Rock and Roll Clearly Music

Rock and Roll

Clearly music is as an integral part of a society's history as a widespread phenomenon of everyday interactions and occurrences. It has existed as early as humans themselves. As Bennett Reimer (2000, p.25), music educator and philosopher, noted: "Whenever and wherever humans have existed, music has existed also." Thus music that becomes popular acts as a gauge of what is happening in society at that time. It reveals an illustrated picture of the attitudes, views and disposition of the present day, as much as does art or literature. Music offers insights and multiple perspectives in addition to its emotional influence as much or more than even written historical materials. As such, it is impossible to understand the reason why rock and roll not only was born in the 1950s, but took hold and actually shook the world without also understanding what was historically occurring at this same time. It is imperative, to understand all of history, to know how popular music, such as rock and roll, fit into the totality of what has taken place.

Rock and roll was not the first, nor will it be the last, popular form of music that arose in response to what was taking place in the social and political arena. As Grossberg (2008), states, any study of music including rock and roll must start with the identification of the context within which it is located and the identification of its relationships. The dominant features are nearly always understood as sociological variables, which although frequently locally significant, must continually confront their own exceptions. During the mid-1800s, as the West opened up to the newest settlers with the Homestead Act, and hopes soared high for land and gold, songs such as "Oh, California," "The Old Chisholm Trail," "Home on the Range" and "I've Been Working on the Railroad," became popular countrywide. The transition of the risque "Roaring Twenties," or the "Jazz Age," and its flappers, Dixieland and Charleston tunes, transitioned from the height of optimism to the brinks of despair less than a decade later. In the early 1930s, when the stock market crashed and millions died in the dust bowl plains, people sang "I've Got Five Dollars" and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime." Politically, Woodie Guthrie, Molly Jackson, "Leadbelly," and Pete Seeger promoted the unions and, for the first time, made people equate folk music with supposed leftist and subversive leanings. Throughout the next decade, as the now-freed African-American slaves moved into the northern cities, they brought with them a new blues style and songs such as "My Captain" describing the hard working conditions and unemployment.

Over the decades, increasing numbers of people have become interested in listening to music, as the radio and TV has reached across the U.S. And then the world. Music indeed counts. There are also those scores of people who attend concerts, play their own musical instruments or buy millions of records. "For despite another of the claims often made about contemporary societies that their rationalities and utilitarian values have all but erased the spiritual, the emotional, in a word the distinctively human qualities of life, it is evident that the clamor for music not only survives but indeed is intensified in such societies" (Hatch & Millward, 1987, p. 16).

For some individuals, music is the peak way to express their emotion and creativity. For others, it is the positive or negative view of the Western cultural tradition. Music may represent support and encouragement of the societal and political norm or instead sound of protesting, rebelliousness or revolution. "What is common to each of these and other orientations is an undeniable belief in both the power and the importance of music in society" (Hatch & Millward, 1987).

Finnegan (1989) has suggested that people see music as a pathway, since it offers a basis for activities and relationships and a means to express personal and collective identities and value structures. It also gives these people a way to meaningfully structure their actions and activities, as demonstrated in how music is so closely integrated with holidays and life cycle special events. Music thus provides a way that groups of people, be they households or wider demographics such as teenagers view their home, city, nation or world. Music forms and reinforces territorial boundaries and interactions among people, with relationships, networks, groups and subcultures. It revolves around collective identities and statements of existing differences and similarities.

The arrival and development of rock and roll exemplifies this integration with the people and society. It is impossible to study this music form without seeing it in light of the historical context. Longhurst (1995) notes that "the development of rock and roll in the 1950s is often presented as a kind of liberation from the dullness of American and British life of the period" (1996, p. 115). Cohen (1997) explains that New York disc jockey Alan Freed first used the term "rock 'n roll" in 1954, a turbulent time in the country, for both the whites and particularly the blacks and the country's history of racism. This newly arrived music included African-American musical elements from the blues, gospel and rhythm and blues. The radios were increasingly playing more of this black-derived music at the same time as racial integration was being purposely or reluctantly followed among blacks and whites throughout different parts of the United States.

The blacks were not the only ones who were breaking the boundaries and seeking a new way of life. At the end of the World War II, teenagers and the young working class became the driving population behind musical creation and production. In fact, Wall (2003, p. 37) calls rock and roll the "product of the birth of teenager." Roe (1996) states that the music of this period was the young people's way to construct their identity and revolt against the norm. During the war, teenagers did not have the power or ability to make their own decisions and escape from their parental authority. When the war came to an end, they had much more freedom to do and say as they wished. Rock and roll reinforced this rebelliousness between the younger and older generations. At the same time, technology was advancing, so that music could easily be heard and even seen on early televisions across the country. And the youth had the purchasing power to buy the products being produced in mass. Waters (2003) notes that the year 1955 marked the emergence of rock and roll from being lost in the shadows to shining in the open under the bright lights. It is also when the rules of music transformed. The way that music was produced and how it was received throughout all areas of the country by different populations significantly altered culture.

Marcus (1987) sees rock and roll going beyond the youth population. He argues that rock and roll needs to be understood not as an outlet of specific subcultures of class and race but instead as a musical means of establishing a more general national identity. He describes his concepts as a way to widen the context in which music is heard -- to observe and define rock and roll not as a youth culture, or counterculture, but just as American culture. To Marcus, this musical genre is best recognized as a cultural happening that struggled against the American norm, due to its antiestablishment message, at the same time as continuing to represent a distinctive national character. As time went on into the 1960s, rock and roll would be embraced as part of Americanism.

Marcus' book Mystery Train sees rock and roll developing from the "ancestors" of Harmonic Frank and Robert Johnson, who strongly influenced individuals such as Elvis Presley through their subcultural musical expressive style. In the mythic iconicity of blues guitarist Johnson was a classical folk "badman" performer who dug deep into the inner core of tremendous emotional despair, sexual angst, social abandonment, and geographic marginalization. He is America's "first rock and roller," who established an entirely new form of music with loud, jabbing sounds that were driven by a beat and rhythm so strong that it was impossible to not to participate. The medium of rock and roll gave musicians as Johnson the opportunity to express a version of America that displayed the contradictions of the country's cultural spheres. Frank and Johnson can be seen as having the same aesthetic and historical importance as that which is give to such authors as Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

Music, argues Marcus, can be viewed as the country's great literature. It portrays an idea of what it means and is worth to be an American and what the life stakes in the country ought to be. The musical artist can illuminate the concerns and questions that are being raised by the American people and add quality and meaning to their efforts. Not only does Marcus rewrite American history through the view of rock and roll, but he also was the first to recognize this music as a metaphor for what was taking place historically. He encourages people to come aboard a train being engineered in "weirdo abandon" by musicians who "dramatized a sense of what it is to be American" (1987, p. 10). Christgau, another writer who sees the correlation between this music and the greater society in which it occurred, adds: "rock criticism embraced a dream or metaphor of perpetual revolution. . . . Worthwhile bands were supposed to change people's lives, preferably for the better. If they failed to do so, that meant they didn't matter." (2003, p. 140)

Rock and roll is recognized much more than by its musical and stylistic differences. It is also utilized in many different ways by its followers. Grossberg (1983) analyzes the way that rock and roll functions in societal transformations. He notices that although rock and roll has a variety of different local effects, it appears to also have a unified historical identity. He says that it is possible to explain seeing rock and roll in a larger cultural context by making two assumptions: 1) Certain rock and roll texts cause effects as long as they are found within a larger "rock and roll apparatus" by which the music is inflected, such as dress styles, behavior, and dance in addition to economic and political interactions and 2) the strength of rock and roll is found through how able it is to produce and create structures of desire, which act a power struggles.

At one time during rock and roll history, this musical form was a function of the relationships that exist among the music and other institutional, social and cultural factors. It is possible to analyze the definitive political stance of specific times of rock and roll as well as move beyond these contexts and envision a rock and roll unity. It is possible to identify the cultural form of rock and roll by reviewing the structures by which this music has consistently created and placed its followers in a location of affective alliances.

Rock and roll is commonly thought of as a sociomusical phenomenon, and is therefore closely associated with a specific set of social conditions that occurred during a relatively specific period of time (Hatch & Mallward, 1987). For some Americans who lived during the

1950s, rock and roll raised only aesthetic questions, for other individuals it either consisted of or pinpointed essential moral or political conflicts, while a different population demographic felt it was a dangerous economic phenomenon. For some of the more conservative Americans, rock and roll constituted a symptom of moral degeneration. The North Alabama Citizens Council, formed to resist court-ordered school desegregation, said that rock and roll and jazz were a plot by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to mongrelize America by forcing Negro culture on the South. They characterized rock and roll as the "basic, heavy-beat of the Negroes. It appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity" (Hamm, cited in Hatch & Millward, 1987, pg. 70). The equation of rock and roll with racial tensions in the South focused more attention on the problem, and provided more television pictures for world consumption, with the attendant probabilities of escalation of demands and resistance to those demands.

Grossberg (1983) theorizes that rock and roll's dominant affective context is a temporal instead of sociological. He also sees rock and roll as a cultural rather than a political revolution. The sociological descriptions do not offer blatant accounts of the creation and continued power of rock and roll, but must constantly appeal to an a priori definition of music that is closely aligned with a particular historical moment. Even though such factors as race, economic class, gender, age nationality and subculture may be in part a cause of these specific affective alliances, the birth of rock and roll needs to be seen in the context of growing up in the U.S. after the World War II. Rock and roll defines the particular aspect of postwar alienation that occurs with other social structures.

Rock and roll was born into a specific context of time, or late capitalism and post-modernity, reports Grossberg (1983). The overriding circumstances of this post-war context include the effects of the war and holocaust on parents, the new economic prosperity and optimism, the fear of instant and complete annihilation from the atomic bomb and the emergence of the cold war and the growing McCarthyism, which led to an overall political apathy and repression. At the same time, the country saw the growth of suburbia with its inherent repetition and boredom, the development of a consumption economy with a sophisticated technology that was taking control of everyday life, the expansion of mass media and marketing, the major growth of social knowledge from television and growing educational opportunities, the growing impact of the baby boom generation, the continuation of an individuality mindset along with the need of expanded progress and communication and what was called "shock." The youth were not only bored with the American Dream life in the suburbs, but also feeling fearful, alone and isolated from their parents and the world around them. The more that these adults stressed their uniqueness and promised them a perfect future, the more angry, frustrated, and insecure these teenagers and young adults became.

However, although music plays such an integral role in the historical, social and political makeup of a culture, it does not receive its important place in education. Tagg (2001) sees a number of contradictions on how music is perceived yet how it is studied. The first contradiction puts music's statistically verifiable social value in one corner and its institutional status in the other. He says that little doubt exists that music in the American culture is the most ubiquitous of symbolic systems. Its importance in both economic and temporal terms cannot be denied. The American brains hear music on average about three and a half hours daily, or nearly 25% of a person's waking life. Ninety percent of radio time consists of playing music and about 50% of television programming either has music on the screen or as an underscore. In fact, there are not many people who spend more time reading, writing, listening to speeches, dancing, or looking at viewing artwork. Even compulsive television and movie addicts hear music as they are sucked into the screen. Yet most music education classes and schools do not place an emphasis on music, but instead place it towards the bottom of the academic list of important courses. When classes are to be cut, music is often considered the first to go, especially music history or appreciation. Music's share of the total school curriculum and the school system's budget for instruction bear little or no relation to its extracurricular importance in terms of either financial or time budgets. Such disparity between the actual value of today's music and its low status in the hierarchy of public and private education is also seen in cultural politics and higher education and research.

Tagg (2001) relates that another contradiction comes closely after this first one: Regardless that music is definitely important in the American culture, the country has yet to establish a workable way of understanding how all this music in the mass media actually impacts the people hearing and experiencing it. Although literary and cultural studies classes widely study critical reading and the ability of recognizing the hidden messages under advertising and other marketing in order to enhance independent thinking, the same cannot be said about the abilities to analyze musical messages. There is no analytical method that has the ability to deal with all the music that is disseminated through the mass media and applied on an everyday basis by millions of people.

A third contradiction continues from the second, but in part explains why this understanding of music has so slowly developed. He believes that there is a disparity between the analytical meta-language of the Western world's music and that of other systems of symbols. That is, "it deals with peculiarities in the derivation patterns of terms denoting structural elements in music when compared with the denotative practices applied in linguistics and the visual arts."

In order to bring clarity to this disparity, Tagg (2001) uses the terms "constructional" and "receptional," each of these words representing an opposite. Being able to understand both the written and spoken word, or having receptional skills, is normally believed to be as essential as speaking and writing, or having constructional skills. Yet in music, being competent in receptional skills does not have equal importance. For instance, adolescents who can understand quite complex intertextual visual references in music videos are not normally considered artistic, nor given credit of having the visual literacy they clearly own.