All Intensive Purposes

More Rebecca Solnit:

There are songs of insurgent power; they are essentially what rock and roll, an outgrowth of one strain of the blues, does best, these songs of being young and at the beginning of the world, full of a sense of your own potential. Country, at least the old stuff, has mostly been devoted instead to aftermath, to the hard work it takes to keep going or the awareness that comes after it is no longer possible to go on. If it is deeper than rock it is because failure is deeper than success. Failure is what we learn from, mostly.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost 119 (Viking 2005).

(Though not all rock is like this -- for example, Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, as described in Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic.)