock, but taken together, both the English and American records formed a sediment from which, before long, hard rock would find its own shape.

As the Rolling Stones ticked off their eleventh album in four years, following Jagger's all-sex-drugs-and-rock-n'-roll posturing and the man-as-guitar equation embodied by Richards, in 1968 in Hertford, England, Ritchie Blackmore's Deep Purple made, for the first time, the leap from rhythm and blues to hard rock (with the album "Shades of Deep Purple"). In 1967 in New York, the Velvet Underground had institutionalized the form, art and content of the rock song; in Los Angeles, Jefferson Airplane had brought acid-rock to maturity; in London, Pink Floyd laid down the laws of psychedelic rock; while Hendrix pushed rhythm and blues to its most extreme technical and formal consequences (almost exclusively on the guitar side).

Hard rock takes shape as a violent, heavy, essential and coarse music. Far slower than rock n' roll, far less percussive than rhythm and blues, it gains in power what it loses in speed and obsessiveness. The guitar is, more than ever, the star instrument, and attention is diverted from it only for the singer's falsetto, which (borrowing and simplifying, while sharpening, soul and rhythm and blues devices) becomes the other pole of attraction for an audience drawn to live shows in venues far bigger than the traditional club; then, here and there, a drum or bass solo. Rhythm and blues is negated to the extent that its tempos, cadences and timbres are altered; but it survives in the persistence of that reveling, explosive fusion with everything that is so characteristic of the blues.

The themes are those of rock n' roll first, and of the Rolling Stones after: women and sex, above all. The Rolling Stones, in particular, are fundamental to that "negative" approach to music and life, "rebellious" in the most self-indulgent sense of the word, loutish, thuggish, provocative, hedonistic. Even for the genre the Rolling Stones practiced (which would never be hard rock), they were nonetheless far more elegant and compelling in performing songs whose content was, perhaps, identical to what would later become canonical for hard rock. Hard rock doesn't preach the pain of living, but living badly: because, in its view, there's more pleasure in that. The fringe of consensus for a music that preaches not self-destruction but physical pleasure and hedonism as the supreme value, fun, getting wasted, not giving a damn about anything except filling one's own belly, would prove enormous (especially among the less educated). Hard rock is a constant devotion to superficiality, to appearance, more than to the symbolic, the fanatical or the fetishistic. God, who is usually not denied, serves as guarantor of the existence of someone to whom one can be a perpetual and unwitting prodigal son.

Hard rock is the negation of thought not as such, but as culture: all you need to do is not study, not apply yourself, not work, not toil, just dance, have friends, be at the center of fashion, have sex industrially, to be all set and feel like the center of a world that would be taking things far too seriously to call cartoonish. In thirty years, hard rock will not stray from these principles; indeed, it will define itself precisely by how faithfully it upholds them. Hard rock is music for believers, believers in the good (identified with pleasure), in the duty to attain it and to trample over anything standing between us and that attainment.

Hard rock is the music that expresses the spirit of neither the adolescent nor the young man, but of the eighteen-year-old who has just gotten his car and can't wait to smash it into a wall without getting hurt, purely for the fun of it or to be on trend. Hard rock is the music of play, and it betrays itself whenever, inevitably clumsy and unconvincing, it takes itself seriously. Devoid of any content, any depth, any interpretive or problematizing capacity, confined to a piano-forte mediocrity, the antithesis of punk and metal (which indeed define themselves precisely by negating hard rock, from opposite fronts), hard rock represents (an octave higher) the culture and values of the least alternative pop: or, within the same, eminently pop, family, the male, patrilineal axis.

Hard rock is the only music that has succeeded in programmatically exalting physicality and physical performance. Muscles, sexual and sensual organs, hair: everything must be strong, big, on display. The only reason that matters is that of the boys, meant as the young and the male; if everything else (society, nature, women) doesn't match up or doesn't vindicate the boys, it must be destroyed, ignored.

Death, memory, politics, work, friendship, drugs: all themes that get touched on (invariably orbiting the pivot represented by sex), but in the most naive, superficial and skin-deep way possible: as trinkets or a diversion between one orgasm and the next; as more or less tedious professors who have to be there to take in everything that doesn't fall within the sights of the rocker, oxymoronically both myth and celebrity unto himself.

Too often hard rock (like rock in general) has been defined more by what it isn't than by what it is: that is, by saying more what it is not rather than what it is; if a track can't be considered punk, metal, progressive, or any other rock subgenre, then it's hard rock. In this way, the tensest and most violent songs by countless musicians have ended up being read as hard rock: hence a hard-rock Neil Young, a hard-rock Bruce Springsteen, a hard-rock Frank Zappa, a hard-rock Patti Smith, and so on. On the opposite front, when a metal or punk band drops to more middling or less extreme sounds, it gets filed back under hard rock, a term used for Motorhead, Manowar, Cheap Trick and many others. Without wanting to get into the specifics of each case, it's clear that, given how the term hard rock has been defined here, such examples are neither pertinent nor formally traceable back to pure hard rock, understood as a style of music and life fundamentally embodied by groups of young rebels smitten with the myth of sex and of their own trendy style, with long hair and outlandish clothes, often leather and generally coarse. Four- or five-piece bands (often with the addition of a keyboardist), where guitarist and singer engage in a constant simulation (complete with vocal moans and guitar slides) of sexual excitement.

For a sizable portion of the world's under-40 population, finding support for the idea that the female sex organ is the center of the universe, and that the ultimate aspiration and fulfillment is obtaining it, framed by sports cars and parties of every kind, has proven to be a magnetic and reassuring existential outlet. In this, the mirage of luxury and money, all the more childish the more it clashes with often shabby clothes and looks, makes clear how a religion promising paradise through mere material satisfaction can command a following perhaps unmatched by any other. What's more, shrewdly, and perhaps even somewhat consciously, the hard rocker never lets slip the programmatically poignant, reflective moment, the moment meant to seem serious and profound when, more often than not, it comes off as mawkish and meaningless: the love ballad. Millions of hard-rock records will be bought for their ballads (and almost every famous hard-rock band will become famous because of them), sometimes with an almost total disregard for everything else.

In the same year as Deep Purple's debut (that famous '68, which hard rock certainly did not soundtrack), in England one of the former guitarists of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, gave birth (carrying forward and pushing to a harder extreme the discourse already begun with his previous band) to the album "Truth", fundamental (above all as a technical school, as well as one of riffs, i.e. composition) for all the hard-rock guitarists to come. At the same time, in California, in San Francisco, Blue Cheer delivered the first American hard-rock album: "Vincebus Eruptum"; but they were, in America, at least for the time being, a fairly isolated case; moreover, their sound would go on to influence future garage-rock and metal more than hard rock as strictly defined.

1969 is the year of hard rock's boom (even if, in terms of mainstream popularity, one would have to wait at least until the following season) and also sees its first split: in England, Led Zeppelin, with their self-titled debut, mark out everything their subsequent path would be (fruitful, in their genre, up through their seventh album in 1976): a fusion of blues and folk charged with a hardness and roughness that, thanks to recurring drops into quiet, slow passages, comes across as all the more emphatic and pronounced. Although Plant, with his excessive, deafening, orgasmic and passionate falsetto, sets the pace for the later, more grandiloquent hard-rock voices; and although Page (who had left the Yardbirds to form Led Zeppelin, causing the former band to disband) is fundamental in teaching the blues to future hard-rock guitarists, nevertheless, precisely for this reason, Led Zeppelin would remain too tied to the Yardbirds trademark to be considered hard rock except in fits and starts.

Deep Purple, rather, invented hard rock in that they broke free a priori from blues idioms, and with Blackmore's guitar they offered the first example of hard-rock guitar playing (far from Clapton, Page and Beck, even while occasionally borrowing devices from all three): rough, powerful riffs, coarse, sharply defined, granite-solid: the very opposite of the smoothness (even at high volumes, as with Page) and liquid effect of rhythm and blues. Not lionizing Led Zeppelin, as is regularly and unconditionally done, doesn't mean being against them; in the context of a history of hard rock, it simply and objectively means that the band in question was not as fundamental to the genre as others (see Deep Purple); regardless of the quality of the songs, whoever admires Led Zeppelin must be aware that they are appreciating folk-blues more than hard rock, because that (albeit in a more or less frenzied way) is what Led Zeppelin did; precisely what Deep Purple (thereby paving the way for the revolutionary metal upheaval) tried not to do, or to move beyond, through the exacerbation of the power and simplicity of riffs and chords, through the violence of sound pushed to the point of noise for its own sake.

That same year, 1969, America tried to make up for lost time. Santana, with their self-titled debut (and their self-titled guitar hero), presented themselves (despite hailing from San Francisco) as the bards of an idealized Latin America, in tones far too sensuous and self-satisfied, yet original in their own way, being pretty much the only ones to address the languid, decadent atmospheres of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies within hard rock (much as Sepultura would do, twenty years later, within metal). Over thirty years of career, Santana (later simply Santana), after their immediate early success (their second and most famous album, 1970's "Abraxas", contains their biggest hits), would churn out an endless string of albums, swinging between dizzying highs (like the unexpected, if remote-controlled, very recent ones) and lows (like the entire 1980s), while consistently proving unable to write songs of their own, even as they showed themselves capable of magnificently interpreting songs already written by others (one above all: "Black Magic Woman", which they would carry to fame in the most sublime way).

Also in '69, MC5, from Detroit, arrived as something never seen before: too violent, too angry, too excessive. The live album "Kick Out The Jams" (featuring the psychedelic masterpiece "Starship") cements their status as a hard rock that anticipated garage and punk, and was thus a kind of heresy within the genre (no one, given also the sheer peculiarity of their performances, would follow them wholesale, even if nearly everyone would follow them on particular aspects). In the same city, Alice Cooper kicked off, with "Pretties For You", his glam saga, as melodic as it was violent and nihilistic. This was the first application of hard-rock techniques to express something other than what the genre would otherwise dictate. Hard rock becomes a means rather than an end across Cooper's countless albums (still active today, but seminal above all with his first eight releases, from 1969 to 1975). Hard rock, with a steady undercurrent of satire, cabaret and out-of-fashion irony (playing with fire, or laughing with death at its side), gives voice to the most searing and significant alienations and contradictions of the individual living in the industrial metropolis.

With the '70s, hard-rock comes of age and delivers everything it has to offer. Deep Purple, bolstered by a new singer, Ian Gillan, who would go on to set the standard for anyone wanting to work in the genre, unleash the genre's cornerstone albums ("In Rock", "Fireball", "Machine Head"), pushing, thanks to a formidable rhythm section, right up to the edges of heavy metal. Meanwhile, a whole host of other bands set about putting their own original spin on the hard-rock songbook.

In 1970 the Texan ZZ Top made their debut ("ZZ Top's First Album"), using hard-rock to broadcast to the world every perversion and oddity conceivable or imaginable in a land eaten away by desert, drought and heat. In England that same year, hard-rock on one hand starts to grow stale with genre epigones too self-absorbed for their own good, like Uriah Heep (and their self-titled debut), while on the other it undergoes an incredible renewal, perhaps the most radical it would ever experience, with Black Sabbath and their debut release - a genuine bridge between the old hard-rock world and the future of metal, as well as a bolt from the blue of perversion, negativity, satanism, misanthropy and darkness the likes of which no one had ever attempted before, and which few would manage to match with the same effectiveness afterwards. What's more, Osbourne's vocals and Iommi's "doom" guitar (built, at their best, on slowness and heaviness rather than speed and sharpness, in a process that pushes to the extreme what classic hard-rock had itself already done to rhythm and blues and rock n' roll) stand almost as the antithesis of hard-rock, even while working from within it.

Just as the legend of the Beatles–Rolling Stones clash was born, so now was the legend of the Led Zeppelin–Black Sabbath rivalry (the general public saw Deep Purple, completing the imposing English triad, as a kind of compromise between the two). In truth, just as with the former, so with the latter there was almost nothing in common between them – if anything they were defined by a mutual incompatibility as stark as good versus evil, black versus white – except for fame: like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin persisted within a world that was already artistically dead (popular song for the former, blues-folk for the latter); like the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath either interpreted or heralded great, absolute novelty (rhythm and blues for the former, metal for the latter).

Noting the peculiarity (logically deducible, though, given how easily digestible this kind of music was for the public, how relatively easy it was to make, and how it was almost always identical to itself or at best a variation on the same few themes) of the fact that few rock sub-genres have proved as long-lived as hard rock, and how, perhaps as a consequence, most hard-rock bands, especially the classic ones, have enjoyed extremely long careers, as enduring as rock itself, we arrive at 1971. In England, Budgie and U.F.O. debut with their respective self-titled albums. The former, as unsung as they are superb, will spawn a saga spanning at least five strong albums (1971-1975), full of songs that ought to be considered classics, delivering a hard rock as thunderous as garage rock and anticipating heavy metal (in effect metal plus punk) even in its more epic, fantastical dimension. The latter (technically much influenced by fellow countrymen the Yardbirds) will borrow from progressive rock – besides its aching, over-the-top melodies – an obsession with outer space and the imaginative, enigmatic, childlike stories such a setting can conjure.

As proof of the planet-wide spread of the hard-rock aesthetic, Dublin sees the debut (again in 1971) of Thin Lizzy, playing a hard folk-blues as thrilling and modern (the lesson of Hendrix looms large above all) as it is tied to the most remote, deeply felt roots of their homeland (witness their rearrangement of the gorgeous, bohemian traditional tune that would make them famous: "Whiskey in the Jar"). Together with Van Morrison, they stand as the music's first flag-bearers.

In 1972 in America, Ronnie James Dio's prodigy-fronted Elf and Blue Oyster Cult – the former rather mediocrely, the latter with an excellence that will let them turn out masterpieces all the way to 1988 – pick up from the restless fantasies of U.F.O. and Alice Cooper for an original take on hard-rock conventions. Blue Oyster Cult, in particular, bring a dark, occult gloom previously heard only in Black Sabbath, marrying it to disorienting, metaphysical arrangements (thanks above all to the keyboards), in a constant evocation of the dream-versus-reality conflict, in that no-man's-land that is the unconscious – a collective, even "social" unconscious rather than a merely individual one, born of the underbelly of the modern metropolis.

Also in 1972, Germany's Scorpions (of the two guitarist Shenker brothers, Michael would also serve time in U.F.O.) emerge as continental Europe's first hard-rock band, helping the genre spread far and wide (over their very long history they will alternate extreme performances bordering on heavy metal with almost entirely acoustic or outright pop ones – the kind, from "Still Loving You" to "Wind of Change", that the whole world knows).

1973 brings two of the most celebrated hard-rock outfits of all time into the world: one American, one English; one orthodox to the point of self-contradiction, the other happy to lose itself in the most disparate genres; one influenced by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, the other by glam and progressive rock; one raw and primitive, the other programmatically symphonic; one a perpetual live act, the other almost perpetually studio-bound: Aerosmith and Queen, whose strengths and limitations are essentially those of hard rock as a whole. It's not that Aerosmith and Queen made unoriginal, naive music, often bloated and self-indulgent, at times cheap and too blatantly commercial: the point is that this is exactly what hard rock is ("It's only rock 'n' roll," as the Rolling Stones would say).

In 1974 in England it's the turn of Judas Priest, who with "Rocka Rolla", before becoming (in 1976) among the few true founders of '80s metal, revisit the most textbook hard-rock conventions (nonetheless proving that metal is more a negation or overcoming of hard rock than its natural continuation), and of Bad Company (fronted by the singer of the blues-revival band par excellence, Free), who, caught between Cream's blues and the Yardbirds' guitar-heroics, deliver one of the most quintessentially "English" hard-rock sounds around.

In America (from New York), Kiss, picking up right where Alice Cooper left off, amplify his playful, glam side on the one hand while toning down his more intrinsically tragic, damned side on the other: between 1974 and 1978 (10 albums in 5 years) they will churn out classic after classic (from "I Was Made for Lovin' You" onward), embodying a proud rock 'n' roll spirit (and sound), amplified by pyrotechnic live shows that made them masters of arena rock. Kiss share the hedonism, exuberance, rawness, ignorance and excess of Aerosmith, adding a bitter aftertaste, a flair for the fantastical and the diabolical (in short, a touch of Black Sabbath) unknown to the former. The masks and costume-like looks they wear (alongside Alice Cooper, among the few to do so) conceal a tragic irony.

Canada's Rush carve out a place of their own (geographically too) in hard-rock history from 1974 onward (the year of their debut): drawing on U.F.O. and Blue Oyster Cult, they fuse hard rock and progressive rock, conjuring ethereal, cosmic, apocalyptic atmospheres – always, though, with a class alien to run-of-the-mill hard rock. On occasion (as on 1976's masterpiece "2112") they reach a sonic power that rightfully makes them the forefathers of a certain strand – the "progressive" one, precisely – of heavy metal. With a three-piece line-up as singular as it is rare in the hard-rock landscape, the members of Rush boast a conservatory-level, classical technical grounding; in particular, the singer's voice sounds almost childlike, yet is capable of reaching the vocal heights of Plant or Gillan.

By the mid-'70s hard rock begins to strain at the seams, closing in on itself in a way that – had the metal revolution not intervened – risked strangling it through sheer sterility. Yet in that very year, 1975, if not entirely solving the crisis, two phenomena at least bring a vital wave of freshness. The first is the "guitar hero". Building essentially on the example of Jeff Beck, hyper-technical guitarists seize all the spotlight, which had normally been split with singers in proportions of fifty percent or more, launching into performances (preferably live) that bring back the free-form spirit of acid and psychedelic rock, albeit geared more toward "admiration" than orgiastic, orgasmic fusion. From Detroit, Ted Nugent, with his self-titled debut, kicks off the movement.

As if by magic – and here we arrive at the second novelty of 1975 – from Australia (proof that hard rock had truly come to cover the whole globe...) burst four very young, ragtag "rhythm and blues men". AC/DC, with "High Voltage", refound hard rock by starting again from absolute zero: from the most elemental, primitive rhythm and blues of the Animals, injecting it with powerful garage-rock or rock 'n' roll riffs, obsessively repeated in songs built on four chords and driven by the orgasmic interplay between Angus and Malcolm Young's slide guitars and Bon Scott's raw, Black-shouter voice (in the mould of James Brown). So excessively primitive, raw and minimalist were AC/DC that at first they almost seemed like a joke: over a 20-year career they would do nothing but rework the same themes (the most banal hard-rock staples, sex and drugs, albeit with a suburban-thug, nihilistic, self-destructive attitude bordering on punk – the very antithesis of hard rock) using the same tricks (a rhythm and blues dragged up from the caves). They would nonetheless become hugely famous with the public, anticipating the punk look with poses that were at once irredeemably loutish and self-satisfied, yet also childlike and thoroughly scruffy (the Young brothers would appear in shorts barely covering their thighs, jacket and tie, as if to declare, even through clothing, the coarse, ill-mannered, deliberately gleeful anti-aestheticism of their sound). Bon Scott, hard rock's first illustrious victim, died choking on his own vomit after a night of heavy drinking in 1980. Moreover, at least in the collective imagination, the sheer noise of their sound would foreshadow certain strands of metal. AC/DC, the most important band for hard rock after Deep Purple (whose stylistic forebears they effectively stand as, in an extreme pursuit of simplicity and sonic primitivism not even making use of the keyboards so heavily exploited by other bands) demonstrate what hard rock really means, and they do so by playing, essentially, primeval garage-blues. Proof that the most orthodox hard rock is a sub-genre of rhythm and blues rather than of rock itself (let no one claim, at this point, that Led Zeppelin are the most hard-rock of them all, since they frequently veer into genuine folk-blues...).

1975 also sees the release of the debut album of what was meant to be the most important hard-rock band of them all (with Dio on vocals and Blackmore on guitar): but "Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow" kicks off the saga of a band, Rainbow, that will end up disowning hard rock in favour of a very different genre that, before long (in the '80s), would take shape unambiguously and unapologetically as metal.

Hard rock's crisis, delayed but not averted in 1975, explodes the following year, even though public and critics alike read it as the genre's apotheosis. In 1976, indeed, out comes the self-titled album (after the band's namesake city) by Boston: an appalling parade of clichés, riffs heard and re-heard a thousand times, decade-old schmaltz, the silliest of ballads, the dumbest and most vapid of lyrics; all of it topped off with a commercial gloss as impressive as it is shameless. It's like hearing a version of Deep Purple made for silly, frivolous, small-minded girls; or somewhere between Queen and Aerosmith, with the worst of both. To the genre's blind zealots this summa of hard rock's most rhetorical excess may well look like a masterpiece (and in a sense it is: in the sense that nothing less artistic or original, yet nothing more slavishly indebted to the genre's history, could possibly be made); in truth, had it not been for the calculated radio-friendliness of tracks like "More Than a Feeling", this record would have been taken about as seriously – rather than snapped up by millions – as someone going around boasting about having invented the wheel. That same year, the Runaways on the more garage-heavy side and Heart on the more folk-inflected, sentimental side prove that hard rock is either a male domain or it isn't, properly speaking, hard rock at all.

In 1977, the year of punk, Steinman and Meat Loaf's (from Texas) symphonic soap opera "Bat Out of Hell" appears as a safe harbour (if a rather dull one) for everyone who hadn't taken to the punk gospel. A knowing, calculated encyclopaedia of hard rock and '50s cabaret, both in its content (the sex-obsessed, melodramatic, crude meditations of the hard rocker's life) and its forms, flaunting a naivety so blatant that it betrays, beneath an imposing orchestral architecture, an underlying decadence and melancholy, however hidden. Like all boardroom projects that, with varying degrees of honesty, are calibrated to sell the public the by-now-obvious truisms of cultural phenomena, it would go on to reach tens of millions of people.

In 1978, with the genre in crisis and Aerosmith's collapse (at least for the time being) imminent, California's Van Halen pour fresh fuel on an almost-extinguished fire: they retrace and reaffirm all the genre's well-worn truths, but do so with such sincerity and conviction that they take the whole world by storm. Once again a hyper-technical guitarist and singer, once again rhythm and blues and sex-symbol appeal, once again immediate, infectious riffs destined to become "classics" (their career-best in "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love"), once again an explicit homage to tradition (see their cover of the Kinks' distant 1964 manifesto "You Really Got Me"), once again unabashed nods to sex and drugs, once again the obligatory "romantic" moment (the hit "Jump" from "1984"). Edward Van Halen's lightning-fast guitar playing – classic in its riffs yet innovative in its execution and technique, forever measured against Hendrix – would become, in the public's eyes, the most celebrated in hard rock, alongside those of Page, Blackmore, Perry and Slash (by far the weakest of the bunch).

Along the same lines as Van Halen, but with a less sincere and more world-weary tone (and also slower, bluesier, more pompous and less fun), David Coverdale's Whitesnake (Coverdale being the former singer of Deep Purple during their post-Gillan period, from '74 to '77).

A first assessment after ten years of hard rock's existence (1968-1978) shows how, on an ideological and social level, this was a purely playful movement, set apart from any of the weighty issues concerning either the individual or society at large. Proof of this lies in the indifference hard rock will show toward punk: the truth might even be that punk, the "existential" movement par excellence, arose as a reaction to the naivety, the childishness, the epicureanism, the machismo, the bourgeois complacency of hard rock and of the average individual it represented.

Hard rock lyrics say nothing, nothing beyond the most obvious, predictable, padded-out, overused things imaginable. And this isn't necessarily because the people writing them are stupid: it's because conveying a particular, meaningful, weighty message isn't part of the genre's remit, which aims only to satisfy the sensual, voluptuous side of a person, not the inner, problematic one. While hard rock's motto is "Let's Go!", punk's (and heavy metal's) is "No!"

In 1979, the second major German band arrives with a fairly predictable brand of hard rock, but with a power and fury a cut above everyone else: Accept. Over a career built on excellent, intricate (and extremely violent) compositions, they will go on (in 1982) to invent power metal. Accept, while remaining faithful to hard rock orthodoxy, represent a fairly singular case of perfect balance between rock and metal, impact and harmony, simplicity and depth. The wider public (especially in Europe) will largely ignore them.

The dawn of the '80s marked a watershed for hard rock too. As always happens with a change of decade, amid the inevitable continuity there are shifts in taste, consumption and ideology that claim illustrious victims, condemned to disappear or reinvent themselves, only to return later, or with the next trend, more glorious than before (then again, 1980 wasn't exactly Judgment Day; the previous three years had already brought major changes, changes that were, if anything, only belatedly registered by those who would pay the price). Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Santana and Aerosmith, in crisis for some time, officially declare bankruptcy; Alice Cooper and Queen change genre entirely: the former, moving into dark and synth-pop, will fail both commercially and artistically, while the latter, embracing dance and world music, will keep on selling, remaining artistically stuck in the same limbo-like ambiguity that has always defined them.

In theory, with the '80s and the arrival of metal, hard rock should have disappeared; yet the segments of the audience enchanted by naive, theatrical compositions structured around the binaries of soft-loud, fast-slow, electric-acoustic were, and would remain, the majority, as always happens with middle-of-the-road compromises that are neither fish nor fowl.

With metal's brand-new scale of tonalities now objectively present, hard rock (and the "sound" of every rock subgenre) would draw on it, sometimes to raise its average sound intensity, sometimes to lower it, widening the gap between soft and loud both within a single band's compositions and between more pop-oriented bands and heavier ones. A dark, artificial backdrop would then season everything, as was obligatory for the period in question, steeped in darkness down to its very roots.

In 1980, one of the least original, most mediocre and yet — or precisely because of this — most celebrated and hugely wealthy hard rock bands makes its debut in England (with "On Through The Night"): Def Leppard. Over the years, amid tear-jerking ballads and aching guitar solos, with retro, congested-sounding vocals, they will rack up tens of millions of copies sold, cementing (as if it were even needed) the figure of the hard rocker (the hyper-endowed macho man, fashionable precisely because unfashionable, ostentatiously damned, and as thoroughly uncultured and ignorant as he is, to the common man, a poet and an artist) already worn thin in the previous decade by Aerosmith and Van Halen. In fairness, it must be said that Def Leppard added a fresh "Eighties dimension" to this template and reaffirmed it with a sincerity of intent and conviction that puts them in the same company as the American "masters" just mentioned. This could also be seen as an extreme flaw: not only were these guys doing, saying, thinking, believing the same things that had been rehashed since time immemorial, they were doing so with the naivety and sincerity of the very first time. Then again, it could be that hard rock expresses a truth so universal (that of the worker-convict, the rough-hewn romantic, the epicurean junkie) that, in reasserting itself over and over, it does nothing more than affirm life itself. Def Leppard aside, England would remain barren of hard rockers for the whole of the '80s.

That same year, 1980, England's Girlschool (with "Demolition") retrace the glories of The Runaways, while in New York the Plasmatics, fronted by punk-witch and the one true metal woman, Wendy Williams, earn a place apart in history for a metal-garage sound steeped in punk's existentialist, nihilist, unyielding spirit. Plasmatics deny hard rock, bitterly mocking it, from within the genre itself.

In 1981 (with "Too Fast For Love"), Los Angeles's Motley Crue rewrite the genre's rulebook. They embody and interpret every stylistic trope and sound of hard rock, but do so with a decidedly extreme approach (both soft and loud) and a negative, punk-inflected edge alien to the genre. In England (which would never shake off the blues) this would have been impossible. For the first time, the songs are explicitly offensive toward everything and everyone, no longer merely macho, but misogynistic and misanthropic. They're performed, essentially, by four depraved, unmanageable pin-up boys who make a career out of provocation and outrage: they are also, it should be said, excellent musicians and songwriters; at least until 1989 they will churn out track after track as violent as they are viscerally catchy. This is hard rock in its purest form, Motley Crue's music: simple, with no pretensions beyond fun and escapism, with no purpose in life beyond sex, booze and reckless living — but for once it's music made without mawkish sentiment (certain ballads notwithstanding), never boring, without immediate precedent, and leaving the blues behind: it's (real) rock 'n' roll. They will sell (especially in America) millions of records.

In 1982, New York's Twisted Sister are baptized (with "Under The Blade"), somewhere between glam, metal and hard rock. Among the most original (and entertaining) acts in the genre — by turns self-mocking, desperate, channeling Black Sabbath, or channeling Jerry Lee Lewis — they will deliver their masterpiece, "Stay Hungry" (1984).

In 1983, Florida's Savatage (with "Sirens"), moving between speed-metal riffs and pop flourishes, kick off a long career built on a romanticism as down-to-earth as it is sincere and true to themselves, culminating in the rock opera "Streets" (1991), unmatched in the genre for its complexity, the quality of individual songs, and the catharsis, naive emotion and moral sense it conveys. W.A.S.P. (fronted by the former New York Dolls drummer, now on bass and vocals, Blackie Lawless), on the other hand, following in the footsteps of Motley Crue and Plasmatics, push pessimism, nihilism and sadism to the point of negating the genre altogether: their debut single is titled "Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)". To grasp the impact of this band, consider that Marilyn Manson is one of their ideal descendants.

1984 sees the rise of Bon Jovi, New Jersey's standard-bearer for the most adolescent, romantic, sensual and female-friendly strain of hard rock: following in the footsteps of Aerosmith and (especially) Def Leppard, the band will conquer the charts with their ballads more thoroughly than many a pure pop act. What's undeniable, though, is their gift for composing very traditional, very American song forms, echoing the squared-off structures and "blue-collar" tone (as well as the "low culture") of Bruce Springsteen.

In the second half of the '80s, the hard rock front sees three phenomena emerge, each signaling the genre's demise: "alternative" (and deliberately "crossover") hard rock, represented by Faith No More (or at least some of their work), who debut in 1985, and by Jane's Addiction ("Nothing Shocking", 1988, featuring the Oedipal and simultaneously postmodern masterpiece "Ted, Just Admit It..."); "failed" hard rock, represented by kitsch bands unable, despite their best efforts, to pass as alternative — witness the unlistenable glam of Poison and the pointless funk of Extreme (while Bad English earn the dubious honor of greatest pop-metal band of all time, i.e. the worst band ever, at least within the hard rock landscape); and "last-season" hard rock, kept alive solely by the stubbornness and explosive rage of the genre's final myth and the last band able to interpret it without clumsiness or sterility: Los Angeles's Guns n' Roses (who pick up right where hard rock had left off, before punk and metal, and drag it into a post-punk, post-metal era).

In the early '90s, old mummies like Aerosmith rise from the grave (riding the wave of rejection of the "'80s sound"), offering their one and only '70s gospel to a huge new generation of fans happy to pay handsomely for it. Pearl Jam's "Ten" (1991) is a case apart, however, since before moving on to grunge (a genre some of its members had already helped invent), the band makes an album that is, quite deliberately, a flight back into the '70s (the decade dominated by hard rock), and in particular an almost continuous homage to electric-era Neil Young.

After thirty years, hard rock finally arrives in Italy as well (fruitfully, even though on a global scale rock had by this point already been dead and buried for a good while): Litfiba deliver a summation of Mediterranean hard rock on the live album "Colpo Di Coda" (1994), offering, among other things, the best (or least bad) hard-rock lyrics ever heard. A poignant, adolescent, atmospheric poetry, heavy with sounds as sun-drenched as they are powerful and immediate.

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15/02/2026