Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Palmer, Robert. Rock & Roll: An Unruly History. New York: Harmony Books, 1995.
Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Prinsky, Lorraine E., and Jill Leslie Rosenbaum. “Leer-ics or Lyrics: Teenage Impressions of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Youth & Society 18, no. 4 (1987): 384–97.
Samuels, Gertrude. “Why They Rock ‘n’ Roll.” New York Times Magazine, January 12, 1958, 19.
Schechter, Danny. The More You Watch, The Less You Know. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Tate, Greg. Introduction: “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects.” In Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate, 1–14. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
Tosches, Nick. Hellfire. New York: Delacorte Press, 1982.←57 | 58→
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Zak, Albin J., III. I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.←58 | 59→
Television
Television is an industrial product and presentational device, a communication technology with visual and auditory components that is accessed via broadcast. When discussing television and its effects, we speak of it less as an artifact and more as a mass medium with broad cultural and political impacts. As the Media Ecologists (Innis, McLuhan, Carpenter, Ong, Postman, et al.) have pointed out, television, like all communication technologies, is not a neutral conveyor; TV delivers information beyond the content of its programs. Keeping that in mind, it is necessary to consider the messages communicated by television about rock ‘n’ roll, both in the content and formal features of its programs, and in the myriad choices made by programmers about what was presented, when, and how.
Television came at the tail end of a remarkable run of technological developments, enumerated by Postman: the telegraph, the rotary press, the camera, the telephone, the phonograph, the movies, and radio (Disappearance 72). One can hardly overstate the impact of television on American and world culture. One sample statistic conveys television’s ubiquity: by the end of twentieth century more than 98% of U.S. households had at least one television set (https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf), more than the number of homes with indoor plumbing (Rural Community Assistance Partnership). Richard Jackson Har←59 | 60→ris notes that television became both the main window through which we view the world and the door through which a world of images and ideas enters our minds (3). Going further, Postman indicates that television did not simply reflect, extend, or amplify culture, but gradually became our culture, its physical characteristics and symbolic codes accepted as natural (Amusing 79). As television became the primary source of information for most Americans, it framed their reality.
The technology for broadcasting pictures was developed in the 1920s, but the device was not widely known until it was publicly unveiled at the 1939 World’s Fair.1 Although few people could afford television sets at that point, the commercial and cultural potential was sufficiently obvious that the Federal Communications Commission adopted national standards for the medium in 1941. In 1946, the number of television sets in American homes could still be measured in thousands, but by 1950, the medium had reached critical mass. In 1956, television sets were being purchased at the astonishing rate of 20,000 a day (Miller and Nowak 338); the question was never whether TV would “catch on” but whether manufacturers would be able to make it affordable enough to satisfy demand. It took television only a few years to outstrip all other media in terms of influence and barely longer to achieve market saturation.
There were pockets of resistance. The sudden ubiquity of television, combined with the uneven quality of the programming (the demand to fill air time far exceeded supply in the 1950s), fostered skepticism. Some found in television a convenient scapegoat for a range of social ills, from declining literacy rates to violent crime. But despite the anxieties, Americans proved to be congenitally incapable of the one act that would mitigate the problem: turning the thing off.
If the phonograph, radio, and telephone represented the first incursions of technology into American homes, television constituted a full-scale invasion. While viewers marveled at the sights and sounds beamed into their living rooms, there was a tradeoff: they were connected to the world, but increasingly likely to settle for a second-hand experience. They liked to stay home and watch. Raymond Williams used the term “mobile privatization” to describe this melding of mass and private experience. Film offered similar stimuli and had been exerting a powerful impact on American society for decades but, as Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, television had different properties from film, and neither was just radio with pictures. In addition to entertainment, television carried all manner of cultural information and delivered it in a more compelling and domineering manner than anything that preceded it.
It is important to remember that, as rock ‘n’ roll music emerged, the television networks were still establishing its command-and-control model of broadcasting. But viewers were generally trusting, too enthralled to question medium←60 | 61→ or message. After the initial novelty wore off, television was thought of less as an activity than as a faithful companion. Television producers fostered this affinity by importing many of the genres, programs, and aesthetics from radio that, in turn, had adopted many of its presentation modes from vaudeville. This bond between medium and audience discouraged critical analysis; one does not question the motives of a friend.
Figure 3.1: The 1950s American family gets programmed.
Source: The Story of Television, produced by William J. Ganz Company, Inc. for Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 1956. https://archive.org/details/Story_of_Television_The
One would be hard-pressed to find a single sphere of public or private, conscious or unconscious life that has not been dramatically affected by television. Neil Postman says that “television has achieved the status of ‘meta-medium’—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well” (Amusing 78–79). Jody Berland notes that television is “a producer of practices which are (re)articulated spatially in both production and reception,” creating a “visual rhetoric of ‘us’” (37). Joshua Meyrowitz describes television as the most dominant component in a “media matrix” that not only influences our perceptions by virtue of content, but alters the “situational geography” of our society