I vaguely recall a school lesson about bread in ancient Egypt.
By vaguely I mean the only part I recall is something about how they would
make bread with rocks in it. I asked the teacher why they would do such a thing
and she responded, “poor dental hygiene”. You could imagine, if you had learned
in school that bread was originally to include rocks in the dough, what a talking
to that baker would get, for dentistry still had to occur before such reckless experimentation
could be fiddled with. As such, one could make an argument that the
conservative objections to rock and roll of the 1950s had less root in pious
moral panic, and more in concerns over the dentist bill.
To understand this first let us consider the experience of a
trip to the beach. Walking past a boardwalk t-shirt stand, you may see several teen idol licenses
you are not familiar with and assume their names are just strange sayings. In the
same fashion that I originally assumed One Direction was some kind of
motivational fad buzz-phrase, some preacher or school principle must have first
been horrified at the idea of “all the teens in town getting on the road to the
Hell that is the pre-masticated buffet”. The zeal must have been enough to
prevent the sheepish audience from understanding the intended figurative use of
the word Hell as a caution against the inability to eat solid foods.
What was meant to discourage tooth loss inducing bread-dumbness
had instilled a religious vendetta in 1950's America against the kind of rock
and roll that doesn’t necessitate dentures out of the box. That being said, the
establishment would gradually accept rock and roll music and an observable
turning point came when Brian Wilson declared he was “making real good bread” in
The Beach Boys' 1964 hit “I Get Around”. This point of fact attests to the
complete mis-attribution of his impact on rock and roll to that Pet Sounds/Smile
hub-bub. It was indeed his straight talk to the self-deputized tooth cautioners
that got us out of the days of grievances over “devil’s music” and in to the
frontiers that would be the days of grievances over the youth being just a
bunch dopers that are allergic to haircuts.
