///Other than that, we have to live with the celebrity culture, the teenage fads and the exploitation. We shouldn't complain, because it was our generation that we started them, in the 60s (read John Marr's History of Modern Britain, he has a few choice words about America's role in this too).///

It started in the 50s when multiple versions of a song released simultaneously was the norm. Usually, an artist with a different niche audience could count on them to buy his or her version of another artist's popular song. This worked well in a country still in the throes of institutionalized racism. There were white artists who specialized in ripping off black artists in this manner. These included singers as Fabian, Pat Boone, Bunny Paul and Georgia Gibbs—real name Frieda Lipschitz.

Now what is the difference between a white artist as Elvis doing a black man's song as "That's All Right, Mama" (written by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup and released in 1946) and Pat Boone doing Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame"? Shouldn't Elvis also be accused of ripping off black artists and didn't Domino have minor hits in the 60s doing Hank Williams and Beatle numbers and doesn't that make him a black artist ripping-off white artists as well? No.

"That's All Right, Mama" was not a big hit for Crudup. Elvis may have heard it on the King Biscuit Time program some years before. Presley stated in 1956 that Crudup would "bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw." His cover did not compete against Crudup's and the Sun label credited Crudup as author, which means he made money with every copy sold, every cover version released. The song became famous due to Elvis and sparked an interest in Crudup's own recording career which would have otherwise been forgotten. Elvis deserves credit for keeping alive the song of a great but underrated bluesman.

What Georgia Gibbs did to La Vern Baker, however, was downright predatory. Whenever Baker released a new single, Gibbs would put her own version of the song out right on top of it. Since Gibbs was white, white listeners felt more comfortable purchasing her cover thereby stealing money that should rightfully have gone to Baker. Had Gibbs waited a year or two before putting out the cover, that would be a different story but her timing was designed to do nothing more than ride on the popularity of Baker's version. Gibbs also pulled the same stunt on Etta James and Ruth Brown but not to the extent that she did with La Vern Baker. There was no other motive than to cash in on the work of these black artists and then use her white privilege to pull the rug out from under them in the white record-buying market. Now, one can blame Gibbs's label rather than Gibbs but it makes no difference. In exasperation, Baker once hauled Gibbs into court claiming Gibbs owed her money for capitalizing off her material but Baker lost. Afterwards, before catching a flight to Australia, Baker bought flight insurance and sent it to Gibbs with a note saying, "You need this more than I do because if anything happens to me, you're out of business."

But how did Gibbs use white privilege? Many radio stations of that time did not want to play race records or even mainstream records if they were by black artists. This left a huge gap for people like Gibbs and Boone to fill with their covers. As a result, both greatly outsold the black artists whose songs they copied but whose airplay was far more restricted. This also cut into the black artists' royalties and fame. Moreover, these practices set integration back. Had there been no white, sanitized covers for these stations to play, they would have been forced to play the black artists' records which would have broken down barriers. Instead, the pale imitators not only allowed the barriers to stay up, they had a vested interested in keeping those barriers up—they were profiting from it, which means the recording industry as a whole was profiting from it. Rocknroll may have originally been breaking down the barriers of society but now was shoring them up.

The sad thing is, these practices were so predatory, so unfair, that after the barriers came down at the start of the 60s, people forgot about Georgia Gibbs and her lightweight renditions. They wanted the real thing. The theft netted Gibbs lots of money at the time but left her really nothing for posterity and served only to obscure Baker's rightful legacy and all in the name of profit.

So rocknroll was no longer serving the function it once did that was setting the nation on fire—smashing barriers, bringing people closer together, overturning the established order. It went into exile across the Atlantic Ocean. America had lost its focus. Suddenly the music didn't matter anymore. The girls wanted either non-threatening, clean-cut boys-next-door types as Pat Boone or pretend bad boys like Fabian (and, needless to say, they had to be white). For those who wanted something in between, there was Frankie Avalon. The music was watered-down R&B and that water was very shallow. And for those who found even this R&B just too raw for their dainty ears, there were also bland love ballads with sugary sweet melodies (Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by). The leather-jacketed, cigarette-smoking, denim- and dirty t-shirt-wearing, beer can-slamming rocknroll shriekers with greased hair combed into complex swirls a la Gene Vincent were gone. Vincent's image wasn't fake and neither was Eddie Cochran's. What you saw was what you got. Unfortunately for them, it wasn't what America wanted anymore. Fortunately for them, Britain did and so to Britain they went.