A GOOD FRIEND, WHO IS MY AGE, was over at my place a few years ago and we were listening to a recording of some folk group from my early youth: “Today while the blossom still clings to the vine/I’ll eat your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine …”

I kind of like that era of folk music, for reasons having mostly to do with nostalgia. It reminds me of my parents when they and their world were still young and vigorous and brimming with idealism. Very early in the song, though, my friend asked me to turn it off. When I asked her why, she said she could not listen to music that does not “have an edge.”

I was somewhat surprised at the time, and I’ve pondered that incident since, trying to understand her revulsion to music that I enjoyed. And it has occurred to me that at least part of the explanation could lie in the very different nature of our childhoods — mine in the mean streets of Richmond and hers in the bland, monocultural affluence of Orinda. Richmond had, and has, a surfeit of “edge,” while Orinda is like an edge deprivation chamber.

It is worth pointing out that Orinda — and the rest of American suburbia — came into its own in the 20 or so years after World War II. These towns’ first inhabitants were people who had watched their neighbors all but starve in the Great Depression, and who then, during the war, fought their way across war-torn continents filled with ruined cities and death camps and people living in bomb craters and eating their own pets to survive. They’d had all the edge they ever wanted to see, and their attitude was understandably something like, “OK, no more edge. From now on we want everything to be nice and round and pillow-soft. Make us feel good.”

There is perhaps no better personification of this desire for comfort and reassurance than Lawrence Welk. I recently made myself sit and watch one of his shows (they rerun occasionally on PBS), just to try and “get” what his appeal was. The music was uniformly cheery and uplifting, and while it still retains a certain charm of days gone by, I’m not really a fan of his oeuvre. It can perhaps best be described as a sort of musical Novocaine.

While understandable, I think the suburban living pattern was something of an over-correction.

Whatever else they are, suburbs are crushingly dull places, scoured clean of the grit and pathos that are the constant companions of city dwellers. There is no human drama on display in suburbia. There is no poverty, no striving and ruthless plutocrats, no glaring hypocrisy begging to be opposed, no winos and addicts sobbing their tragedy to midnight streets. No: Suburban desperation is all quiet and hidden away, rather than open and challenging.

I was watching some videos recently of Elvis Presley performing live during the peak of his popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. Though I was not a dedicated fan when he was alive nor since, and I consider some of the lingering mythology surrounding him to be a little creepy in its more obsessive iterations, I’ve enjoyed his music in a general way, and understand the groundbreaking nature of what he did in his prime.

It occurred to me that Elvis’s effect on the teen girls who were screaming and moaning through his performances was perhaps the most overt depiction of female sexual passion ever put on television. A big part of his charisma was that he was so intensely and frankly carnal — I was startled by the realization that the girls in the audience were not just excited in a general way to see a popular performer, but were, in fact, pretty unmistakably aroused by him.

While Elvis was a talented musician and charismatic performer, he was also insubstantial in many ways. I have an acquaintance who was a teenager during Elvis’s prime, and she told me recently that part of her young teenage fantasies included a tall, dark-haired handsome man with whom she could have long, deep conversations — but that her spell was broken the first time she heard him interviewed. While Elvis looked dreamy, his lack of ability to speak well told her that he was a dull, uninteresting person.

But as I watched those early performances, it occurred to me that the scope of his impact was inseparable from the context of the suburban living arrangement I mentioned earlier. Into the anemic, denatured lives of 1950s suburban girls stepped a guy who combined an incredible, almost feminine physical beauty with a sort of barely leashed libidinous menace that was unmistakably masculine — and the result was an almost manic sexual energy between him and his fans. He seemed to them to be the perfect antidote to their boredom. He had real edge.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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