those wild and crazy teenagers...

While watching the film on Elvis, a memorable point brought up was the fact that teenagers' desire to rebel against their parents helped bring about Elvis' popularity. Since parents across America were shocked by Elvis' new sound, terrified by his integration of black culture into mainstream music, and disgusted by his dancing (uh oh... those hip movements...), Elvis became immediately appealing to the teenage population. That's not to say that everything parents dislike teenagers automatically love, but... sometimes... yes. 

In 7th and 8th grade I suddenly decided I was sick of letting my parents have it easy by being responsible, and (looking back) started to be extremely obnoxious. I was the typical moody early teen who was REALLY into bad screamy music with indiscernible lyrics (enough to blast out your eardrums several times over), with a few good bands thrown in there occasionally. I decided that just about anything on the radio was wayyy too mainstream for me, and anything that would make my parents cringe and want to angrily shut off the music in the car was genuinely great stuff. 

My point to all this? It makes a lot of sense that Elvis was so popular when parents weren't so fond of him. Obviously thats not the only reason he went down in history, but seeing as how teenagers tend to be an extremely influential age group (in terms of marketing), its funny that the same principle had the exact same effect over 50 years ago.