Rock ’n’ roll didn’t simply shake the cultural landscape; it caused an earthquake — a sudden rupture whose aftershocks reverberated from the 1950s onward. At its epicenter was Elvis Presley. A white Southerner who borrowed, filtered and, perversely, embodied black musical traditions, including gospel, blues and even swing, Elvis made palatable (and sellable) what white America had previously either ignored or condemned. His voice hinted at the sensuality of the Black church; his hips were denounced as pornographic. But Elvis’s real subversion was racial. Here was a white man singing like he was black and, worse, moving like it too.

Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, for whom Elvis recorded his early material, is often credited with musing: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”

In postwar America, conformity was the air people breathed. It was the era of Levittown suburbs, Chevrolet Bel Airs and nuclear family orthodoxy. The suburban conformity of postwar America, starchy, restrictive and suffocating, has been memorably captured in Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road (1961), later adapted into a film featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, which explored the desperate yearning for escape beneath the surface of middle-America in the 1950s.

Civil rights were barely on the horizon; feminism was still second-wave future tense. Against this backdrop, rock ’n’ roll didn’t just sound unlike anything else: it felt transgressive. And it didn’t pop out of a cultural vacuum. Film had already incubated the youth rebellion. Asked what he was rebelling against in the film The Wild One, Marlon Brando replied: “What have you got?”

James Dean died in a car crash in 1955 at age 24, after starring in Rebel Without a Cause. His death cemented his legend as the ultimate symbol of tragic youth, living fast and dying young. But it was in rock music that young people discovered a new kind of rebellion: they didn’t just listen to it; they danced to it, wore it and shrieked at the bands that played it. Rock music both surrounded and penetrated them.

The outrage that greeted Elvis’s performances (particularly his shamelessly “indecent” hip swivel: he was known as “Elvis the Pelvis”) was the genre’s original moral panic. Parents feared their children would be corrupted by Elvis and the “jungle music” he purveyed. That was the point. Rock was supposed to worry people. 

And what made it dangerous wasn’t the music alone: it was the race politics hidden in plain sight. In this sense, the genre was born already in disguise: Black art, white faces, sold as new. What Elvis launched wasn’t just a sound or even a look: it was a method, a way to disguise rebellion as pleasure.  

Dylan and the politics of protest

By the 1960s, rock had swapped its leather jacket and drainpipe bluejeans for placards and newsboy caps. As America agonized over the nuclear bomb, civil rights and the Vietnam war, a generation of musicians appeared. They were a bit like troubadours, but their aim was not just to entertain, but to educate. Enter Bob Dylan. He didn’t invent the genre that became known as protest music, but he gave it poetic licence. His songs didn’t chronicle the world: they pointed angry fingers at the likes of the “Masters of War”. Dylan didn’t merely lament conflict; he condemned the military-industrial complex with a biblical fury. His “The Times They Are A-Changin’” became the opus of a generation. 

Dylan’s influence remains today: He showed that a rock lyric could be philosophical, elliptical and occasionally incomprehensible. But it could still resonate. The more obscure his lyrics became, the more they seemed to capture the zeitgeist.

Unlike the comparably important output of Motown (more of which below), there was no optimism in Dylan’s folk-rock hybrid: it encouraged discomfort if not downright rage. It told uncomfortable truths. He wasn’t alone. Artists like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and, eventually, John Lennon, aligned rock with anti-establishment causes, such as anti-war, anti-nuclear, pro-civil rights and, in Lennon’s case, the dissemination of love.

But there was something else going on: the medium itself was becoming more openly oppositional. It wasn’t just the lyrics; it was what we now call attitude – some genres of rock became truculent, angry and uncooperative. Rock became self-consciously untamable and immovably defiant. 

Rock concerts morphed into political assemblies with guitars. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, rock was asserting its own “cultural capital”, inverting what respectable taste looked and sounded like.

And of course, this politicization of sound generated its own backlash. From the FBI’s surveillance of folk singers to the Reagan-era culture wars, protest music was never left alone. But the mere existence of such responses proved the point: rock could and was willing to provoke. Not change policy perhaps, but change the way people looked at the world. Some might argue that this is a necessary precursor. It urged fans to think and argue. Still does.

Motown, Hip-Hop and today’s outrage

If rock in the 1960s screamed defiance, Motown in the same decade softly murmured it. Berry Gordy’s Detroit hit factory crafted a pop-funk blend that explicitly avoided politics or any kind of social issue. Gordy’s genius (and, for some, limitation) was to make music that white audiences couldn’t resist. Artists like Marvin Gaye and The Supremes broke barriers, but at a price: no overt mention of civil rights, no protest, no bucking the system. Respectability was the Trojan horse.

Yet this silence was strategic: it was part of Gordy’s master plan. He demonstrated that black culture could “cross over” and flourish, if not dominate the mainstream. Eventually, cracks formed in its apolitical façade. Marvin Gaye’s inimitable What’s Going On (1971) was a turning point. A protest against the Vietnam war and an elegiac cry for peace, it was unmistakably political. 

Still, by the 1980s, it was another genre that picked up the cudgel of confrontation: hip-hop. Unlike rock or Motown, hip-hop didn’t bother with subterfuge. Emerging from the ruins of post-industrial cities, it voiced fury, detachment, pride and a different type of community, closer to tribes than families. Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” was both a song and call to arms. The message behind N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” was self-explanatory. Hip-hop didn’t flirt with outrage: it pursued it. And it succeeded. Politicians, parents, and the police responded predictably: with bans, censorship, and surveillance, all of which paradoxically made hip-hop more relevant.

Kanye West, in many ways, was and is both culmination and mutation. Early in his career, he revived the politically aware rapper: “Jesus Walks”, “All Falls Down”, and “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” offered critique and analysis-of-sorts. But then he seemed to lose interest and turned inward: flirting with Trump, invoking slavery as “a choice” and dissolving the boundary between art and spectacle. His brand of provocation blurred the lines between dissent and bigotry.

Today, whether through Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer-winning meditations on black trauma or the performativity of artists like the British pair Bob Vylan, the tradition continues, reminding us that the purpose of such music is not always harmony but conflict, collision and confrontation. As ever, it is unpleasant, filthy, and repugnant to some. That, after all, is the point.

Kraken wakes

The recent Glastonbury controversy — still raging as police investigate Bob Vylan’s anti-IDF chant — reminds us that rock’s restless and unruly spirit never quite disappears. Like Kraken, the legendary sea monster, it just lies dormant until someone dares to wake it. That a neo-punk duo like Bob Vylan could provoke such political and media uproar with a few shouted words speaks not only to the raw power of performance, but to the enduring unease society feels when music stops entertaining and starts accusing.

Critics argue the chant “incites violence”. Yet the legal bar for incitement is set high: it requires intent, imminence and, crucially, actual disorder. No such consequences have emerged. What has emerged is something more familiar: moral panic. Just as Elvis’s hips, Dylan’s lyrics, and N.W.A.’s defiance once stirred fears of chaos, today’s outrage says more about the public’s need for containment than any actual threat.

If anything, the Glastonbury episode proves the point made across decades: rock and its successors exist to disrupt, offend, confront and get people’s backs up. It challenges the status quo or, to paraphrase Brando, “what you got”. And in doing so, it affirms its place in a tradition that stretches back through the history of cultural resistance. Sanitized pop will always dominate the charts. But when a song, a chant, or a moment on stage still has the power to rattle institutions, from the BBC to the police, it’s a healthy sign that the music, however filthy or odious, still matters.

*[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Claudia Finak-Fournier edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.