Your search for: rock AND roll AND censorship

'Ever since people started writing about rock, other people have made fun of them. Anthony DeCurits's anthology, with its clutch of academics, rock writers, and musicians, will strike cynics as inherently pretentious. They will be wrong: This is a smart, witty, ingeniously balanced assortment of ...

'Ever since people started writing about rock, other people have made fun of them. Anthony DeCurits's anthology, with its clutch of academics, rock writers, and musicians, will strike cynics as inherently pretentious. They will be wrong: This is a smart, witty, ingeniously balanced assortment of rock commentary, with a healthy number of pieces that seem prescient and even moving.' --John Rockwell, European Cultural Correspondent, The New York Times.

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 ...

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.

Examining the various boundaries of American artistic tolerance, chapters address the societal and legal responses to rock and rap music. Artistic expression has historically clashed with mainstream views, resulting in apprehension acted upon internally and externally, especially when expression is ...

Examining the various boundaries of American artistic tolerance, chapters address the societal and legal responses to rock and rap music. Artistic expression has historically clashed with mainstream views, resulting in apprehension acted upon internally and externally, especially when expression is aimed toward children or young adults. This work studies the mass media content and programming in network television, Rolling Stone magazine, and the New York Times reviews and spot news concerning rock and rap music. The National Endowment for the Arts, the FCC, and the music industry's internal responses to parents and adults are discussed as well. Inhibitions and censoring, it is argued, stem from adult concerns for a healthy functioning society and from anxiety about the impact of sexual explicitness and uncontrolled behavioral expression on adolescents. This work attempts to explain why societal intolerance has a pattern of limiting the lyrics and sounds of rock and rap music.