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  • Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties by James Wierzbicki
  • Aaron J. West
Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties. By James Wierzbicki. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. [x, 288 p. ISBN 9780252040078 (hardcover), $95.00; ISBN 9780252081569 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780252098277 (e-book), varies.] Notes, bibliography, index.

While many nostalgically view music of the 1950s as a product of a simpler time, James Wierzbicki frames America as a nation that "rejoiced in its victory, celebrated its prosperity, boasted of its scientific progress, and relished the opportunity … to at last live a 'normal' life. On the other hand, America trembled at the thought of not only losing all that it had gained but also of having everything go up, literally, in flames" (p. 4). The idea of America "going up in flames" not only reflects the looming dangers of the atomic age and fear of Communism but a variety of other changes in society as well. From the creation of Cheez Whiz and Playboy to the racial integration of major league baseball and use of female contraception, indeed, there were many reasons for some Americans to believe that their culture was burning. Wierzbicki labels such cultural tensions as "anxiety fabric" (p. 6) to describe how particular social anxieties affected a variety of music genres. Each of his chapters addresses a specific musical genre, moving from the accessible ("The Pop Music Mainstream") to the "puzzlingly abstruse" (p. 5) (e.g., the "Mavericks").

In his opening chapter, Wierzbicki associates the sentimental ballads of the early 1950s with the sexual repression of the era. In this pre-rock and roll era, performers such as Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra specialized in recordings that emphasized lush string arrangements and romantic lyrics while [End Page 653] de-emphasizing overt sexuality. With few exceptions, these songs were models of mid-century sentimentality, but Wierzbicki views this supposed innocence as the result of a repressed sexuality where "Americans' public attitudes toward sex were at odds with what Americans did or thought about in private" (p. 19). He frames these slow-tempo ballads as cauldrons of repressed sexual desire, writing, "the hits of the early 1950s were overwhelmingly in keeping with a culture that valorized both marriage and premarital chastity. At the same time, the many hits whose rhythmic elements made them so conducive to slow dancing were very, very sexy" (p. 30).

In chapter two, possibly his most compelling chapter, Wierzbicki discusses the myriad social anxieties surrounding the birth of rock and roll. Other scholars have confronted many of these issues, but Wierzbicki does a commendable job in summarizing these prior observations into one short chapter. He touches on the commercialism of rock music, its remarkable lack of female performers, and most importantly, the criticism that rock attracted, especially in regards to juvenile delinquency. Wierzbicki addresses the ubiquitous belief that rock music led to all types of bad behavior, ranging from minor moral lapses to communist subversion.

As with his discussion of rock and roll, in chapter three Wierzbicki addresses a variety of social issues surrounding jazz in the 1950s. He begins with a compact history of the evolution of jazz as it transformed from a popular to an art music. He writes, "there was no precise moment when an apparently moribund genre of popular music was resuscitated as art or when it gave up the ghost and ascended to an aesthetic/philosophical heaven" (p. 59). Sadly, Wierzbicki offers no further discussion on how remarkable this "ascension" was in American music history. Instead, he focuses on the State Department-sponsored tours of the 1950s, providing astute observations about these tours that "were designed not just to entertain and thus win the hearts of audiences abroad; they were also designed to prove … that America in fact was not a nation of brutal racists" (p. 147). The author's discussion of these tours is well researched and compelling, but it is a pity that more of the chapter was not devoted to this topic. It is also a shame that Wierzbicki neglects...

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