Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | 781.66 ALT | 31330005210897 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | 781.66 ALT | 32116001944913 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | 789.6/ALTSCHULER G | 31479004038294 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | 781.66 ALT | 31481003744070 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A slender academic treatment of rock music as a cultural, political, and historical force. Rock 'n' roll has a long pedigree, and Altschuler (American Studies/Cornell Univ.) follows its history only partway to its birth in the union of black country blues and hillbilly balladry. Instead, his story begins in the late 1940s and early '50s, when a few daring "race" artists managed to bring their sound to white teenagers in an era when "the orchestras of Mantovani, Hugo Winterhalter, Percy Faith, and George Cates created mood music for middle-of-the-road mid-lifers, who hummed and sang along in elevators and dental offices." Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick, and other rock historians have done better than Altschuler in capturing the mood of the revolution that followed, but Altschuler shines when he sets the history of rock in the context of other social trends, particularly the growing civil-rights movement and American advertising's discovery of adolescents as a market segment. All were calculated to bring down the harrumphing of older social critics, who were legion: the authors of U.S.A. Confidential, who worried that disk jockeys and their audiences were "hopheads. . . . Many others are Reds, left-wingers, or hecklers of social convention"; the poet Langston Hughes, who grumped that rock 'n' roll "makes a music so basic it's like the meat cleaver the butcher uses"; even the late-in-the-day editorialists at the New York Times, who harped at the "nightmare of mud and stagnation" that supposedly was Woodstock. Rock 'n' rollers weren't the only ones to endure controversy, Altschuler adds, noting that the NAACP turned on Nat King Cole for his political indifference (Cole later became a committed civil-rights activist), and even safe-as-milk Pat Boone was once suspected of harboring hophead thoughts. Rock 'n' roll carried the day against all its critics, though, to become whatever it is now, capable of exciting puritan and prurient emotions alike. So dry at times that the reader may worry whether rock is truly dead. But an informative depiction of the early sound and fury all the same. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Altschuler (Thomas & Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies, Cornell Univ.) has previously written on diverse topics related to American history. Although this marks his first foray into music scholarship, he does a fine job of discussing the musical and sociological influences that came together to form rock'n'roll. He also delves into the impact of the genre on life in America in the 1950s and early 1960s. While incorporating extensive research and quotes from the most astute rock music critics, past and present, he manages to craft prose that will suit a general audience, perhaps high school and college students and interested music fans. If the book has one fault, it would be that the chapter "detailing" the continuing import of rock'n'roll seems almost more of an afterthought than a conclusion. Altschuler does not really present any revelations about the sociological implications of rock'n'roll, but he does provide a valuable service in bringing various theories and historical observations and analysis together in one concise, easy-to-read volume. Highly recommended for all libraries with popular music and American studies collections, especially as a complement to Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City and James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin.-James E. Perone, Mount Union Coll., Alliance, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Editors' Note | p. xi |
| Acknowledgments | p. xiii |
| 1 "All Shook Up" Popular Music and American Culture, 1945-1955 | p. 3 |
| 2 "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" Rock 'n' Roll and Race | p. 35 |
| 3 "Great Balls of Fire" Rock 'n' Roll and Sexuality | p. 67 |
| 4 "Yakety Yak, Don't Talk Back" Rock 'n' Roll and Generational Conflict | p. 99 |
| 5 "Roll Over Beethoven, Tell Tchaikovsky the News" Rock 'n' Roll and the Pop Culture Wars | p. 131 |
| 6 "The Day the Music Died" Rock 'n' Roll's Lull and Revival | p. 161 |
| Epilogue: "Born in the Use" The Persistent Power of Rock 'n' Roll | p. 185 |
| Notes | p. 193 |
| Index | p. 213 |