Product Description

This history of rock music is not a history of the charts (which I consider an aberration), but a history of the great ideas introduced by rock musicians over 50 years of relentless innovation, and the history of their greatest albums (regardless of how many copies were sold). It ends up being more focused on “alternative” rock than on “mainstream” rock, simply because alternative musicians tend to be more innovative and sincere than mainstream musicians.

In a sense, rediscovering “alternative” rock and giving it its dues is also a way to restore the reputation of rock music among the more sophisticated audiences.

Today, rock music is a genre that employs sampling techniques, electronic instruments, digital/computer technology, cacophony, and ethnic sources. The roots of today’s rock music lie in the technical innovations brought about in the first half of the 20th century. Therefore, my “alternative” history of rock music begins much earlier than most books on the origins of rock‘n’roll, and covers much more territory than guitar-driven rock‘n’roll.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207804 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 566 pages

About the Author
Piero Scaruffi has been writing about music for about 30 years, including eight books in his native Italy and articles for over 20 years for over 30 magazines. He pioneered Internet-based journalism. In 1985 he created his first e-zine, distributed by e-mail over the Internet. In 1995, that mutated into his own website, www.scaruffi.com, which is now one of the largest encyclopedias of rock music available on the Internet.

Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia
The author is certainly knowledgeable and if you are looking for an encyclopedic book which mentions all bands in last 50 years you may enjoy the book. If you are looking for a story - how certain styles developed, why were they influential - then it is a painful reading. An average paragraph mentions 4-5 band names. If you know rock music well, the book may help to remind bands you have long forgotten and help to group the bands under specific music styles. But I'm not sure that you would learn much more than that from this book.

The author also comes out with strong opinions without argumentation, e.g. Elvis Presley is one of the most overestimated musicians. This may be true, but it depends what kind of influence are we talking about - music itself, music business, youth culture. Nobody can throw out a statement like this just with one sentence.

A Godsend
Really the most amazing history of rock I've ever come across. I don't really agree that this is a "listing" of all the rock musicians from 1951-2000: once I took the time to actually read it in chronological order, Scaruffi's bold, seemingly unsupported assertions about Elvis, The Beatles and others made much more sense, and I had the feeling that I really understood how rock music has evolved over the years. It can be so hard to look for all this information in other sources, and this book really layed everything out clearly.
But a warning: this is no coffee-table book - the information is presented in a no-frills, sterile way that compares to a textbook. Threre are books out there that are much more fun to read, but if you're serious about really knowing rock music, all its sub-genres and other musical styles that influenced it, this book is gold. The only down sides are its ungainly index and the density of the information... but how else does one fit so much information into one book?

i liked it
This is a book i'd recommend, whether you're a specialist (I think I am) or a novice (my sister is, and she never was into rock music before she read my copy of Scaruffi's book).
I got five shelves of books on music, and this one ranks
with the ten best. First, its comprehensive: it begins a century ago, it ends with the year 2000. That's as recent as printed books can get. That's what I wanted: not the usual "history of rock'n'roll" that starts with rock round the clock and ends with the sixties... I disagree with the reader who wrote that this book does not deal with the evolution of a style.
What it doesn't have is the "mundane" story that so many rock
historians indulge in. If you want to know what Clapton
whispered to Beck when they produced the first guitar feedback, and what they were drinking, this aint the book. But just check out the first two chapters: I had never read all this stuff about musicians who predated everything from sampling to world-music... Its also the most detailed chronicle of rap, techno and house that I have found in print (his website has a lot more, by the way).
There are two main drawbacks:
1. No index. Who was the idiot who decided that a 600-page book with thousands of names did not deserve an index of names??? I would also like an index of songs and records.
2. This should really be 2 or 3 books. If you are familiar with his website, this dude has written a lot more stuff on all the bands you can think of. The book is summarizing long bios in a few short sentences.
Still, I can't think of any book in my collection that packs so much info.
Tahnks to this book I also discovered another great book, the A bient Century (its one of the few given as biblio).