A History of Rock in 15 minutes: 348 rockstars, 84 guitarists, 64 songs, 44 drummers, 1 mashup

Today’s beautiful thing is a brilliantly-done mashup offering up a (partial) history of rock and roll music. The brainchild of Ithaca Audio, the video uses an invented (and inventive) Facebook feed to tell the story.

Of course, we could argue endlessly about the inclusion – and exclusion – of certain songs and artists, but it’s a very tidy and intriguing package as is. Here’s the filmmakers’ very thoughtful response to viewers’ comments about the songs included:

“Some people have also made some really good points about the diversity of the acts involved and raised questions about what’s been included vs what hasn’t etc. There are tons of hugely influential artists and sub-genres that we haven’t included in this and our main aim was to create a mashup that was foremost entertaining to watch, contain it to around 15mins, for it to primarily work well musically (and in the form of a Facebook feed) and have examples of the evolution of mainstream rock over the decades rather than create a kind of definitive documentary of rock. We really hope that comes across and you guys enjoy the video for what it is. It would have been great for us to start earlier on and explore more of the influence of the early pioneers before Elvis, which we picked mainly because musically it makes a great sounding intro with The Yardbirds. As you guys can probably tell, more hours than we’d like to think about now went into working out this giant musical jigsaw and getting it to work harmonically at the same time, but in hindsight we’d have loved to have tried to get some of the incredible women in rock to sit within the mix and feature a few videos rather than just noting their influence. Thanks for all the love so far and the interesting points that people are making too – it’s all great to hear.”

It’s a really stunning video, and the audio hangs together surprisingly well. You can download the audio on Ithaca Audio’s website. I suggest you first watch it a few times through (by the second viewing, I was pausing every few seconds to make sure I didn’t miss anything), then give it a time or two with just the audio. They’re very different experiences, but each really adds to the other.

Big kudos to Ithaca Audio for a difficult job masterfully and creatively accomplished!