PERIOD PIECES

Was the Renaissance real?

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

Two historians make the case that the era we imagine—a golden age of cultural rebirth-is little more than myth.

With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound. The break ravaged record companies and derailed careers. In the fifties, the wonderful jazz-and-standards singer Beverly Kenney performed a song she’d written called “I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll,” and then—perhaps for other reasons, but surely for that one, too—took her own life.

But listen closely and you hear continuities stronger than any rupture. The second song that the Beatles sang to the American public was a Broadway ballad from “The Music Man.” Chuck Berry, their hero, worshipped Nat King Cole, with Berry’s great rock songs of the fifties being variants on Cole’s witty hipster jazz songs from a decade before. (Berry also took most of his guitar licks from the sophisticated jazz guitarist Carl Hogan, of Louis Jordan’s band.) And the elements of Leonard Bernstein’s or Richard Rodgers’s music within the best work of a Paul Simon or a Paul McCartney are as obvious as is the intertwining of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. It was in the record business’s interest to convince the teenagers to whom it was selling music that their music was nothing like their parents’ music. But the rock revolution can easily look more artifactual than authentic.

To anyone who grew up in the period, this is a bit absurd. Of course the rock revolution was real;