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2. PERF2065 MUSIC:
STYLE & GENRE
WEEK TWO | ROCK
IS THERE A BUSTLE IN YOUR HEDGEROW?

3. TODAY…  Rock and Roll as social
change, industry
commodity and musical
style
 But only from the 1950s to
1976

4. 1951 IN AMERICA
• Week 2: We left the blues at the dawn of inner-city R&B:
electric, raw, up-tempo
• “It was good-time music, danceable and unpretentious, and,
by comparison with the mushiness of white music in the
same period, it was like a window opened to let some bad air
out.” (Cohn, 1969, p5)

7. “It was tough. After all this
time, teenagers had finally
made it through to the
promised land and they’d
found it barren. Definitely,
it was frustrating. They
had all this money,
nothing to do with it and
they went spare.” (pg.7)

8. ATTACK OF THE “TEENAGER”
• Emerged from changes in work, education, leisure,
and consumption
• Prior to WWII, few children stayed in school past 14,
but worked to contribute to the family income
• Post WWII, affluence increased, meaning youth
income was less important for families
• Education also became more important

9. ATTACK OF THE “TEENAGER”
• Schools became self-contained social worlds, with their
own rules, but under the surveillance and to a greater or
lesser extent the control of the ‘adult’ world.
• “With its rules of dress, its stylised manners, its team spirit, with all the
petit bourgeois trappings of social programmes, school clubs and its own
newspaper, this was a world all of its own. The American sociologist
Arthur Coleman described the high school student of this period as ‘cut
off’ from the rest of society, forced inwards towards his own age group.
With his fellows, he comes to constitute a small society, one that has its
most important interactions within itself, and maintains only a few threads
of connections with the outside adult society’” (Wicke 30)

10. ATTACK OF THE “TEENAGER”
• “By the mid-20th century the pace of economic,
technological, and other cultural changes made too
close an identification between parents and
teenagers detrimental to the life-chances of the
younger generation. Parents’ advice and
occupational skills were not as helpful as in the past”
(Weinstein, youth, 103).
• A clear demarcation between adults and this new
group of teenagers was becoming apparent.

11. BUT WHY MUSIC?
• TV in over 50% of
households in affluent nations
by mid-1950s.
• Led to teenagers seeking
other forms of entertainment
away from the rest of the
family but also…

13. 1951: Cleveland based radio DJ Alan Freed coins the phrase ‘rock and roll’ to
describe this new form of music. His innovation: he plays R&B for a mixed-race
audience.

17. Eddie Cochran, Summertime Blues, 1958
I'm gonna raise a fuss, I'm gonna raise a holler
About a workin' all summer just to try to earn a dollar
Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, "No dice son, you gotta work late"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
Well my mom and pop told me, "Son you gotta make some money,
If you want to use the car to go ridin' next Sunday"
Well I didn't go to work, told the boss I was sick
"Well you can't use the car 'cause you didn't work a lick"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues
I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a fine vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nations
Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
"I'd like to help you son but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm a gonna do
But there ain't no cure for the summertime blues

19. SOMETHING ELSE…
• What [Sam] Phillips was looking for was
something that didn’t fit, that didn’t
make sense out of or reflect American
life as everyone seemed to understand
it, but which made it beside the point,
confused things, and affirmed
something else. What? The fact that
there was something else (p.18).

20. THERE AIN’T NO CURE…
•Was the rock rebel ultimately an impotent figure? The
rebellion presented was itself based on consumption, and
in order to consume you have to become part of ‘the
system’.
•“However rebellious and provocative rock’n’roll appeared
and however much it conflicted with the conservative and
conformist pressure in the high schools at the time, it was
nothing more than the cultural form in which the teenagers
in fifties America accepted their real conditions of life. Its
significance lay precisely in the fact that it gave a complex
cultural form to this process, one which was conveyed
through music and linked to the media, which could take
up the separate experiences of young people and feed
them back.” (Wicke p47)
BUT THEN…

22. BOOM! IT’S THE 1960S
• THE BEATLES represent the end of the beginning of rock.
• The style of rock n roll is *still* the same:
 electric guitar-driven
 a kit drummer
 ensemble players
 composer/performers
 the studio as a creative tool
 the film clip (post-touring)
 psychedelic script / album covers
 Individual members as celebrities
 rock starts to get taken seriously as art

23. THREE PIVOTAL
MOMENTS IN BLUES
HISTORY
3. BLUES INVASION
ARRIVING NOW!
BRABAZON, 2012

25. 1965: DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC & SUCH
• People get angry but it
further enshrines rock
as important and
meaningful.
• Rock becomes the
soundtrack of the anti-
war peace movement.
• Rock is hippie music:
free love, psychedelics,
social reorganisation.

29. Marcus: “The Doors weren’t present at Woodstock either. But they were more present at 10050 Cielo Drive…”

30. • Simon Frith revises and critiques rock’s
authenticity and promises (1978)
• Queries rock’s claims of being separate
from mainstream pop’s commercial
tendencies and points out its problematic
tropes around masculinity and rock
production
• “Rock is a capitalist industry, and not a folk
form, but its most successful products do,
somehow, express and reflect its
audience’s concerns.” (pg 62)
PARTY’S OVER!

31. 80s Rock Scholarship in one quote:
“If [rock] cannot offer transcendence, it can
at least promise a kind of salvation. If it does
not define resistance, it does at least offer a
kind of empowerment, allowing people to
navigate their way through, and even to
respond to, their lived context. It is a way of
making it through the day (p.52).”
PARTY’S REALLY OVER!

32. PUNK SCHOLARSHIP (NEXT WEEK)
MOVE AWAY FROM ROCK AS IDEOLOGY
SCENE RESEARCH
HEAVY METAL STUDIES
AND…
POST