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(More customer reviews)I just finished reading, "All Shook Up." Although some of Altschuler's sociological themes are very interesting, particularly those dealing with the lingering effects of rock and roll on white America, his discussions of the formative years of rock and roll and the seminal crosssover influences are vey weak, and from my perspective, inaccurate and superficial. Altschuler would like the reader to believe that it was primarily big name individuals (Presley, Berry, Boone, Nelson, etc.) who were the most influential in bringing rock and roll to the general culture. Although individual musicians played an important role in the evolution of rock and roll, it was the early rhythm and blues and doo wop groups that provided the most important and earliest crossover influences. There are many other books dealing with the early influence of such groups, but in this book, they are given relatively little attention compared to individual singers. Also, having grown up in the forties and fifties in Brooklyn, New York, my recollections are quite different from the accounting presented in this book. By the time Presley, Berry and other individuals mentioned in this book arrived on the scene, the crossover process was well underway. What happened before Presley, etc. is a critical part of the historical record and warrants much more attention than is presented in this book. In reading this book, I had the same feeling that I have had visiting the Rock and Roll of Fame - the creative and historical influences of rock and roll on our culture are lost, relatively speaking, to name recognition occurring several generations down the road.
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The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify?As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone.Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.
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