ABSTRACT
The academic study of pop and rock music is rooted in sociology, not musicology (for which, even now, popular music is at best of marginal interest), and the sociology of pop and rock is, in turn, rooted in two nonmusical concerns: the meaning of “mass culture” and the empirical study of youth (and delinquency). These were individual topics of academic interest in the 1930s, but they merged with the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the mid1950s. Rock ’n’ I was the first unavoidable mass cultural commodity explicitly aimed at teenagers, and it therefore stood symbolically for the more general fifties phenomenon of a commercial teen culture (which soon had its own complement of teen-market researchers, a phenomenon sardonically observed at the time by Dwight MacDonald).1
