Space rock is a subgenre of rock music; the term originally referred to a group of early, mostly British, 1970s progressive and psychedelic rock bands such as Hawkwind and Pink Floyd, characterised by slow, lengthy instrumental passages dominated by electronic organs, synthesizers, experimental guitar work and science fiction or astronomical lyrical themes, though it was later repurposed to refer to a series of late 1980s British alternative rock bands that drew from earlier influences to create a more ambient but still melodic form of pop music. The term was revived in the 21st century to refer to a new crop of bands including The Flowers of Hell, Comets on Fire, and Flotation Toy Warning who diversely draw upon the ideas and sounds of both waves of the genre's founders.
Famous quotes containing the words space and/or rock:
“Here were poor streets where faded gentility essayed with scanty space and shipwrecked means to make its last feeble stand, but tax-gatherer and creditor came there as elsewhere, and the poverty that yet faintly struggled was hardly less squalid and manifest than that which had long ago submitted and given up the game.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)