Youth Culture and the Emergence of Popular Music

Abstract

Popular music is now a familiar feature of everyday life. It is available 24 hours a day on radio and television; it accompanies advertisements and Hollywood films; it is piped into shops and arcades; and it is used to raise money for any number of humanitarian causes. Pop has not always enjoyed such prominence, and this chapter traces the story of pop’s growing economic and cultural importance. By focusing on popular music, we can illustrate the changes both in a major industry and in the habits and hopes of a substantial part of British society. The rise of rock’n’roll in the 1950s cannot be separated from the growing impact of US popular culture on British life, or from the ‘discovery’ of the teenager, or from the development of new recording and other technologies, or even shifts in the distribution of political power. As the American critic, Greil Marcus, once wrote: a pop explosion is more than a change in style even if it is far less than a revolution… at its heart, a pop explosion attaches the individual to a group — the fan to an audience, the solitary to a generation — in essence, forms a group and creates new loyalties — while at the same time it increases one’s ability to respond to a particular pop artifact, or a thousand of them, with an intensity that verges on lunacy.1

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