Rock music developed as one element of a complex cultural context. Within this context, at any given time, its playing styles and stylistic forms acquire a specific significance, support meanings and values which allow it to function as a medium for the experiences of everyday life. Rock music is neither a musical reflection of reality nor mere entertainment. Together with often bizarre as well as banal everyday objects – carefully selected clothes, hairstyles, the motorbike (cultivated as an infantile symbol of masculinity), razor-sharp steel combs, pointed shoes, chains or metal-studded leather armbands – rock forms the material context of cultural leisure behaviour. It is the respective fans who, with these objects, allocate precisely defined meanings to rock, and who set in motion a dialectical relationship between musical form and cultural usage which has continually spawned new playing styles. In the words of Simon Frith: ‘The rock audience is not a passive mass, consuming records like cornflakes, but an active community, making music into a symbol of solidarity and an inspiration for action.’

Because of this it is impossible to consider rock music without placing it in its social and cultural contexts. Rock music is not the musical means of expression of youth in general, swinging from one ‘craze’ to another according to the latest fashion. It is only in the commercial reflection offered by the music industry that rock appears like this.