It has been over five decades since Elvis Presley appeared on The Milton Berle Show, singing “Hound Dog,” and dancing his highly controversial pelvic-thrusting jive (Culture Shock). On that night thousands of Americans witnessed the beginning of rock icons, a cultural phenomenon encapsulating image, sound, lyrics, and the many facets of media. Since Elvis’s reign, rock has been about image and style just as much as it has been about the music. Would Madonna be referred to as the ‘Queen of Pop’ if she never walked out on stage in a coned bra or in white lingerie singing “Like A Virgin”? Or if she never pushed the limits of religious symbolism, singing in a field of burning crosses? Would Ozzy have the same turn out at his concerts if he never chomped down on a single bat head? In Signs of the Times: The Culture of Rock, we examine the many aspects of particular rock idols within the last six decades, hoping to invoke a discourse about the proliferating effects of rock music.

A big question we must first explore is the obscurity of definition; what is rock? All the boxes enclosing rock music were constantly being broken: first there was Rock n’ Roll, which morphed into Rock and eventually interweaved pop. Both Frank Hoffmann, editor of the volumes The Literature of Rock, and Barbara O’ Dair, editor of The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, interchange the words rock and pop in their introductions, drawing no distinction between the two terms. The Literature of Rock is organized into genre headings including Funk, Soul, new wave, and even Country, all of which Hoffman places under the larger umbrella labeled Rock.

Therefore, we must think of rock music in the same abstract manner the academia is beginning to think of literature. If we try to define rock, if we attempted to draw lines, inevitably problems will arise because rock is not concrete like an insect, as Eagleton put it with literature (Eagleton 14). Rock is an abstraction, a cultural organism that lives, breathes, and grows. Hoffman says, “We tried to define rock in musical terms but it is more productive to think of them in cultural terms,” (Hoffmann iv). This anthology does just that, and becomes a tool for cultural studies, for the use of interdisciplinary courses in the humanities departments. Hopefully all studies will find them useful in different ways, whether for literary value of poetry in the lyrics or the historical documentation of cultural movements. The possibilities are limitless, but the main goal for the anthology is to encompass all of these subdivisions into one central cultural study of Rock.

To further understand the being of Rock, we should go back to its birth. Although there were many reasons for Rock N’ Roll, the two main dynamics were economical and political. We cannot deny the racial implications involved in the development of this movement. The increase of mobility after the Civil War helped integrate the music styles of black and white traditions, but many black musicians agree with Louis Jordan, a R&B musician, when he stated “Rock N’ Roll was just a white imitation, a white adaptation of Negro rhythm and blues” (Hoffmann vi). In fact many of Elvis’s lyrics and melodies were composed by African American musicians but the music industry knew they had to paste a white face onto the records if they wanted the masses to follow (Hoffmann vi). With this anthology we have tried not to focus on our own political agendas, rather, we mention this to give a prime example of the gravity an image possesses in the realm of rock, which often times engages race, gender, class, and many other aspects of identity.

Another issue concerning rock’s emersion was the ‘generation gap’ (Hoffmann viii). The disapproval of adults to this new provocative revelation only fueled rock’s prosperity even more. The resistance fused a unity of youth rebellion to form a new kind of nationality, which grew in strength with the concurrent emersion of mass media. Rock was becoming a monumental enterprise. Again, in terms of this anthology, this is extremely important because the cultural concerns become exceedingly economically driven.

The beginning themes of Rock N’ Roll concerned problems of young love, rebellion, dress styles, and recreational pursuits, because this was the audience that was most profitable--white youth (Hoffmann viii). As the generation grew up the music themes changed to ecology, personal fulfillment, and political issues. As Rolling Stone put it in their book Images of Rock & Roll, rock was about the “antiestablishment, anticulture,” which ultimately brought about a new culture of its own (Woodward).

Again this had as much to do with the actual subjects being explored with the capital of selling this type of material. With this anthology we investigate the monetary implications of rock culture by highlighting certain movement with the careers of famous performers. By isolating all the information into separate section we are asking the consumer that has bought the albums, spent the money on the concert T-shirt, bought the mimicking outfits, why did you buy into this particular person? Was it the image? The lyrics? Or was it the common variety, peer pressure?

We’ve constructed our anthology in such a manner that would be most productive to thoroughly examine all these previous thoughts and questions. The contents are set up in the six decades that rock has lived in, the fifties to the present. We are aware of the predicaments this causes with many performer such as The Rolling Stones that have lasted throughout several decades or for those that fall somewhere in between, but this solution was far better than trying to define genres. For those bands that prevail through generations we have placed them in the decade that they blossomed in, or when they caused the most controversy. For example KISS is a band that started in the seventies and abounded through the eighties and nineties, yet we sited them in the seventies to stress the powerful commercial triumph of their face painting era. The unmasking of their faces at the brink of the eighties was extremely shocking for their fans, and becomes a huge emphasis of our notions of image. This does not mean we stop at the end of the decade; on the contrary we follow the band or the performer’s career through each ubiquitous decade. Anther example in opposition is Prince, who actually started his career in the seventies but is listed under the eighties category because this is when the image of Prince exploded into pop culture.

Under each grouping we have chosen a select few bands and solo performers that best reveal the types of issues we described earlier. This anthology is not meant for survey courses by any means, nor is our intention to provide the scope of the most influential presences within the last sixty years. Instead, we have isolated certain iconic legends in rock, without labeling them as “best” or as the faces of rock. We listed them alphabetically in an attempt at neutrality.

With each of these musicians we have designed a thorough overlook of all the aspects of their work and divided them into four sections. The biography gives personal information on each musician involved, and then goes into a little more detail about albums and their musical careers. Another section entitled text comprises several outside text that relate either to the artists music or image. These texts vary from a literary essay on the feminist rock star Janis Joplin to a review of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell Tour. For the contents we have put them in jumping titles like ‘Backstage Interview’ and when the user clicks on this text the article “Stage Pass: Aerosmith Braves Hazards on Trail of One-Nighters” by Dan Hedges will show up in a new window.

The next section contains lyrics, some successful and some unsuccessful songs produced by the performers. This is an interesting section because many times people listen to songs (provided in the fourth section) without knowing what their favorite band is actually saying. This gives people a chance to investigate the words behind the music. Readers will find some music can be extremely poetic even you can’t understand a single word of the pounding screaming, like the contemporary band The Blood Brothers. Other lyrics will highlight the extreme absurdity or foolishness of the language.

The last section is video, which includes music videos, live interviews, and live concert recordings. This section is an extremely significant ingredient because it serves as a huge contribution to the culture of rock, allowing the experience of our anthology to become a three dimensional encounter of the life form. The clothes, body movement, props, make-up, all of this creates a story behind the music, and video is a fantastic narrative for these artists to express themselves. Indeed, this is why videos have become an integral and important part of the phenomenon, just as they provide for us a great tool for analyzing that phnomenon.

In the end, the simple fact remains: performers are recieved differently when they present themselves differently. Anthony DeCurtis wrote for Rolling Stone, “No music is entirely pure; no music is exclusively about itself” (Woodward). There is the listener, the viewer, the musicians, the sound, the images, the recorded documents; all of these embody the eminent culture of rock.