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his moves. Known as “Elvis the Pelvis,” he shocked an older, and more
“decent,” generation with his gyrating hips and sultry sneer, which many saw
as a sexual attack on traditional moral values. The FBI, in fact, kept a file on
Presley, referring to his dancing as “a strip-tease with clothes on” and fearing
that it would lead young boys to masturbate. Even Frank Sinatra, the previous
generation’s teenage heartthrob and not exactly a pillar of traditional values
himself, said “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It
fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” But
his popularity never waned. With songs like “Hound Dog” [a cover of a hit
by the African American blues singer Big Mama Thornton] and “Don’t Be
Cruel,” Presley dominated the music charts. In 1956 alone, he sold an esti-
mated $22 million in albums and became a television and film star as well.
He was paid the then-incredible sum of $50,000 to appear on the famous Ed
Sullivan Show, only from the waist up, and was seen by over 60 million view-
ers. Rock was firmly established as a popular, and commercial, music form,
even if it did upset the conformity of the era with its appeal to the mixing of
the music of different races and to a new, open sexuality.What Are You Rebelling Against?
Movies also broke new ground in the postwar era. Films became more mor-
ally ambivalent and a new type of star, an “anti-hero,” emerged and became
particularly popular, like Rock & Roll, among American youth. These new
stars were younger themselves, often troubled, and rejected authority figures.
They were bad boys who played by their own rules. Movies dealt with themes
that emphasized the “underside” of American life, like The Man With the
Golden Arm, based on a novel by Nelson Algren and starring Frank Sinatra as
drummer with a heroin habit who gets clean but then is drawn back to the
junk. Among others, the best-known figures of the 1950s, both film icons,
were James Dean and Marlon Brando. Dean made only three films and died at
age 24, while driving his Porshe Spyder, aptly nicknamed “Little Bastard,” on
a highway in California. Still, he made quite an impression in a short time and
become a symbol of the new anti-hero among youth in film. Dean, and
Brando, symbolized the alienation, angst, turmoil, lost hopes, and rebellion of
teenagers and the young. Dean starred in East of Eden and Giant but his best-