3 - ‘Love Me Do’: the aesthetics of sensuousness

Summary

Rock‘n’roll contained the seeds of a development which was to advance into new musical dimensions in the sixties. The foundations of this development were laid in British beat music. Although rock‘n’roll had turned music into a collectively used teenage cultural leisure form, the beginnings of a basic change in popular music which could be seen in this failed, ultimately because of production conditions in the mass media. Rock's musical roots – the traditions of Afro-American music and country music – were still influenced far too much by their folk music origins to allow them to be easily transformed into an aesthetic created on the basis of a relationship with the media. The growing significance of the mass media – particularly records – for music, shifted the internal relationships of musical performance further and further in the direction of the musical potential of studio production. rock‘n’roll styles were simply not flexible enough and they increasingly lost their original individuality. The connection between the music and the context in which American teenagers had used it had at first been very immediate, but this trend caused it to dissolve again. The missing element was rock's firm establishment in the process of music production, which had so far remained untouched by it. The change of meaning which rock‘n’roll had brought to popular music was of no interest to the record companies and recording studios.