Review, Kevin J. Dettmar, Is Rock Dead? (Routledge, 2006)

St.  Louis Post-Dispatch, January 22, 2006

Though the exact moment of rock ’n’ roll’s birth remains a matter of debate, more certain is that since its infancy, people have been intent on killing this illegitimate child of white country and black rhythm-and-blues. As Kevin Dettmar shows in his witty and entertaining book, Is Rock Dead?, rock’s would-be assassins have included both its bitter enemies and staunch supporters.

Dettmar, an English professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is not really interested in answering the question posed by the title—as he makes clear early on, he believes the music today is as vibrant as ever. Instead, Dettmar focuses on the numerous ways people have proclaimed rock dead and traces the various anxieties reflected in such expressions, depending on who’s pronouncing the post-mortem.

The book’s most interesting section details the era of rock ’n’ roll’s birth in the 1950s. At a time when American culture was ridden with tensions growing out of the Cold War, the nascent civil rights movement and public fears posed by juvenile delinquency (with which rock ’n’ roll became associated when “Rock Around the Clock” blared out of the soundtrack of the movie Blackboard Jungle), the music provided a scapegoat. Dettmar writes: “The provenance almost exclusively of the young, African American in its genealogy, Southern in pedigree, rock ’n’ roll became the lightning rod for all of Middle America’s (and middle-class) fears.”

Ranging widely through the period’s popular culture, Dettmar shows how the music raised contradictory anxieties about teenagers, who were just entering public consciousness as a demographic group. On the one hand, rock ‘n’ roll aroused fears of anti-social behavior and juvenile sexuality. As one character tells a budding rock ‘n’ roll star in the 1959 British movie Expresso Bongo, “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder and an H-bomb in your pants.”

Paradoxically, rock ‘n’ roll’s young fans also were portrayed as mindless conformists, like the zombies so common in the period’s science fiction movies. In a context where rock ‘n’ roll represented both anarchic individualism and the herd mentality of mass culture, pronouncements of the music’s death by conservative commentators reflected wishful thinking.

Dettmar devotes two chapters to discussing music critics who have pronounced rock dead, a tendency he characterizes as Boomer Triumphalism. Most such critics, born in the early years of the baby boom, associate the music with their youth and often their youthful idealism, confusing their own loss of idealism with rock’s loss of purpose. But, as Dettmar says, these critics willfully refuse to listen to the music of a younger generation, ironically in much the same way their parents refused to listen to theirs.

Is Rock Dead? provides a fascinating window into public discourse of the last half-century as people of different generations, races and political opinions have debated the meaning of popular culture. As Dettmar says, the very moments of transformation that some interpret as rock’s death, others see as evidence of life. Or, as Bob Dylan sang, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”