Rock and Roll: Music for Your Body

Rock & roll is the music of rhythm. Well, you might say, blues, jazz and gospel have all their fair share in being music for the body.  Rock & roll has established a body culture amongst many of its fans. It refers to the human body as much as the human body seems to be related to it.

The dialectics of rock & roll are quite clear: the stimulus creates the response for the next stimulus ,,, and so on. No cause-effect relation, but an ongoing sequence of events, both individually and collectively.

The politics of sex have always been political events, even in their most bizarre modes. But it was also politics which shaped the increasing importance of music: the Viet Nam war has a direct relation to Woodstock and the Summer of Love, the lack of credibility of established parties led to the alternative movement, technological "progress" enabled new modes of musical expression (electric guitar, synthesizer, etc.).

All of these factors impacted on cultures and societies as a whole, but they also found their expression in rock music as a medium of "liberation" via pleasure and amusement. The messages are clear: rock your body and let it roll. Only a fool would assume that there's no sexual connotation. Of course, there is.

Rock music is body music in essence, and body music means music which gives pleasure to the body. In the beginning of rock music way back in the 1950s, Elvis Presley was considered to be an artist of obscenity. Hip swings and other body motions were seen as the devil's work having gained control of the human being.

The connection between music and body feelings was not supposed to be expressed in public. Sex and music, a perfect blend for centuries if not millenia, suddenly became a matter of moral discussions, often leading to public outrage and even ban of certain musicians and/or their music. The purpose was simple: sexual liberation was not on the agenda of those societies and rock music simply put it on the agenda by performing, rather than by discussing the merits of this placement.

Subsequently, the mid-1960s turned out to become the times of sexual and political revolution, not only in personal terms, but in terms of politics, education, racial relations, arts and particularly music. Musicians like The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, The Who and others insisted on the maturity of their artistic projects and their openly declared relation to the Pleasure Dome known as the human body.

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