![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
♠
Some adult Americans pretended not to be upset by the frenzy surrounding rock 'n' roll. Like many fads, it might go away. (Elvis, they said, was not so bad - he bought houses for his parents, said his prayers, and did not smoke or drink.) But there was no doubting that the popularity of rock 'n' roll exposed the nascent rise of a sometimes restless “youth culture.” And many older people openly revealed their sense of alarm. A psychiatrist, writing in the New York Times, proclaimed that rock 'n' roll was “a communicable disease” and a “a cannibalistic and tribalistic kind of music.” The racist metaphors here went unchallenged. Another critic, writing to a Senate subcommittee on delinquency, lamented that “Elvis Presley is a symbol, of course, but a dangerous one. His strip-tease antics threaten to rock-n-roll the juvenile world into open revolt against society. The gangster of Tomorrow is the Elvis Presley type of today.”
-- James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974
xXx
Some adult Americans pretended not to be upset by the frenzy surrounding rock 'n' roll. Like many fads, it might go away. (Elvis, they said, was not so bad - he bought houses for his parents, said his prayers, and did not smoke or drink.) But there was no doubting that the popularity of rock 'n' roll exposed the nascent rise of a sometimes restless “youth culture.” And many older people openly revealed their sense of alarm. A psychiatrist, writing in the New York Times, proclaimed that rock 'n' roll was “a communicable disease” and a “a cannibalistic and tribalistic kind of music.” The racist metaphors here went unchallenged. Another critic, writing to a Senate subcommittee on delinquency, lamented that “Elvis Presley is a symbol, of course, but a dangerous one. His strip-tease antics threaten to rock-n-roll the juvenile world into open revolt against society. The gangster of Tomorrow is the Elvis Presley type of today.”
-- James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974
