Rock'n'Roll solution, not problem
"Rock'n'Roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons...and, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd -- in fact, plain dirty -- lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has ever been my misfortune to hear."
- Frank Sinatra 1957
Ol' Blue Eyes mentioned no names in his caustic grading. But his condemnation included not just onstage interpreters and those cheering on the raucous evolution, but also, by implication, the profound reshaping it delivered to the entire planet.
Sinatra, of course, epitomized an earlier idealization of the coolness spirit. But his favored model was a dinner-jacketed, cocktail-slinging hipster whose winked argot and nightclub long-legging had become passé, given generational exchange.
(And it merits remark that, when younger, Frankie had himself been assailed by clucking parents. It is not known to what degree his transformation from objection's focus to its spokesman was genuine or simply prompted by professional apprehension.)
The coolness of his era was one to be observed, to be entertained by, and perhaps aspired toward. But the new Rebel Music was egalitarian. Of its audience. Everyone could be a Rock'n'Roller, whereas only the socially well-situated orbited the Rat Pack galaxy.
Much 1950s Rebel Music was Southern and not Northern in origin. It was produced by the working poor, not imposed downwardly upon them by a gold cuff-linked, Copacabana elite. Factors of class and region had not been so prominent in popular culture. Rock'n'Roll ushered to the table's head constituencies theretofore
unacknowledged.
Too, Rock'n'Roll was of multi-racial character. It was and remains an ill fit for propagandizing separatists. To twist an aged saw, a bird needs both the black Blues wing and the white Country one to flip, flop, and fly. Remove either from the equation and you can have fine music, true. But it won't be Rock'n'Roll.
Hailed since as masters and giants, pioneers more likely stumbled onto greatness as blueprinted its construction. And their ambitions doubtless prioritized daily bread above dreams of renown.
But from a patchwork foundation of poor boy nerve and determination rose a phenomenon so unique in its make-up, so cracklingly vibrant amid placid pop culture, that it endures, still.
As a singer, Frank Sinatra was a baker's dozen sorts of koo-koo. But that he didn't dig Rock'n'Roll back then was his problem, not ours.
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