Trollheart

I think mr Dave misread your post too. I think he thought you were saying "if it has guitars in it I think it has to be rock" whereas what I read it as is "surely just because there are guitars in it doesn't make it rock?" to which the answer is of course no, it doesn't.

Many, even most pop bands use guitar, though more in a kind of backing way than pushing it to the fore as rock does. Even jazz, funk, reggae bands use them, and you wouldn't consider any of them rock, per se.

I think the fundamental problem here is that many people (not saying you're one of them) see "popular music" as being in one of two categories, pop and rock, with all the various subdivisions and genres attendant on those. But at its heart, they think a song/band/artiste is either pop or rock, and sometimes it can be hard to decide which, as the criteria are a little vague.

At its very basic level, pop music is short of course for popular music, so should any music that's liked by a large group of people be called pop? Would Led Zep thank you for calling them pop? Bon Jovi? Springsteen? Dylan? I could go on. Then you could say pop is the "lighter" form of music, where the lyrics are usually fairly bland, the music doesn't get too technical and much of it is geared towards dancing or chart success. Rock music can achieve these effects too, but it isn't generally its raison d'etre, as it seems to be with pop music.

I recently had occasion to move all my music collection from one drive to another, and subdivided it so that it would be easier to find the music I wanted at any given time. So from everything being under "Trollheart's Music Centre" and then listed by band and album, I made subdirectories for rock, pop, classical, instrumental, experimental and so on, with subfolders in each. This left me with something of a dilemma, as it was hard to decide what in my collection that wasn't obviously Rock (Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher etc) could be seen as such, and what should be classified under the pop banner.

There's also an ugly stigma that attaches to pop, sometimes deserved though not always, as if pop music is the poor relation to rock, which sometimes it is. But bands like a-ha and Chris de Burgh, Deacon Blue and Kylie, could not in fairness be called Rock and so went into the Pop folder.

But the point is that not everything that's loud, has guitars or is seen as rock is rock. I personally see rock as harder, more honest music that pretty much always has something to say. To me, it's music that moves you, makes you think, perhaps changes the way about how you think of something, and music that you keep coming back to. It's not, for me, something you play to death. With pop music, I've seen (and heard) people play one or two songs over and over, and ignore the rest of the album(s), whereas with rock I tend to, once I find something I like, look for similar or more of that music.

After all that, I don't know the Black Keys so can't comment on them specifically, but that at any rate is my take on what makes rock music (and what doesn't).

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018