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Article Excerpt
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look
upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.--Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
In The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz argues that our "most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sit-coms," and these black-and-white images of suburban domesticity, in turn, have significantly influenced our understanding of 1950s America in general (23). From Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver, fifties sitcoms have repeatedly depicted postwar America as a homogeneous, white, middle-class, suburban world fundamentally grounded in "square" cultural values such as emotional sobriety, cultural homogeneity, social conformity, and political complacency. Looking back from the perspective of the next decade, Malvina Reynolds's 1963 folk song "Little Boxes" famously described post-World War II suburbia as a world in which everything--and everyone--was "all made out of ticky-tacky"and "all look[ed] just the same." When we conjure up this traditional view of the fifties as a silent generation of cultural conformity and political apathy, we frequently recall images from black-and-white fifties sitcoms that have played a decisive role in framing our sense of this banal, ersatz decade as "an era of political and cultural uniformity, regarded either as a nightmare of repression or a paradise lost, depending on the point of view" (Biskind 4).
More recently, however, revisionist historians and cultural critics have argued that the "study of postwar America [...] is in need of a vigorous infusion of new ideas and approaches" (May 9) that will challenge the consensus view of the fifties as "simple, innocent, happy, unanimously supportive of a broad spectrum of beliefs, or radically separated from the 1960s by a culture of complacence" (Foreman 1). Reinterpreting postwar America as a "time of notable change and cultural complexity" (Meyerowitz 5), critics have begun to reconceptualize the fifties as a more complex "era of conflict and contradiction, an era in which a complex set of ideologies contended for public allegiance" (Biskind 4). In particular, Joel Foreman argues that critics need to develop new historical models that "resist [the] simplification" (6) of "television artifacts such as I Love Lucy and Happy Days, the stage play/film of Grease, and a limited assortment of figures--most notably Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and James Dean--whose lives and careers have been romanticized and cut loose from any meaningful historical context" (2). While the "main current" of fifties culture may have been "relatively calm" (Lhamon 1), works such as W.T. Lhamon's Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s have looked behind the era's homogenized cultural facade to reveal how the "fifties were alive with vital art, new codes of behavior" (1), and an "uncommonly high proportion of embattled and daring works" (5).
One way to begin to develop such an alternative understanding of 1950s American culture is to redirect the focus of our critical inquiry by turning away from sitcom images of Leave-it-to-Beaver placidity and listening instead to the newly emergent sounds of post-World World War II jazz and the origins of rock and roll music. Unlike the complacent 1950s depicted in suburban sitcoms, the music of the 1950s characterizes an age of rapid change and dramatic cultural upheaval. The changes may not have been either universal or evenly distributed, but certain currents of fifties music reveal a world very different from the dull placidity depicted on docile sitcoms of the day. First, modern jazz and, later, rock music presented stark counterpoints to the dominant "square" values of mainstream American culture. Replacing sobriety with intensity, regulation with spontaneous invention, collective organization with individual freedom, cultural conformity with artistic experimentation, and political apathy with at least the cool politics of covert cultural militancy, if not quite the hot politics of overt political action, both bebop jazz and certain kinds of rock music laid out the basic blueprint for the cultural revolutions of the post-World War II American avant-garde.
As Jacques Attali argues in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, music is "essentially political" because "all music, any organization of sounds is [...] a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality" (6) and, more specifically, music plays a prophetic role because it has "always been in its essence a herald of things to come" (4). Music not only "runs parallel to human society, is structured like it, and changes when it does," but it also plays a more "dangerous, disturbing, and subversive" role, racing "ahead of the rest of society" to "explor[e] much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code" (10-11). Listening attentively to the new (dis)harmonic and (poly)rhythmic codes expressed by emergent, counter-hegemonic musical sounds, therefore, can reveal the "crisis of society in the crisis of music" (11). If we want to reconstruct a more complex understanding of the 1950s as a "time of notable change and cultural complexity" (Meyerowitz 5) with an emergent culture of "embattled and daring works" (Lhamon 5), then it would be useful to consider how the revolutionary sounds of both modern jazz and rock functioned as a "noise that destroys order to structure a new order" (Attali 20).
Both critics and creative artists have frequently noted the important role that modern jazz in particular has played in shaping the emergence of new countercurrents in post-World War II American culture, a role that rock music would perhaps play in a different key during the radical cultural upheavals of the 1960s. As Lewis MacAdams explains in Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde, it was bebop's combination of "jerky and dissonant" sounds with "jaggedy rhythms" and "breakneck tempos" that best reflected both...
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