Zócalo Public SquareWhat Musicians Besides Elvis Changed America? – Zócalo Public Square https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org Ideas Journalism With a Head and a Heart Mon, 21 Oct 2024 07:01:54 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 What Musicians Besides Elvis Changed America? https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/05/28/what-musicians-besides-elvis-changed-america/ideas/up-for-discussion/ https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/05/28/what-musicians-besides-elvis-changed-america/ideas/up-for-discussion/#comments Tue, 28 May 2013 07:01:51 +0000 Zocalo https://legacy.zocalopublicsquare.org/?p=48124 Historian David Halberstam once identified the three most important events of the 1950s as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the building of Levittown, and the rise of Elvis Presley. That a musician should rank among the top three important phenomena of a 10-year span is unusual, and no musician since has achieved such significance. Still, music matters a lot. It influences our perceptions, our social lives, and, sometimes, even our politics. And musicians do keep influencing us. Therefore, in advance of the Zócalo/Occidental College event “Can Popular Music Still Change Culture?”, we asked several writers and critics to address the following question: What musician, aside from Elvis Presley, changed American society the most?

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]]> Historian David Halberstam once identified the three most important events of the 1950s as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the building of Levittown, and the rise of Elvis Presley. That a musician should rank among the top three important phenomena of a 10-year span is unusual, and no musician since has achieved such significance. Still, music matters a lot. It influences our perceptions, our social lives, and, sometimes, even our politics. And musicians do keep influencing us. Therefore, in advance of the Zócalo/Occidental College event “Can Popular Music Still Change Culture?”, we asked several writers and critics to address the following question: What musician, aside from Elvis Presley, changed American society the most?

The post What Musicians Besides Elvis Changed America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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