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This chapter focuses on rock 'n' roll films in the U.S. during the mid-1950s. The story lines of these films, often starring and largely made for teenagers, revolved around the music industry with a heavy weighting of musical performances in clubs and television studios, particularly toward the films' denouements. It attempts to explain the reasons behind the popularity of these films and analyzes the film cycle amid in the context of contemporary practices of labor, exploitation, consumer citizenship and decentralization. It also discusses the decentralization and diversification of the media industries and the question of teenage leisure expenditure.

When rock 'n' roll crossed the Atlantic to Germany in the second half of the 1950s, it brought only rioting young men and young women into the public eye. Three interconnected concerns shaped East and West German reaction to rock 'n' roll: (1) worries about uncontrolled female sexuality; (2) male aggression; and (3) perceptions of racial difference. The public behavior of female rock 'n' roll fans at dances and concerts and in the streets challenged the traditional norms of female respectability that authorities in East and West Germany had made central to their respective reconstruction efforts. Rock 'n' roll challenged East and West German constructions of national identity because Germans saw it as a black or black-influenced music that undermined gender norms.

This chapter explores the musical tastes of the motor-bike boys. Pop music was a manifest and ever-present part of the environment of the motor-bike boys: it pervaded their whole culture. However, the motor-bike boys had very specific tastes that were not part of the current pop music scene, and were not catered for in the on-going mass-media sources. They liked the music of the early rock 'n' roll period between 1955 and 1960, especially that of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. By current standards in the commercial market and the pop music provided by mass-media channels, their tastes were at least ten years out of date. By deliberate choice, then, and not by the accident of a passive reception, they chose this music. This reveals the dialectical capacity which early rock 'n' roll had to reflect, resonate, and return something of real value to the motor-bike boys.

Rock ’n’ roll was initially regarded as a threat that combined aesthetic and social delinquency. Its energies were, however, primary to utopianism of the emerging cultural movements. Just as rock ’n’ roll displaced the hegemony of the Great American Song book, the rock ’n’ roll musical both displaced and recreated the classic film musical. In developing new techniques for representing musical performance, the fans and entire cultural gestalt that the new music sustained, cinema became second only to records in the creation of a rock ’n’ roll culture. But even as cinema developed audio-visual compositions based on the music—forms of rock ’n’ roll visuality—it also had to confront the competition that rock ’n’ roll posed to itself and other components of the established culture industries.

Since rock ’n’ roll was expected to be a brief—and very disreputable—fad, the major studios ignored it, and only exploitation producers attempted to cash in. Motivated by Blackboard Jungle’s profits, Sam Katzman hastily produced Rock Around the Clock (1956); but this time Bill Haley and his Comets actually appeared in the film, both in performance and in the narrative. In the narrative, rock ’n’ roll is presented as essentially dance music that emerges spontaneously in the white rural working class, completely free of generational or ethnic tensions. Rock Around the Clock established generic norms that were quickly reproduced in numerous other films, many of them featuring important black rhythm and blues musicians. In this, they imitated the radio and theater spectaculars organized by Alan Freed, Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll.

This chapter discusses the romantic genealogy of rock 'n' roll and how its style resulted from the happy integration of white hillbilly music with black “race music” or, as it came to be known in the 1950s, “rhythm and blues.” Supported by recent scholarship that has delved into the files of record companies, analyses affirm that rock 'n' roll represents a blatant appropriation of black music by white entrepreneurs. A postmodern view might regard rock 'n' roll not even as music, but as simply “a marketing concept that evolved into a lifestyle.” The chapter also analyzes how Bill Haley's recording of “Rock Around the Clock” turned the tide of American popular music in late 1955.

In the early 1970s, the Indian-based music played in orkes Melayu described in chapters two and three crystallized into “dangdut.” The notion of dangdut as the music of “the people”–the majority of society–emerged during this era, and it has been a persistent theme ever since. This chapter argues that notions of “the people” were constructed within social discourse, popular print media, and the music itself. The articulation of dangdut and “the people” operates on three intertextual levels: dangdut is the people; (2) dangdut for the people; and (3) dangdut as the people. Musician, composer, record producer, film star, and Islamic proselytiser Rhoma Irama, a dominant force in the early history of dangdut, is central to this chapter. An analysis of his compositions shows the influence of rock ‘n’ roll, Indian film song, pop Indonesia, and hard rock.

This chapter observes the conflation of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll music and film at the end of the twentieth century. The chapter begins by probing the genesis of this cinematic-musical alliance on the cusp of the late 1980s and early 1990s as demonstrated in “Wang Shuo Hooligan Literature” and its film adaptions such as Mi Jiashan’s The Troubleshooters (1988). It, then, turn to a navigation of Cui Jian, the Godfather of Chinese Rock, tracing his voices, images, personas, and iconographies in Chinese films. Close readings of the films such as Beijing Bastards (1992), Good Morning, Beijing (1990), Roots and Branches (2001), and The Sun Also Rises (2007) suggest that the emergence and evolution of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film shall be seen as a result of widespread and multifaceted transformations in postsocialist China. At the core of this rock imaginary is the aesthetic of cinema vérité and postsocialist realism. The paradigmatic portrayals of rock kids, social outcasts, urban drifters, and postsocialist flâneur therefore herald a new wave of what Naficy has called an “accented” cinema and independent, transnational film practice, whose trajectory parallels the rise of youth culture and popular music in contemporary China.

This chapter examines the development of rock ‘n’ roll music in China and its links with the emergent youth culture. It focuses on how young rebels use their own rock music as a means of reflecting their changing attitudes, behaviour, and “mood of living.” It examines Tian Zuangzhuang 's Rock Kids, Zhang Yuan 's Beijing Bastards, and Jiang Wen 's In the Heat of the Sun.

Chapter 1 offers a case study that illuminates how norms of studio-era film production came to be negotiated with the multimedia context of the 1950s and early 1960s. In exploring the production of “Elvis movies” from 1956 to 1961, this chapter examines how Hollywood transformed Presley the rock ’n’ roll star into a singular screen attraction. Producer Hal Wallis, a veteran of the studio era, sought a balance between the cyclical, generic structure of the former star system with the new opportunities for cross-platform promotion portended by the media landscape of the 1950s. Presley’s rebel-oriented 1950s films put on display what modern media fame meant in the second half of the 1950s and suggest a hierarchical relationship between television and film. Subsequently, Presley’s 1960s work enacted an assembly-line integration of feature film and LP record production, demonstrating how Wallis’s star-making formula during the studio era translated to a cross-platform context. In this way, Hollywood adapted to the “electronic age” of the 1950s while maintaining strict control over the output of a star’s labor, reconfiguring the power structures of the star system by aligning media industries into the synchronous production of a multimedia star image.

This chapter presents the politics and experiences of identity as exercised by the motor-bike boys. It first discusses the author's approach to studying the motor-bike boys' culture at large, by making contact with a motor-bike club in a large English city in 1969, thus producing an account based on general observation, conversations with individuals and groups, participation around the club, often with the group just described, and tape-recorded sessions. It then embarks on a more intimate examination of this particular culture. The world of the motor-bike boys was above all else concrete and unequivocal. They perceived it without ontological insecurity, without existential angst.

By the middle 1960s, doo-wop and the early rock 'n' rollers were supplanted by new styles. While many white artists including Bob Dylan and the Beatles were changing rock music, the African American community brought gospel-inflected Motown and southern soul to the airwaves. The Impressions, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Miracles, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and the Reverend C. L.'s daughter Aretha Franklin were among the genre's pioneers. This generation of performers would also carryon the influence of the Dixie Hummingbirds.

Elvis Presley was the greatest of rock ’n’ roll performers, combining both black and white cultural traditions and the secular and religious components in the music of his own family. His early performances on Milton Berle’s and other television shows made him a national figure, and also caught the attention of producer Hal Wallis, who brought him to Hollywood. Before he was drafted, he made Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, and two other films that unapologetically mobilized the truculent delinquency innovated by Marlon Brando and James Dean. Magisterially directed by Michael Curtiz, King Creole is the best of them, a fully realized noir thriller that presents Elvis at his most exciting, dramatizing the complexity of his music and his debts to African American culture.

This chapter explores the centrality of music and rock ‘n’ roll to these travels and how the geopolitical limits of the Cold War circumscribed them but also, importantly, how youth culture and youth travel expanded this social space into the eastern and southern peripheries of Europe, including Spain and around the Mediterranean. The New Age Travellers, young nomads of the 1970s and 1980s, who adopted a lifestyle of illegal trespass out of their peregrinations between music festivals and concerts, spread out from Britain to continental Europe, adopting a near stateless existence. Notably, it was the music and travel culture of the young that in many ways was most successful at traversing the Cold War division of Europe with considerable attention focused on Berlin as a kind of unruly frontier space of cultural transfer. The conclusion of the Cold War itself was punctuated by a 1990 performance of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz with 350,000 young people from all over Europe in attendance. Yet even as the circuits of travel expanded and the exclusions of class, gender, and nationality diminished, those of race and ethnicity persisted in the political context of decolonization and immigration.

This chapter explores the early success of Starday Records in country music. When Starday was first established in the 1950s, it was the only label that released solely country music. Jack Starns pulled out of the company, and Harold W. Daily replaced him with the former president of the 4 Star record company, Don Pierce. It notes that Starday experienced great music success with the release of Joe “Red” Hayes’ “A Satisfied Mind” and George Jones’ “Why Baby Why.” In the emerging trend of rock ’n’ roll music, Starday attempted to make a hit through Thumper Jones’ (an alias used by George Jones) “Rock It,” but it failed due to the fact that country music radio stations did not like playing rock ’n’ roll music.

This chapter explores how music technologies and electronic studio processes relate to altered states of consciousness in popular music. First, an overview of audio technologies such as multi-tracking, echo, and reverb is given, in order to explore their illusory capabilities. In the rock ’n’ roll music of the 1950s, studio production techniques such as distortion provided a means through which to enhance the energetic and emotive properties of the music. Later, in surf rock, effects such as echo and reverb allowed the music to evoke conceptual visions of teenage surf culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, these approaches were developed in psychedelic rock music, and space rock/space jazz. Here, warped sounds and effects allowed the music to elicit impressions of psychedelic experiences, outer space voyages, and Afrofuturist mythologies. By exploring these areas, this chapter shows how sound design can communicate various forms of conceptual meaning, including the psychedelic experience.

At first the State Department’s Music Advisory Panels rejected popular music, but the Department eventually used blues, rock ’n’ roll, and folk music to attract worldwide audiences. Musicians who were flexible and knew how to entertain succeeded in connecting with audiences. Because of the music’s reputation for social criticism, audiences abroad sometimes expected that the artists would criticize their government, even when the musicians had no such intention. Although the U.S. government called attention to their successes in Vietnam and Eastern Europe, some American audiences rejected Addiss and Crofut and Blood, Sweat and Tears after their tours because of their State Department patronage.

Arriving in London desperate for work (and hoodwinked by the producer who paid for his travel and relocation to London), Furie is selected as the director of the low-budget horror film Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961) through pure happenstance. Pleased with the results of this picture, the producers hire Furie to direct two more features, The Snake Woman (1961) and Three on a Spree (1961), shot in less than ten days each. Producer Kenneth Rive offers Furie the chance to direct his first personal project in England. During One Night (1961), set during World War II, presents a story of male impotency and wounded masculinity that was quite daring for its time. Following this, Furie finally scores his first big-budget production, The Young Ones (1961), starring pop star Cliff Richard. Its success rockets him to directorial stardom. He returns to Kenneth Rive to direct a courtroom drama, The Boys (1962), his first venture into British kitchen sink realism.