424 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
disillusionment. The adult society described in the book is so corrupt—“phony”
is a key word—that only through a teenager’s eyes can innocence be glimpsed.
Mov ies a l so to ok up t he t heme, w it h a you n g Ma rlon Bra ndo a nd a n even you n g er
James Dean playing characters who sullenly resisted adult notions of virtue and
respectability. Many youngsters, like these characters, felt alienated, and they
found reasons to blame older generations for creating a society that evoked such
feelings.
Postwar teenagers—at least those in the rapidly swelling middle class—
also grew up with money to spend and exposure to an array of media that
now included television as well as books, records, movies, newspapers and
magazines, and radio. By the 1950s the mass media—radio, television, news-
papers, magazines, and other modes of communication directed to a broad
audience—were introducing Americans to experiences far beyond their own.
Within popular music, many middle-class youngsters chose the cultural alter-
native of downward mobility to claim turf that was supposedly more authentic
than that of their elders. “If rock ’n’ roll had had no other value,” declared a
writer who was a teenager in those years, “it would have been enough merely to
dent the smug middle-class consciousness of that time.”TEENAGERS AND RADIO
In 1951 white Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed learned from a local record
store owner that white youngsters were buying records previously thought to
be exclusively “Negro music.” Freed, then working as a classical record host,
responded by starting The Moondog Show, a youth-oriented program centered on
rhythm and blues records and broadcast across the Midwest. As Moondog, Freed
won immediate success, speaking the language of his mostly teenage audience.
Before long, he was organizing live rhythm and blues shows in Cleveland that
attracted racially mixed crowds.
Freed would soon win national fame for introducing white teenagers to
rhythm and blues. Perhaps his most lasting contribution was the label he gave
the music: rock and roll. Freed borrowed the term from African American slang,
where it was sometimes used to mean sexual intercourse (as in “good rocking
tonight”). Presumably, only insiders knew what the term meant, but decoding
the double entendres of R&B records was part of their appeal for white teenag-
ers, who delighted in records like the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man” (1951; “I
rock ’em, roll ’em all night long”) and Bull Moose Jackson’s “Big Ten Inch” (1952).
That their parents were usually oblivious to such music and its
innuendos contributed to the sense of a generation gap.
The general public accepted “rock and roll” as a name that was
free of racial overtones and fi t the style. In fact, the label has been
claimed as a key to the racial crossover. The new name encour-
aged white acceptance of the music by suppressing its black roots.
A white author later explained that in 1955, when he was
twelve years old, he and his friends found rock and roll appealing
because it “provided us with a release and a justifi cation that we
had never dreamt of.” The music made it easy to offend grown-
ups, to mock “the sanctimoniousness of public fi gures,” and to
draw a “clear line of demarcation between us and them.”K Alan Freed, working
in Cleveland in the early
1950s, became one of
the fi rst white disc jockeys
to play rhythm and blues
records for white youth.naming the genre172028_17_412-439_r3_sd.indd 424 23/01/13 10:58 AM