Dear Comrades,
Rock'n'roll was not invented in Tin Pan Alley or Wall Street. It grew gradually and took most of America by surprise.
It grew from the very roots of the American working class. It flourished in the ghettos and among the peasantry.
It was nurtured by the marginalised and minorities once a disc jockey named Alan Freed had given the new old name, rock'n'roll, to describe all emergent negro styles (rock'n'roll was a slang term used in the American negro jazz world of the 30s to describe sex. Freed used it around 1947). It had grown, been heard by, then performed by, and added to, by young whites both urban and rural.
When the rock'n'roll turned into a blazing inferno, it found the youth of the western world was warmed and eventually the youth of the entire world and, in the beginning, the working class youth almost without exception.
If original rock'n'roll was picked up and promoted by entrepreneurs and free enterprise in general, it was corporate capitalism that corrupted it, spoilt it and abused it, until it is today just another opiate of the masses.
During the early to mid-fifties, rock'n'roll was denounced by the Ku Klux Klan and the most bigoted reactionary sections of the American and British ruling classes.
It was also denounced by the communist parties of the world, taking their lead from the Soviet Union, who, not understanding what it was dealing with, dismissed it as just the product of a rotten and debased society, which it was, but it was also much more.
If only the Communist Party could have understood it and embraced it. Consider the reaction if American black rock'n'rollers had found acceptance in communist countries before they had civil rights at home.
Consider the 60s and the antiwar/establishment movements if there had been acceptance and encouragement in communist countries.
Communism didn't fall in eastern Europe (temporarily) because people rejected the system or that it was unjust or atheistic.
No, the mass of the young people who rejected Marxism-Leninism did so for 501 jeans, walkmans, Big macs, Coca Cola and rock 'n 'roll.
I really do maintain that if the Reds had not been square, then Red Square could still be Red.
And China is right -- if people want Big Macs and not a party approved sandwich, make sure they get their burgers, or they'll go to the source!
If only rock'n'roll had been made ours, half the world could still be too!
Paul Barrett, South Wales.