Rock intellectualizing’s third basic flaw is its captivity to bohemian/New Left assumptions regarding morals, culture, and politics. The Songbook will examine rock’s largely uncritical promotion of the sexual revolution as it unfolds, but here we consider the oddity of its leftism.
On one hand, most rock intellectuals broadly endorse the leftist fight against various injustices of our social order, which is assumed to be radically flawed because it is essentially capitalist, but on the other, they have broadly endorsed the youth culture music scenes, all of which are fundamentally sustained by acquisitive consumerism.
(By “youth culture music scenes” or “rock youth culture” I refer to the pattern of youth identity centered around music which has involved many sorts of music, such as hip-hop or ska, that are not really rock despite the efforts of rock intellectuals to tie them together as one package.)
Rock intellectuals try to elude this contradiction by insisting that the control of the modern capitalist “structure” extends far beyond the economic and political realms, into our thoughts, psyches, and everyday lives, so that fighting against it requires cultural means. Such struggle cannot avoid the utilization of commodity-linked identities and communities, and that the rock intellectualizers say, is what the youth are in fact up to with their music scenes.
But amid all their talk of battles over cultural symbols , one detects a tone of defensiveness. For from a sterner leftist perspective, rock youth culture could be seen as a channeling of the (naturally leftist) idealism of youth into rock activity, and thus as a continual transmutation of this rebel spirit into mere revolt in style, that is, into a particularly self-important sort of lifestyle consumerism. The gist of this critique was articulated by the socialist Irving Howe as early as 1966, but a much harsher version of it became imaginable by the 1980s, given the huge amounts of money and passion young people were putting into recordings, fashions, and shows whether “underground” ones or not.
I think the possibility of this sterner critique goaded the more political rock intellectualizers to construct ever more ingenious contraptions of Theory to demonstrate rock’s “meta-political” leftist impact. But beyond the implausibility of such arguments, they tended to generate truly atrocious prose: see the opening quote from Lawrence Grossberg in Songbook #14.
And make no mistake, that incoherency and pretentiousness is rock’s. It won’t do to mainly blame it on the likes of Derrida. The rock theorizers simply spelled out the Marxisant nonsense (of a sort that Marx would have found noxious and which serious socialists like Howe in fact loathed) you had to hold if you were to really believe that rock youth culture’s “rebellion” had a politics, or at least a potentially positive political impact. Their horrid prose showed us what rock’s celebrated political seriousness amounted to, if you took its celebratory self-description seriously.
A QUALIFICATION: the stance described above is the one held by typical rock intellectualizers, usually in a far-less-rigorously-theorized mode, and often subject to an oscillating interest in political radicalism typical of bohemians, from about 1975 to 2000. It is not so clear to me whether many of them, especially the younger ones, hold it today. Things began to change in the late 1990s, so that a good deal of the air had gone out of the stance even prior to 9/11. It has faded out into low-volume background noise, never being openly forsworn by its old proponents nor openly rejected by younger rock bands and writers. Thus while there seemed to be a continuity between 80s and 90s “rock radicalism” and the Bush-hatred/Obama-love frenzy of 2004-2009, something had changed. The rhetorical stakes, for one, had become more mainstream, i.e., more about “America” and its honor, and less about “Amerika” and attacking the entire system, even if the tone had somehow become more shrill. The (democratic) socialism involved had become stealth, election-smart, and highly gradualist, all of which tended to alter its character more than many on the right think. In any case, while you might see a rock-oriented member of Generation X, such as your truly, voluntarily read, or at least try to read, a radical “cultural studies” book about rock back in the 1990s, my sense is that Millennial Generation rock fans do not bother with such stuff, unless they have professors who force them to. And as for the radicalism of the late 60s-early 70s, it did not theorize in the fulsome 80s-90s manner about rock identity. The pattern was more one of rock following and reacting to the (already-existing) radical theory, than the reverse. I can further explain that difference, and why the quasi-political pretensions of Rock nonetheless began in the 60s, if needed.
August 27th, 2011 | 9:43 am
Carl, give me a call when you can. (It’s not about your Evangelical worries about the One, True Church.)
August 27th, 2011 | 10:10 am
Do you think perhaps some of this comes from the near identification of rock with the anti-Vietnam counter-culture around the time of Woodstock?
August 28th, 2011 | 5:50 pm
Carl, Count me as one who would like to hear more about the change FROM the ’60s and ’70s following and reacting to radical theorizing TO the ’80s and ’90s radical theorizing about rock youth group identity politics.
Does the development of a “historical consciousness” of rock in the ’80s (to borrow a term from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations)–evident in the increasing numbers of “rockumentary” films which celebrated past youth, rebellion, liberation, eccentricity, and the whole “spirit of the 60s”–indicate the change you speak of?
Unlike earlier rock films of the 60s and 70s (e.g., Woodstock, The Kids Are Alright), the films of the 80s, and especially the 90s–when they were not merely “antiquarian”–developed a “monumental” historical narrative of the heroes and legends of a past radicalism. Much of the “retro” scene of the 80s and 90s seems to follow monumental patterns. This “historicism” was also shown in feature films of the ’80s and ’90s, like one with Kiefer Sutherland–the title of which escapes me–where it is said in favor of radicalism, “The ’90s are gonna make the ’80s look like the ’50s.”
If younger rock intellectualizers are not as much influenced by radical theory these days, is it because the historical narrative of rock has become merely antiquarian? If I read you correctly, the new “critical” histories of rock such as those found in cultural studies likewise seem to indicate an antiquarian moment to the present generation.
Is there such a thing as a non-historicist account–neither progressive nor declinist–of rock? Or is rock inherently historicist? Punk must out radicalize rock and something “post punk” must out radicalize punk, etc.
Also, is Howe’s criticism of the stylization and aestheticism of radical politics a general criticism of his, or is there a specific essay you could point to?
David, I think you are right. The near identification of rock and the counter culture became and perhaps still is the prevailing story celebrated amongst rock intellectualism.
August 28th, 2011 | 5:54 pm
BTW–The quote above should say, “The ’90s are gonna make the ’60s look like the ’50s.”
August 29th, 2011 | 7:16 am
John asks, “Is there such a thing as a non-historicist account–neither progressive nor declinist–of rock? Or is rock inherently historicist?”
Well, an objective account might focus on limited musical change and record sales, things like that, and provide a fairly prosaic account of the rock phenomenon. But such an account is necessarily puzzled about certain things regarding rock–for one, it doesn’t seem to function as other pop music styles typically have, that is, enjoying a four-to-twelve year run of popularity and then fading away. For another, the obsessions it generates seem more intense ones.
But rock’s own account of itself, again, an intellectualized one, was totally historicist or avant-garde-ist from the late 60s dawn of rock consciousness up to the advent of grunge.
Each new stylistic turn in rock was cast as a progression, a turn. This was particularly pronounced with punk and the “new wave” “post-punk” and “alternative” which came in its wake, where a rift between the main boomer group and a younger one(that blended into Gen X) opened. Those styles were not simply to be new ones, but they were to correct the errors of earlier rock. From Beatles/Stones to Dylan to Airplane/Dead/Hendrix/LedZep to Velvets/Bowie to Pistols to JoyDivision/4AD/Echo/U2 to…SST/REM/Husker DU to Sub Pop/Nirvanna…this was the sort of idea people had, with all sorts of variations.
But Grunge revealed (although not so many saw it then) that the gig was up…it was a conscious return by the alternative punk-influenced set to a re-embrace of 70s hard rock and 80s metal, altered a bit to be sure, styles that were the great opposite of good alternative “let’s-progress values.” In the early 90s, the sickly-sweet smell of rehabilitating the 70s excesses rebelled against by punk and co. was everywhere on the rock scene. Stylistically, grunge married hard rock and post-punk; spiritually, it marrried a new complacency about rock excess and decadence being unavoidable and un-overthrowable, with the post-punk flirtations with despair. That 70s Show meets Bauhausian gloom. Cobain’s suicide had a horrible fitting-ness to it.
Currently, rock is experiencing something of a little renaissance…I can report that there are tons of new bands being played on the college radio stations, that judged from the musical standards of my own 1987 college-DJ self, are really quite good. Purely sound-wise, it’s some of the best Rock music ever made–you take the best of mid-60s pop, the best of alternative and new wave, figure out, you know, how Love or The Jesus and Mary Chain might have been just a little bit better, or how they would sound with a little new wave synth thrown in there, and voila!
But it’s all recycling…and it knows it. And it’s all without much expectation of changing the world or even achieving fame.
And of course, my mature tastes say: it’s not as good as rock and roll, nor is it as good as classical and jazz.
A non-historicist account looks, I think, to modern middle-class-ness, or suburbaness, or to what Chantal Delsol calls “late modernity,” to explain the phenomenon as one that for many years thought it was ever-progressive but which from the 90s on has had to admit its conformity to a certain consistent repeating pattern.
We’re in the era, aesthetically and ideologically, of the late-modern cul-de-sac: we move, but in a circle. And voices like Delsol’s that offer advice about how to get out of that cycle are still spurned.
Maybe more later.
August 29th, 2011 | 10:11 pm
Wow, that’s some ramble…for better or worse.
How ‘bout I just respond to David and John’s main queries.
David, you’re right about the Vietnam connection, but here’s the confusing thing. Initially, about 1965-67, the “counter-culture” scene the new Rock music tended to be identified with (particularly in the Bay Area) actually espoused an abandonment of politics, a giving up on activist radicalism, for, best case political scenario, a “long march” through the culture, so as to alter through “inner change” the really deep roots of the “system’s” sickness. Of course, many had second thoughts about this (especially as a pull-out from Vietnam seemed ever more possible and essential) and by ’68 and ’69, urgent calls were heard, from the Yippies to Jefferson Airplane’s “We Can Be Together,” to bring the counter-culturals and the political radicals into a new unity.
When punk came in 76-77, its exploration of hateful feelings was against the hippie counter-culture focus on love, spirituality, and hedonism, and not very interested in directing its anger-exploration for political purposes. That is to say, while being explicitly anti-hippie, punk was very much a bohemian and cultural-ist movement. Punk held that the hippies were right to focus on culture, they just had done so in a wrong/naive way. So punk anger was more aesthetic than political.
However, whereas the 60s cultural-ists, such as the Pranksters, the Diggers, and the Haight-Asbury rock groups knew they were competing with SDS and such for the passion of disaffected youth, the 70s ones were not competing with a big radical political movement. Rock-infused counter-culturalism had become the whole “radical” show. Or at least, it was big enough to completely overshadow the radical activists who were bringing out ever smaller crowds.
And that set the pattern for the 80s-90s, which is why the theorists were then going to rock youth culture, trying as best they could to provoke or theorize some political significance out of it, and not rockers going to, and periodically challenging (“Revolution,” “We Won’t Get Fooled Again,” don’t follow leaders) the radical activists and theorists for their political cues. In 1966, it was a breathless question to ask who the most cutting edge radical theorist or leader was…women would be drawn to that man like a magnet…but soon enough, the breathless zeitgeist-heavy question was who was the most cutting edge rock artist. Rock bohemia had somehow taken the mantle of heroic radical significance from the political activists.
In sum, while we associate 60s rock with 60s political radicalism to this day, it had a troubled on-again/off-again relationship with it at the time, with certain artists defying any pattern. But we have associated Rock with Radicalism ever since that time. My post shows that association runs against basic leftist logic, and wonders if it isn’t fading away entirely, but it certainly has been a key feature of rock’s self-understanding.
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