Icons of Rock

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Авторы: Scott Schinder

Издательство: Publisher: Greenwood press

Год: 2008

Кол-во страниц: 376

Формат: pdf

Размер: 7 Мб

Язык: englich

It’s now been more than half a century since rock and roll’s offi cial birth, although the music’s roots stretch back much further. In that time, the genre has produced a rogues’ gallery of memorable performers who’ve made essential contributions to rock’s development as a major American art form, while emerging as fascinating, bigger-than-life fi gures in their own right. It’s common for historians to point to July 5, 1954—the evening that Elvis Presley recorded his debut single, “That’s All Right, Mama” at Sun Records’ Memphis studio—as the Night That Rock and Roll Was Born. But rock’s birth cycle was messier and more complicated. The mongrel synthesis of black and white musical forms—blues, jazz, gospel, country—was the product of the convergence of an unruly mass of musical, cultural, and social forces that had been percolating for longer than anyone could remember. Presley’s signifi cance lies largely in the fact that in addition to being a brilliant and riveting performer, he was a charismatic young white man whose music could be marketed to Caucasian audiences at a time when musical tastes were as racially segregated as the rest of American society.

Those musical divisions began to break apart in the years following World War II. Postwar posterity created the fi rst generation of American teenagers with suffi cient disposable income to make them a potent economic force. Not coincidentally, that generation became the fi rst to forge its own musical tastes; prior to the rock and roll era, kids more or less listened to the same music as their parents.