Appropriately, given the archetypal conbintion involved, rock'n'roll became an overnight sensation, the rock superstar is born, and music as an industry—through record sales, concert promotion, and radio play—is not only revitalized but irrevocably altered. Arguably no other genre of music has had such
profound consequences in so many different facets of public and private
life: sexuality; fashion; public relations, advertising, and marketing;
gender; attitudes to authority; attitudes to the body and embodiedment;
adolescence and youth; entertainment, media, and journalism; social
customs and mores; and our individual sense of self and lived experience
were changed and challenged by the presence of rock'n'roll.
In 1955,
as several divergent streams of music, promotion, and business coalesced, rock'n'roll made its presence felt with several hits surging
to the top of the pop, r&b, and country and western charts. These
crossover classics include: Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock', Fats
Domino's 'Ain't that a Shame,' Chuck Berry's 'Maybellene' and Little Richard's 'Tutti Fruiti.' A nationwide obsession whose spark would not lose it's vitality, intensity, and ingenuity for nearly half a century, is born.
Although tame by today's standards, the initial clamour and charged eroticism of the early rock hits was deemed objectionable by
the arbitors of artistic and moral sensibility of the day. Encyclopedia
Britannica's Book of the Year had this to say about the burgeoning new
genre: "The most popular music was almost all either a resurrection of
old materials or a flagrant imitation of folk songs, the latter reaching
is lowest ebb in the so-called ‘rock'n'roll' style of rhymetric chant
(which) concentrated on a minimum of melody line and a maximum of rhythmic
noise, deliberately competing with the artistic ideals of the jungle itself."
Although the improvisatory nature of jazz might be most closely aligned
with the archetype of Uranus in spirit, the
best of rock—exhilirating, provacative, infectious, raucous, and
manic —comes
closer at expressing the foundational nature of the archetype. Through
rock, the bridge between archetype and expression—pattern and form—comes
increasinly closer to a nonseperable unity, and the archetype of Uranus
comes increasingly more transparent to itself in its actualization of
potential.
Olson and Belar, both working for RCA, create the first electronic
music synthesizer, also known as the Olson-Belar Sound Synthesizer.
This synth used sawtooth waves that were filtered for other types of timbres.
The user programmed the synthesizer with a typewriter-like keyboard that
punched commands into a 40-channel paper tape using binary code.
The first transistor radio, invented by a small company in Indianapolis, I.D.E.A. CO., is introduced to the public in late in 1954. By 1959, nearly half of the radios sold in America would be transistor radios.
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1955
is the year that music historians nearly unanimously agree is the year
in which 