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Ms. Lovelace:
You're taking a rather narrow view of the development of music in the fifties, not to mention indulging in a radical degree of anachronism.
Everything I'm about to say is in some way roughly sketched out in the John Waters farce "Cry Baby," so feel free to skip the rest of this and just go rent it.
First, let's get some facts straight.
Number One, rock and rock IS the blues. While Led Zepplin and Jimi Hendrix are a bit latter- day for the purpose of this discussion, they're the most explicit examples of the promiscuity of the two conceptual frameworks. [PS motown, R&B, and rap are all descendants of the blues form as well]. Thus I'm going to use the blues as my overarching paradigm and term of reference, because RnR is simply a particularly large frond of its superstructure. I'm also going to stretch the timeline a bit.
Second, rock wasn't the magical subversive point that Behind The Music always makes it out to be, but it definitely pissed off a fairly large and [more importantly] vocal and influential portion of the population, and thus could be considered subversive. Rock didn't really innovate anything that hadn't been thoroughly covered by blues and hot jazz in the twenties. Talk about sexual liberation from the paradigm or marriage and chastity, talk about the flappers first...the structuring of race relations and the first fits of panic about cultural miscegenation, talk about the Harlem Renaissance and the speakeasys.
The blues have a longstanding tradition of being sexual and suggestive in a way that flew in the face of pretty much every Christian in America. Like to admit it or not, we were founded by some very up-tight Protestant denominations, and the bleed-over of Victorian thought across the pond didn't help matters. Songs like "Need a Little Sugar in my Bowl," and "Bedbug Blues" barely merit the term extended metaphor: indeed, the nominal concealment in some way increases the voluptousness of the suggestive imagery.
Long before Jerry Falwell got into his beef with rock 'n roll (by way of his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis), black preachers all across the South were raining hellfire and brimstone on members of their communities that spent their Saturdays at speakeasies and pigs.I refer you explicitly to "Aunt Hagar's Blues," written by W.C. Handy, the text of which explicitly deals with the conflict between blues-bar culture and Baptist church attendence.
Rock and roll just happened to come along, in a consumer fashion [in terms of radio stations, etc., picking up and promoting "rock artists] just in time to strike a huge, fat vein of newly-born conservatism...the white, suburban middle class, whose children were just sprouting into wee adolescents. Post-WWII is when the "middle class" was expanding grealy in number, and starting to define itself as something suburban, [rather than explicit definition as "city" or "country" people] with all of the incumbent gentrification, both in the consumption of material and moral goods. With this calcification came new forms of snobbery, mimicking the behaviors of the "rich" and the "hereditary gentry." One could almost speak of suburbanites attempting to "pass" as genteel folk, in a sense akin to racial "passing" as described by James Baldwin and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance...thus an almost overcompensating, obsessive attention to "proper" behavior and image projection: thus the boom of the intellectual commodity "What would the neighbors think?," and, by extension, "keeping up with the Joneses."
Race was also a stressful issue in this attempt to define the middle class. Blacks were poor and socially marginalized, and either came from highly rural or urban backgrounds--thus embodying pretty much everything that the developing middle class was trying to get away from. Falling into the same stigmatized categories would be immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe--considered the criminal reputations long held by the Italians, Spanish, Poles, etc., and, of course, Mexicans. Blues and rock, invented by poor, "ethnic" people, were thus taboo.
First blues, then "hot" jazz, and finally rock and roll, all put shivers up the spine of that segement of the population would consider themselves "proper," in the time period between about 1900 and the 1950s. All of the above were considered "wild" and "unrestrained" musical forms--and the governing philosophical paradigms of European-descended peoples values restraint over expression and rationality over passion.
[this further ties in with the race issue, consider that at the time, non-white "colored" people were classified as irrational and excessively emotional.]
Furthermore, the dance styles that accompanied the music were:
1) too vigorous to be considered refined or skilled, especially for females. Furthermore, that these caused exertion was horrifying...sweat is for manual laborers
2) the origin and derivation of these dance steps was from dubious "ethnic" communities...Mexican and Spanish influences, African-American folk-dance, the "baudier" dance-trends to come out of France and Italy (such as the can-can, etc.).
3) the steps and movements of this dances were explicitly or implicitly sexual...the pelvic thrusting, etc.,etc., which was the ultimate taboo, again, especially for young females. A great part of the social projection of gentrification and sophistication lay in the maintenance of an image of chastity and demureness in young (pre-marriage) females. Rock 'n roll and its incumbent activities were thus considered
Even the mainstream African-American community of the time also rejected RnR and jazz music and dance on the basis of these qualifiers, seeing the entire trend as reinforcing negative stereotypes about the Negro.
What made rock innovative as a cultural moment was, as Mystery Gypt pointed out, the invention of "youth" as a demographic of consumption...the foundations of ideas that we take for granted now, like "adolescent rebellion" and "the generation gap."
And here's the irony: rock and roll invented/commoditized the mainstream concept of youthful subversion of authority--an idea previously bounded largely to intellectual institution and a very limited segement of the population. In a way, your question is the lineal kin of cultural developments generated five decades ago that you're now flaming. Go figure.
So. What more do you want? |
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n the Mezz: Their view of African-American culture involved fantasies of escape from the pressure to work, from sexual restraint, from convention. The "white Negroes" of the 1920s projected their own desires onto black Americans, most frequently through music.