Sublime

Critics tend to credit “I Saw Her Standing There” and “All My Loving” with setting off the initial blast of Beatlemania, but “Please Please Me” was the spark that lit its fuse. It was a rejection of all the sugarcoated pop that had clogged the British charts for more than five years. In its place, the Beatles had assembled fragments of their favori

“Dreamlover” by Mariah Carey).

by the early fifties, adolescents really seemed to consider themselves a “new breed” of some kind.

“I hate rock-’n’-roll,” she said, one night in the middle of the Stones at the Forum, and left. HER surfboard was lashed onto the top of her new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon but she hadn’t even been outside in the daytime, it seemed to her, since she took up with rock-’n’-roll. She was all white like an adult, not tan.

(minus Elvis) becomes the definition of rock, everything reverses. In this contingency, lyrical authenticity becomes everything: Rock is galvanized as an intellectual craft, interlocked with the folk tradition. It would be remembered as far more political than it actually was, and significantly more political than Dylan himself.

Not the artists who embody the beliefs and conventions of their time, but the ones who transcend them.

1959 Drifters hit “There Goes My Baby,” thus inventing a