Of course the rock performers had to take some of the blame for their fans’ unruly behavior, if only because they too moved—dancing and jiving to their own music in ways that shocked and offended adult viewers. Pop singers like Eddie Fisher had moved too, but only from one conventional, operatic gesture to another—clasping their hands together on their chests or stretching their arms out, palms up. A good part of the frisson of early rock lay in the rhythmic and often sexually suggestive movements of the performers—grinding their hips, thrusting their pelvises, rolling their shoulders, leaping and falling on the floor—“rocking,” in short, as a way of announcing that the “new” music was inseparable from creative, free-form, beat-driven motion.
Among white performers, Elvis Presley pioneered the new physical expressiveness, requiring the family-oriented Ed Sullivan Show to censor out his lower body from the TV screen. Bo Diddley, a black performer, was not so lucky. His contract for a 1958 nationwide TV booking stipulated that he had to perform without moving, in order to “preserve decency.” Once on air, he forgot this rule or, more likely, simply found it impossible to hold his body separate from the music, and was docked his entire fee.6 Little Richard probably got away with jumping, prancing, and climbing on his piano only because of his over-the-top, manic, seemingly asexual persona.
But it was, again and again, the audience that stole the show, often to the consternation of the performers. The rock historian James Miller reports that the better Elvis Presley got at performing, “the less he got to do it. The problem was the tumult he now routinely provoked.” Describing a 1957 concert, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “Presley clung to the microphone standard and staggered about in a distinctive, distraught manner, waiting for the noise to subside a bit.”7 A few years later, Beatlemaniacs—the just-pubescent followers of the Beatles—effectively silenced their heroes with their frenzied screams. At no time during their U.S. tours was the group audible above the shrieking, which forced the band to abandon the concert stage in 1966, only two years after their first American appearances.
By the late 1960s, rock performers were negotiating their own security arrangements with the managers of concert venues, partly out of fear that they would be crushed by their fans, should the latter succeed in actually conquering the stage. Even the gentle, cerebral Grateful Dead eventually got “sick of out-of-control fan behavior” and distributed a flyer to concertgoers forbidding gatecrashing, bottle throwing, kicking down fences, and “miracling,” or begging for free tickets outside the venue.8 When the content of the spectacle was rock music, young people were no longer willing to accept the spectacle form, with its requirement that large numbers of people sit still and in silence while a talented few perform.
The Revolt of the Audience
The rock rebellion can be interpreted in all kinds of ways. It was an uprising of the postwar generation, bored by affluence and stifled by the prevailing demands for conformity in lifestyle, opinion, and appearance. It was a challenge to the racial segregation that divided not only communities but music, which could be “pop” (for whites) or “race music” (for everyone else). And as the 1960s wore on, it fed into a widespread counterculture, which in turn helped animate a political movement countering war and domestic injustice.
But the rock rebellion was also something simpler and ostensibly less “political”—a rebellion against the role of the audience. In the history of festivities, the great innovation of the modern era had been the replacement of older, more participatory forms of festivity with spectacles in which the crowd serves merely as an audience. In the two centuries leading up to the twentieth, even audiences had been successfully tamed. If you went back to seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century France or England, you would have found theater audiences, for example, that were disruptively rowdy, interrupting the actors with their own comments, milling around during the performance, or actually sitting on the stage in the midst of the action. By the end of the eighteenth century, aristocratic ideas of decorum—along with the innovation of reserved seating—brought, according to sociologist Richard Sennett, “a certain deadness into the theater. There were no more shouts from the back of the hall, no more people eating food while they stood watching the play. Silence in the theater seemed to diminish the enjoyment of watching the play.”9
Utterly missing from the audience’s new role was any kind of muscular involvement beyond the occasional applause, and this prohibition extended to musical performances as well as the theater. From the nineteenth century on, all forms of Western music were being consumed by immobile audiences. At a military parade, for example, the martial music might be stirring and the marching soldiers might themselves be caught up in the pleasures of rhythmic synchrony, but the good spectator—as opposed to the occasional exhibitionist—stood perfectly still and, except when straining to see better, remained as unobtrusive as possible. Concerts had become the most common setting for musical performances, and at these the role of the audience was to sit quietly and refrain from any motion at all. Even the most covert forms of dancing—foot tapping and head nodding—could disturb one’s fellow listeners; audience members had learned how to hold themselves in a state of frozen attention.
The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others. As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that the neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the execution of that motion by the perceiver.10 To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving. Infants automatically imitate the actions of others; with age, they acquire the ability to inhibit the imitative impulse. So the well-behaved audience member—who does not snap her fingers or nod her head in time to the music—is not really at rest; she is performing a kind of work—the silent, internal work of muscular inhibition.
It is sexual inhibition that rock is usually credited—or blamed—for challenging, as in one writer’s explanation of rock as “the unleashing of generations of repressed sexuality,”11 with the music serving only to convey a less inhibited, African American sexual sensibility to the repressed white middle-class “mainstream.” No doubt mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American culture was sexually repressive—homophobic and skittish about heterosexual sex as well. There’s no doubt, too, that sex had a lot to do with the rock rebellion, if only because of the irresistible appeal, at least from a female point of view, of stars like the “sleazy,” working-class Elvis or the witty and vaguely androgynous Beatles: They represented romantic possibilities that went well beyond necking in a car with the khaki-clad, buttoned-down, young white men of the time. But there is more to the story than sexual repressiveness and the perhaps inevitable revolt against it. Mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture was deeply restrictive of physical motion in general, whether or not it had anything to do with sex.
Entertainment, for example, meant sitting and watching TV or movies. There were still “carnivals,” but these no longer involved dancing or sports other than, say, throwing objects at a target. At a mid-twentieth-century carnival or fair, machines did the moving for you; all the carnival-goers had to do was sit in a seat and let the roller coaster or Ferris wheel propel their bodies along a preexisting path. Religious worship was, in the dominant Protestant tradition, equally sedentary, allowing participation only in the form of hymn singing. There was dancing too, of course, but before rock’s emergence into white culture, this typically meant ballroom dancing—decorously choreographed fox-trots and waltzes that allowed for little group interaction or individual variation. Even walking had been made largely obsolete by suburbanization and the automobile culture it spawned. At the time, of course, no one reckoned the eventual price of all this routine immobilization in the form of obesity and other health problems.
Hence, in no small part, the particular appeal of rock mania to teenage girls. Elvis and especially the Beatles inspired a kind of mass hysteria among crowds of young white women, who jumped up and down, screamed, cried, fainted, and sometimes wet their pants in the presence of their idols. To adult commentators, Beatlemania was pathological—an “epidemic” set off by the Beatles as carriers or “foreign germs.” In a particularly ingenious, partly tongue-in-cheek explanation offered by the New York Times Magazine in 1964, the girls were merely “conforming” and “expressing their desire to obey.” They wanted to be subsumed into the mass, which, in the author’s view, was the same as being “transformed into an insect.” After all, he observed triumphantly, there had been an earlier craze of “jitterbugs,”o and “Beatles, too, are a type of bug.”13 But former Beatlemaniacs report that the experience was empowering and freeing. Brought together in a crowd, girls who individually might have been timid and obedient broke through police lines, rushed stages, and, of course, through their actions, determined that the Fab Four would be the most successful and best-known band in world history.
Rock struck with such force, in the 1950s and early 1960s, because the white world it entered was frozen over and brittle—not only physically immobilizing but emotionally restrained. In prerock middle-class teenage culture, for example, the requisite stance was cool, with the word connoting not just generic approval, as it does today, but a kind of aloofness, emotional affectlessness, and sense of superiority. Rock, with its demands for immediate and unguarded physical participation, thawed the coolness, summoned the body into action, and blasted the mind out of the isolation and guardedness that had come to define the Western personality. To the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, white rock fans were simply trying to reclaim “their Bodies again after generations of alienation and disembodied existence.”
They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the cold ass, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints with the spark of life.14
Rock and the African Ecstatic Tradition
Possibly there would have been a youth revolt in the mid- to late twentieth century without rock and roll. As Daniel Bell observed in the 1950s, mainstream American culture stood poised unstably between its puritanical legacy and the hedonism encouraged by the expanding consumer culture. People were enjoined to work hard and save, even as advertising conveyed the steady exhortation to spend and indulge oneself in the here and now. Similarly, their premarital sexual explorations were supposed to proceed no lower than the neck, despite the fact that the commercial culture was already heavily—although by today’s standards, somewhat coyly—sexualized. These contradictions, or examples of gross societal hypocrisy, might eventually have touched off a widespread cultural revolt on their own.
Rock’s contribution was to weigh in decisively on the side of hedonism and against the old puritanical theme of “deferred gratification.” First, because it was a kind of music—rhythmic and heavy on the percussion—that almost demanded an immediate muscular response. And second, because the kind of dancing evoked by rock—unlike such European varieties as polkas or waltzes—bore traces of a centuries-old ecstatic religious tradition. At first, in the 1950s and early 1960s, people danced to rock music in couples—a form of dancing that originated in Europe in the nineteenth century and served largely as a courtship ritual. As rock evolved, people began to move to it more freely, dancing individually or in lines and circles. A person might get up and start dancing alone, another might follow, women might dance with women, men with men, couples might dissolve and re-form—until the entire gathering was swept up by the rhythm.
There is no doubt, among scholars, that such distinctively African American contributions as jazz, gospel, the blues, and rhythm and blues all have roots in indigenous African music. The common characteristics of African, African American, and much Caribbean music—polyrhythms, antiphonal responses, and a capacity for both repetition and creative variation—delineate a singularly hardy musical tradition, one that had endured the Middle Passage and centuries of enslavement. Even particular stylistic themes—like the famous “Bo Diddley beat”—which inspired white performers including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen—can be traced to West Africa via, in this case, Cuba.15
And as we saw in chapter 8, one hallmark of African-derived musical traditions is their intimate connection to dance. Within the western and central African societies that supplied the Americas with slave laborers, music was performed to be danced to, not just listened to, and the performers themselves often danced as they played their instruments. So inseparable were African music and dance that many African languages lack distinct words for the two activities, although they possess “rich vocabularies for forms, styles, and techniques.”16 As the cops who attempted to maintain order at early rock concerts perhaps should have realized, rock and roll is part of a family of music that it is almost impossible not to respond to with dance or some other form of rhythmic involvement.
In the Caribbean and in Brazil, African traditions of music and dance had found a home in new religions, like Vodou and Candomblé, that mixed elements of both European Christian and African theologies. In North America, however, the same traditions were preserved within the unlikely environment of Christian theology, which slaves embraced in part because Christian worship was the only form of communal activity they were allowed, outside of laboring together in the fields.17 Segregated from white worshippers and for the most part ignored by them, black Christians developed their own distinctive forms of worship based on African religious traditions of music and dance. One of these was the holy dance, or ring-shout, involving “hand clapping, foot stamping, and leaping”—and dating from at least the early-nineteenth-century revivals in Virginia.18 A black plantation preacher wrote that “the way in which we worshipped was almost indescribable. The singing was accompanied by a certain ecstasy of motion, clapping of hands, tossing of heads.”19
Nothing like this had occurred in the context of Christian worship since dance was prohibited in European Catholic churches in the thirteenth century. Other accounts make it clear that the ring-shout involved not only an “ecstasy of motion” but an ecstasy of the spirit, as in West African pagan rituals. The historian Albert Raboteau reported that the ring-shout would typically proceed to the point where “the individual shouter stood outside himself, literally in ecstasy, transcending time and place as the rhythms of the chorus were repeatedly beat out with hands, feet, and body in the constant shuffle of the ring.”20 A nineteenth-century white observer offered this description of a ring-shout performed by African slaves:
One by one of the congregation slipped out into the center of the floor and began to “shout”—(that is whirl around and sing and clap hands, and so round and round in circles). After a time as this went on, the enthusiasm became a frenzy and only the able bodied men and women remained—the
weak dropping out one by one, returning to the “sidelines” to clap and urge the “shouters” on.21
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many newly freed African Americans had sought respectability by toning down their religious services—“banning the shout, discouraging enthusiastic religion, and adopting more sedate hymns.”22 But as mainstream black religion became more staid, “Holiness” sects sprang up to celebrate the old ecstatic forms of worship, featuring “healing, gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and religious dance.”23 The Holiness churches, which gave birth to interracial Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century, took the added step of bringing more secular black sounds back into church—ragtime, jazz, and blues—along with drums, tambourines, saxophones, and guitars.
Gospel music, arising in the 1930s, was smoother and more professional than the old spirituals, but still invited physical participation by congregations and performers alike. “Don’t let the movement go out of the music,” warned gospel bandleader Thomas A. Dorsey. “Black music calls for movement!”24 Mahalia Jackson wrote, “I want my hands … my feet … my whole body to say all that is in me. I say ‘Don’t let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!’ The Lord doesn’t like us to act dead. If you feel it, tap your feet a little—dance to the glory of the Lord!”25 By the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began to break through segregation, and on the very eve of rock and roll’s emergence into white culture, African American intellectuals had claimed the African-derived tradition of religious music and responsive motion as a means not only of artistic expression but of collective survival. In Juneteenth, for example, Ralph Ellison has his hero, Reverend Hickman, tell a crowd: “Keep to the rhythm and you’ll keep to life … Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won’t get weary. Keep to the rhythm and you won’t get lost … They couldn’t divide us now [thanks to our music]. Because anywhere they dragged us we throbbed in time together.” 26 In a musical tradition featuring rhythmic participation by the congregation, it almost goes without saying that the “audience” is no longer confined to spectatorship. As one scholar observes, the “Western barrier between performer and audience” had been breached, making way for “an inclusive, communal, communicative event.”27
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