ABSTRACT
Our story begins in the 1950s. To represent (or even introduce) a decade as complex and self-contradictory as the ’50s through one event or one figure is necessarily a distortion; the same era that gave us Sputnik also gave us Peyton Place. But Dwight D. Eisenhower did reign as president for the majority of the decade—from 1953 through the end of 1960—and thus was the president who was asleep at the wheel when rock & roll invaded these shores. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, with Democrats in the White House, that what was later to be dubbed the “British Invasion” in rock & roll occurred. Yet despite the fact that 1950s rock & roll was entirely a domestic invention, its arrival was nevertheless most often experienced as an invasion: although where on Earth (or not on Earth) it had come from was a question of ongoing concern. To Eisenhower, in one of his few recorded remarks on the new music, rock & roll “represent[ed] some kind of change in our standards.” “What has happened,” he went on to ask, “to our concepts of beauty, and decency, and morality?” 1
