Rock music emerged during the mid-1950s to become the major popular musical form of young audiences in the United States and Western Europe. Its stylistic scope is too broad to be encompassed by any single definition; the only feature common to all rock music is a heavy emphasis on the beat. Rock 'n' Roll, 1950-62 The primary source of rock 'n' roll was rhythm and blues, an idiom popular among black audiences that combined …showed first 75 words of 1400 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1400 total… almost solely for listening, not for dancing. The inevitable reaction was disco music, a music first and foremost for dancing. With its thumping regularity of accented beats divided into minibeats, disco was decried by hard-line rock fans as mechanical, commercial, and unlyrical. Nevertheless, its following increased and, after the Bee Gees composed and recorded their disco-beat soundtrack for the film Saturday Night Fever (1977), disco became for a while a major sector of rock music.