Rock Music, Jukeboxes, and Top 40

The radical fear that had been a feature of earlier hostility to popular music was again present, as before only partly cloaked in general discriptions of rock 'n' roll as "barbaric" and "primitive".

But there were also important differences. While much of the language used echoed past struggles, there was a new tendency to draw on psychological terminology. Science - "objective", energetic, modem - was summoned in support of battered morality.

But what psychology most clearly revealed - and it was fairly obvious without it was that the crux of the latest cultural collision was not in mental or emotional deficiencies, but in something much more normal, the so-called "generation gap".

The development of a separate teenage identity had resulted, among other things, in the perception by the adult world that its authority was being eroded. Rock 'n' roll was being castigated as the most powerful symbol of the teenage attempt to tilt the balance in the parent-child relationship. But, as in previous collisions, the attitude of the group that feared for its control was profoundly ambiguous. Inseparable from the older generation's hostility to the teenage culture was its envy of the freedom and independence which that culture seemed to have been achieved - in contrast to the life, past and present, that the old had known.

Despite this ambivalence, the pressures on rock 'n' roll were considerable. At its height, the attack was directed more at its purveyors than its consumers, at the softer target of those whose livelihood depended on it, rather than at those who actually lived it. Before long rock'n' roll began to become acceptable. As with earlier styles, acceptability involved dilution. Under pressure from parents and from representatives of moral and civic authority, radio stations and record producers and companies began to turn the prospect of independent, anti-authoritarian teenage culture into an expression of tolerably obstinate adolescence.

At the same time, vested interests knew that the teenage market was now too valuable to be put in jeopardy. Part of the answer was Top 40 programming, which came to the fore in the later 1950s. Besides coping with the separate problem of disk jockeys' so-called "play-for-pay" deals with record companies, the Top 40 system introduced a measure of control into the music being heard over the air. By a very neat twist, hard promotion turned that controlled segment of available records into something that the teenage market found irresistible.