Because Teenagers are More Powerful than Elvis

Teenagers scare me.

I feel like I’m finally allowed to say that having officially surpassed my teenage years, a fresh 20-year old in the making now (even though I’ve been fearful of them since the moment I started high-school). But I feel like everyone is a little bit afraid of the teenage generation, whether it be now, then, or 40 years down the road. We just have to face the facts: it is a truth universally acknowledged that teenagers are scary. I fear them in public, when I can hear them laughing and yelling and throwing things around with their friends in the next Target aisle over. I fear them in private, when their small-town popularity gives them the impression that the whole world is in their favor. And I especially fear them online, where a fourteen-year old girl’s TikTok review calling my favorite pair of shoes a fashion “out” this summer went viral, leaving me to wallow in phases of different identity crises (because am I not cool anymore?).

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Teenagers are always right. It’s like an unspoken rule that society has always inherently followed. Be it media, culture, fashion, and so on, whatever is popular, and whatever is mainstream, is what teenagers dictate to be. Because teenagers are always “right.” They’re the leading consumers of practically every market to ever exist, and are the reason why certain sayings have applied to generation after generation, grandparents asking grandchildren whether or not they’re “in with the times” anymore. The times are defined by the youth and youth culture, and so imagine the societal upheaval that occurred within all of these different cultural markets when this idea of youth was first formed. When the idea of the teenager originally came to be. Imagine the absolute whirlwind of a decade that the 1950s and ‘60s were, when young girls and Elvis posters started to rule the world.

The Elvis phenomenon itself – very obviously – predominantly took place within the music industry of the time period, however, another market was soon taken over by this same rise of rock’n’roll and black musical influence, in what we know to be called the film music industry. Film music in particular faced a lot of everchanging tides during the ‘50s and ‘60s due to the immense amount of societal and cultural change taking place throughout the years. It was a massive period of transition happening post-WWII, where the emergence of the working class was taking place. Within such an economic boom, parents not only had the allowance to give their children more pocket money, but these same children now had the means to start working themselves, coins in one hand and a paycheck in the other. It was formulaic as to why consumerism had begun to be ruled by the youth during this time, and in addition to the youth’s desires and intent, their own culture was forming alongside their consumer identities, motivating such cultural markets to adhere to their tastes. With the shift to television, the political affairs surrounding “The Red Scare’‘ and McCarthyism, and the mundanity spurred on by the newfound suburbs and nuclear families, young people began to rebel the society in which was growing to confine them, seemingly inspired more by the music and news seen on TV, and a need to escape from the tradition and conservatism that both their parents and their government were enforcing on them. With Elvis appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show and Little Richie playing piano underneath his legs, youth culture was slowly being born. And the teenager was slowly starting to reform societal means, greatly impacting not only the film music industry, but various other markets, in this way. The late 50’s to early ‘60s brought along with it the youth-dominated culture that still prevails today.

Traditional orchestral music was beginning to be seen as “outdated” and “inappropriate” in comparison to the youth-oriented culture then dominating the market, and film music needed to start modernizing itself in the midst of this, which explains and justifies the gradual shift that took place. There was an “irreconcilable tension in the mid-1960s” that had to be dissolved (Cooke 396). And in a cable sent to Bernard Herrmann on November 4th of 1965, Alfred Hitchcock comments on this same idea of tension by remarking that he is, “particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type of music that we have been using for so long…Unfortunately for we artists, we do not have the freedom that we would like to have, because we are catering to an audience…This audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding…This is why I am asking you to approach this problem with a receptive and if possible enthusiastic mind. (...Quoted in S. Smith 1991, 268-9)” (Cooke 396). Therefore, a youth-centric shift from traditional orchestral music within the film music industry began to unfold, both motivated by the rapidly changing trends occurring within the popular culture of the time, and described by the differences in the genres of music and styles of film scores that subsequently were taking place.

The music genres that the youth began to attach themselves to, and later on identify themselves with, launched into film music scores beginning in the ‘50s and ‘60s as their prospective audiences began to change. With youth consumers filling the theaters, “pop” genres of the coinciding times, such as jazz, rock, rhythm and blues/“black music,” American country, disco, and hip-hop, worked their way into film scores more and more, once companies within the film industry realized what a surefire way it was to attract larger and larger crowds as they did so. In regards to jazz specifically, their arrival in film music “became significant in the 1950s not only for the stylistic watershed they represented, but for the direct link they often promoted between popular music, social problems and youth culture…” (Cooke 398). Jazz was the genre that youth in the ‘50s started to catch onto to due to the fact that their parents never listened to it, and was something that they could deem as wholefully theirs - teenagers wanted something new, music that claimed itself as the opposite of the big band and classical music that tainted the generation before them, and black culture’s jazz music came about to young, white audiences at just the right time. Similar to music history’ s timeline, “Rock’n’roll became spectacularly successful in film immediately afterwards,” much like how jazz’s influence on rock caused it to become the next genre to overtake the popular music scene of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, too. In his book A History of Music and Film, Mervyn Cooke writes that “indomitable youths” were “determined to dance” to these rock films, and that since “such dancing was typically forbidden in the aisles, (so) space needed to be cleared for this purpose elsewhere in the venue” (Cooke 398). And in addition to the aforementioned Elvis phenomenon, Cooke also mentions that, “All these rock’n’roll films exploited the popularity of a fashionable musical style rather than an individual star’s charisma. A shift of emphasis in favour of the latter came with the wide exposure of Elvis Presley’s singing and acting in Love Me Tender (dir. Robert D. Webb), Loving You (dir. Hal Kanter) and Jailhouse Rock (dir. Richard Thorpe), the first also dating from 1956 and the two last both released a year later” (399). But a film that perfectly encapsulates this idea of focusing more so on a musical artist’s charm, rather than on just trying to follow pop music trends as was being done before, is Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which had featured the absolute pop culture craze of the time period, the Beatles. Due to the style of the film, and the director’s and group’s wishes, the movie took the Beatles as they were, without filtering them through Hollywood as Elvis was before. And the band’s personality and appeal was easily noticed because of this decision, not only increasing their popularity through the film’s success, but also introducing them to the youth musically as well, as the film read almost like a continuous music video, acting as a vehicle for their songs. The crowds that went to view the film attracted more listeners to the group’s music, and spurred the revival of rock music happening within youth culture as well. Even in conjunction with the Beatles’ image, their raw visuals and social commentary throughout the film spoke to the youth watching by showing them a rebellion “against age and class distinctions.” (Cooke 400). And the making of this pop music video film was a huge success in return, Cooke reeling that, “Phenomenal ticket sales for A Hard Day’s Night at the global box office were complemented by sales of the soundtrack album netting over three times the film’s production costs. The album, which sold 1.5 million copies within two weeks of its release (J. Smith 1998, 55), was prophetic of later marketing strategies by including songs which did not feature in the film, and also established the concept of a long-playing record made up of multiple singles, each potentially an individual hit; this strategy later had spectacular results for the Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever (see below)..The music of Help! was as phenomenally successful as that of its predecessor: its song ‘Yesterday, one of three chart-topping hits from the film, sold more than one million copies in just ten days (Denisoff and Romanowski 1991, 142)” (399-400). All of these movies then worked hand-in-hand to build the foundation for the initial shifts within the film music industry, and the following gains that later pop movies and commercial youth media would soon discover.

Jazz music, and other music genres composed within black culture, such as soul and funk, were predominant in ‘60s film music alongside its rock successor, until disco hit the youth culture margins. However, aside from the music compiled beneath black influence, American country music wove its way into film music scores during the late ‘60s as an ironic medium amidst political tension. American country music, from that point forward, was used in “a wide range of film, TV and cartoon scores” in extremely creative ways, not just in connection to political satire, but also in suggestion to “ignorance, corruption, and moral decay” (Cooke 403-404). For example, in the Coen Brothers’ 2000 film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, bluegrass music was used to set the mood when the movie’s three main characters were getting seduced by a group of sirens, who sang a lullaby originating from the Angel of Death, “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby.” The siren’s intentions were “corrupted” and “morally decayed” in the film, paralleling the atmosphere that bluegrass and American country music within films has then created for itself. Cooke writes that, “As Barbara Ching notes, country music ‘sounds the American heart’; it can succeed in ‘affirming the purity of the ‘American way of life’ in mainstream commercial cinema, or in ‘condemning a nation hypocritically mired in provincial materialism’ in more cynical art films (Ching 2001, 204)’” (Cooke 404). And the cynical nature of the thieving sirens most definitely presents this American materialism in this way.

Disco, on the other hand, personified popular youth culture, and was therefore the film music used within pop movies of the ‘70s. Most commonly recognized in John Badham’s 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, starring the infamously talented disco club goer John Travolta, the film was a musical, dance hybrid, in which music played a big role. And most of the film’s score features disco songs written for the movie itself, where the Bee Gees populate more than half of the movie’s soundtrack. The cultural impact that the film had was immense, and was a widely successful phenomenon and major box office hit.

Yet, the turnaround of the ‘80s and ‘90s brought with it inner-city youth culture, and the growing market rap was having on popular music and culture following the disco rave. The hip-hop scene was now what the youth revolved around, and film music adapted to it as it had been doing so for years already, exemplified in the success of director Spike Lee. Lee’s film Do The Right Thing (1989) was the first movie to incorporate hip-hop within its score, and the youth of the time, specifically the black youth of the time, urged to see a film that not only discussed the social and political conflicts in which their communities were facing, but also incorporated the hip-hop that was simultaneously speaking of these conflicts as well. And Spike Lee accomplished just that, further working to develop hip-hop out of culture hidden beneath poverty, too. The film, like pop movies that came before, held certain music video elements to it, alongside the pop music used in its score, but it also included cinematic features as well, both in its visuals and its sound. Bill Lee, a jazz composer and Spike Lee’s father, comprised the soundtrack and also worked to reframe the hip-hop music in the film with his soprano saxophone depending what was being seen on-screen, meddling together two music genres that connected back to American black culture, and reworking modern black pop music with older black pop music in order to speak to the audience even more. The movie introduced the art of hip-hop not only through this, but in various other ways, be it dance, art, fashion, style, culture, and so forth, to crowds that were not familiar with it in the way the black race had been. And its incorporation of the hip-hop music of the youth informed the rest of society in regards to black struggle in a way that, sometimes, only music can. Hip-hop musicians and producers began to become so well-known, that they’ve now been “active in film since the 1990s,” creating and composing music oftentimes solely for movies themselves, from Snoop Dogg’s Dr. Dre as music supervisor for Above the Rim (1994), to Wu Tang Clan’s leader, filmmaker RZA (Cooke 403).

In addition to the change in genre, though, film music’s shift from traditional orchestra to modern pop is also described through the change in style that many film scores went through at the time as well, predominantly with the rise of compilation scores. Compilation scores had an extremely music video appearance to them, but were used in good grace, as a means to either use pop lyrics as insight into a character’s head, “integrating multiple nondiegetic songs into a linear narrative,” or to allow for the pop music to age a movie by itself, using the popular songs of the decade in which a movie is meant to be set in in order to enhance the story telling. These styles of scores took off in the late ‘60s with Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate, in which the entire soundtrack was made up of Simon and Garfunkel songs. Similar to the Bee Gees and Saturday Night fever (1977), Simon and Garfunkel composed many songs solely for the sake of the film itself, however, ones made outside of the film score, such as “Sound of Silence,” were crucial to the movie, too, especially in terms of voicing the main character, Benjamin’s, thoughts. On this, Cooke relays that, “The film, which began the trend of using pop lyrics to suggest a character’s otherwise unvoiced preoccupations — most notably in its use of ‘Sounds of Silence’ in the swimming-pool montage as a ‘motif of withdrawal’ (Reay 2004, 57)...” (Cooke 409). But compilation scores inherently tied to a certain time period, similar once again to Saturday Night Fever (1977) and its obvious connection to the disco and ‘70s era, are useful for exactly this regard - in that pop music defines decades simply through sound, and a film meaning to take place during a certain year can use this in its favor. Cooke further claims that, “Compilation scores containing pop hits from yesteryear provided both a convenient method of establishing historical periods and a means to promote nostalgic personal identification” (Cooke 411). A demonstrative example of this can be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights, which was released in 1997, but was set in 1977, almost 20 years prior. However, the setting is not only believable through the visuals on-screen, but also through the music heard throughout the background of the film, in which a compilation score of exclusively hit ‘70s songs can be heard, aging the movie entirely. It’s a nostalgic tool, but one that would not be able to function without youth culture, and the youth of varying time periods, to decide what music even becomes popular in the first place.

It feels pretty easy to claim that the youth are the kingpins of society. It’s probably one of the main reasons why they’re so scary, the fact that they’re just a little too powerful at times. But, through such power, the film music industry underwent one of the largest shifts in consumer history — a shift that, in turn, gave me the soundtracks to many of the films that I know and love today. From changes in genre, to implementations of differing style soundtracks, film music, beginning in the ‘50s and ‘60s, reworked itself entirely in order to transition from the traditional orchestral scores of the earlier 1900s, to the pop music that went on to scale the following half of the century.

And if teenagers can redefine an entire music platform, I can’t imagine why their cultural impact would be targeted by others. It’s almost as if the voice of the youth does actually do something.