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Pity Peggy Sue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Barbara Bradby  and
Brian Torode
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Extract

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War,

It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality.… Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms… black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound. It makes obvious the potential anarchy of sexual feeling.

(Frith 1978, p. 180)

Frith appeals to an age-old metaphor: black nature is seen as fundamentally threatening to white culture. In modern popular music, this conflict is played out in terms of the liberation or the repression of sexuality.*

Type
Part 4. Reading Rock and Roll
Information
Popular Music , Volume 4 , January 1984 , pp. 183 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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