America! #%$* Yeah!

So, American culture sort of owned the world in the post-war period. Just saying. The Europeans couldn't resist the appealing image of a surly, semi-suicidal teenager dangling that carcinogen of cool, the cigarette, from his lips. Sure, we may have been undermining the foundations of centuries upon centuries of European culture, but whatever. We rocked!

But seriously, what did all those continental cats dig our beat so much? My guess is the fragmentation of culture that began at the start of the 20th century (and maybe even beforehand) with the modernist movement. Every genre of music and art was becoming more and more specific and, dare I say?, esoteric, especially after WWII, so American mass culture stepped in to fill the void. And there were a lot more teenagers around, doing their baby-booming thing, as was their wont to do. In addition, America was awesome. Fact.