Rob Skogen
“Dude, if you were to make a Mount Rushmore of rock n roll, who would you include?�
We have all had this conversation with friends late at night, likely over a few beers. It is an ongoing discourse that young people have been having for the past few decades, but I would be willing to bet that Elvis, the Beatles, and Dylan have all been prominently mentioned in a majority of these debates.
The reasons cited typically focus on an individual song, performance, or album and may vaguely allude to some greater context. Rarely are the three connected in any significant way. The phenomenon that was Elvis Presley, or was the Beatles, or was Bob Dylan was unique in and of itself, but the collective impact they had on American culture is still not fully understood.
At face value, these figures represent the innocence of a generation coming of age. Elvis introduced white America to an “alien� musical form in the 1950s. Soon afterwards, the Beatles hit the scene and endeared themselves to a vast teenaged. Dylan took everything to another level after meeting the Beatles and fused the electrically charged pop rock with the politically charged folk scene. The American experience was never the same.
At least that is the romantic version of things. After reading a few of the articles this week, I was deeply shaken when the elephant in the room was brought to my attention. Inherent in the capitalistic system is a hypocrisy of exploitation of some group of people at every turn. In this case, the young boomers and every other generation to follow were unwittingly manipulated by a music industry that was keenly aware of their spending potential and the profits to be had from creating heroes.
But that unleashes the overall question that seems to be an undercurrent in everything we have been reading. Is popular culture a tool used by the establishment to control the masses, or is it a tool used by the masses to overthrow the establishment?
Maybe we’ll have to wait on that monument a bit. It seems there are some more pertinent discussions to be had.