ABSTRACT
Academic rock criticism struggles with a perennial paradox: it targets an object that draws its legitimacy from rebellion and therefore resists academic enquiry. In The Blackboard Jungle, a film that served as promotional vehicle for Bill Haley and the Comets 'Rock around the Clock', rebellious students shatter the jazz records of a teacher who misguidedly seeks to connect to their popular-music interests. To most rock historians, the mid-1960s artistic shift evoked above marks the birth of the rock counterculture: rock and roll's naive celebration of teenage pleasure gave way to politically resonant, artistically ambitious 'progressive' rock. Markers of autonomy in rock music have indeed followed an itinerary made up of successive reversals. Empowerment in 1950s rock and roll was voiced through the celebration of rhythm and blues sensuality, but also through the flaunting of consumerist pleasure. The evolution of the music market and the inherent limitations of classic rock's craft-based utopia have generated more oblique professional profiles.
