This changed in the 1960s, particularly with the global explosion of the Beatles and the decade-long commercial dynasty of Detroit’s Motown Records, both of which rewrote the entire entertainment industry’s conception of what rock ’n’ roll could be. If the artists who made rock ’n’ roll in these early years were usually deadly serious about it, many of the people tasked with selling it saw it as disposable, a passing fad. The variety was staggering, even in the early years: for instance, the musical differences between records as individually magnificent as Link Wray’s “ Rumble,” Jackie Wilson’s “ Lonely Teardrops,” and the Skyliners’ “ Since I Don’t Have You” are enormous, but in 1958 all three would have been classified as “rock ’n’ roll.” Young people bought rock ’n’ roll, the logic went therefore, rock ’n’ roll was anything young people bought, or anything anyone wanted young people to buy. But more practically, for most of the 1950s and into the 1960s, “rock ’n’ roll” described pretty much any music that DJs like Freed and their record-industry counterparts wanted it to. (Disgraced by vindictive payola charges in the early 1960s, Freed drank himself to death at age 43.) In the broadest sense, the term usually described music popular among teenaged Americans that derived from traditions long thought to be anathema to a “respectable” white American middle class. The phrase “rock ’n’ roll” was popularized by Alan Freed, the pioneering radio disc jockey who became internationally famous for spinning R&B, blues and country records for huge audiences of American teenagers and had his life ruined for his service. There’s no real agreement on the music’s birthdate: from a musicological standpoint, the closest thing to a consensus is probably Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats’ 1951 smash, “Rocket 88.” But in 1951, no one would have called it rock ’n’ roll, despite its distorted guitar, souped-up backbeat and pounding piano part, all of the things that – along with the crucial fact that an unusual number of young white people are believed to have bought it – have retroactively inspired its Big Bang designation. Unlike, say, hip-hop, a music that spent much of the 1970s as a fiercely localized subculture before first brushing up against the commercial mainstream at the very end of that decade, rock ’n’ roll was always inseparable from its potentials as big business. “Rock ’n’ roll” as most people currently understand it – a music born in the 1950s that flourished in the 1960s and for a time was nearly synonymous with American youth culture – really began as a marketing shorthand. (Unless this strikes you as a direct precursor to Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis.) Rock ’n’ roll, in particular, has meant a lot of different things at a lot of different times to a lot of different people, and even the phrase itself well predates the vast range of sounds it would come to describe.

Every musical genre consists of a set of beliefs about music itself, but also about the people who make and listen to that music, about the experiences it’s imagined to connote and the functions it’s imagined to serve. Musical genres are, by nature, deceptively complex things they are as much ideological categories as sonic ones. One of the only things anyone can say for sure about “rock ’n’ roll” is that no one’s ever known exactly what it is.

Songs that have the words rock and roll