The values of Rock Music based on it's listeners views: the cases of Iranian and Turkish Audiences perspective

The term Rock refers to a particular category of pop music. Since the late 1960's, rock music has raised important social, cultural and artistic discussions. Rock music influenced several generations through its rather short life. Several music genres emerged from this music while it carried on its own life up until now. Huge number of audiences of rock music turned this music as one of the significant popular music of 20th century. Massive attraction of people from nearly all cultural background around the world put this music in the centre of attention of several scholars in various disciplines from musicologists to sociologists. Rock can be defined by three dimensions. Sociologically, it is a commercially-produced popular music aimed at an exclusionary youth audience of a type characterized by the late-capitalist societies. Musically, it tends to be highly amplified, with a strong beat and rhythmic patterns, and to draw heavily on proto-folk musical sources from Southern USA. Ideologically, it is associated with an aesthetic program of ‘authenticity’, developing elements from discourses around folk-revival and art music (Middleton 2001: XXI).
In Iran, in spite of having enormous audiences of this music, there are very little studies on rock music due to various cultural, political and other issues. This paper is an effort to analysis audience's attitude and valuation, mostly Iranian and Turkish listeners, toward rock music.
Since there is currently no formal event of rock music in Iran we paid attention to one of the neighboring countries where usually is a destination of Iranian rock lovers. To visit Turkey, Iranians need no visa and therefore has become the first destination of part of Iranians to enjoy rock music. For this reason, we focused to the three-day Istanbul Sonisphere Festival in June 2010.
The needed data has been collected from 300 people who participated in the mentioned Festival. The first part of the questionnaire was devoted to personal and general questions in which data analysis reveals: the background and familiarity with rock music, the age of listeners when first were influenced by this music, the ability to play musical instruments, the average amount of time spent on reading books, magazines and internet articles on rock, and finally the level of tolerance for other musical genres. In the second part of the questionnaire the attitude of listener toward the importance of three issues of music, lyric and album’s cover design were asked. Total data analysis manifested: 1) "Music" as the most important element among the three issues, 2) "Thrash Metal" as the most likeable genre among the thirteen important musical genres and 3) "Freedom" as the most attractive aspect in the 22 issues related to rock music. The findings also revealed other issues toward the rock music such as the level of audience's ability to communicate with "music", "genrelogy", and "semantic appropriation". Moreover, studying the audiences of rock music here showed how dynamically listeners get involve with rock’s lyrical, pictorial and musical structures.