This course will serve as an introduction into the critical analysis of popular music as a communicative device. The class will focus on the rhetoric used in the text, image, and sound of rock and roll. These devices successfully connect social issues with a mass audience through the organized form of music. Although a form of entertainment, popular music is also a response to the social/political eruptions in American history. We will explore those conditions in society that provided the foundation for creative musical collaborations, resulting not only in communicating a message to a mass audience but also those collaborations that conditioned popular taste to that which is now culturally accepted.