Rock y violencia en España (1956-1964). Los casos de Madrid y Barcelona

Abstract

Rock and roll music came to Spain by the end of the 1950s. Franco’s regime announced its arrival highlighting one of the characteristics that accompanied the new musical and sociocultural phenomenon that had triumphed a few years earlier in many countries of the world: the outbursts of violence which took place in concerts, dance halls, cinemas, theaters and even the streets. These violent demonstrations were carried out by youth gangs that appeared in the United States and Western Europe during the 1950s and were later known as urban tribes. The incidents that occurred during Bill Haley's performance in Barcelona in 1958 revealed that in Franco's Spain there were youth gangs followers of rock music which grew in number during the first half of the 1960s, and that violence, like with their foreign counterparts, also was a distinctive mark. This work focuses on the activity of these youth gangs in Madrid and Barcelona, their relationship with rock music and the vision of them offered by the media.

Keywords

• rock music
• violence
• franco regime
• popular culture
• musical press