killing the king with our song

I just used the term king because it's kind of a popular term, down with the king, or kill the king.  There is that Rolling Stone lyric from Street Fighting Man:

And I'll shout and scream
And I'll kill the king and
I'll rail at all his servants

See there we have rock and roll (cool) and rebellion (killing the king) all neatly tied in one package.  In the meantime those stodgy Beatles were singing:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

Well screw them, it sounds like they just want to sit around and talk.

Well that's kind of the way it was in the sixties.  Music was a force.  The bands were like prophets.  When a band came out with a new album we all rushed to buy it to hear what they had to say.  Which was a little strange I thought at the time.  These are just a bunch of guys with guitars, what do they necessarily know about anything?

I exaggerate a bit, but this gives me a chance to get back to cool and rebellion and away from child rearing among the hunter gatherers.

So, rock and roll then.  We know Beagles was no fan, and still isn't to this day.  I guess I first noticed it around 1957.  My sisters had been big fans of Johnny Mathis, those big 33 1/3 albums spun on the turntable morning to night, and then suddenly there was a 45, and there was Elvis.  I didn't like him at first but that was just because my sisters liked him (looking him up in wiki just now I see that he became a sergeant, in a tank battalion when he was in the army.  How about that?), but it wasn't long before I got into the whole thing, got myself one of those new-fangled portable radios and walked up and down 55th and 59th and Kedzie Avenue listening to Dick Biondi. 

As you know, having once tried to explain it to me, I don't know much about music, I don't know the difference between a melody and a rhythm.  I don't know what elements of a song make it blues or country or rock and roll.  Common lore is that rock and roll came out of blues and a bit of country (the country of that time which I guess would be like Hank Williams.  Seems like country has changed quite a bit over the years, what passes as country today is nothing like the country I used to listen to in the middle seventies.). 

Music was kind of segregated then, the whites and blacks had their own music and there weren't that many crossovers.  As today, the whites had most of the money and the blacks had most of the cool.The teenagers of the time, the ones just before the boomers, let's call them the Davy Crockett generation, being attuned to cool the way teenagers are, picked up on the cool of the black music, just beginning to move from blues to rock and roll.

I think we can safely say that that whole sixties political thing came out of the civil rights movement, so there we had it, rebellious white teens race mixing with black kids, to the horror of the establishment. 

How far was that from the Rolling Stones singing about killing the king?  Not that far I allege, and I'll continue my crackpot theory next week.