That’s not rock! That’s not country!
I’ve heard or read each of those statements endless times over my lifetime. One in particular stands out to me.
I was working as a DJ at a country radio station at the time. We aired a syndicated weekly show of live concerts during my shift. One week the live performance was Hank Williams Jr.
Knowing Hank Jr. liked to add elements of rock to his live shows, I suspected this might not go over well with our station’s audience.
Barely 3 songs into the show, the phone in the DJ booth started to flash for incoming calls. Sure enough, it was listeners loudly complaining “This isn’t country” and “Get this rock music off my country station!”
At first, I tried explaining “But this is Hank Williams Jr. He’s a country artist!” (his studio recordings are very country) but that didn’t matter and eventually I just stopped answering the phone until the concert was over.
The irony is, had I played that exact concert on a rock station the phones would have lit up asking why we were playing country music!
Were the country fans right saying the Hank Jr. concert was rock? Or would the hypothetical rock fans have been right that it was country?
What makes rock music “rock?”
As I ventured down this rabbit hole, I discovered simply defining rock is itself controversial, and scholars have spent hours arguing about it.
Rock Music: A type of loud popular music, developed in the 1960s, with a strong beat played on electric guitars and drums
We already have a problem. Chuck Berry’s hits in the 1950s also met that criteria. This is obviously going to take a deeper dive than the dictionary.
Allan F. Moore is Professor Emeritus in Music at Surrey University, a longtime editor of the journal Popular Music, and one of the foundational figures in treating rock as a legitimate object of musicological analysis rather than just sociology or journalism.
Moore’s book “Rock: The Primary Text” built a technical vocabulary for it: instrumental roles, rhythmic organization, the voice, melody, harmonic patterns, the “open/closed principle” (his term for how riffs and forms repeat versus resolve), and texture.
While Moore provided a fully rigorous technical vocabulary for describing rock, it doesn’t seem to have made actually identifying it any easier, even for the likes of regulatory agencies.
According to Britannica, even governments have tried and failed to define rock music.
Canada leaned on sound-based markers (electric guitar, bass, organ, “rock instruments”).
Britain tried to nail down pop by amplification and rhythm, and the whole thing collapsed into an industry fight over singles-vs-albums and teenagers-vs-adults rather than anything about the actual sound.
There’s no obvious definition of rock
In the end, the closest I can find to defining what rock is revolves around the cultural & ideological aspects – something that feels both valid and impossible to pin down.
A band can fail the “authenticity test” by being too polished or too sloppy depending on which flavor of authenticity the critic is unconsciously using. Nobody making the “that’s not rock” argument is naming which one they mean, which is exactly why the argument goes in circles.
Professor Moore’s acceptable definition of rock can be met – guitars, drums, backbeat, verse-chorus structure – and get dismissed as “not real rock” almost entirely on ideological grounds: too polished, too corporate, too radio-friendly.
Two examples. You be the judge.
Two songs. Give each one a real listen before you read on.
Song One: “Cellophane” — Return to Dust, from their self-titled debut EP (2023).
Song Two: “Bruises” — The Warning, from Everything’s Falling (2026).
Is one of these rock and the other something else? Are they both rock? Neither? Before you keep reading, decide for yourself.
People are having this exact argument about one of them right now.
The obvious choice – and what it means about rock.
My guess is “Cellophane” gave no one any pause.
Perhaps “Bruises” didn’t give you any pause either. It’s full of heavy guitar riffs, after all. At the same time, it’s also polished, hook-heavy, and danceable. If you look online for Everything’s Falling chatter, you’ll find arguments landing on both sides of the rock line.
Rock may not have a real definition outside of academia. I base it on subjective things like guitar tone, drumming style, and the grit in a singer’s voice. Strip a song down to just those three things and Ariana Grande’s “Hate That I Made You Love Me” fails instantly. “Cellophane” passes just as fast.
“Bruises” passes the test for me as well.
It’s polished, hook-heavy, and danceable in a way “Cellophane” never even attempts to be. It’s also loaded with the same backbeats, riffs, and drum fills that make “Cellophane” an easy yes.
I don’t have a cleaner answer than academics or dictionaries do.
I’ve mentally outlined for myself a foundation that defines rock. If a song has no guitar distortion, no drum-kit grit, no vocal rasp, it doesn’t pass my test. Adding to that foundation doesn’t mean it’s not rock, subtracting from it does.
For you, maybe it’s more ideological than just song structure. Some lean more on the “authenticity” I discussed earlier.
If I asked you what kind of concert the man in the image at the top of this page is at, everyone would guess rock.
I think we can all agree something makes rock “rock.” After all it’s not just a genre, it’s an attitude: “They rock!”
Getting everyone to agree on what that something is may never happen.
Was Hank Jr. rock or not?
We began with my story of callers lighting up a phone line over what they perceived was a rock concert on a country station. I can’t say they were wrong.
What caused me to suspect it may not go over well with the station’s audience? I recognized that foundation without even thinking about it.
What I’ve landed on while researching this article: there isn’t an agreed upon definition for rock. It may be different for you than it is for me.
That’s worth being honest about. Not something to fix, just something to notice. Call songs like “Bruises” whatever you want. It still sounds the same either way.
That doesn’t mean nothing’s there, though.
When I think back to those callers lighting up the phone lines over Hank Jr., I think they were reacting to something real and just couldn’t say exactly what. Rock has edges. You can hear them.
Just don’t ask anyone to hand you the whole map.
