Epic Rocking is the phenomenon where bands release really long songs that either seem to twist and change gears a million times before ending, or just manage to sustain themselves for their prolonged duration. More common in the '60s psychedelic/acid rock era and in the '70s Progressive Rock period. Also quite common in many forms of Electronic Music, particularly in the realm of Ambient, Trance, and Techno, as well as most forms of Heavy Metal music (seriously, in the metal genre — apart from thrash, groove, and grindcore — long tracks are easily more the rule than the exception).
This trope is the polar opposite of Three Chords and the Truth: Instead of a short song with lyrics and catchy beat that anybody can play, these bands focus on deliberately complex songs where playing is a matter of superior technical skill and everything else is secondary to the instrumental showmanship and considerations of the sound itself, even lyrics. note Lyrics can appear in these songs, but they're often sparse and the song is mostly instrumental. When there are lyrics, expect an Epic Instrumental Opener to precede them and Big Rock Ending to succeed them. Songs featuring this trope also often feature Uncommon Time, since changing time signatures helps maintain the listener's attention in a longer composition, and modulation (which is the same thing, but for key signatures).
Done right, they maintain the listener's attention and sound really cool, sometimes downright awesome. Done poorly, they just ramble, cause yawning, and suffer chronic Ending Fatigue. Because of this, bands often have a hard time thinking about where to place the longest song(s) when it comes to the final album order before the release goes gold; the usual place for the longest song is usually the last track in the album, before an outro (if there is one) and the hidden tracks.
Put Epic Rocking in a Rhythm Game and you have an instant Marathon Level.
When vocals/lyrics make only a small fraction of the song's duration, it then doubles as Limited Lyrics Song. Only studio versions are included since live examples would bloat the list to hell. Many of those songs have a Subdued Section for everyone's sake.
Contrast Miniscule Rocking.
And for clarity's sake: This is a trope about long songs. Not about awesome songs. Please don't add a short song here because it's awesome (we have Awesome Music for that) or delete a long one because it's not awesome. The trope doesn't apply to compositions either, as any work involving an orchestra can be expected to last from ten minutes up to several hours with very little "rocking," although it certainly may be epic. Also, this trope only applies to songs 6 minutes or more, anything less is too short to qualify.
Example sub-pages:
Other examples:
- Bob's Burgers: In "Ears-y Rider", a biker gang holds a wake for their former leader, Horny Dave, at the mortuary next door to the restaurant. The song they play for him is at least 21 minutes long.
Mort: This memorial jam has been going on for 21 minutes. I just wonder if I should fade it out.Biker: This was Horny Dave's favorite jam. Keep it cranked.Mort (nervously): Horny Dave's favorite jam? This is my favorite jam. Keep it cranked, Eddie!
- In the Broad City episode "Fattest Asses," Abbi and Ilana go to a party whose music includes a church bell techno song that lasts at least 27 minutes.
- "We're Still Rockin'" by Da Yoopers is a rare straight example from a comedic group. The song is 5:57, starting with a slow tempo and building to a frenetic B-section before resuming its original tempo.
- The first verse of My Party Now
by the Irish comedy band Dead Cat Bounce involves a guy finding a guitar and hijacking a party to perform for them. As part of what the attendants are subject to:
- Parodied in a season one episode of Flight of the Conchords, when Bret writes a love song for his girlfriend, Coco, and asks Jemaine to critique it. When he sings it for Jemaine, the camera keeps cutting to moments that clearly happened several minutes later as Jemaine moved around the apartment until a final cut when Bret finished singing. Jemaine's first complaint is the two-hour length of the song. Parodied again in a season two episode when the duo is commissioned to write a jingle for a 30-second toothpaste commercial, but wind up turning in an eighteen-minute ballad.
- While not itself an example, the song "Where It's At" in the Bend-Aid episode of Futurama becomes this accidentally when Beck sings it. The song starts normally enough, and there's a slight fade indicated a time jump after the characters are done talking, and then Beck comes on.
Beck: Wooo. Normally that song doesn't go for three hours, but I got kind of into it. And then I forgot how it ended.
- Parodied in this article by The Hard Times: "Metal Song Not Even Close To Being Over". A punk accidentally wanders into a metal show and is overwhelmed by their 12+ minute songs. The same article ends with a punchline about how all Hardcore Punk songs are <90 seconds.
- Parodied in the Homestar Runner CD Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits with "Moving Very Slowly", a metal song with a very long outro which fades out, then fades back in and finishes.
- "The most unwanted song" by "Komar & Melamid and Dave Soldier". Its length supposedly contributes to its unwantedness.
- Jello Biafra/Ministry side project Lard have "70's Rock Must Die", which lyrically is a rant against '70s nostalgia, and musically is 7 minutes of parodying 70's hard rock tropes (gratuitous cowbell, endless guitar soloing, a Power Ballad style bridge, vocal histrionics, an overly repetitive chorus, and of course a Big Rock Ending). They also have straight examples with the 7 and a half minute "The Power Of Lard", the 15 minute "I Am Your Clock" and the 32-minute "Time To Melt" (the latter two don't really go through a lot of changes though, they're just deliberately punishingly slow)
- Referenced in Mitch Benn's "Never Mind the Song (Look at the Stage Set)", in which a Hair Metal band's epic guitar solos are to allow the lead singer to nip offstage to the toilet in the middle of the song.
- Also in a Led Zeppelin parody:
And now everyone here is staring at me in fear
'cause this is meant to be Stairway, obviously
And the original song's a good eight minutes long
He's not going to do all of it, is he?
- Also in a Led Zeppelin parody:
- The song "6969" by Ninja Sex Party is an Affectionate Parody of Rush's 2112. The song clocks in at just under nine minutes, and shifts gears five separate times. It's quite the departure coming from a comedy band whose other songs often barely pass the three-minute mark.
- Their next original album starts with "The Mystic Crystal", which likewise has 5 distinct movements, and tops "6969" by coming in at about thirteen minutes.
- Referenced in Rock Band World. One goal is named "Play For Long Time", and you have to play some of the longest songs in the Rock Band catalogue.
- Parodied in Saturday Night Live in "The Tom Arnold and Madonna Story" where Tom Arnold submits his record for publishing and the first complaint of the record company executives is that his Johnny Be Good cover lasts 9 and a half minutes... and that's the shortest track on the whole record.
- Parodied again on the same show years later by Jack Black and the cast; in an attempt to make a response to the overly trite birthday song everyone knows and hates, a 7-minute "epic" was written with plenty of pretentious lyrics set to a mixture of medieval and progressive rock, full of druids and witches, and signifying... nothing.
- Parodied in This Is Spın̈al Tap with "Jazz Odyssey".
- Top Gear (UK): Takes a cheeky swipe with one joke. After Clarkson and Hammond lose a the Beat the Stig challenge and it's down to James May in his Capri, Jeremy hypes up James by telling him to do it for the Prog Rock generation, at which point Richard snarks aside to camera:
- Richard: Unfortunately- rather like Prog Rock- James' lap will last 45 minutes and make no sense to anyone.
- Parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic, repeatedly: "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota", "Genius in France", "Nature Trail to Hell", "Albuquerque", "Trapped in the Drive-Thru", "Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me", "Jackson Park Express".
- "Albuquerque" is a special case. On the rare occasions that Al performs it live, he'd sometimes start singing it, get almost to the end (where the singer forgets what he was talking about), and would thus decide to start the song over, making it even longer.
- Given the fact that the file size of MOD files is determined more by the instruments included in the file than by the actual song data, it's not too surprising that quite a few Demoscene compositions are very long pieces when played back.
- MIDI files and Chiptunes can also produce long playbacks from small files.
- "SSI Intro" by Purple Motion of the Future Crew is 11:52. "Progressive Funk" by Moby (not that Moby) is also 12 minutes.
- And then Skaven, another Future Crew member, made a 30-minute, looping mod file named Beyond the Network as the soundtrack to Bejeweled 2, named after its opening movement.
- And then Skaven, another Future Crew member, made a 30-minute, looping mod file named Beyond the Network
- An interesting little open source program can stretch any audio file out to many, many times its original length.
- Justin Bieber's 'U Smile' got the same treatment, becoming a 38-minute opus.
- And here is Pogo's "Bloom" at 22 minutes.
- Justin Bieber's 'U Smile' got the same treatment, becoming a 38-minute opus.
- Most of, if not all of Kurzgesagt soundtracks are more than 4 minutes long.
- The Internet Is For Music is a 30-minute long mashup of nearly every Internet meme/viral video that existed at the time the song was created.
- Baseball, America's Pastime is a 9 hour long song that consists of one continuous song played on two different kinds of rock organs mixed in with western classical, Japanese, and Latin American instruments, occasionally sampling from classic baseball songs. You know those "10 hours of X" videos? You only need to play this once and add about 40 minutes of blank space at the end.
- This is a symphony composed entirely out of rock rearrangements of various Castlevania songs. The whole symphony is a hour and a half long, and each movement? At least 10 minutes long.
- Renald Francoeur's "Tour the World" (8:35) is about as long as an Educational Song can get.
- These two Discogs lists, both quite long themselves (Archive Panic in full effect here), but to save you the time looking through them, the longest entries of both lists are 10^100 years & 9×103623 years long, respectively. note
- A Google Doc categorizing artists who reliably fall into this trope and detailing their length stats. Perpetual work in progress.