Embedded in his groundbreaking media analysis, McLuhan reflected the puritanical attitude of his generation toward rock ‘n’ roll, referring to it as “a central aural form of education which threatens the whole educational establishment,” going as far as to say that “If Homer can be wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock” (Video McLuhan).26 While part of the anti-modernist backlash stems from a sense of loss of the primacy of book-based linearity, and the capacity for logical reasoning that it encourages, rock music can hardly be isolated from television, radio, computers, or other media for its role in ushering in a new era of instability and relativism. But, an argument can also be made for a certain body of rock music as a relative bulwark against further erosion of a literary orientation. McLuhan recognized art and tribalism as two resources with the capacity to provide some insulation from the onslaught of electronic media, and rock ‘n’←49 | 50→ roll combines these qualities. Rock music is an integral part of the contemporary hyper-mediated matrix—it can be loud and intrusive—but it can also play a palliative role for young listeners as a response to the overall thrust of media messages controlled by adults and commercial interests.
Rock music is seldom considered in the context of modernism because of its folk roots and its hedonistic tendencies, but rock ‘n’ roll not only thrived on what Berman called the “moving chaos” of modernism, it gave it a palpable form, comprised of electrified sound, energy, speed, fashion, and attitude. But 1950s rock ‘n’ roll was more of a symbol of modernism than a reflection of it. It carried the banner of discontinuity, but rarely strayed from the established themes and preoccupations of imagination and emotion associated with romanticism.
In the 1950s, modernism found its dissonant musical expression in the jazz and classical avant-garde, led by such artists as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage.27 Just as the instant “reality” of photography liberated painters in the nineteenth century to embrace abstraction and other experimentations, twentieth century modernism turned the arts toward the conceptual and the theoretical. In this respect rock ‘n’ roll was, if anything, anti-modernist, a visceral response to what Jonathan Franzen called “the sadness of modernity” (92). Even as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s was perceived by adults as a break with the past and the foremost manifestation of modernism, the music itself did not represent a great leap from Tin Pan Alley in terms of form or its romantic subject matter, and the fullness of the relationship between musician and audience was one of naïve transparency, a generally wholesome expression of joy, sincerity, and innocence. Borrowing vocal stylings from blues and R&B, rock ‘n’ roll singers often sounded knowing and libidinous, but the lyrics were rarely much more sophisticated than the doe-eyed, june-moon-spoon poetics of the previous era. Doo-wop music epitomized this self-absorption, more concerned with harmonies, arrangements, and sound than lyric content.28 Rock artists may have appropriated the urgency of singers such as Muddy Waters (nee McKinley Morganfield), B.B. King, and Robert Johnson, but their music reflected little of the suffering that informs the blues. If the blues is a music borne of sorrow and redemption, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll is a music of joy and abandon; it had nothing to redeem.
Only in the 1960s, behind the more cerebral contributions of Bob Dylan, The Who, The Velvet Underground, The Mothers of Invention, and others, did rock music acknowledge the interface of various recording and performing technologies, self-consciously and purposefully adopting the tools and aesthetics of modernism. In many ways, the 1960s hippies, with their alternative lifestyles, could be seen as representing a great cultural compromise, embracing both the utopianism and high-flying creativity of modernism and a down-to-earth folk tribalism.←50 | 51→
Like his contemporary, McLuhan, Lewis Mumford was a keen observer of technological effects, but lacked an appreciation for the interplay between rock music and modernism. Observing the phenomena of rock festivals in the 1960s, he saw an inconsistency between the revolutionary urge of youth to “drop out” of consumer culture and their reliance upon mass-produced and mass-mediated products and messages. But reducing this phenomenon to a “purely megatechnic primitivism” (Myth 373) oversimplifies and undervalues the cultural and political movements from which rock drew much of its power and to which it lent significant support and energy. W. T. Lhamon Jr. refers to the seedbed and source material that nurtured rock ‘n’ roll as poplore, which “behaved like folklore and sometimes had folk traditions. But identifiable individuals were making this lore in the city now, assembling it with cameras and electric instruments, propagating it on television and radio and records…” (98). Also lost on academics such as Mumford was the quality of rock ‘n’ roll that joined romanticism to the folk process and reflected diffidence as much as defiance. Lhamon uses the term “congeniality” to describe the ability of rock ‘n’ roll (and other art forms of the 1950s) to find common ground with its audience even as it aspired to originality and innovation.
When the advent of rap music and hip hop in the 1980s revived the debate about the content of lyrics in popular music, social scientists conducted content analyses that demonstrated how benign the words in most 1950s rock songs actually were. Lorraine Prinsky and Jill Rosenbaum cite several quantitative studies that found that “songs from the 1950s tended to reflect more traditional values of love and sex” and it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that social protest, drugs, and “nontraditional views of relationships” became commonplace (385).
Unlike the blues, suffering was not the starting point for rock ‘n’ roll. The genius of the blues was transforming misery into consolation and gratification. Rock ‘n’ roll was a joyful expression of a burgeoning youth culture that helped to define what Melvin Tumin called a “cult of happiness” (554). As Simon Frith indicates, despite rock’s reliance on mediating technology and its later tendency toward social commentary, it retains a fundamental adherence to romantic and folk ideals. “From Romanticism rock fans have inherited the belief that listening to someone’s music means getting to know them, getting access to their souls and sensibilities. From the folk tradition they’ve adopted the argument that musicians can represent them, articulating [their] immediate needs and experiences…” (“Art” 267).
Although the young people of the baby boom generation were considered non-conformists, it was not until the 1960s that this attitude gained political currency and became widespread. As Steven Chaffee points out (citing Lull and Christenson), “if it had any clear social goals, rock music was intended to insulate young people from the rest of their own society much more than it was to build an←51 | 52→ international following” (415). Plus, as many psychologists have documented, the spirit of teenage rebellion is tempered by the strong desire to belong. From this perspective, the embrace of rock ‘n’ roll by 1950s teens can be seen as less defiant and more romantic, less of a rejection of mainstream values and more of a participatory communion with their peers. Leo D’Anjou calls the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the 1950s “a rebellion without rebels” (np), arguing that teenagers did not see themselves as renegades until television and other media portrayed them that way.
According to John Mundy, “rock ‘n’ roll created a cultural space in which these dichotomies [rebellion and conformity] could be given expression, explored, and, symbolically at least, resolved” (99). Observers as divergent as Dylan Thomas and George “Shadow” Morton understood that the “rebel without a cause” was not a threatening figure, but representative of the contradictory aspects of modernity. In his 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, Thomas referred to “the good bad boys,” while Morton’s song “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” a hit for The Shangri-Las in 1965, famously referred to a male love interest as “good, bad, but not evil.”
Young people in the 1950s may have been self-absorbed, but they were not immune to the general anxieties of society, and paranoia in the form of bomb shelters and air raid drills was part of the psychological landscape in the 1950s. In the content of its songs, early rock ‘n’ roll was fundamentally romantic and escapist, but it was also