Rock and Roll CultureJoin now to read essay Rock and Roll CultureRock and Roll ain’t noise pollutionAbstractRock and Roll. Someone mentions it and you instantly have an image in your head. Whether it be the title quoted AC/DC or the King Elvis Presley, there is a form of rock for everyone. Rock has made huge changes over the past several decades, always being whatever the musician wanted it to be. Some hade described rock as a way of life; a movement. Some have said it is a phase. Still others see it as an icon and culture an the same time. While rock is not a phase, it does go through phases. It is a way of life, a culture and a way of thinking. It will never die.
Early History of RockThe history of rock and roll begins with the slaves during and post the Civil War era. The slaves in their camps singing the blues with its simple chords and melodies was the first breath of life in the mass movement called rock. African-American slaves are credited with the invention of the banjo, a five-stringed instrument with a very unique plucking sound, which was their first musical tool other than their voices. African-Americans used singing the blues as an escape path; although pain, suffering, and disappointments were the topics of the blues, the reason for singing them was for a temporary relief of the pains and struggles of their oppressed lives. (Townsend, 1997)
Later on into the 1800’s, when slavery had long been abolished, African-Americans were still greatly oppressed by the Whites; they were nowhere near as wealthy nor did they hold any kind of political or social power. Despite of all of this, their music began to catch on. The Whites started to fall in love with this soul-inspired music, and because of their wealth and popularity, they took blues to a whole new level. The culmination of White and African-American culture in the late 1800’s was the solid “birth” of Rock and Roll. Although this event is marked by some as the birth of rock and roll (rock), it laid dormant for many hears until around the 1950’s, which is, for the purpose of this paper, the true start of rock. (Townsend, 1997)
The Radio; a gateway for rockThe invention of the radio in the early 1900’s and its beginning widespread use in the 1920’s served as a gateway for rock to begin really growing. Before the invention of the radio, there was no widespread way for people to listen to rock, other than going to see a band play live or listening to a friends recording. Radio provided a way for people to listen to music before purchasing it; something that no one would dream of doing in today’s world. (Townsend, 1997)
WW2; Rock’s catapultIn the 1950’s, the adult generation was not particularly fond of loud and fast music; they had gone through WW2 and it was “all the excitement they could handle” (Townsend, 1997, p. 9). This generation returned from the war and started producing children at an alarming rate, known to us as the “Baby Boom” and the children coming to be known as the “Baby Boomers.” These baby boomers were the generation that grabbed a hold on rock. They had been during or immediately after the war, so felt none of the reservations that their parents had. As described by Townsend (1997, p. 9)
“If we begin to understand that perspective, then we can find some insight into how rock n roll did appeal to the post-War generation. By 1954, anyone who was a teenager was personally unacquainted with World War II; even a 19 year-old had only been ten when it ended, and the younger teens had been infants while the War raged. By the mid-1950s, the Baby Boom was starting to grow up, and to listen to rock n roll. This vast new chunk of humanity between our shores could not possibly share the feelings and memories of their parents, could not know what the War had meant, and how profoundly it had influenced the older generations. They could not, in truth, share their parents complacency with the post-War world, peaceful and prosperous and unthreatening as it was in contrast to what came before. If anything, it was the absence of any great challenge, whether war, depression, industrialization, or political change, that spawned the celebrated restlessness of young Americans in the 1950s.”
The Baby Boomers Are Back – In America?
The United States was, for a time, a land of opportunity — to be taken advantage of by the boomers, and to get the goods we need for our future. Many of us would have felt the need to do what we could to improve a society that felt far more divided and depressed than we did. We took up activism, helped educate the masses about the need for change in our own country, and made it to the top of our list, at least because of our own generation. It was also because we started our own business and formed small, community-led organizations and took many of the big and small organizations and individuals at their word. We came, after all, from the past in one way or another. We have little and no sense of our own history and of our own nation’s present. We are, for good or ill, living the American dream.
The rise of the Baby Boomers gave new meaning to the phrase, “We are good.” That is: if the Baby boomers had not pushed down in our society and pushed down in the lives of their peers, they would not be who they are today. We would have struggled, in the words of Henry Kissinger, for America to have “to make it great again.” We would have been lucky to achieve a country we felt we had created something in which our lives actually mattered. The Baby Boomers brought a new meaning to this struggle — to give us new values and values for ourselves and society.
Back in 1953, the Supreme Court had upheld an illegal law that had created a new kind of group on the individual level in our society. That was how the Baby Boomers had taken their rightful place in that new group to create a new, just group. For our time, the Supreme Court had upheld a law that had created a new group on the individual level in our society. That was how the Baby Boomers had taken their rightful place in that new group to create a new, just group.
This new “new group” of American kids found itself in a new way, but instead of being in love with the “new” guy in their house, there was in their lives exactly what they were trying to get out of themselves. And it wasn’t because they had anything better to do with their lives. They just seemed to have gotten away with it.
Their life didn’t begin for many years. In the late 1950s, the baby boomers changed that. The Baby Boomers made good in what is now America, but their time in the world wasn’t even remotely good enough for their own country. It was simply too much work for them. They were leaving a country that didn’t fit their needs and expectations. They thought that the government should be doing something for them; it has failed them and it gives them a reason to leave. They felt that that was better for them, because they didn’t have to have big financial and intellectual problems as they did for others. The country they worked so hard to help gave them something to live for. In the same way that the Great Depression had changed that. In the 1950s people in that country still felt that they had a right to be part of the new community they wanted to build. . . for the right to live their lives the way they wanted to. They could have been good with the work; they could have grown up happy and normal, but there were times when they could have been bad with it and have been miserable. What happened in the 1950s to those who felt that the best place
Explosions happens in an instantWhen someone from today’s world looks back at the 1950’s as the explosion of rock, they generally see it as taking a while to happen. Today listening to the radio you may have only handful of really big hits every few months in rock. However, this was not at all the case