Why 1955? Explaining the advent of rock music

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Road ◽  
Elvis Presley ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Frank Sinatra

At the time, 1929, 1939, 1945 and 1968 all seemed important turning points in the track of our civilisation. By contrast, as anyone alive at the time will attest, 1955 seemed like an unexceptional year in the United States at least. Right in the middle of the ‘middle-of-the-road’ years of the Eisenhower presidency, 1955 hardly seemed like the year for a major aesthetic revolution. Yet it was in the brief span between 1954 and 1956 that the rock aesthetic displaced the jazz-based aesthetic in American popular music. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Patty Page, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Les Paul, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Frankie Lane, Johnnie Ray and Doris Day gave way on the popular music charts to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and the growing legion of rockers.

scholarly journals The Parents' Music Resource Center: from information to censorship

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Chastagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Public ◽  
Resource Center ◽  
History Of

My purpose in this paper is to recount the history of the Parents' Music Resource Center, an American organisation founded in 1985 whose main concern has been to denounce the obscenity and violence of rock music on the grounds that it is partly responsible for the numerous ills that plague the United States. The PMRC claimed that it only wished to inform the public but my suggestion here is that the actions of the organisation resulted in a de facto censorship of popular music. I shall accordingly describe the various steps of the process that led from information to censorship as well as probe the deeper reasons that may have motivated the action of the Center.

scholarly journals Comparing Brazilian and North American songs about money

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Ruben George Oliven
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Intense Process

This article compares Brazilian and North American popular music. If focuses on the lyrics of songs composed mainly in the first half of the twentieth century when an intense process of national building was taking place in Brazil and the United States. Several of those compositions became classics. Those songs were and still are very popular because they echoed and continue to echo the social imaginary of both countries. It is for this reason that popular music is so crucial for the understanding of both societies.

scholarly journals Nisei Politics of Identity and American Popular Music in the 1930s and 1940s

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-119
Author(s):  
Susan Miyo Asai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Immigration Legislation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Popular Music

Growing nationalist thinking and anti-immigration legislation in American politics today calls for a critical historicizing of the continuing ambiguities of U.S. citizenry and notions of what it is to be an American. The identity crisis of Nisei-second generation Japanese Americansresulted from the complex intersection of America's racialized ideology toward immigrants, California's virulent anti-Asian agitation, and the economic and political power struggles between the United States and Japan in gaining dominance of the Pacific region.

Banding Together

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Lena
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Texas ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Creative People ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Death Metal ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Government

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? This book explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles—ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States—the book uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understand the cultural language and evolution of popular music. The book discovers four dominant forms—avant-garde, scene-based, industry-based, and traditionalist—and two dominant trajectories that describe how American pop music genres develop. Outside the United States there exists a fifth form: the government-purposed genre, which the book examines in the music of China, Serbia, Nigeria, and Chile. Offering a rare analysis of how music communities operate, the book looks at the shared obstacles and opportunities creative people face and reveals the ways in which people collaborate around ideas, artworks, individuals, and organizations that support their work.

Diversifying Musical Experiences in Schools and Music Teacher Preparation Programs

2019 ◽  
pp. 891-901
Author(s):  
Robert H. Woody ◽  
Mark C. Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Preparation Programs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Large Ensembles ◽  
Classical Traditions

This chapter discusses the innate differences between vernacular music-making cultures and those oriented in Western classical traditions, and suggests students in traditional school music education programs in the United States are not typically afforded opportunities to learn skills used in vernacular and popular music-making cultures. The chapter emphasizes a need to diversify music-making experiences in schools and describes how vernacular musicianship may benefit students’ musical development. It suggests that, in order for substantive change to occur in music education in the United States, teachers will need to advance beyond simply considering how to integrate popular music into their traditional large ensembles—and how preservice music teacher education programs may be the key to help better prepare teachers to be more versatile and philosophically open to teaching a more musically diverse experience in their future classrooms.

C. Sharon Advisor Dov Weisglass, Remarks on Relations with the United States, Disengagement, the Road Map, and the Possibilities of a Palestinian State, Tel Aviv, October 2004 (excerpts)

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-207
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
The Road ◽  
Road Map ◽  
The Relationship

Ha'Aretz's lengthy interview with Dov Weisglass, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's ““point man”” with Washington and probably his closest advisor, was conducted by Ari Shavit and published first in excerpts and two days later in its entirety. In addition to bringing into sharp contrast the contradiction between Israel's declaratory policies and assurances and its actual policies and intentions——and in so doing eliciting a swift ““clarification”” from the Prime Minister's Office——the interview also conveys a sense of the intimacy and easy camaraderie that characterizes U.S.-Israeli interactions. The full text is available at www.haaretz.com. Tell me about the dynamics of the relationship between you [and U.S. national security advisor Condoleezza Rice], and whether it's an unusual relationship.

scholarly journals »Heimat im Koffer.« – »Oder über das Emigrantendasein. (Falls nicht zu traurig).«

Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

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