ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what rock music means for youth as a social group faced with specific problems in contemporary social structure. The approach to be taken in analyzing rock music as a function of the problems of youth in contemporary post-industrial societies is based on the theoretical views defined by Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Mannheim and Jose Ortega y Gasset. Rock music has been traditionally understood within either a cultural or a societal framework. The debates in the rock literature over whether rock music is an authentic expression of creative impulse or a commercial commodity, and whether the music has progressive, reactionary or harmful social consequences, can be enlightened by considering the group that uses it in the constitution of its life. The periodization of rock music, which has become integral both to the merchandising of rock as nostalgia and to the critical and academic literature concerned with the music, may be grounded on broader historical transformations.
