Images Of America In Rock ‘n’ Roll

11 Pages 2820 Words

mnation than country music was. The vision of the blues was created by Robert Johnson, and it was one which could not offer hope or salvation to those whose lot was hard work all the days of their life. (Marcus, 21) Like country, blues never found large scale acceptance outside of black America. Each race had its own music to listen to. That all changed with the dawn of rock-n-roll in the middle of the 1950s. Nearly fifty years later rock music is still the music of the working class, and along the way its history contains the history of that class of people in songs about frustration and the simple joys of life, songs about pain and hope.
Pain
“This ain’t livin’,” – Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues”
Marvin Gaye was born in 1939 in Washington, D.C., but was Detroit where he made his mark. Gaye was one of Motown’s most consistent hit-makers, and ironically was partly responsible for the end of the Motown sound of the 1960s with his 1971 album entitled What’s Going On? (Rolling Stone, 370)
The period in Gayes’s life before recording What’s Going On? was plagued with problems. His marriage to Berry Gordy’s sister was becoming more and more violent, the government was seeking back taxes, and he was estranged from his family. (Edmonds, 26)
Rather than continue with the “pop” formula of his past Motown hits, he used the pain to record his greatest record. The song which may have captured his pain best was “Inner City Blues (Make me Wanna Holler).”
“Inner City Blues” chronicles Gaye’s struggles in life. He continually repeats the refrain “Make me wanna holler, the way they do my life.” The ‘they’ in the song could be any number of people – it is the government who tries to take what little money he has earned, it is those who live amongst the American elite and have what they need handed to them, it is the politicians who choose to fight wars overseas rather than tackle the problems which...