Abstract
In 1957, a short article appeared in Harper’s Magazine—an article that would handily summarize (and even satirize) the ways in which visual culture participated in the transnational features of rock and roll. In the article, a “Mr. Harper” tells of receiving a letter from a journalist in Communist Czechoslovakia. The (probably fictional) Czech wrote from behind the Iron Curtain to Mr. Harper: “I heard about rock ‘n’ roll. Is it a new style of jazz, or does it belong to popular music? I would be glad to hear it. How does Elvis Presley sing? I had lent a Canadian journal Liberty, issue from August 1956, and in this is a picture from Elvis Presley while singing and playing on guitar. He looks as in ecstasy.”1 This is no doubt an American fantasy of what rock and roll’s global influence might ostensibly be when consumed by someone at the outskirts of America’s cultural reach, but it effectively summarizes the ways in which such a reach was achieved. Popular music was an export of imagery as well as sound. The Czech writer sees an image of Elvis before he hears him. The reader is left to guess at the reason the Czech writer has never heard Elvis Presley: that the Communist state has, in rock’s early stages, been able to control American music’s influx within their borders. And it is this image of the singer that makes him want to hear more. The Harper’s article hints at the transgressive nature of rock and roll—the music crossed both cultural and international boundaries (even an Iron Curtain).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Blake’s Got a Girl has been included in pop survey exhibitions such as David E. Brauer, Jim Edwards, Christopher Finch, and Walter Hopps’s show and edited volume Pop Art: U.S./U.K. Connections, 1956–1966 (New York: D.A.P., 2001) and Paul Moorhouse’s Pop Art Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 16.
Gary Burns, “A Typology of ‘hooks’ in Popular Records,” Popular Music 6, no. 1 (January 1987): 1. See also Richard Middleton’s article “‘Play it Again Sam’: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music” from Popular Music 3, Producers and Markets (1983): 235–270.
American and British radio systems were different in this period. It is difficult to quantify how often popular songs were played on British radio, as such songs were not played by the BBC and were mainly reached through individual purchases, jukebox playing, and pirate radio. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 124.
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 219.
See Graham Bader’s article “Donald’s Dumbness” for a discussion of how another Pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, grappled with the Pop dynamic of commercial source material (among the article’s other contributions to the field of Pop art). Bader succinctly describes the issue of originality (and therefore reproduction) in regard to Lichtenstein; “This was a fundamental paradox, and an equally fundamental realisation for Lichtenstein himself in 1961: that being an artist meant producing what didn’t look like art, just as being original would mean questioning the very notion of originality itself.” Graham Bader, “Donald’s Dumbness,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no.1 (2006): 96–113,103.
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good (New York: Abacus, 2006), 433–434.
See Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer (London: London Press Exchange, 1959) and Teenage Spending in 1959 (London: London Press Exchange, 1959) and in Sandbrook, 409.
Edward Royle, “Trends in Post-War British Social History” in Understanding Post-War British Society, ed. James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (New York: Routledge, 2004), 14.
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 126.
Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 66–67.
Dick Hebdige, “Towards a Cartography of Taste 1935–1962,” in Hiding in the Light (New York: Routledge, 1988), places Hoggart within a context of cultural critics who viewed consumer culture as a decidedly American threat. These British cultural critics of the 1950s “equated the expanded productive potential opened up by the automation of manufacturing processes with the erosion of fundamental ‘British’ or ‘European’ values and attitudes and further associated this ‘levelling down’ of moral and aesthetic standards with the arrival in Britain of consumer goods which were either imported from America or designed and manufactured ‘on American lines.’” Hebdige, 47.
See also Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), for a thorough history of the origins of the BBC and their attempts to control music and taste in Britain.
Peter Blake’s Elvis and Cliff (1961) is an enamel paint and T-shirt transfer on board measuring 30 × 18 inches and is in a private collection.
Roger Coleman, Peter Blake, catalogue of an exhibition, 17 November — 13 December 1969 (Bristol: Tate Publications, 1969), 18.
Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 70.
Marco Livingstone, Peter Blake: One Man Show (London: Ashgate, 2009), 76.
As film music scholar Irwin Bazelon points out, viewers control what they see (they may simply close their eyes); however, the ear “is physically open at all times,” Irwin Bazelon, Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Van Nosrand Reinhold Company, 1975), 76.
Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, in Composing for the Films, consider the ear a passive organ, because the eye is more used to discerning commodity culture, while the ear cannot keep up with technological changes. Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2007), 13.
See Clement Greenberg’s thesis on the virtues (and purities) of mediums, “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 61–74. Caroline A. Jones’s chapter, “The Modernist Sensorium” in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) provides a thorough history of how Greenberg negated all other senses in favor of sight.
Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (New York: Abrams, 1990), 35.
Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: Harper, 2009), 65.
Branden Joseph, “Rauschenberg’s Refusal” in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 266–267.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2014 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mednicov, M.L. (2014). Jukebox Modernism: The Transatlantic Sight and Sound of Peter Blake’s Got a Girl (1960–1961). In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47726-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37523-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)