1 - ‘Roll Over Beethoven’: new experiences in art

Summary

When rock music made its first appearance with American rock‘n’roll in the early fifties, using the word ‘art’ in this context would doubtless have seemed sacrilegious. Even today the claim that rock music is an art form still provokes heated discussion and intense resistance, although in the meantime rock has aspired to academic honours and the Beatles count as its ‘classics’. If to some people rock music signals a new musical creativity in the age of the mass media, to others it equally represents the mere substitution of commerce for art. Now we could just leave it at that without further observation. It is irrelevant to the actual effect of rock whether it is honoured with the description of ‘art’ or not. Since its real status in contemporary music culture hardly needs this sort of justification, such arguments are futile and unproductive.

However, if we want to understand what it is that rock evokes in its listeners and why this music has become in quantitative terms such a phenomenon in present-day music culture, we must start from the assumption that it should be regarded not only as the expression of general social relationships and economic mechanisms, but primarily as what it is to its young fans above all else – music. The significance that it holds, the values that it embodies and the pleasure that it provides are linked to its role as aesthetically relevant sound material.