Why was rock n roll controversial?

Answer 1

Rock 'n' Roll music was controversial in its early form because of its new fresh sound. Some people thought that lyrics in the songs were inappropriate and had sexual themes. Most of that however wasn't true. Furthermore, the majority of the people that were offended by this new style of music were an older audience.

Another answer:Rock & Roll started as a spinoff of R&B (rhythm and blues). R&B originated as a popular style within the black community, but soon started gaining crossover sales among white young people. The country was still strongly segregated, however, so some enterprising music producers, particularly in the south, started making "covers" of R&B songs using white artists (Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley, for example). In particular, they removed some of the more risqué lyrics to make the songs more acceptable to white audiences.

However, many conservative parents and religious leaders were convinced that re-packaging R&B as "Rock & Roll" to sell it to white teenagers was worse than leaving it in the black community. They felt that R&B reflected and promoted the loose morality of the underclass. They insisted that the rolling rhythm of swing eighth notes behind a strong 4/4 backbeat was just as sexually-charged as the suggestive lyrics. More than anything else, the idea of cultural crossover in dance music--black and white young people listening to the same kind of music--gave rise to fears of miscegenation. None of this was a new argument; exactly the same reaction had occurred in the Jazz Age when young people from both sides of the tracks began dancing to Jazz and Swing in the 1920s and '30s.