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Originally Posted by Blatherskite
You just said rock and roll was invented. It wasn't invented by a particular person like one would invent a... trash thingy... or something... but it came from human imagination. Ditto the "concept" of the teenager (which really IS the teenager).
If you want to put "exact English" to it (which is something that rock and roll is definitely NOT about, but I'll oblige), then yeah, it was conceptualized over a number of years. Ditto teenagers, but generally everybody can agree that both came to the apex at around the same time and both were so in tangent with each other that it couldn't POSSIBLY have been coincidence that teenagers were suddenly "going wild." Spendable incomes, raging hormones, repressed society (including hits like "Can I have that doggy in the window?"), and a general bad attitude towards getting grounded all contributed, of course... but come on.
Do you expect me to believe the premise for one second that rock and roll could have possibly gotten popular without these raging high school crazies? On the other side of things were veterans who didn't want to hear such stuff and horrible horrible racists.
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There just wasn't a moment in time when rock 'n' roll 'happened', and when I say it wasn't 'invented', I mean that it came from various sources (in particular, r&b, jazz and country) and was actually nothing new. For an example, listen to what Wynonie Harris was doing in the 1940's: rock 'n' roll in all but name. And add to that Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, and a host of other black artists.
More relevant was the affluence you mentioned. It's a myth that teens didn't rebel until that point, and a myth that music wasn't a form of rebellion. An understanding of the history of jazz will tell you that parents were outraged by this form of music decades before the term rock 'n' roll was used.
Affluence meant more people had access to television and so parents could see these outrageous artists, children had more money and so could afford their own clothes, and could afford to buy more records and what we now call 'merchandise'.