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Introduction

Many factors contributed to the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but none were more significant than the near-simultaneous emergence of both television and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. One element that is seldom considered in studies of the counterculture is how the inherent incompatibility between TV and rock music both reflected and contributed to the social fissures that would become known as the generation gap.

The phrase “generation gap” came into popular use in the 1960s, but the roots of the generational culture wars can be traced to the previous decade. A closer look at the 1950s, when television and rock music came into prominence, suggests that many of the social and cultural conflicts that surfaced in the 1960s had been percolating for years. An examination of the interplay of rock ‘n’ roll and television calls into question common assumptions about that time period.

Each generation tends to see its past in rosy hues, requiring later historians to provide more objective analyses. By virtue of sheer numbers and the communication technologies available to them, the baby boom generation has dominated discourses regarding the era in which they came of age. Even many academic portraits of the 1950s have looked past undercurrents of anxiety and disaffection, adopting a geniality and quiescence bordering on nostalgia. The purpose here is not revisionist history, but a close examination of the effects of television on rock ‘n’ roll and its audience and how that dispels the view of the 1950s as placid and carefree.←1 | 2→

The advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s inspired equal parts popularity and paranoia. The new music was, according to Robert Albrecht, “the most tangible symbol of a newly erupting techno-consumer culture of the post-World War II era, [which] became both the knife that sliced the generations apart and the glue that welded all the disparate elements together into a peculiar nationhood of young people” (160). The enthusiasm of young people for rock ‘n’ roll music was immediate and unequivocal but, as the beat grew louder and more insistent, mainstream resistance became so intense and disproportionate that the term “rockaphobia” may be used to describe it. The interplay between rock ‘n’ roll and television in the 1950s did not, in itself, create sociopolitical dividing lines, but this mass media interaction brought those conflicts into the foreground. Many of the baby boomers who witnessed the early presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on TV became less likely to embrace traditional ideas or institutions and were increasingly motivated to create their own counter-cultural identity. This social migration delineated the boundaries that would later be identified as the generation gap.

One reason that the early interaction between rock ‘n’ roll and television has been under-studied is that, despite its prominence as a cultural force, it took almost 15 years after rock ‘n’ roll emerged for a distinct literary sub-genre of rock criticism to evolve. To a great extent, it was an act of self-invention on the part of a small set of entrepreneurial publishers and writers who launched publications such as Crawdaddy! (New York 1965), Mojo Navigator (Los Angeles 1966), Fusion (Boston 1967), and Rolling Stone (San Francisco 1967). In combination with a greater sophistication in the music, reflected most prominently in the evolution in the music of The Beatles, these magazines demanded that rock ‘n’ roll be given the same critical attention as other forms of music and art. In the 1970s, accredited scholars (e.g., Charlie Gillett, Simon Frith, Carl Belz, Greil Marcus, Lawrence Grossberg) began to apply academic scrutiny to the subject, approaching this musical genre as something other than a temporary symptom of the “social disease” of juvenile delinquency. Despite their efforts, the do-it-yourself rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic was ingrained, and the ranks of writers who cover rock music have continued to be dominated more by fans and gadflies (e.g., Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs) than by “experts.”

While rock music has received more scholarly treatment in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the intersection and interaction between rock ‘n’ roll and television before the emergence of the Music Television channel (MTV) in 1981. Even within the thin body of literature that does consider television and rock ‘n’ roll co-jointly, only a small handful of scholars have adequately utilized communication theory to inform an analytical (synchronic) as well as an historical (diachronic) perspective. One reason for this paucity of analysis is that the paradoxes that were manifested when rock ‘n’ roll was presented on←2 | 3→ TV in the 1950s and 1960s were subsumed by the spectacle. The performances might have been stilted, but they were sufficiently new and rare to be fascinating for their very existence. Consequently, there was little attention paid to why the televised version of rock ‘n’ roll was so patently contrived or to the cultural effects of this interplay.

It would overstate the case to claim that there is a direct causal relationship between the presentation of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and the broader social, cultural, and political upheavals that followed. Clearly, there are too many other factors involved to draw reductive, deterministic conclusions about how television policies and attitudes towards rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s impacted social upheavals in the 1960s. But when their beloved rock ‘n’ roll was presented on television in the 1950s in a manufactured and mutilated form, the condescension and contempt was experienced by young viewers as an indignity and a rejection, motivating them to find alternative venues. This migration reconfigured the social geography of the country and constituted a cultural revolution and a manifestation of a new zeitgeist.

This book uses multiple approaches to identify sociological, technological, and aesthetic tensions and incompatibilities between television and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s. The focus is less on television or rock music than on the interaction between the two, concerned primarily with the impact of television policies, attitudes, and practices on what was presented to the TV audience. The role of the music business in relation to television is also examined, revealing patterns that continued to have significant impacts in the decades following the 1950s and remain a factor in generational dynamics today.

Among the aims of this book are:

• to trace the development of rock ‘n’ roll music and a distinct youth culture in the 1950s;

• to describe the aversion that parents and mainstream institutions, including television, expressed towards rock ‘n’ roll, an antipathy that constitutes “rockaphobia”;

• to demonstrate how rockaphobic television programming invigorated a counter-cultural response from the baby boom generation;

• to celebrate the innovative television shows that sprang up across the country before the national edition of American Bandstand created a codified TV genre; and

• to suggest that television’s initial response to rock ‘n’ roll established a pattern of misunderstanding and marginalizing youth culture that persists today.

This analysis is informed by the author’s coming of age in the 1950s, by his experience as a journalist and public relations professional in the music business,←3 | 4→ and by his scholarship in the field of communication, especially the area of study known as media ecology.

Defined in 1970 by Neil Postman as “the study of media as environments” (“Reformed” 161), the concept of media ecology developed from the work of Harold Innis, who posited in 1951 that “the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated” (34). Other scholars who pioneered this approach include Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, James Carey, Susanne Langer, Jacques Ellul, and Alfred Korzybski, although much of their work preceded the adoption of the term “media ecology” by McLuhan and Postman. The media ecology view is perhaps best encapsulated in McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” suggesting that each technology creates its own unique environment quite apart from the content delivered by that technology. Although in the field of media ecology the terms technology and medium are often used interchangeably, Postman offers that “a technology is a physical apparatus [and] a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put” (Amusing 84). When examining the effects of television, it is the medium, not the content or the material object that is foregrounded.

Figure I.1: Neil Postman, one of the fathers of Media Ecology.

Source: The Open Mind. “Neil Postman: Informing Ourselves to Death.” Aired December 12, 1990, on PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/the-open-mind-neil-postman-informing-ourselves-to-death/←4 | 5→

In a 1995 interview, Postman says that every “new technology is a kind of Faustian Bargain. It always gives us something, but it always takes away something important. That’s true of the alphabet, and the printing press, and telegraph, right up through the computer” (Postman “Cyberspace” video). While Americans readily embrace new technologies as tangible measures of empowerment and progress, Postman argues that technology and mediation also bring unintended consequences and costs. The presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on television may be seen as one piece of evidence to support Postman’s skepticism.

Bibliography

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———. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.←5 | 6→

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Videography

Postman, Neil. “On Cyberspace” interview with Charlene Hunter-Gault. The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, PBS, 1995. See www.youtube.com←6 | 7→