Rock'n'roll necessary in PC 2023

by DC Larson

There is a foolish conceit holding that, as societal wrongs were once sanctioned by laws and customs, absolutely everything of their eras is similarly deserving of rejection. 

By that tilted fancy, past artistic expression has no greater moral validity than separate drinking fountains. 

1950s rock'n'roll represented a social unity that voices of divisiveness, including Jim Crow-allegiant officials, viewed as threatening to an illusory order made possible by strictly enforced segregation.

Young men who would help birth the music drew upon country airs of rural America that were rooted in European forms, as well as blues and jazz idioms that enlivened the nation. Over time, as ecstatic mongrel blends emerged in countless juke joints, honky tonks, and shoestring recording endeavors, rock'n'roll came into brash being. And the world was forever bettered.

But that unplanned nascency was only possible because of musicians' and audiences' broadminded attitudes of cultural appreciation and openness to creative cross-pollination.

(By the way, I refer to real rock'n'roll -- think Elvis and Chuck Berry -- not contemporary, corporate-processed pop and rap products. Too often, the latter reinforce separatism; real rock'n'roll constitutes a challenge to them and their values.)

With its varied bloodlines and conduciveness to brotherhood, rock'n'roll is as needed in these times as when Ike put up feet at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

And those who now argue against it sound like the racist idiots of old.

Present PC days are inhospitable to blending styles, but with a twist. Whereas in 1952, for instance, it was the forces of established manners that decried looming integration, it is today a fresh generation who would stand against artistic unity.

Traditionally, the ideal was oneness, unity, 'E pluribus unum' - from many, one. Now, everyone is divided into identity groups, each with its own hyphen, organizations, spokesmen, fraternities, political ambitions, and exclusive social circles.

And art. Consider the concept of "cultural appropriation." This imagining holds that every cultural expression is the sole property of the community in which it germinated, and that for outsiders to include it to any degree in their own work is immoral and illegitimate, constituting colonialist plunder.

That mindset would decry multi-sourced rock'n'roll just as did the hooded cretins of decades past. It was detailed by one anonymous online poster:

"Cultural appropriation is the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is of an oppressed people's cultural elements by members of the dominant culture...This is often seen in the use by cultural outsiders of a minority, oppressed culture's symbols or other cultural elements, such as music, dance, spiritual ceremonies, modes of dress, speech, and social behavior, among other cultural expressions."

The philosophy propounded is plainly no more tolerant than was the 1950s orthodoxy that reviled rock'n'roll. And it is at odds with the notion of equality.

Whether rock'n'roll's birth could occur now, when segregation is again the fashion, separateness the ambition, and creative openness is vilified as theft, is an open question.

In PC 2023, rock'n'roll remains rebel music.

Waterloo, Iowa writer DC Larson counts among credits Goldmine, Rockabilly Magazine, No Depression, and Blue Suede News.