Let's Rock!

December 5, 2016
Historian Aquila treads already well-covered ground in this often repetitious, sometimes enlightening, but mostly colorless version of the rise of rock and roll in America in the 1950s. Delving deeply into archives, he sketches the familiar story that rock arose as a hybrid of rhythm and blues, country, and pop. Bill Haley and the Comets might have launched the phenomenon of white artists recording black R&B hits, but Elvis’s version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” propelled white rock and roll into the stratosphere, moving R&B to a new level. Aquila deftly illustrates the ways that radio deejays such as Dick Biondi, television shows, and movies promoted rock stars, providing wider cultural coverage for this new music. Aquila cannily emphasizes that rock and roll reflected rather than challenged the cultural values of Cold War America: capitalism was inherent in marketing a new product to an audience willing to buy records, and the music unquestioningly incorporated gender and sexual stereotypes of the time. Aquila echoes the oft-repeated assertion that rock and roll fostered racial integration long before the civil rights movement, failing to mention that audiences at concerts in the 1950s were still segregated and that black performers still faced enormous prejudice on the road.