Rockpedia

Every place

• United States

  46 genres

  Rock's first home and still its largest single claim: forty-six of the genres here begin in the United States, from rock and roll in 1954 to the emo revival in 2010. It is also the place this map can say least about. A country is not a point, so the ring sits on the geographic centre while the music came from Memphis, Detroit, the Bay Area and a hundred towns in between.

  Alternative rockAlt-country / AmericanaAlternative metalArena rock / AORAvant-garde metalBlackgaze / post-black +40

• United Kingdom

  39 genres , 1 scene

  Britain took American blues and sent it back louder, then kept going: hard rock and progressive rock at the end of the sixties, heavy metal out of Birmingham in 1970, punk and post-punk across the late seventies, shoegaze and Britpop after that. Thirty-nine genres start here, the only figure on this map within reach of the United States. For a country the size of Oregon, the density is the whole story.

  NWOBHM Alternative rockAnarcho-punkArt rockBritpopCrust punkD-beat +33

• New York

  10 genres , 1 scene

  New York's contribution is refusal. Art rock and proto-punk in the mid-sixties argued that a rock band did not have to play well, punk made the same argument again at CBGB in 1974, and no wave dismantled what was left of it by 1978. The city then produced both hardcore's most disciplined form, in youth crew, and its most commercial, in rap rock.

  CBGB, New York Art rockBeatdown / metallic hardcoreGarage rock revivalNo wavePost-punk revivalProto-punk +4

• California

  10 genres

  Two very different Californias sit inside one ring. The coast gave rock surf guitar in 1961 and country rock at the end of that decade; the suburbs and the inland valleys gave it hardcore punk in 1980, thrash in 1983 and nu metal in 1994. Four of the loudest turns the music ever took, all within thirty years and about four hundred miles.

  Country rockDesert rockFunk rockHardcore punkNu metalPowerviolence +4

• Sweden

  9 genres

  Sweden is metal's second country, and it arrived twice. Bathory's first records in the early eighties are where black metal starts; Stockholm's death metal studios defined the genre's other half by the end of the decade. Nine genres begin here, and the corpus holds twenty-two Swedish bands - Candlemass, Entombed, At the Gates, Meshuggah - each of which founded something.

  Black metalD-beatDeath metalDeath 'n' rollDjentDSBM +3

• Norway

  6 genres , 1 scene

  Norway's second wave is the most concentrated event in this corpus. Between 1991 and 1994 a record shop in Oslo called Helvete held most of the people who defined black metal, and the genre still carries their decisions about how it should sound. What came after is less notorious and more interesting: gothic metal, avant-garde metal and black 'n' roll all start here too.

  Helvete, Oslo Avant-garde metalBlack metalBlack 'n' rollGothic metalSecond waveSymphonic black metal

• Canada

  6 genres

  Canada's line runs from garage rock in 1963 to the two things it is best known for: technical extremity and vast, patient noise. Voivod and Cryptopsy pushed thrash and death metal past what those genres were thought to hold, while Godspeed You! Black Emperor went the other way entirely and post-rock followed them.

  Garage rockPost-grungePost-rockTechnical death metalTechnical thrashWar metal / bestial

• Germany

  6 genres

  Germany built metal's engine room. Speed metal in 1981 and the Teutonic thrash of Kreator, Sodom and Destruction gave the genre its velocity; Helloween then turned that speed melodic and invented power metal more or less on purpose. Neue Deutsche Härte took the same machinery into stadiums a decade later.

  Industrial metalNeue Deutsche HärtePower metalSpeed metalTeutonic thrashThrash metal

• London

  4 genres , 1 scene

  London is where British rock learned the blues and then unlearned it. Blues rock in 1963 and psychedelia in 1966 came out of the same small circuit of clubs, played by people who kept turning up in each other's bands. Punk arrived at the 100 Club in 1976 and spent three years telling that circuit it was finished.

  London punk Blues rockCeltic punkPsychedelic rockPunk rock

• Australia

  4 genres , 1 scene

  Australia's four genres share an isolation. AC/DC's boogie rock exported one of rock's most durable formats and has been copied ever since; the Go-Betweens' jangle pop and the country's neo-psychedelia were regional concerns for years before anyone abroad noticed. War metal, the most extreme thing on this map, was built deliberately far from everything.

  Australian metalcore Boogie rockJangle popNeo-psychedeliaWar metal / bestial

• Finland

  4 genres , 1 scene

  Finland's specialities are slowness and scale. Thergothon and Skepticism invented funeral doom in 1991 by playing doom metal at half its speed, which turned out to be a genre rather than a joke. Five years later Nightwish and Stratovarius were selling symphonic power metal by the arena - the same question about how much space a metal song can occupy, answered at the opposite end.

  Finnish metal Folk metalFuneral doomSymphonic metalSymphonic power metal

• San Francisco

  3 genres , 1 scene

  San Francisco gave rock two things it had not had. The psychedelic long-form in 1966 licensed the song that does not end after three minutes; Bay Area thrash, seventeen years later, produced the fastest and most technically demanding metal of its day. The Haight and Ruthie's Inn have nothing in common except that both were places a scene could rehearse in public.

  Bay Area thrash Acid rockBay Area thrashPsychedelic rock

• France

  4 genres

  France keeps arriving at rock sideways. Magma invented Zeuhl in 1970 and sang it in a language they made up; coldwave took post-punk somewhere colder and more synthetic in 1981. Alcest's blackgaze in 2007 crossed black metal with shoegaze, a combination that sounded like a category error right up until it became a genre.

  Blackgaze / post-blackColdwave / minimal waveDSBMZeuhl

• Washington DC

  3 genres , 1 scene

  Washington DC's hardcore is the most consequential thing a small scene has done to rock. Dischord ran the city's own label on its own terms from 1980, and hardcore punk got its discipline - and its ethics - here. When that discipline became a cage, the same people invented post-hardcore and emo to get out of it.

  Washington DC hardcore EmoHardcore punkPost-hardcore

• Chicago

  3 genres

  Chicago is where rock and roll was recorded before it was named. Chuck Berry cut his first sides here in 1954, and the electric blues underneath them fed the British blues rock of 1963. Thirty years later the city's post-hardcore made a virtue of the opposite: dry, brittle, and recorded to sound like a room rather than a record.

  Blues rockPost-hardcoreRock and roll

• Florida

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Florida is where death metal became a genre with a house style. Morrisound Recording and Scott Burns produced so much of it between 1987 and 1995 that the Florida sound - clean, fast, brutally legible - became what the genre was assumed to sound like everywhere else, including in places that had never heard of Tampa.

  Tampa Death metalOld school death metal

• Los Angeles

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Los Angeles turned rock into an industry twice. Deathrock in 1979 gave American goth a vocabulary of its own rather than an imported one. Glam metal from 1981 made the Sunset Strip a labour market: hundreds of bands inside a mile, all playing to the same handful of A&R men.

  Sunset Strip DeathrockGlam metal

• Seattle

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Seattle is the clearest case on this map of a scene becoming a genre by accident. Sub Pop marketed a group of local bands as a single sound from 1988, and grunge went from regional to global inside three years. The city's other invention went the opposite way: drone metal is one chord, held.

  Seattle Drone metalGrunge

• Detroit

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Detroit's two entries are thirty-three years apart and make the same argument. The MC5 and the Stooges built proto-punk in 1967 out of volume, repetition and confrontation. The garage rock revival started here too, in 2000, stripping rock back to the same few components for the same reason.

  Detroit Garage rock revivalProto-punk

• Stockholm

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Stockholm's death metal is one of the few sounds in metal identifiable from a single chord: the buzzsaw guitar tone Sunlight Studio put on the city's records from 1989. Old school death metal means, more than anything else, this. A decade later the same city took a share of the garage rock revival.

  Stockholm death metal Garage rock revivalOld school death metal

• Japan

  3 genres

  Japan takes a genre apart and rebuilds it to different specifications. Ruins and the math rock of 1988 treated rhythm as the only subject worth having; goregrind arrived the same year at the opposite extreme. Babymetal's kawaii metal in 2010 fused idol pop with metal so completely that the argument about whether it counts is now part of the genre.

  GoregrindKawaii metalMath rock

• Birmingham, England

  2 genres , 1 scene

  Heavy metal was invented here in 1970, and the corpus treats that as a fact rather than a claim - Black Sabbath's first record is where the branch begins. Fifteen years later Napalm Death built grindcore in the same city, taking hardcore and metal to the fastest point either could reach. Both came out of an industrial city with no music industry in it.

  Birmingham GrindcoreHeavy metal

• New Jersey

  2 genres

  New Jersey specialises in hardcore's blunt end. The Misfits invented horror punk in 1979 by playing surf and doo-wop melodies at punk speed with horror-film lyrics over the top. Beatdown hardcore in 1993 kept the violence and dropped the melodies.

  Beatdown / metallic hardcoreHorror punk

• Canterbury, England

  1 genre , 1 scene

  The Canterbury scene is named after a place, which is rare, and it earned the name. Soft Machine, Caravan and the musicians who moved between them turned a small English city into a school of jazz-inflected progressive rock with a shared personnel list and a shared sense of humour.

  Canterbury Canterbury scene

• Ireland

  2 genres

  Ireland's contribution is a method - put traditional music inside a rock band without treating it as decoration. Horslips and Thin Lizzy did it with celtic rock in 1970 and Cruachan did it with metal in 1994. Every folk metal band since has used the template, whether or not it knows where it came from.

  Celtic metalCeltic rock

• Scotland

  2 genres

  Scotland shares celtic rock with Ireland and then goes its own way. Pirate metal, invented by Alestorm in 2006, is either the least serious genre on this map or proof that folk metal's premise works with any folk tradition at all, including one that is largely invented.

  Celtic rockPirate metal

• Belgium

  2 genres

  Belgium's two entries sit at opposite ends of rock's dynamic range. Coldwave in 1981 was minimal, synthetic and deliberately quiet. Agathocles' mincecore in 1990 reduced grindcore to its most basic parts and attached a political argument to every one of them.

  Coldwave / minimal waveMincecore

• West Germany

  1 genre , 1 scene

  Krautrock is the corpus's only West German entry, and the historical label matters - Can, Neu! and Faust were working in a country that no longer exists, deliberately refusing both American rock and German tradition. The motorik pulse they settled on is still audible in post-rock, electronic music and a good deal of what came after punk.

  Krautrock Krautrock

• Gothenburg, Sweden

  1 genre , 1 scene

  Gothenburg gave death metal melody. At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquillity worked out at Studio Fredman that the genre's speed and growled vocals would carry harmonised, almost traditional guitar lines underneath. Metalcore spent the following decade borrowing the result, usually without the growl.

  Gothenburg Melodic death metal

• Massachusetts

  1 genre , 1 scene

  Melodic metalcore was assembled in Massachusetts at the end of the nineties: Gothenburg's harmonised guitar lines fitted to hardcore's structure and its breakdowns. It became the dominant heavy style of the decade that followed, and by some distance the most argued about.

  Massachusetts metalcore Melodic metalcore

• American South

  2 genres

  The American South is where rock and roll's two halves were joined: rockabilly in 1954 set country phrasing over rhythm and blues and made a music neither side owned. Southern rock did it again fifteen years later at length, with two lead guitars, giving the region a music of its own rather than a share of everyone else's.

  RockabillySouthern rock

• New Orleans

  1 genre , 1 scene

  Sludge metal is New Orleans' invention: doom metal's weight, hardcore's aggression, and a Southern blues drag underneath holding it all back. It is music that sounds like a heat problem, and the scene sustained itself for the better part of two decades on an overlapping cast of a few dozen musicians.

  New Orleans Sludge metal

• Palm Desert, California

  1 genre , 1 scene

  Stoner rock was built in the desert outside Palm Springs, at generator parties with no venue, no licence and no audience except the people who drove out. Kyuss's downtuned, loose, low-slung sound came from playing to open ground with nothing to reflect off. It has been imitated indoors ever since.

  Palm Desert Stoner rock

• Italy

  2 genres

  Italy's two genres are the same instinct twenty-six years apart. Premiata Forneria Marconi's symphonic prog in 1970 put an orchestra's ambitions inside a rock band. Rhapsody's symphonic power metal in 1996 did it again with a metal band and a fantasy novel's worth of narrative attached.

  Symphonic power metalSymphonic prog

• Liverpool

  1 genre

  One genre starts in Liverpool, and it changed the shape of the industry rather than the sound of it. The Beatles and the beat groups around them made the self-contained band - writing its own songs, playing its own instruments - the standard unit of rock. Almost every act on this map has used that format since.

  Beat / British Invasion

• Poland

  1 genre

  Blackened death metal is Poland's entry, and Behemoth is most of the reason for it. The combination - death metal's weight with black metal's atmosphere and imagery - became one of extreme metal's standard forms, and one of the few to sell arena tickets in a country that had banned most of its ancestors.

  Blackened death metal

• Boston

  1 genre

  Boston is where celtic punk became an American music rather than an Irish one. The city's Irish population gave the form both its audience and its subject matter, and the result travelled - a punk band with a tin whistle is now an unremarkable thing in places with no Irish connection at all.

  Celtic punk

• Switzerland

  1 genre

  Switzerland belongs to the first wave of black metal, the early-eighties records that worked out the genre's vocabulary before it had a name or a country to call home. The same small scene produced Coroner, whose technical thrash is among the most intricate metal anyone made that decade.

  First wave

• Texas

  1 genre

  Groove metal came out of Texas in 1990: thrash slowed to half speed so the riff lands rather than blurs. It is the rare genre invented by an established band changing its own style mid-career, and almost everything heavy that reached American radio in the nineties borrowed its rhythmic vocabulary.

  Groove metal

• Athens, Georgia

  1 genre

  A university town of forty thousand produced jangle pop in 1980 and, through R.E.M., the working template for American indie rock: clean guitars, buried vocals, and a career built on college radio and touring. It is the strongest argument on this map that a scene needs a small population rather than a large one.

  Jangle pop

• Illinois

  1 genre

  Illinois holds one end of Midwest emo, the style that took hardcore's emotional register and set it to interlocking, deliberately untidy guitar lines. It is a genre of suburbs and college towns rather than of a city, which is why the corpus records the state and the map draws a ring.

  Midwest emo

• Kansas

  1 genre

  Kansas holds the other end of Midwest emo, the same suburban guitar music arriving from the opposite direction. It also holds the geographic centre of the United States, which is why the largest ring on this map is centred here - an accident of arithmetic, and the reason the caption below insists that a ring is an area rather than a point.

  Midwest emo

• Israel

  1 genre

  Oriental metal begins with Orphaned Land in 1994: metal built on Middle Eastern scales and instrumentation rather than decorated with them afterwards. The band's stated purpose, an audience shared across a regional divide, is unusual enough that it has become part of how the genre is defined.

  Oriental metal

• Memphis

  1 genre

  Memphis is where rock and roll was first recorded and sold as itself, at Sun Studio in 1954. One genre on this map starts here, which badly understates it: every branch in the tree descends from what came out of that room.

  Rock and roll

• San Diego, California

  1 genre

  Screamo started in San Diego in 1991, around Gravity Records: hardcore played faster and far more chaotically, with the vocals pushed past shouting into something that could not be sustained for a whole song. Frequently it was not, and the collapse became part of the form.

  Screamo

• Netherlands

  1 genre

  The Netherlands turned symphonic metal into an export. Within Temptation and Epica built the form around a trained soprano set against a metal band, and it became one of the very few metal styles to chart across Europe as a matter of routine rather than as an event.

  Symphonic metal

• Montreal

  0 genres , 1 scene

  Montreal is the one place on this map whose scene is defined by a building rather than a sound. Hotel2Tango is a rehearsal space and studio in the Mile End, and Constellation Records is the label that grew out of it; between them they produced records by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and most of the city’s post-rock, all of it recorded live to tape, packaged by hand, and sold without a press photograph. Arcade Fire came out of the same few streets a few years later and did the opposite with it.

  Montreal

Too vague to plot

• Global

  8 genres

  Some genres have no birthplace. These eight assembled across scenes and continents at once, usually over a network rather than in a room, and blackened death metal or cybergrind cannot honestly be pinned to a coordinate. They are listed rather than plotted, because a dot would be a guess dressed as a fact.

  Atmospheric black metalBlackened death metalCybergrindNew nu metalNWOTHMInstrumental prog metal +2

• Europe

  3 genres

  Three genres here belong to a continent rather than a country. Avant-prog, progressive power metal and cyber metal were each carried by bands working in several countries at once, and the corpus records the region rather than pretend to a city it cannot name.

  Cyber metalProgressive power metalAvant-prog / RIO

• Scandinavia

  2 genres

  Viking metal and pagan black metal belong to a region rather than a country. Bathory's turn toward Norse myth in 1990 was Swedish, the bands who followed were Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic, and the subject matter is considerably older than any of the borders involved.

  Pagan / Viking black metalViking metal

• Middle East

  1 genre

  Oriental metal is recorded twice on this map, once in Israel and once here, because the genre's sources are regional rather than national. The corpus keeps the wider entry rather than assign a music built from shared scales and shared instruments to a single country.

  Oriental metal