Originally posted to Popular Music Musings:
I got a fascinating question from a reader; I don't want to go broadcasting his name all over the place without permission (though he did allow me to post our email exchange to the blog), but here's what he asked:
Without writing a whole book on it, what do you think life was like before "rock and roll"? I'd also be particularly interested to hear your take on the price paid (if any) by the rock stars of the 60's, in the days before the counter-culture became the culture. Nowadays, we only think of the glory. But weren't the rock stars more or less on the front lines of a culture war at the time? What was the down side for them? Or is this all bullshit? What do you think?
Great questions! Here were my answers.
What was life like before rock & roll? On the one hand I can't comprehend it, but on the other hand I'm not sure if Keith really does either. If he's talking about "rock & roll" in the sense of a musical challenge to racial divides, social mores, and parental authority, it was nothing that hadn't happened before. Sinatra was considered daring and overly sensual in the '40s, and bebop jazz was despicable noise; the swing craze terrified parents in the '30s because whites and blacks were on the same dance floors and listening to the same "narcotic" rhythms; jazz of the '20s was, of course, the soundtrack to the roaring twenties, an era of alcoholism and wild orgies that put the '60s to shame. Even ragtime was considered the decline of civilization in the 1890s. (One famous editorial called it "Syncopation gone mad.") [Actually, the editorial said that "Ragtime is a disease of syncopation gone mad," which would have had more impact if I had remembered it when I initially wrote the answer email. — MJW.]
My guess is that the REAL difference between those musical revolutions and the rock & roll revolution is that rock happened during the most oppressive time period of all those others: the Cold War, McCarthyism, Southern racist violence, and social conformity were all at peaks that we hadn't seen before or sense. (In the 1910s, silent movies were able to show brutal murders and even bared breasts; in the 1950s, a married couple on TV couldn't share a bed!) So the rebellion against those things was the equal and opposite reaction...but the 40s (while not as liberated as rock & roll) were a freer, happier, less confined world.
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