“The ultimate insult (since people DO recognize that rock and roll and disco are different beasts) was enshrining disco acts in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Whatever. It doesn’t matter on the sense of scale of global events, but it is still an insult to the rock acts that are still kept out of induction.”
I do believe disco came from rock, or more specifically from funk which in turn came from rock, with salsa and probably various other hispanic forms thrown in. Here’s where it gets tricky, though. Because you can draw a pretty neat Euclidian box around rock from the mid-50s to the British invasion or a little before. It’s easy, country and western and blues or r&b played harder and faster so teens could dance to it.
But what do you do with folk, which pulled in an earlier form and mixed the rock with it?
What about what we generally refer to as “pop,” which changes from Beatles-rock to disco to hip-hop depending on the time, but often isn’t defined by anything in particular and could just as easily have been recorded by a Pat Boone or even Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, for that matter?
What about soul, which mixed r&b with gospel? Is that still rock, or something else?
What about jazz fusion, and all the jazz and blues-influenced hybrids like Pink Floyd or Steely Dan?
Heavy metal seems easy, in that it’s a simple backtrack to roots blues amped up until your ears bleed. Some of it, though, loses its danceability, and that seems to defeat the whole purpose of rock in the first place.
It’s confusing, but I’m of a mind that, okay, you can either restrict yourself to something that resembles the main line stretching from Elvis to the future, or you can accept anything that has an element of rock, even a sliver of it, so long as you don’t care what’s piled on top of it. That way, when one person’s confused at the inclusion of Sam Cooke, another Madonna or the Beastie Boys, yet another K.C. and the Sunshine Band, eventually you’ll get people scratching their brows at Slayer, if that hasn’t already happened—I honestly wouldn’t know, you can tell them all to take the good with the bad.
You’re my hero.
I would say, though, that “pop” simply means “popular” - which means it could be anything. In truth, “pop” means nothing musically.
Otherwise, there sure are alot of snobs puffing up some music as superior, often just because it’s “different” or rebellious.
You could paraphrase for this Lincoln’s wise remark that people often call progress what is nothing more than change. People often call superior what is nothing more than different.