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ОглавлениеThree pivotal phenomena changed the American cultural landscape in the mid-1950s. First, television established itself as the dominant communication medium of its time. Second, the first wave of the baby boom generation reached adolescence and the term “teenager” came into common usage.1 Before this time, people between the ages of twelve and twenty were recognized as an age group, but as the baby boomers came of age they gained a unique cultural identity and unprecedented influence. Third, rock ‘n’ roll emerged as a distinct form, a hybrid of several earlier streams of American music, including blues and rhythm ‘n’ blues (R&B) created primarily by African Americans; country and western swing created primarily by Whites, and other pop, jazz, folk, and spiritual influences. Rock ‘n’ roll was interdependent with the new teenage audience, but the relationship of both to television was problematic and sometimes adversarial.
The 1950s are often recalled and unfailingly portrayed as an era of innocence and bland conformity, tranquil suburbia, reassuring Dr. Spock, and the faceless efficiency of the Fordism economic model.2 The rapid growth of the middle class, near-full employment, and new leisure activities helped keep post-war anxieties at bay, but unease festered on a subterranean level. As Karl Mannheim put forward in the 1920s in his Theory of Generations, each generation is a sociological phenomenon unto itself, shaped by the historical conditions and events of its time (286–88). Historians frequently cite Mannheim as they identify fissures in the←9 | 10→ social cohesion forged in the crucibles of the Depression and World War II. Although there was a widespread sense of economic security and opportunity, the 1950s was also the era of Sputnik, the Cold War, McCarthyism, bomb shelters, polio epidemics, planned obsolescence, and a new kind of alienation that resulted from increased mechanization and bureaucratization.3
The 1950s also saw the impacts of the Great Migration, during which millions of African Americans move from the rural south to the industrial north and Midwest. While escaping the worst of overt Jim Crow oppression, urban Blacks were victims of red-lining and other forms of discrimination, leading to ghettoization and the formation of a permanent underclass. These conditions created tensions that galvanized the civil rights movement.
Similar restiveness could be detected in other quarters as well. Empowered by their labor and leadership on the home front during World War II and inspired by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Eve Merriam, women were beginning to express dissatisfaction over their limited roles as housewives and mothers. And a group of iconoclastic writers who came to known as the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, created a romantic ideal out of wholesale rejection of mainstream values.4 The political aspects of this romanticism were not widely embraced in the 1950s, but the call of the open road, literally and metaphorically, began to resonate. These rumblings of discontent coincided with technologies that offered unprecedented possibilities for personal fulfillment, which crystallized for young people as a goal in and of itself for the first time in history. This energy would soon be expressed, and exponentially multiplied, by rock ‘n’ roll.
Despite creating considerable anxiety, however, the chinks in America’s social armor were seldom highlighted in the 1950s, certainly not in mainstream media. Middle class Americans were beginning to fall under the spell of television, with its steady diet of variety shows, situation comedies, and advertisements.5 One of the few visible ripples on the cultural waters was created by the popularity of comic books. Comics had evolved from newspaper strips into cheap youth-oriented magazines in the 1940s, published by maverick entrepreneurs amenable to themes and images with little other outlet beyond pulp paperback novels. The depictions of sex in these comics were tame by contemporary standards, but the juxtaposition of scantily clad women and wanton, often grisly violence, evoked howls of protest. Under pressure from Congress, a code of standards was developed by an organization calling itself the Comics Magazine Association of America, imposing what David Hajdu termed a “monument of self-imposed repression and prudery” (291). Mad Magazine adopted the sub←10 | 11→versive comic book sensibility, adding its own brand of iconoclastic satire to the mix, providing many baby boomers with their first taste of political analysis and irreverence, but sidestepping themes of horror and sex. As Hajdu indicates, the firestorm that erupted over comic books presaged the battle to come over rock ‘n’ roll. By the mid-1950s, television was luring teenagers away, but the upstart comic book publishers had created a business model for the independent record producers who would soon bring rock ‘n’ roll to the fore.
Although he did not coin the term “generation gap,”6 Bob Dylan’s 1963 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’” pitted the baby boomers against their parents in no uncertain terms (“your sons and daughters are beyond your command”). New world or old: one had to choose. But it was in the 1950s that nearly every question vexing society, from education and crime to economics and politics, was recast in generational terms. Even as the middle class migrated to suburbia to enjoy their yards and appliances, sociologists such as Paul Goodman saw something more troubling going on. He likened 1950s America to “a closed room with a rat race as the center of fascination, powerfully energized by fear of being outcasts” (234). The darker side of the 1950s may not have permeated mainstream culture, but it impacted those who lived through it, especially young people.
Adolescence
Before exploring the interplay of television and rock ‘n’ roll, it is important to identify the antagonists in this generational quarrel. On one side were the well-documented adults of “the greatest generation,” survivors of the Depression and victors in World War II. On the other side were their offspring, too busy enjoying unprecedented leisure time, social mobility, and communication technologies such as the telephone, radio, and the phonograph to appreciate how different their lives were than their parents’ had been.
For most of human history, children were looked upon simply as small people with limited competencies. The notion of childhood as a distinct phase developed in the Victorian nineteenth century, when the life cycle was viewed as being comprised of three stages: dependence, semi-dependence, and independence. But in 1904, psychologist G. Stanley Hall put forth a scientific definition of adolescence based on the process of physical maturation and the onset of puberty.7 Many of Hall’s methods and conclusions have since been questioned, but he focused attention on the unique condition of the teenage years before the term “teenager” existed. Erik Erikson and others would refine Hall’s data, identifying a set of←11 | 12→ characteristics unique to this age group, especially the crucial process of identity development.
A consensus now exists among sociologists, psychologists, and educators that childhood cannot be defined simply by chronology or biology. As Steven Mintz puts it, “childhood is not an unchanging biological stage of life but is, rather, a social and cultural construct that has changed radically over time” (viii). In each era, society adopts its own views and myths about children that inform the laws, policies, and mores that dictate how children are treated. This was certainly the case in the 1950s, when adolescence came to be viewed as a stressful period of acclimation to the responsibilities of adulthood. Developmental psychology, a relatively new concept at the time, suggested that stress from societal pressures and raging hormones served as a proximate cause of unsanctioned teenage behaviors, but many adults were afraid that the kids were out of control. This fear, projected onto and fuelled by the media, became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Joseph Kett places 1950s adolescence within the larger context of industrialization, identifying three key developments: first, work was removed from the home, turning the domestic realm into a predominantly recreational site; second, child labor laws prevented young people from holding full-time jobs; and third, education became compulsory (36). Along the same lines, Frank Fasick traces the “invention” of adolescence to several factors, including population increase, the shift of adolescents from the workplace to school, the dependence of adolescents on their parents, the growth of commercial enterprises geared to adolescents, and urbanization (6–23). While compulsory education is widely hailed as a progressive and salutary policy, one of the unintended consequences was to curtail such practices as mentoring and apprenticeship. Denied opportunities for meaningful work, adolescents were left with greater leisure time, less structure, and a feeling of disorientation and uselessness.
For all these reasons, adolescents became more isolated from other generations in the 1950s. Teenagers’ primary orientation to the family unit, previously reinforced by economic necessities, was weakened and supplanted primarily by the school. After conducting the most comprehensive survey of adolescents undertaken to that time, James S. Coleman wrote in 1961 that the child is
cut off from the rest of society, forced inward toward his own age group…he comes to constitute a small society, one that has most of its important interactions within itself…In our modern world of mass communication and rapid diffusion of ideas and knowledge, it is hard to realize that separate subcultures can exist right under the very noses of adults—subcultures with languages all their own, with special symbols, and, most importantly, with value systems that may differ from adults (3).←12 | 13→
Coleman points to the importance of the high school as the most significant site for the transmission and development of youth culture in the 1950s. If rock ‘n’ roll and television were the primary tribalizing influences, high school was the locale where teenagers processed the new information and formulated their individual and collective responses. While high school had been an important part of young life for most of the twentieth century, the social dynamics underwent a seismic change in the 1950s. High school populations increased significantly in that decade due to the baby boom and a reduction in truancy, the latter a reflection of both greater enforcement of compulsory education laws and a greater public appreciation for the civic and economic advantages afforded by matriculation. Among minority groups, especially Blacks and immigrants, education was firmly established as a means of upward social mobility.
Not only were there more high school students in the 1950s, but an almost wholly new activity rapidly moved to the center of their social universe: dating. Where most after-school activities had previously been designed for groups, and were often chaperoned, in the 1950s dating became an entrenched ritual that was almost exclusively engaged by couples, contributing to a hothouse environment that revolved around constant romantic positioning and negotiation. Although Seventeen Magazine was founded earlier (1944), it helped inculcate many teenage girls in the middle-class self-absorption of high school life in the 1950s. Along with dating came a greater emphasis on maturity symbols such as smoking, drinking, and, in the suburbs, driving. Not only was there an intensification of the pressure to be “popular,” but an increased need for larger allowances to pay for movies, meals, and gas. If 1950s rock ‘n’ roll both reflected and fomented the possibility of youth emancipation and transformation, high school was the locale where the youth culture was expressed, tested, and affirmed.
Although it has been exaggerated (and remains an issue of contention in contemporary culture wars), there was also a trend towards permissiveness on the part of parents and educators in the 1950s. This shift from religious-based and restrictive responses to child behavior to a more liberal and science-based framework was influenced by the mainstreaming of Freudian psychology and John Dewey’s ideas regarding the value of personal experience in learning. In the 1950s, greater freedom of expression began to be considered not only salutary but humane.
As adolescents were recognized as a distinct social group, the word “teenager” entered the lexicon, and what would become “the norms of modern childhood” were established (Mintz 3). This recognition was a mixed blessing for adolescents. On one hand, parents and psychologists better understood the unique emotional←13 | 14→ and psychological aspects of this age group, but teens were effectively segregated from the world of adults, looked upon as prisoners of their own hormones, and defined by risk-taking, exhibitionism, and other anti-social behaviors. This broad-brush diagnosis was seized upon by many in the cultural mainstream as the source of broader societal problems, and teens were often scapegoated. Janet Finn’s longitudinal study of the human services shows how behaviors that had previously been perceived as within the range of normal for adolescents came to be pathologized (167–191). And Thomas Hine describes the rise of the juvenile court movement that began to treat “youth crime as a problem of personal development rather than as a transgression against society” (70). Teenagers didn’t have problems, they were the problem.
The disaffection and disapproval of young people was also reflected in the arts. In literature, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) exposed teenage angst and alienation as social issues, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) gave expression to the view that young people were infected with all the dark aspects of (adult) human nature.8 But anti-youth sentiment and parental paranoia were projected most vividly in film, notably in a series of “teenpics” from American International Pictures such as Hot Rod Gang and High School Hellcats. To make matters worse, the teen menace came to be personified in popular films featuring Marlon Brando and James Dean. Their characters in the movies The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1954), respectively, were alarming to adults, for whom adolescence was becoming nearly synonymous with juvenile delinquency.9 When Brando’s character in The Wild One is asked, “What do you rebel against?” he responds, “What have you got?” To older viewers, this exchange perfectly encapsulated the alarming combination of negativity and irrationality they associated with teenagers. Predictably, the more volatile and negative the reaction to these black leather-clad hoodlums, the more young people identified with them. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, “…despite all the developmental psychology and high school ‘life adjustment’ texts, maturity just wasn’t sexy” (57). The defiant Brando and the wounded Dean were. But more than literature or film, rock ‘n’ roll became the defining feature of adolescence.←14 | 15→
Figure 1.1: Marlon Brando, as an endearing delinquent in the 1953 film The Wild One.
Source: The Wild One. Directed by László Benedek. Stanley Kramer Productions, 1953. Amazon Prime Video. https://www.amazon.com/Wild-One-Marlon-Brando/dp/B001NQ31S8
It is worth noting that, although much alarm was raised in the 1950s about the impact of rock ‘n’ roll on the values and behaviors of young people, the factual basis for such broad concern remains strictly anecdotal. James Leming, an authority in the field of moral education, surveyed the research on the relationship between rock music and youth socialization and concluded that “one searches in vain for evidence that rock ‘n’ roll has had any influence on the values or social behavior of youth” (364). Although his survey was conducted in the 1980s, subsequent attempts to establish a cause-and-effect between popular music of any genre and anti-social conduct have also failed. Perhaps the most significant impact of rock ‘n’ roll on adolescents in the 1950s (and beyond) was that it gave them their first inkling of the possibility of forging a collective identity apart from the mainstream.
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Robert Albrecht asks us to consider music as a form of energy, a “gestalt of sensory perceptions and experiences, physically felt and emotionally embedded from head to toe” (4). He theorizes that music was a precursor to language. In this view, what←15 | 16→ began as a simple mimicking of sounds in nature evolved over time into a more complex set of utterances, allowing for increasingly sophisticated interlocutions. Music differs from other art forms in that it is immaterial. It can be translated into a concrete form of written notation, but loses its sonic properties in the process. Except in the human memory (and, one could argue, in the form of echo), music exists solely in the present. The instant a note is heard, it is gone, replaced by another note, or by silence. Paintings and sculpture, by comparison, occupy a permanent position in time and space. Music also defies literal explication, taking on myriad subjective and contested meanings depending not only on the particular manifestation (written composition, performance, or recording) but on the context and subjective vantage point of the listener.
There is a perennial problem representing music in words. Several musicians, frustrated by failed attempts to describe their work in print (including Thelonious Monk, Frank Zappa, and Laurie Anderson), have been quoted as saying something like “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Albrecht laments the practice of “textualizing” music, saying “music is not like language at all and does not follow or adhere to the same functions, forms, and structures as the spoken or written word” (14). Susanne Langer suggests that language and music belong to two distinct symbolic systems, discursive and presentational. She describes discursive symbolism as “the vehicle of propositional thinking” without which there is “no literal meaning, and therefore no scientific knowledge” (67), and presentational symbolism as the means of conveying emotions and artistic expression. Language allows for the possibility of objective clarity, while music (and other arts) allows us to explore subjective ideas and feelings.
David Shumway describes rock music as “both a sign system—or perhaps an ensemble of such systems—and a practice; a form of semiosis and an activity in which performers and listeners engage” (“Practice” 756). Understanding music, especially rock ‘n’ roll, as a communal practice helps to explain the fact that it “speaks” to people, and does so in ways that are not purely subjective. Listeners may not agree on the meaning of a particular piece of music, but can acknowledge certain common effects (music played at a slow tempo in a minor key invariably evokes sadness, for example). This is especially the case with popular music that, by definition, is produced not only to share messages, but to do so broadly. The most successful pop songs tap into universal emotions.
But even if music elides literal meaning, it is seldom random. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks has described, “every bar, every phrase arises organically from what preceded it and points to what will follow…over and above this there is the intentionality of the composer, the style, the order, and the logic that he has created to express his musical ideas and feelings” (112). In this sense, music is never←16 | 17→ chaotic, but rather the antithesis of chaos. Even the most seemingly confused and improvisational music imposes some kind of order.10 This applies to rock ‘n’ roll, in contradiction to its reputation for anarchy and spontaneity. In fact, nearly all popular music, including most rock songs heard on television or radio, adheres to such a predictable chorus/chorus/refrain/chorus format and three-minute time limit that it is perhaps the most tightly structured music ever created.
A medium is generally defined as a technology through which information is conveyed. According to Lance Strate, “all technologies are media because they go between ourselves and our environment” (Legacy 29). But music also serves as a connection between human beings and their surroundings, and any musical genre can be considered a medium because it carries meaning and because its widespread effects can be isolated, enumerated, and studied. Since one of the fundamental assertions of this book is that rock ‘n’ roll has different effects and takes on different meanings depending on which delivery system is used, it is necessary at times to consider rock ‘n’ roll as a medium of communication. Viewed in this way, the presentation of rock ‘n’ roll on television is clearly understood as a remediation, defined by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin as the process in which one medium “appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance” of another medium, leading to alterations of both media and how they are perceived (65).
Consideration of popular music must also be approached in the context of Michael Real’s broad concept of mass-mediated culture, which encompasses all “expressions of culture as they are received from contemporary mass media, whether they arise from elite, folk, popular or mass origins” (14). The very existence of rock ‘n’ roll cannot be disentangled from the mass communication technologies, including recording playback devices and broadcast media, which permeate twentieth century American culture. From this vantage point, rock ‘n’ roll music is first and foremost a cultural touchstone, irrevocably linked with youth and florescent concerns such as romance, sex, and freedom. As we discuss rock ‘n’ roll, we engage with more than a musical genre or the collective output of artists identified with it, but with a cultural practice that encompasses subjective qualities of spirit and attitude. Though it may elude easy definition, some level of non-conformism, insubordination, and subversion cannot be avoided as an integral element of the gestalt.
As with all popular art forms, rock ‘n’ roll may be defined by its antecedents, developing as it did from traceable roots in the blues, rhythm and blues, country and hillbilly, jazz, and other popular styles. Particular structures, styles, and syncopations, nearly all borrowed and tweaked from the earlier genres, can be identified as characteristics of rock ‘n’ roll music. Describing the mixing of African and European forms that produced rock ‘n’ roll, Ray Allen applies the anthropological concept of syncretism, which “refers to the recombination of cultural elements into←17 | 18→ a new whole that commonly occurs when different cultures are in close contact” (136). By the mid-1950s, rock ‘n’ roll was readily identifiable from its forebears, with a particularized vocabulary of chords, harmonics, and rhythms.
Unlike television, which is not an artistic expression in and of itself, rock ‘n’ roll is an art form. In The Story of Rock, among the first scholarly works devoted to rock ‘n’ roll, Carl Belz argues that rock is “part of a long tradition of folk art in the United States” (3). Unlike fine art, which self-consciously comments on the world, folk art offers a direct reflection of reality. Belz admits that this distinction is not always clear-cut and, as rock music developed in the 1960s, it certainly adopted many of the ambitions and pretensions of art with a capital “A.”11 But rock ‘n’ roll of the 1950s, although sometimes deceptively sophisticated, satisfies Belz’s conception of a folk idiom. In those early years, rock ‘n’ roll was as much of a sociological phenomenon as a musical one, bubbling up from the youth subclass, conveying cultural information that transcended any particular song.
Although it possesses its own distinct conventions and vocabulary, a concise description of rock ‘n’ roll is elusive. It is sufficient here to note four fundamental building blocks:
• the 4/4 meter of traditional blues and jazz, a common element in most popular music,
• the basic shuffle adopted from African American swing (jazz and R&B) and the hybrid Western Swing (equal parts jazz swing and hillbilly), organized around eighth notes with variation provided by syncopation,
• the I-vi-IV–V harmonic progression of the 1950s vocal style that came to be known as doo wop, epitomized by groups such as The Ravens and The Orioles, and
• the two-bar rhythm familiarly known as “shave-and-a-haircut, two bits” or “hambone,” often translated as ONE (two) and (three) FOUR / (one) TWO THREE (four).12
As critic Alex Ross reminds us, music history is not a flat landscape, but borderless and continuous (541), and precise dating of musical phenomena can be problematic. Many point to Wynonie Harris’s 1948 R&B hit version of Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” as the song that signaled that boogie-woogie had been replaced by something faster and more insistent. But 1954 is widely viewed as the year in which rock ‘n’ roll emerged as an identifiable genre. That year, Joe Turner, a veteran of the Kansas City jazz scene, and Bill Haley, who came from a country & western background, both sang “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”; Hank Ballard & The Midnighters originated a string of suggestive story songs with “Work With Me, Annie”; “Sh-Boom” by The Chords, “Gee” by The Crows, and “Earth←18 | 19→ Angel” by The Penguins became the first R&B records to “cross over” onto the pop charts, signaling the arrival of the urban doo-wop vocal style; Ray Charles impiously blended gospel and rock with “I’ve Got a Woman”; Johnny Ace defined a more intimate ballad style with “Pledging My Love”; and Elvis Presley made his first recordings for Sun Records in Memphis.
Figure 1.2: Bill Haley and His Comets still rocking around the clock in 1960.
Source: The Dick Clark Show. Aired February 20, 1960, on ABC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAYN1jwy37o
Although young people responded avidly to this creative outburst, Richard Peterson points out that demand on the part of the baby boom generation was not a defining factor: “In 1954 the oldest of the baby-boomers were only nine years old and half had not even been born yet” (98). He uses a “production of culture” theory to suggest that if the dam burst in 1954–55 it was because market demand, which had been building for a decade (unacknowledged by decision-makers in the culture industry), was suddenly met by independent record companies and radio stations. The “indies” made R&B, rockabilly, doo-wop, and novelty records with artists that the major labels looked down upon, and got them into the hands of influential disc jockeys. Even if the songs were not particularly sophisticated or melodious, the teenagers liked what they heard. In its early incarnations, rock ‘n’ roll existed to express a feeling and elicit a response, not to make a statement.←19 | 20→ Although often inchoate, rock ‘n’ roll developed an ethos that was more than the sum of its component parts.
More important than the particular harmonics, arrangements, and riffs they appropriated, rock ‘n’ rollers emulated the attitudes of earlier musicians. They were young, barely older than their audience in most cases, and lacked the experience or discipline of their R&B or jazz models, but they developed their own insurgent and insouciant demeanor, and they shared a commitment to immediacy in their music and their daily lives. “Live for today” became a hippie mantra in the 1960s, but it was in the 1950s, with its television-generated fads (hula hoops, slinkies, poodle skirts) and dizzying array of tribalistic dances, that a deceptively revolutionary notion took root: life was supposed to be fun. This idea put the baby boomers at odds with the previous generation, for whom responsibility and sacrifice—not fun and games—were the watchwords. But revolution was not a conscious goal for most of the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, who, despite embracing many of the trappings of rebellion, rarely challenged convention. The sound may have seemed raucous at the time, but the great majority of musicians readily accepted narrow confines of decorum (no direct sexual references) and structure (the 3 minute limit dictated by the 45 rpm disc and AM radio) in order to get to the business at hand: rhythm, romance…and selling records. In this new world of heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality, “now-ness” was all, and matters of form and expertise were secondary to function and expression.
Rock ‘n’ roll could only have developed at a time when the technology, including the electric guitar and amplification, existed to project it. More than any other music genre, it epitomizes the effect of electricity. Musicians making rhythm and blues, western swing, and jazz were incorporating electrified instruments into their performances as early as the 1930s. With amplification also came acceleration. It’s not that musicians suddenly learned to play at greater speed—hillbilly fiddle and mandolin players were already renowned for their torrid “breakdowns” and various international styles including klezmer, polka, and jigs had been employing triple rhythms for decades—but that electrified instruments and microphones allowed them to play faster and still be heard over other instruments, and to perform in larger settings.13
But before the capacity for volume and speed could find its ultimate expression in rock ‘n’ roll, there was a lull. As Murray Forman points out, the brassy, uptempo sounds of the 1920s and 1930s were muted in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with weary Americans showing a preference for calibrated performances reinforcing “values of restraint and conservative decorum” (134). This shift from “swing” to “sweet” was reflected in popular variety shows of the 1940s and early 1950s hosted by Perry Como, Dinah Shore, and Tony Martin. Signifi←20 | 21→cantly, this reliance on Tin Pan Alley “standards” and what came to be called “easy listening” coincided with the penetration of television into the domestic sphere, so even when the music started picking up steam, the modulated, laid-back model for televised music had been established.
Apart from TV, however, the pace of music was picking up, reflecting the mechanization and industrialization of society, with a premium placed on efficiency and amplification. Country music spawned western swing, the fading Big Bands gave way to jump, and the blues was ratcheted up to R&B. They all pointed in the same direction: Rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll were the creative results of this increased volume and speed; one might describe it as electric energy in musical form.
Gospel music is often considered an antecedent, but it predates rock ‘n’ roll by only a few years and generally developed along parallel lines with rhythm and blues.14 The music in most Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s consisted primarily of familiar “sanctified” spirituals, generally sung without instrumentation (often variations of the same hymns sung in White churches), but with more call-and-response interaction between pulpit and congregation. Gradually, the more expressive strains of blues and jazz began to seep into the churches, and writers such as Lucie Campbell and Thomas A. Dorsey pioneered a movement towards original composition and a greater emphasis on vocal expression. Dorsey personified the trend, turning away from the blues—he had played piano with Ma Rainey and made several successful records under the name Georgia Tom—and ushered in the first wave of what came to be called gospel music.15 In the 1950s, electric guitars, bass, and drums began to be accepted as part of church services, and the gospel sound at this stage often bore a close resemblance to rock ‘n’ roll, with subject matter being the most obvious difference.16
It should not be forgotten that all music is a “cultural construction” (Albrecht 54) and, like gospel music, rock ‘n’ roll developed organically, according to a folk model. Belz places rock ‘n’ roll in the context of the 1950s youth movement:
Rock emerged in response to a series of changing values and vital needs…but it did so in its capacity as voice of the people rather than an art which talked about them from a detached and self-determined vantage point. On the immediate level as well as in its ultimate significance, the music has been a confrontation with reality rather than a confrontation with art. This distinctiveness of function marks rock as a folk art rather than a fine art. (5)
Or, as Richard Meltzer put it, “rock ‘n’ roll was the upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s. Not a cause, a catalyst, a cipher…the whole shebang in itself” (pers. comm.).17←21 | 22→
The increased mediation of music—through radio, recordings, and television—dramatically altered the relationship between musician and audience, and rock music would not exist without electricity and other twentieth century technologies. Robert Albrecht is among numerous scholars who trace the evolution of rock music from blues and country forms that were firmly rooted in oral traditions, noting that “the most significant performers were themselves products of an oral culture” (161). Despite its utter reliance on electro-mechanics and mediation, rock ‘n’ roll retains the features of direct communication and pre-literate expression that makes it an example of what Walter Ong identified as secondary orality. This evolutionary model reminds us that orality—direct communication through sound and speech—has been diminished (made “secondary”), but not obliterated, by electronic media.
If popular culture is understood as the interaction of audiences with products or ideas (with the emphasis on derived meanings), and mass culture is broadly defined as products or ideas disseminated by electronic technologies and intended for a broad, unspecified audience (with the emphasis on the medium), then rock ‘n’ roll is an expression that belongs to both popular (folk) and mass culture. The music emanates from a youth community steeped both in orality (gleaning news by word-of-mouth) and technology (receiving information through mass media sources). For most fans of the music, the distinction between popular and mass culture may seem irrelevant, but the dichotomy is brought into sharp relief when rock is mediated through television.
Notes
1. According to the editors, the first use of the term “teenager” in print appeared in Popular Science in 1941 in an article about young filmmakers.
2. This model is personified by William H. Whyte’s Organization Man.
3. This angst is captured compellingly in David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd.
4. Ginsberg’s poetry reading at Columbia University in February 1959 was an event at which the generation gap came into focus. Diana Trilling’s account of the event in Partisan Review (Spring 1959, Vol. 26, No. 2) describes the peer group clash between the literary lions of the Columbia faculty and Ginsberg’s cohort of young Beat poets.
5. The spell was so strong that families were lured away from the hearth, taking a toll on family dynamics and discourse. Reinforcing the new orientation, the Swanson Company introduced the “TV Dinner” in 1953.
6. Although Robert Pielke says the term “generation gap” originated in the early 1950s (8), Sarah Chinn claims that the term was in common use decades earlier among immigrant families to describe the tensions between immigrant parents and their Americanized children (Inventing Modern Adolescence, 2008). OED points to a July 28, 1962 headline in the←22 | 23→ Daily Record (Stroudsburg, PA), “Generation Gap Affects Parent-Child Relations” as the first published citation. The phrase turns up for the first time in The New York Times on March 2, 1964 in an article entitled “Merman’s Magic Enchants Britain,” in which Ethel Merman is said to have “done what no other entertainer has managed since The Beatles and the rock ‘n’ roll groups came on the scene. She has bridged the generation gap.” By 1967, the term was in wide usage.
7. Hall’s groundbreaking tome was published with the encompassing title Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Hall is also credited with bringing Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to America.
8. Salinger’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, was fond of using the word “phony” to describe adult interactions. As Edmund Carpenter notes, the advent of this term is directly linked to widespread use of the telephone and the disembodied voice and depersonalized communication it engendered. See the film Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (Media Generation, 2003, directed by John Bishop and Harald Prins).
9. Nicholas Ray’s film took its title from Robert Lindner’s 1944 book Rebel Without a Cause: A Hypno-analysis of a Criminal Psychopath, although it did not adapt Lindner’s influential view of juvenile delinquency as a mass psychosis.
10. A possible exception is the experimental composition, such as several composed by John Cage, the purpose of which is to create the tension that arises when the tendency toward form and structure is defied.
11. The meaning of rock ‘n’ roll has shifted with the passage of time. Since this book covers several decades, the distinction between “rock ‘n’ roll” and “rock” needs clarification. Although the term “rock music” is sometimes used as a non-discriminating catchall, “rock ‘n’ roll” generally refers primarily to music of the 1950s, while “rock” connotes styles and cultural meanings adopted in the 1960s and beyond, with increased technical capabilities and proficiencies, and more self-conscious composition.
12. Musicologists John Storm Roberts and Ned Sublette have traced this rhythm to several sources. The fountainhead is probably the Juba dance, which migrated from West Africa with slavery, in which the rhythm is created by feet and hands, similar to clogging and the jig. Slaves were often forbidden to use rhythm instruments because slave-owners feared the communication properties of drums. This rhythm echoed throughout the Caribbean and West Indies, particularly in Cuba, where it was called clavé. Sublette goes so far as to declare the rhumba, mambo, and cha-cha the cornerstones on which rock ‘n’ roll was built (79–83). The music of Bo Diddley offers compelling supporting evidence.
13. Kansas City jazz guitarist Eddie Durham is cited as the first to plug in, which he did to liberate the guitar from the rhythm section, allowing him to pick out notes and take solo leads instead of just strumming. With amplification, guitarists could also be heard in bands with horn sections.
14. A similar misimpression also persists regarding bluegrass music. Although considered to be “as old as the hills,” the bluegrass genre didn’t exist until Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys introduced it on the Grand Ole Opry stage in 1946. In Bluegrass Breakdown (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), Robert Cantwell characterizes bluegrass as a “representation of traditional Appalachian music in its social form” (xi).←23 | 24→
15. For more on gospel music, see Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1975.
16. Although Black church music continues to evolve, the gospel style remains popular. The obvious explanation is that the music is grounded in spiritual tradition but, unlike rock ‘n’ roll, gospel music has never achieved any level of exposure on television beyond local public access stations, leaving it free of pressures for change imposed by TV broader, undifferentiated audience.
17. Richard Meltzer, email message to author, August 15, 2011.
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