Fifty years ago, few academics took rock and roll seriously. Jazz appealed to historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, but the popular music that replaced it in the 1950s attracted little attention from respectable journalists and commentators. This neglect and condescension began to change during the late 1960s and 1970s, a period of complex social and cultural transformations still burdened with ideological controversy for those who experienced it and a certain bewildered fascination for those who did not. In his well-researched study, David Simonelli provides a sophisticated narrative of how rock music encapsulated the many contradictions and crosscurrents of the era, including its engagement with issues of social class, generational conflict, and cultural hierarchy.

Simonelli shows how the emergence of various musical subcultures during the 1950s differentiated British youth from their American counterparts, helping to explain the American success of the British-invasion musical groups during the 1960s. Teddy boys dressed like Edwardians; Rockers drew inspiration from Marlon Brando in The Wild One; Mods dressed stylishly in Italianate suits, cropped their hair, and drove scooters. Rockers detested them as effeminate, but Mods contributed to the fashion trends of the 1960s and prefigured the reconfiguration of gender relations during the 1970s. Above all, the phenomenon George Melly called “revolt into style” proved marketable. More than once, Simonelli notes the paradox that youth purchased music and fashion to express their anticommercialism, a nonconformity that they believed made them authentic representatives of working-class rebellion. British teenagers spent enormous sums of money to shape their personal identities, and businesses as diverse as Shell Oil and the Egg Marketing Board advertised on pirate radio to capture this lucrative market. A threat to the BBC, offshore stations eventually were shut down, but the development of commercial radio in Britain continued to fuel an economic boom in popular culture. More records were sold in 1973 than in 1964 as wealthy rock musicians left Britain to avoid punishing taxations rates as high as 98 percent.

Simonelli excels at characterizing the social origins, musical preferences, and rhetorical styles of British rock groups that dominated the era. He demonstrates how the extraordinary musical evolution of the Beatles during the midsixties transformed the evaluation of rock music by establishment critics. Albums such as Revolver and especially Sgt. Pepper's Hearts Club Band created aesthetic respectability for music that experimented with acoustic technology, integrated Eastern instrumentation, and pursued loosely connected philosophical themes over a number of songs. Leonard Bernstein lavishly praised Sgt. Pepper; The Times compared it to Schubert leider; and other critics noted the beginning of a new era in music. By the late 1960s, rock music was becoming an avant-garde form of artistic expression, perhaps reflecting the earlier education of so many rockers. John Lennon, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Eric Burdon, Ray Davies, and Eric Clapton all attended art colleges at a time when Pop Art eroded the barriers between high and mass culture. Simonelli argues that the progressive rock of Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues drew from British folk and Anglican choral traditions that its increasingly well-educated audience appreciated. Its deep Romanticism separated it from less imaginative American popular music in the 1970s. As the traditional distinction between high and mass culture gradually lost its saliency among cultivated elites, it reappeared within the increasingly fragmented aesthetic tastes of rock music itself. Rock critics developed new forms of high-mindedness that distinguished genuine artists of unquestioned authenticity from less talented musicians who appealed to teenagers.

These younger consumers also enjoyed the androgynous glamrock of the 1970s. David Bowie shrewdly created a persona whose bisexuality and right-wing politics offended enough people to ensure his fame. Simonelli compares Bowie to the Futurists of the early twentieth century whose disdain of the past, love of new technology, and flamboyant self-indulgence outraged traditionalists. Elton John borrowed just enough from glamrock to create a distinctive personal image and wrote hit songs that sold well in America. Both Bowie and Elton John continued trends that helped redefine masculinity during a period when second-wave feminism consolidated striking social gains. Punk stretched boundaries even further. Simonelli argues that despite its pretentions to anarchy and revolution, punk actually challenged the professionalization of music. Johnny Rotten wanted rock to return to its working-class origins. Like earlier groups from the sixties, the Sex Pistols made good money trashing commercialism. Yet the violent aggressiveness, embrace of Nazi symbols, and self-destructive predispositions of punk could not be sustained, as Sid Vicious proved. Other punk stars gradually became absorbed into the larger culture and posed no threat to Thatcherism.

In his brief conclusion, Simonelli agrees that postindustrialism seriously damaged older, more economically grounded notions of social class. Yet as his title, Working Class Heroes, indicates, he retains the term for cultural purposes, a not uncommon choice that contributes to the term's recent elasticity. Rock music appealed across communal and geographical boundaries and, as Simonelli's impressive book shows, embodied aesthetic and social complexities worthy of serious investigation.