War & Peace Quote by Ronnie Hawkins

Rock 'n' roll, Ronnie Hawkins implies, wasn’t just disreputable; it was treated like a form of civilian captivity. The line is funny because it’s grotesquely disproportionate: he yokes teenage music to the most morally unambiguous category of suffering, then dials it back with the comic precision of “two pegs below.” That little measurement matters. It frames social stigma as a ranking system - not a debate about taste, but a pecking order enforced by gatekeepers who believed they were defending civilization.

Hawkins is talking about the early era when rock was coded as delinquency: noise, sex, race mixing, bad hair, bad posture, worse ideas. In many towns, playing it meant getting chased off stages, denied radio play, hassled by police, treated by parents and pastors like you were recruiting their kids into a cult. “Prisoner of war” isn’t literal, but it captures the sensation of being surveilled, confined, and presumed guilty. The subtext: the culture war didn’t begin with cable news; it was already loud in honky-tonks and high school gyms.

The joke also doubles as a flex. If rock once ranked just above POW status, surviving it makes Hawkins and his peers sound like hardened veterans, not just entertainers. He’s reclaiming the shame as proof of impact: they weren’t merely playing songs; they were triggering alarms. That’s why the quote lands today - it remembers rock not as nostalgia, but as a social threat that accidentally became the mainstream.