When thought of, rock ‘n’ roll produces the idea and is popularly associated with sex and drugs. Many of rock and roll's early stars were known as hard-drinking, hard-living, rebellious people. During the 1960s the complex and crazy, glamorous and envied lifestyles of many stars became publicly known. They were fed by the growth of the underground rock press, which documented the extreme ways of the rockers, often exploiting them in the process. Musicians were famous for attracting the opposite sex attention, and having groupies spend time with the bands, doing sexual favors for the members. It was a common, fast paced lifestyle. Some rock artists and groups seemed to steer clear of this attention, while other artists and groups did little trying to stay away from it, and actually encouraged it. Some sexual escapades became part of the rock music scene during this time of the rock era. As these “ways of the rocker” started to dwindle in this sense, rock lost a lot of this specific connection. Rock groups and artists then became more of sex symbols. Drug use became popular in the 1960s as well. Recreational drug use by musicians may have influenced the use of drugs and the perception of acceptability of drug use among the youth of the period. When the Beatles, once marketed as clean-cut youths, started publicly acknowledging the use of certain drugs, journalist Al Aronowitz wrote "...whatever the Beatles did was acceptable, especially for young people. Pretty soon everybody was smoking it, and it seemed to be all right.” The connection between rock music and the rejection of conventional, social norms became associated with drug use, including the use of marijuana, leading to the use of harder drugs. This drug use flowed many different ways, and by the end of the 1960s, drugs and rock music were part of a general youth scene.
References:
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/writer/html?WriterID=aronowitz
http://www.scribd.com/doc/124458/Rock-Music
It's certainly interesting to note that whilst rock music was characterised largely for debauchery and scandal in the 60's, the groups being lotted together as rockers and rollers were often highly disparate in sound, ideology and influence. Rock is a mash up, both in styles but also in its conflation with the culture of sex, drugs and debauchery: it has been at least as much culturally and semiologically constructed as it can be observed to cohesively relate in empirical examples and studies.
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