Lyric Hound

Rock ’n’ Roll was the theme music to the baby boomer’s cultural revolution that changed the world. It was rebel music that raised the hackles of parents and the establishment. While the authorities ignored the sound, the censors searched every lyric for “them bad words” but found none.

Of course they couldn’t find curse words. The bands couldn’t get airplay from radio stations with “bad words” in their songs and airplay was the way to sell records.

The bad words were there – just cleverly disguised as slang, euphemisms, colloquialism, scat, patios and code words. It was the ultimate middle finger of a generation.

After the writers exhausted the love stories and “sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll”, they turned to their own lives and to the society around them. What they captured was an uncanny portrait of the times. The wrote about politics, the environment, women’s issues, civil rights and much, much more. The captured the Age of Celebrity before anyone. The warned about the very drugs they were consuming. No one paid attention because they were rock ’n’ roll singers. Until now.

I have cherry-picked some wonderful lyrics from the best-written songs of rock’s formative years to show how clever and observant these rockers really were. From Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in 1955 to the aftermath of Beatles’ monumental album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band in 1967.

Into the vacuum created by John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 came the Beatles (February 1964). Nothing would ever be the same.