ABSTRACT
If in France there was, by and large, optimism over technology in the postwar era, spending some time examining American ambivalence and anxiety over technology in the same era provides a useful comparison. To understand space-age pop music—jazz-influenced popular music of the 1950s and early 1960s that thematized the exotic, whether terrestrial or in space, and was intended to be played on hi-fis—it is necessary to discuss the historical and cultural factors that gave rise to it to hear how anxiety and ambivalence over technology are registered in this music.
