Pop is Rock. Rock is Pop(-Culture).
When asked to define rock music, what do you think of? The lively rhythms? The powerful beats? The intricate guitar riffs? I for one think of the long and rich history that creates the genre of music that millions of individuals listen to and enjoy each day. Rock and roll started as a marginalized genre of music and has since then made its way to being one of the most listened to genres of the masses.
From Elvis Presley to Mick Jagger to Paul McCartney, these artists are leading figures in the rock genre. Aside from the fact that they are all talented musicians, they have something else in common with one another: they are all white males. Contrary to the white domination we have seen and continue to see in the genre today, the deep roots of rock and roll stem from Black tradition and experience; the origins of rock can be traced to country, gospel, and Rhythm and Blues, created for and by Black individuals (Schapp and Berkers, 2020). It was not until the genre was dominated by white individuals that it transformed from being considered marginalized to being a mainstream “thing” consumed by the masses.
Rock and roll was a term first coined by Alan Freed, a “white disc jockey in Cleveland who played ‘popular American’ music on his programs (Red, 1985, pg.35). Some of the most well-known rock songs have been attributed to white artists, even though they were written for/by and previously recorded by Black artists; this false attribution can be marked as a product of the media, for “decision-makers in radio, film, and television have used telecommunication to create a false dichotomy within the music” (Redd, 1985, p. 32). Elvis Presley’s longest-running number one hit, “Hound Dog” was recorded by Black Rhythm-and-Blues singer Ellie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton only four years earlier (A&E Television Networks, 2010); “mass-media chroniclers have repeatedly credited Bill Haley’s recording of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ with being a rock ‘n’ roll classic and the first example of the genre…despite the fact that the song originally was recorded by black artist Sonny Dae” (Redd, 1985, p. 32). This here ties into the idea of ideological control that John Storey introduced to us in his work, What is popular culture?; ideological control brings about “distorted images of reality [that]…work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless” (Storey, 2009, p. 4). The media created a false impression of the true nature of rock and roll.
The gaining acceptance of rock and roll can be said to be paralleled with this shift in the racial dynamics of the music genre; however, even after this shift to white propriety, rock and roll was considered a product of the countercultural movement that paralleled the Civil Right and hippie movements of the 1960s. “Counterculture refers to an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed first in the United States and then spread throughout much of the Western world between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s” (Paese, n.d). Standing ideas on human sexuality, women’s rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with drugs, and the American Dream were all questioned during this period; there tended to be a division in thought between generational lines (Paese, n.d).
Rock music attracted the generation’s youth—the sex appeal, the drugs, the taboo topics embedded within the lyrics of each song. Listening to rock and roll felt like a form of rebellion for the youth of this period; listening to The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and The Who was a liberation for young adults. Rock music “introduced white suburban teenagers to a culture that sounded more exotic, thrilling, and illicit than anything they had ever known” (Kot, 2020). Rock music opened the minds of teenagers around the world; rock and roll was a byproduct of the countercultural movement, contradicting the previously standing social norms of the 1950s and ‘60s.
That being said, rock and roll had grown tremendously since its beginnings, gaining light as a form of popular culture over time; rock music falls under Andi Zeisler’s definition of popular culture, stating that it “grew out of low culture, the uncouth counterpart to so-called high culture … as the phrase “pop culture” gradually came to take the place of “low culture,” it was defined more by what it wasn’t—elegant, refined, erudite—than by what it was (Zeisler, 2008, p. 5).
Rock music was transformed from a genre of the margins to one accepted and loved by the masses, including me. The genre has grown so much from its root that there are now well over 200 sub-genres within the world of rock (including pop, punk, and heavy metal styles of music.) So next time you turn on the radio or play your Spotify Daily Mix, sit and think of the history behind those songs you are mindlessly listening to, for it might turn out to be much more complicated than you think.
References
A&E Television Networks. (2010, April 1). "Hound dog" is recorded for the first time by big mama Thornton. History.com. Retrieved October 12, 2021, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hound-dog-is-recorded-for-the-first-time-by-big-mama-thornton.
Hamilton, J. (2016, October 6). How The Rolling Stones, a band obsessed with black musicians, helped make rock a white genre. Slate Magazine. Retrieved October 12, 2021, from https://slate.com/culture/2016/10/race-rock-and-the-rolling-stones-how-the-rock-and-roll-became-white.html.
Kot, G. (2020, September 26). Rock and roll. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/rock-and-roll-early-style-of-rock-music
Redd, L. N. (1985). Rock! It’s still Rhythm and Blues. The Black perspective in music, 13(1), 31–47
Paese, M. (n.d.). The counterculture. The history of rock and roll radio show. Retrieved October 12, 2021, from https://www.thehistoryofrockandroll.net/the-counterculture/
Schaap, J., & Berkers, P. (2020). “You’re not supposed to be into rock music”: Authenticity maneuvering in a white configuration. Sociology of race and ethnicity, 6(3), 416–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649219899676
Storey, J. (2009). What is popular culture: Cultural theory and popular culture, pp. 1-16.
Zeisler, A. (2008). Feminism and pop culture. New York, NY: Seal Press. Pp. 1-21.
Hi Giselle, I think you provide a very heuristic perspective on how rock music evolve from a marginalized culture to a mass culture, a popular culture embraced by most of the people. After reading your blog, I realized how ironic it is that rock music only becomes popular after it is free from it’s black origin in most people’s eyes. You used a large amount of evidence to prove many music that is deemed from white artists is actually created by black musicians. These examples contribute a lot to the trustworthiness of your blog, making it easy for readers to sympathize. They also remind me of the first reading that we did at Penn, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In this play, Levee’s music is new and potential; however, the white producer refuses to let him record his own songs but rather claims that he will let a white band perform it. It’s so pathetic that Black artists are deprived of the rights to promote their own music. You connect this phenomenon to some outside sources, which is very inventive. Personally, I think it can also be related to respectability politics. Sender said Queer Eye’s portrait of gay men is “cultivated through decades of employment in the style trades, in making over straight men.”(P.140) Similarly, I am wondering whether some black artists were forced to conform to the general status at that time. They might have to show their music in a legible and comfortable way for white folks, even if that meant to get rid of their own name from the album. Anyway, I like how you discovered this issue and published this blog. I believe you are making these black artists more visible in this way.
ReplyDeleteFrom Chenxi Shi
Hi Giselle!
ReplyDeleteYour post was really well researched, and I enjoyed seeing how you connected your researched evidence back to the works we read in class. Specifically, I liked your defining of rock music under Zeisler's definition of pop culture as low culture, because showing the roots of rock music in Black culture and how it only became mainstream after it was co-opted and made appealing or palatable to white audiences also ties back to the cycle of incorporation and excorporation we discussed in Fiske's article The Jeaning of America. Rock music was originally the Black community's assertion of their right to make their own culture out of resources provided by the white-dominant system — I really liked the way you phrased it by saying "created for and by Black individuals." When rock became mainstream and was incorporated, this shows, according to Fiske, how powerful groups can maintain power by absorbing things that go against it. In a sense, the very creation of music for and by Black individuals was a threat to the white-dominant power dynamic, so the incorporation of rock serves as a form of containment by allowing rock music to exist as a controlled form of dissent but still maintaining the existing social order. I also think situating the incorporation of rock into pop culture in Fiske's framework helps give context to the examples you give of Black artists not receiving due credit for creating rock songs in favor of giving credit to white musicians instead. In general, I really enjoyed your post and appreciate how much research you did on the topic!
- Sarika Rau