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T'as bien raison et pour ceux qui ne sont pas décidé l'avis de pitchfork:
United States of America, 1954: Senator Joseph McCarthy kicks off congressional hearings to determine whether or not the United States Army has been too lenient on Communists. North Vietnam cedes control to the Viet Mihn. The American government plops hydrogen bombs into the Pacific Ocean. Memphis' WDIA, the first American radio station programmed exclusively by and for African-Americans, plumps its signal up to a spectacular 50,000 watts, now accessible from southern Missouri all the way to the Gulf Coast-- reaching nearly 10% of the country's African-American population. Meanwhile, also in Memphis, a 19-year-old Elvis Presley worms his way into Sam Phillips' Sun Studios, recording his first Sun single, a cover of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right, Mama", inadvertently shifting the course of American music.
Two years earlier, Bill Haley released "Rock the Joint"-- arguably the first rockabilly song. It wasn't until 1955 that "Go Cat Go" brainchild Bill Flagg spit out the word "rockabilly" to describe the gorgeously brash, hedonistic strain of youth music suddenly squirting out of radios everywhere. But rockabilly was really born in 1954, when Presley first eschewed white vocal tradition, inhaled, and caterwauled, deep and wild, into Sam Phillips' big silver microphone, agitating teenagers all over the world. Presley eventually exploded, as did rock'n'roll, but in its wake, rockabilly-- rock's shifty-eyed, less commercial, more violent stepbrother-- kept on reacting to the tyranny of McCarthyism, the oppression of suburbia, the bite of racism, the threat of the big bomb.
Like any hybrid genre, rockabilly is groaningly tough to define without using broad and bulky terms, and its weird, disparate influences-- bluegrass, cowboys, pomade, Eisenhower, Levi's 501s, Betty Crocker, Delta blues, Hank Williams, R&B, country music, white t-shirts, Texas, creeper shoes-- are as varied, serendipitous, and appalling as the songs themselves. Given the now-clichéd repression of the classic nuclear 1950s household (think Donna Reed with one hand on an iron, pressing her husband's slacks, her other arm curled around a wooden spoon, churning up cake batter), the notion of affluent white teenagers rebelling-- hiding banned 45s under their canopied beds, moaning along to John and Jackie's orgasm-riddled "Little Girl", wiggling into black leather jackets, and unapologetically worshipping the most famed phallus of them all, the electric guitar-- seems both inevitable and revolutionary. Parents were horrified (their rage fueled, in many cases, by thinly veiled racism-- even though almost all rockabilly artists were white) by the sexually explicit and standard-balking songs their kids were suddenly making out to, incensed by their sneers and outfits, cigarettes and switchblades.
Each of Rockin' Bones' four discs celebrates and skewers the hilarious, red-faced anger of hollering parents, functioning as much as a testament to intense teenage defiance as to rockabilly's twang-filled, echo-heavy, vaguely-unhinged sound. Featuring 101 tracks recorded between 1954 and 1969 (35 of which are available here for the first time on CD), and interspersed with audio clips from the teen-exploitation movies of the era, Rockin' Bones, despite a few curious omissions (including, of all people, Bill Haley), is a gloriously comprehensive set, nodding to both the obvious Sun staples (Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes", Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two's "Get Rhythm") and plenty of more obscure tracks, many performed by people with names like "Johnny Dollar". Packaged inside a faux-hardcover book (pulp fiction, naturally), Rockin' Bones offers loads of bonus reading, including song-by-song commentary from Colin Hawkins, author of the definitive guide to the Sun Records dynasty, Good Rockin' Tonight.
Rockabilly's finest sing like they're sneering, barely capable of squeezing the words out over bouncing, sinister, propulsive guitar. The incomparable Link Wray-- the North Carolina-born guitar hero ostensibly responsible for power chords, fuzz tone, and distortion-- appears with "Rumble", his immortal instrumental featuring what plenty (including Hawkins) have called the most groundbreaking D chord in history. Buddy Holly pops up twice (solo on "Rockin' Around with Ollie Vee" and accompanied by high school buddy Bob Montgomery on "Down the Line"). Jackie DeShannon roars through the Lieber and Stoller-penned "Trouble", transforming a relatively staid country song into something spectacularly sexy, all throat-rumbles and sharp shoulder twitches. Ronnie Hawkins, whose backing band, the Hawks, later became the Band (check the mind-blowing guitar solos here), growls Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love", his voice just creepy and predatory enough to make anyone get up and check their window locks.
Rockabilly had faded by the mid-1960s (plenty suggest it went down, in 1959, with Buddy Holly's plane), but its aesthetic is periodically revived, with varying degrees of success (see Swingers, Brian Setzer, and Quentin Tarantino soundtracks). Meanwhile, historians and critics are still squabbling over what, exactly, rockabilly signifies in the larger socio-political context of the 1950s, and to what extent its players were just snatching and re-appropriating black performance styles, or, maybe, recreating what they saw in Pentecostal church pews. Regardless, rockabilly endures as one of America's purest homegrown sounds, bolstered, as all good things are, by cascading hormones, a healthy dose of teen-insurgency, and just a little bit of terror.
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Why there is so much trouble in this world?
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