Sunday, September 23, 2012

What 'Rock n Roll' means

"I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose." - Woody Allen

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"The music from which rock ‘n’ roll was born throbbed with more libidinous content and performance than anything coming out of white America at the time. Even the name was salacious. ‘Rock ‘n’ roll’, according to the cultural historian Michael Ventura,

was a term from the juke joints of the South, long in use by the forties, when a music started being heard that had no name, wasn’t jazz and wasn’t simply blues and wasn’t Cajun, but had all those elements and could not be ignored. In those juke joints ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ hadn’t meant the name of a music. it
meant ‘to fuck’.

When the music crossed over to white middle-class radio, so many songs involved rocking and rolling that radio deejays — possibly naively, perhaps cunningly — called it rock n roll.

From its very birth, rock sizzled with sex. Elvis was such a sex bomb that his FBI file apparently declared him a ‘definite danger to the security of the United States’, and it only got more dangerous from there."

--- Sex, Genes and Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World / Rob Brooks
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