At which point did rock and pop become separate genres? And why?

This is a question I asked on my Facebook account recently and received a number of very intelligent responses from a wide cross-section of people. This in turn is my own opinion.

Some Beatles fans. Note home-made Beatles jumper in the middle.

One person indicated that they felt that in some respects it may have started with the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and their respective fans.  In some ways I would agree with that, but only partially.  If we look at the difference between the two bands in the early days one thing becomes clear.  The Beatles’ hits were all self-penned songs with an undeniable pop slant.  Any analysis of those songs would perhaps reveal that they reveal that they were largely influenced by the pop hits of the day; the songwriting of Carole King and Jerry Goffin, girl groups in general, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and so on.  This would seemingly put The Beatles firmly in the pop category then.

The Rolling Stones when they were still blues purists.

The Rolling Stones are another matter.  The Stones’ roots were self-consciously more rhythm and blues based since many of the bands members came from the Alexis Korner stable.  Brian Jones had even written letters to the music magazines of the day, some of which were printed, extolling the virtues of the blues and advocated that the genre should be given more coverage.  The Rolling Stones early records were largely cover versions of some blues staples and featuring very bluesy instrumentation; blues harp, slide guitar, open tunings.  However, purists of the time argued that The Rolling Stones were more of rock ‘n’ roll band, mainly because they played a lot of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers.  Neither of those artists were considered blues because their songs were primarily aimed at the dance-floor and – in the case of Chuck Berry – had lyrics that enshrined youth culture.

A further problem arises when we look at what musical academics call authenticity.  The Beatles were in many ways a far more authentic band than The Rolling Stones in those early days.  The Beatles had served an apprenticeship in a dangerous German red-light district and had honed their craft there.  By the time they returned to the UK they were a self-contained unit, functioning with almost military precision and knew the ins and outs of songwriting intimately, having played hundreds of songs for months on end to keep up with an aggressive audience’s demands.  The Rolling Stones hadn’t been playing for anything like as long before they were signed.  Furthermore, all of The Beatles hits were written by members of the band, while The Rolling Stones were initially reliant on cover-versions, which caused them to struggle for a while.  In fact, it was only at the instigation of their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, that they began writing songs at all.

The intimidating presence Ewan MacColl

So where did this issue about authenticity come from?  Did audiences really care whether artists wrote their own songs or not, or even what genre they were in.  Perhaps a minority did.  In the early sixties the UK still had a jazz scene and some young people were into ‘trad’ and others preferred the more up to date, sharper dressed ‘modern’ jazz.  That is what the original ‘mods’ were; fans of modern jazz, and even in the early sixties, the jazz genre had a lot of snobs in it, who would argue about which artist was ‘authentic’ jazz and who wasn’t.  There were people arguing that 1962 hit ‘Take Five’ by The Dave Brubeck Quartet wasn’t proper jazz because it was played in the wrong time-signature (5/8).

There were other snobs among the music-buying public too; those who listened to or even played folk.  The ultimate folk snob was the late, great Ewan MacColl, who reportedly ran folk clubs with an iron hand and forbade folk singers to sing a song from a culture other than their own, and even banned acoustic guitars .  The latter may have taken place because of the influence of Bob Dylan, who MacColl distrusted and felt had taken folk music in the wrong direction.

A young and already iconic Bob Dylan.

The Yardbirds featuring the melancholic Eric Clapton on lead guitar.

Bob Dylan began his recording career as a folk artist, of course. He was one of most influential figures in popular music industry and in the mid-60s his songwriting was at its most popular.  Both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were caught up in his spell and one only has to listen to their records of 1965/66 to hear evidence of it (John Lennon was showing signs of a Dylan influence as early as 1964).  It was Dylan who proved that lyrics could be used to convey something important rather than just throwaway clichés about teen-romance.  Of course, Dylan wasn’t the first person to do this – Jerry Goffin’s lyrics were never throwaway – but he was the first young, fashionable person of any prominence to do so and the effect it had on popular music was staggering.

Therefore, as we have seen, there were purists among blues fans, the folk community and those following jazz.  An example of a purist working in the 1960s popular music scene was Eric Clapton.  In 1965, Clapton decided that to leave The Yardbirds after recording their breakthrough single ‘For Your Love’ (a surefire hit composed by Graham Gouldman).  His reason leaving was that he felt that the band had moved too far away from their blues-based material.  He then joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were totally immersed in electric blues and he took part in recording arguably their best album, before leaving to form Cream – the first super-group.

Personally, I’m not a fan of Clapton, but he was perhaps the first pop musician to be afforded ‘god-like’ status for his prowess on the guitar and for what was considered to be his musical integrity.  He was considered to be a serious artist because he had forgone the hit-making Yardbirds to join a serious blues band at the height of his talent.

The music press of the early to mid-sixties was far different to what it became.  Music magazines were strictly for fans, there was little or no real serious criticism in them, just news about pop-stars.  In fact, it was quite common for some of them to just print the lyrics of chart-topping singles, to enable teenagers to sing along with the radio.  The heavyweight music magazines didn’t come along until serious ‘rock-bands’ arrived.  Remember, this was a time when bands were more commonly described as ‘groups’.

It was people like Clapton and Dylan who began to change this.  Both demanded to be taken seriously.  It was impossible to write about a record like ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in the same way that you’d approach ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.  This doesn’t mean one is necessarily better than the other – each has its own merits – but Dylan’s lyrics were complicated and almost invited analysis, and writers wanted to do precisely that.

This is the point where pop and rock divide, I think.  However, on the face of it The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ is unashamedly a pop song, but it is just as authentic as the Dylan song.  The Beatles were a self-contained band performing just as original material, whereas Dylan’s had only been put together to record.  However, the Dylan record has certainly been afforded more value than The Beatles’.  One is considered art, whereas the other is merely ‘popular’.

There is another interesting component to all of this.  It was male rock critics who decided what the distinctions between rock and pop were.  One of the most noticeable things about The Beatles’ career is the way critics talk about ‘early Beatles’ and ‘late Beatles’ almost as if they are different entities entirely; the former being ‘a group’ and the latter being ‘a band’ (that is, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club ‘Band’).  The early Beatles – the clean cut ‘pretty’ version – are forever associated with screaming female fans, whilst the latter, drug-taking bearded version are preferred by chin-stroking male intellectuals.

As mentioned earlier The Beatles’ early hits were very influenced by the music of girl groups.  Those early Beatles hits will be forever in the rock music canon, whereas only a handful of the girl groups singles that inspired them have joined them there.  This again is an example of male rock critics placing more value on one than the other.  Rock is a very masculine construct, which is afforded far more importance than ‘pop’, which male rock writers associate with female listeners.  The facts are far more complex than that, however, but that seems to be how rock history has been written.