Rock 'n' Roll as the Voice of American Youth Culture

Introduction: Rock 'n' Roll and Youth Identity

Rock 'n' roll is best described as a "hybrid of many musical styles: white country and western, black guitar blues and rhythm and blues, and both black and white gospel music" (De Curtis). Rock 'n' roll began in the early 1950s as a dancing music strictly for teenagers and became known in the 1960s as simply "rock music." This shift occurred because rock no longer stressed music primarily meant for dancing.

Throughout the decades, rock 'n' roll has become a way for young people to express their emotions and problems — such as love, school, peer pressure, cars, and parents. It has also been used as a significant display of rebellion against general authority and adult values.

Since the 1950s, rock 'n' roll has taken a stand against the American economic and political systems, as well as against traditional values more broadly. It has also served as an outlet for positive expression and a means of promoting energy and communal spirit (Szatmary).

During the 1950s, rock 'n' roll spoke out against many of the institutions that worked to control young people across different economic and social classes during the Silent Years of the Eisenhower era (1952–1960). Elvis Presley and many other early rock 'n' roll musicians were viewed by older generations as villains who sought to destroy the decency and stability of the youth.

According to parents of the 1950s, rock 'n' roll started a trend of youth separation from their parents and traditional family values. It also created distance between teenagers and both the home and the church.

Rock 'n' Roll and Society

As the rules of society change, so does the music. As American values shifted through this period, a corresponding shift can be observed in rock 'n' roll — moving away from the simpler rhythm and blues of the 1950s toward the more literate and politically charged subject matter of the 1960s (Edsforth). As the music reflected these changes, it also became symbolic of them, producing a defining musical figure at each major turning point: Bob Dylan at the more cerebral beginnings of the radical sixties, the Beatles during its more idealistic middle period, and the Rolling Stones closer to the end.

Many of the rock 'n' roll stars of this decade came from poor and working-class families, and many of their songs attacked upper-middle-class concepts. Throughout the 1950s, the United States' capitalist economy was largely consumer-oriented. The production of heavy industrial goods for the growing defense sector was not affected, but consumer commodities were becoming the mainstay of the American economy (Curtis).

The mass production of consumer commodities was driven by the growing wealth of a large percentage of the population. The United States had anticipated the general increase in consumer wealth due to its new dominance within the world capitalist system following World War II (Chapple). The new bureaucratic consumer capitalism provoked widespread protest among the children of the middle class and a few of the upper class as well.

The protest against American consumer capitalism in the sixties was reflected in the new progressive rock music being created by mostly middle-class rock groups, including the Mothers of Invention, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, the Fugs, the Doors, and Bob Dylan. The growing student and dropout audience particularly favored these groups. Rock music shared many of the antiestablishment attitudes of the nascent youth culture and the older radicals. As one cultural analysis put it, "Fundamentally, it was against materialist consumerism and puritanical sexual organization."

By the end of the 1950s, rock 'n' roll had become the voice of a completely new generation — the youth of America.

American Pie and the Changing Cultural Landscape

In 1971, the song American Pie entered the lives of millions around the world (McLean). Today, it is one of the most discussed, dissected, and debated songs that popular music has ever produced. The song illustrates how music represents the values of its time. It refers to "the ten years we've been on our own," speaking of 1959–1970 — the decade in which the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of those values by the political and social movements of the mid and late sixties.

The era of the 1950s had been a relatively peaceful period in American life, and American Pie spoke of the new situations Americans found themselves in as that quieter, hopeful world disappeared. As 1970 came to a close, the world the flower children had envisioned no longer seemed viable, and a sense of disillusionment and loss became predominant.