Slang, youth subcultures and rock music

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Marketing rock and roll

Rock and roll's impact in the 1950s reflected the spending power of young people who, as a result of the '50s economic boom (and in contrast to the prewar Great Depression), had unprecedented disposable income. That income was of interest not just to record companies but to an ever-increasing range of advertisers keen to pay for time on teen-oriented, Top 40 radio stations and for the development of teen-aimed television showsteen-aimed television shows such as American BandstandAmerican Bandstand. For the major record companies, Presley's success marked less the appeal of do-it-yourself musical hybrids than the potential of teenage idols: singers with musical material and visual images that could be marketed on radio and television and in motion pictures and magazines. The appeal of live rock and roll (and its predominantly black performers) was subordinated to the manufacture of teenage pop stars (who were almost exclusively white). Creative attention thus swung from the performers to the record makers--that is, to the songwriters (such as those gathered in the Brill BuildingBrill Building in New York City) and producers (such as Phil Spector) who could guarantee the teen appeal of a record and ensure that it would stand out on a car radio.

3. Rock in the 1960s

A black and white hybrid

Whatever the commercial forces at play (and despite the continuing industry belief that this was pop music as transitory novelty), it became clear that the most successful writers and producers of teenage music were themselves young and intrigued by musical hybridity and the technological possibilities of the recording studiotechnological possibilities of the recording studio. In the early 1960s teenage pop ceased to sound like young adult pop. Youthful crooners such as Frankie Avalon and Fabian were replaced in the charts by vocal groups such as the Shirelles. A new rock-and-roll hybrid of black and white music appeared: Spector derived the mini-dramas of girl groups such as the Crystals and the Ronettes from the vocal rhyth-and-blues style of doo-wop, the Beach Boys rearranged Chuck Berry for barbershop-style close harmonies, and in Detroit Berry Gordy's Motown label drew on gospel music (first secularized for the teenage market by Sam Cooke) for the more rhythically complex but equally commercial sounds of the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas. For the new generation of record producer, whether Spector, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, or Motown's Smokey Robinson and the team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the commercial challenge--to make a record that would be heard through all the other noises in teenage lives--was also an artistic challenge. Even in this most commercial of scenes (thanks in part to its emphasis on fashion), success depended on a creative approach to technological DIY.

The British reaction

Rock historians tend to arrange rock's past into a recurring pattern of emergence, appropriation, and decline. Thus, rock and roll emerged in the mid-1950s only to be appropriated by big business (for example, Presley's move from the Memphis label Sun to the national corporation RCA) and to decline into teen pop; the Beatles then emerged in the mid-1960s at the front of a British Invasion that led young Americans back to rock and roll's roots. But this notion is misleading. One reason for the Beatles' astonishing popularity by the end of the 1960s was precisely that they did not distinguish between the "authenticity" of, say, Chuck Berry and the "artifice" of the Marvelettes.

In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, rock and roll had an immediate youth appeal--each country soon had its own Elvis Presley--but it made little impact on national music media, as broadcasting was still largely under state control. Local rock and rollers had to make the music onstage rather than on record. In the United Kingdom musicians followed the skiffle group model of the folk, jazz, and blues scenes, the only local sources of American music making. The Beatles were only one of many provincial British groups who from the late 1950s played American music for their friends, imitating all kinds of hit sounds--from Berry to the Shirelles, from Carl Perkins to the Isley Brothers--while using the basic skiffle format of rhyth section, guitar, and shouting to be heard in cheap, claustrophobic pubs and youth clubs.

Реферат опубликован: 7/06/2006