Rock ’n’ Roll Music

When rock 'n' roll broke out of American radio in 1956, the response from pulpits, police and politicians was roughly the one you would expect — which is to say, extensive. In Santa Cruz, California, police Lt. Richard Overton banned rock concerts on 3 June 1956, the morning after a Chuck Higgins show, declaring the music "detrimental to the health and morals" of teenagers and complaining of "suggestive, stimulating and tantalising motions… induced by the provocative rhythms of an all-negro band." That last phrase made the racial subtext text. In March 1957, Chicago's Cardinal Samuel Stritch, the city's senior Catholic cleric, banned rock from his archdiocese's schools, calling its rhythms a "throwback to tribalism." In Alabama, Asa Carter — a white-supremacist organiser who would much later ghost-write George Wallace's "segregation forever" speech — led his North Alabama Citizens' Council in picketing rock concerts with signs reading "Jungle Music Promotes Integration" and "Bebop Promotes Communism," and in April 1956 Council members jumped onto the stage in Birmingham and attacked the singer Nat King Cole while he was performing. Frank Sinatra, writing in Western World magazine in October 1957, called rock "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression" and, memorably, "a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac."

For a lot of white adults the real grievance was never the sound. It was that Black musicians were selling millions of records to white teenagers, that Black and white kids were dancing together, and that the young audience was claiming a sexual and social autonomy their parents had never authorised. Within a decade rock was the cultural mainstream and its loudest critics looked ridiculous. The racial anxieties driving the backlash did not disappear, though; they went on to be recycled, in almost the same wording, against rap, hip-hop and drill. The music the critics called "jungle" and "tribal" turned out to define a century of popular culture, and what the panic was actually trying to police — racial integration and teenage independence — turned out to be a fight it was going to lose.