Rock 'n' Film

by James, David E.

In the mid-1950s, rock 'n' roll amalgamated earlier black and white working-class musical traditions to displace the Great American Songbook's hegemony over Anglophone popular music. At the same time, the classic musical was both displaced and re-created in a new form of film: the rock 'n' roll musical. For the next two decades, the genre's evolution in the United States and the United Kingdom accompanied and sustained the emergence, flowering, and decay of a counterculture. Cinema was second only to records in the production of the new cultural gestalt that the music generated.