Hard rock (or heavy rock) is a loosely defined subgenre of rock music which has its earliest roots in mid-1960s garage rock, blues rock and psychedelic rock. It is typified by a heavy use of distorted electric guitars, bass guitar, drums, and often accompanied with pianos and keyboards.
Hard rock developed into a major form of popular music in the 1970s, with bands such as Led Zeppelin, The Who, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Van Halen, and reached a commercial peak in the mid to late 1980s. The glam metal of bands like Bon Jovi and Def Leppard and the rawer sounds of Guns N' Roses followed up with great success in the later part of that decade, before losing popularity with the commercial success of grunge and later Britpop in the 1990s. Despite this, many post-grunge bands adopted a hard rock sound and in the 2000s there came a renewed interest in established bands, attempts at a revival, and new hard rock bands that emerged from the garage rock and post-punk revival scenes.
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Famous quotes containing the words hard and/or rock:
“I was not long since in a company where I wot not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?”
—Michel de Montaigne (15331592)
“Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 14661536)