History of Rock and Roll-Jackie Claypool
During the 1950’s a new type of music emerged that would change the way people played music and the way people acted throughout their everyday life. In The Closing of the American Mind reading, it talks about how classical music was “popular� among middle-class families “partly because they liked it, [and] partly because they thought it was good for the kids.� All this changed during the 1960’s when rock and roll began to emerge. Rock and roll became so popular because it “spoke� to the younger generation a lot better than classical music ever could. It allowed young adults to begin to move away from their parent’s music and find their own.
In class we talked about how at first the whole idea of rock and roll didn’t sit so well with the older generation of that time. They thought that it was the music of the devil and that “teenagers + rock music = sex.� When you look back at all of this from today’s perspective, the fact that people were so worried about a new type of music seems so funny, but the fact of the matter is, is that people were very afraid that rock music was going to bring destruction to the younger generation. When Elvis first appeared during the 1960’s people were so outraged with the way that he moved his hips that they only showed him from the waist up on TV. People thought that Elvis’s swiveling hips would cause the younger generation to suddenly become sex machines.
I think that the whole idea of rock and roll allowed people to become more outspoken and unreserved. It provided the younger generation with the opportunity to express their opinions on certain issues. Without it, I think that life would be so much different than it is today.