All Shook Up
How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify?
As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone.
Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This brief and well-meaning study of the music's sociological impact from the early 1950s through the early 1960s the work of such artists as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry is surprisingly flat, given the still-exciting quality of the music itself. Altschuler (Changing Channels: America in TV Guide) analyzes "the emergence of rock and roll as a cultural phenomenon" by reviewing all the standard truisms about the music, which makes the book seem like it was written by a committee of rock critics. He sees rock as "a metaphor for integration," as the focal point for anxiety that cultural life in the U.S. had become "sexualized," a catalyst that "provoked conflict" between parents and teenagers, and an enormous influence on the development of a mass market ripe for exploitation. He also looks at the "lull" in the music between Elvis's being drafted into the army in 1957 and the emergence of the Beatles in 1963, as well as the way that artists like Bruce Springsteen continue the rock effort to foster "intragenerational identity." Unfortunately, for all Altschuler's sincere and painstaking factual precision, he repeats what can be found in such previous works as Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City and overlooks the role that country music played in the birth of rock and roll, found in Nick Tosches's Country and Where Dead Voices Gather.
