Rock on the Roll: Serving Up Popular Culture

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Rock on the Roll: Serving Up Popular Culture is a creative and innovative examination of music’s role in pop culture across generations. The book explores the origins of diverse genres of popular music, their social impact, and the strategic ingredients that make them successful, providing students with an immersive journey through music history. The text employs the speech and nomenclature of various historical periods to illustrate how music incorporated language, especially slang, to represent social issues and technology.

The book begins with a chapter that introduces readers to the ubiquitous nature of slang phrases in music and the influential nature of radio and DJs on popular culture. Later chapters explore historical events that inspired genres of music and particular songs, big-name performers and composers, and the progression and social impact of individual genres of music, including ragtime, blues, European classical, Broadway, big band, country and western, surf rock, and more.

Rock on the Roll manages to be simultaneously fresh, irreverent, and deeply respectful of various musical art forms that have had mass popular appeal. The book is well-suited to courses in rock history, country, pop, and Broadway music, as well as the history of radio.