Culture as a Historical Problem, Part II: Rock and Roll as Mass Social Critique

“I got my own world to live through, and I ain’t gonna copy you... I’m the one who’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”

—Jimi Hendrix

The sixties and the rise of rock provide another interesting case in the study of culture as a historical problem. As the student-led new left, civil rights, anti-imperialist, environmentalist, and feminist movements all gathered momentum in the great counter-cultural wave that swept across the U.S. during the 1960s, commercially produced “popular” music worked as a common affective and thematic canvas for the different people involved in them. Rock was the quintessential musical genre of the decade; its coalescence and mass dissemination through analog media was financed by the culture industry, but it cannot be denied that it played a major role in channeling and expressing the basic rejection of “the establishment,” which was something shared by all the major movements of the era. What about rock music as a cultural form allowed it to have this kind of effect within the historical conjuncture in which it emerged? What allowed it to function as a vehicle for mediating a massively widespread rejection of the status quo?

Towards the end of the 1960s the global system of production we call “Fordism,” or Fordist state-capitalism, was approaching its historical limits as a regime of accumulation. As the complex result of a protracted and global passive revolution, a form of economic growth based on the incorporation of greater and greater numbers of people into a consumer economy of mass-produced goods could only maintain itself as long as people could continue to buy those goods. Barred, to an important extent, from high volume international trade – a key legacy of the economic nationalism of Fordism – market saturation at home translated into an existential crisis for U.S. corporate capital, as an economy based upon the mass production and consumption of TVs, refrigerators, cars, and so on could only remain viable if there were people within the nation-state willing or able to buy those goods. The shrinking “return on investment” in the national economy combined with the steadily increasing wage demands of the recently empowered, bureaucratized trade unions to place a sharp squeeze on profits. And thus, though it had seemed to many that the contradictions of the capitalist political economy had been contained and that the era of destructive, systemic crises was over, this system entered a sharp crisis of profitability by the end of the 60s and had reached the status of a full-blown general crisis of capitalism by 1973.

This blog has already touched upon the fact that the Fordist system gave rise to forms of subjectivity or cultural tendencies that subverted it from within and that, further, would themselves eventually become the defining aspects of social subjectivity under neoliberalism. Thus the reaction against what was experienced as the stultifying homogenization of post-War society, its bureaucratic alienation, its valorization of patriarchy and its elision of racial and gender differences took the form of an assertion of excluded identities against the established order. More generally, the massive wave of youth and student-led rebellion that swept the advanced capitalist world from roughly the mid-60s to ’69 was motivated by a rejection of the culture and institutions of mass-society and a reciprocal expression of individualism. What hasn’t been discussed on this blog as of yet is what it meant that these momentous rebellions had a deeply and specifically cultural aspect. In relative opposition to the revolutionary currents of the liberal period preceding it, the rebellions of the Fordist period were not so much focused upon overthrowing and replacing the existing order as much as simply rejecting it, withdrawing or turning away from it tout court. So, for example, the proliferation of hippie and anarcho-primitivist “back-to-the-earth” movements, the separatism of Black Nationalism, and the widespread embrace of far-out hallucinogenic drugs all in different ways point to a profound rupture with the norms and institutions of the existing society.

At the level of lived subjectivity, the crisis of Fordism manifested itself as a profound “opening up” of possibilities, of apparently new ways of coexisting and of organizing social life. This was what terrified conservatives and mainstream liberals of the time: the rebellion against and rejection of the established order was not solely based upon an inability to “deliver the goods,” though of course in an important way it was so in the case of the civil rights and feminist movements, which directed themselves to the constitutive exclusions of the establishment. It was also, plainly, a rejection of a whole way of life, of “everything that has been achieved by Western Society,” as contemporary reactionaries probably put it.

Part of the force of this rejection is illustrated by the critique of economic life in “The Port Huron Statement.”According to its authors in the SDS: “The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles: that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; selfdirected, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics; that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination; that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.”

This is not a critique directed mainly at the availability of benefits or the distribution of existing wealth, but rather at the character of the work itself, its relatively humanizing or dehumanizing qualities with respect to the people who carry it out. It is not a call to seize the apparatus of work in the name of the people, but a call for a total break with the actually existing organization of production. This critique of one-sided work, already quite radical by any standard, is combined with an affirmative yet equally radical conception of human nature:

Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn. 

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism — the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man — we merely have faith in his potential.

Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is a contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.

The statement outlines a sense of lived experience and social life that, while basically affirmative and rooted in an image of human nature, is nevertheless presented as the direct negation of the prevailing order. Life in Fordist state-capitalism is “inauthentic,” “submissive,” “violent,” “fragmented,” “impersonal”: these are but various names of the general feeling of alienation produced by the social system as a whole, elsewhere described in the “Statement” as the “American malaise.” The overall picture is of the possibility of a qualitatively different form of life, one in which merely mechanical, functional, and dessicated ways of relating to one another are replaced by something more immediate, more personal, and more genuinely human.

One of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.

These are some of the most salient ideological elements forming the sociohistorical background of the 1960s counterculture. Drugs, sexual liberation, “hippiedom” in general – far from somehow emerging ex nihilo, such phenomena articulated, for better or for worse, partial aspects of the social vision and the form of life that seemed to be fitfully coming into view for millions of people, especially during the middle and later part of the decade. This vision was premised on the idea that true freedom for the individual was to be found in a new kind of collectivity that rejected the form and content of the status quo, and it is in this sort of light that the rise of rock music as a distinct artistic genre should be considered.

Rock and roll in its classic form, from the late 1950s through the 60s, was a curious amalgam of pre-existing musical traditions whose historical roots run very deep. I already discussed one of these influences in my previous post. Like folk, rock was from the beginning a genre that emerged from and addressed a mass, popular base whose identity as a social subject was in turn indelibly shaped by it. Stylistically, it took from folk an emphasis on easy-to-remember choruses and more-or-less steady rhythmic patterns that can make the act of listening to music a profoundly social and collective experience. What is generally referred to as “the blues,” which like much else in U.S. popular culture has its roots in very old African American oral traditions, forms another pillar of this heritage. The unmistakable tonal patterns of the blues – the twelve-bar structure, the emphasis on simple pentatonic scales – still makes up the basic DNA of rock’s most distinctive melodic features today. Another element that the blues unquestionably contributed to classic rock and roll is the specific cultural form of the guitar solo, but more on that in a moment.

The economic and technological development of what contemporary commentators referred to as the “affluent society” is also key to understanding what rock is and how it came about. Economies of scale and the industrialized mass production of consumer goods meant that musical instruments, most notably the new electric guitar and the amplifier, were relatively affordable for a great number of people for the first time. After Chuck Berry at the latest, that is, roughly the mid- to late-1950s, youth across the country were forming what eventually became the stereotype of the “garage band” by playing bad music really loudly and generally pissing off the “Greatest Generation,” i.e. their parents. Probably most importantly, it was undoubtedly a blast, as the exhilaration of artistic creation – however amateur – combines with the disapproval of established authority, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a really heady mix in the following decade and a half.

As a musical genre, during the 1960s rock became increasingly aggressive, as its audience grew, the concerts got bigger, and its apparent dissociation from the establishment became more pronounced. One feature of the genre that is indispensable to understanding its social, historical, and cultural relevance is its sheer loudness. The introduction of electrical instruments and amplification devices combined with the rhythmic and tonal characteristics of the style itself to produce a musical genre unprecedented in its volume and energy. The Organization Man of the stuffy, bureaucratized world of the post-war consensus did not know what to make of this strange new mass phenomenon, other than the fact that, whatever it was, he was not part of it. Squares need not apply. Rather, rock was the unique possession of a generation raised in relative affluence that had come to reject the terms of that very affluence as stultifying, inauthentic, and somehow not fully human. Rock, insofar as it appeared as the pure negation of that order, was consequently a powerful vehicle for transmitting this basic desire for an alternative way of living, for opening up an experience of immediacy that seemed to be frustrated by the alienation of Fordist society.

A brief analysis of the solo as a form can further illustrate the organic historical connection between rock music and 1960s radicalism. Today the solo often gets a bad rap as something superfluous to the song as a whole, as a mere onanistic exercise that only serves to gratify the soloist’s ego. After all, it does not go without saying that someone should “take the spotlight” by stepping out in front of the group and seemingly overshadowing them. But the solo as a popular art had been a major element in jazz for some decades prior to the emergence of rock, wherein it was understood not as a superfluous exercise, but as a means by which each individual member of the ensemble could step out and express his or her interpretation of the song, to accentuate it in his or her own way, before returning to ensemble play. Rock and roll basically took this democratizing aspect of the jazz solo, attached dynamite to it, and blew it the hell up, making it into a true mass medium in a way that jazz did not. In the period of its emergence it was far from irrelevant, as it was an integral element in whatever ideological and cultural force rock had as a medium.

The rock solo is a virtuoso performance of a particular kind. Volume and technical skill combine to transfix the audience’s attention on an unfolding dialogue between the soloist and her instrument, while the pulsing rhythms of a steady backbeat also compel bodily participation on the part of the audience. For a generation in search of a sense of individual freedom that could go beyond the one-dimensional social forms of Fordism, the rock solo blasted an extremely loud, inchoate negation of those forms that could, further, be collectively experienced both at the concert and with the mass-produced, vinyl LP. As such it was a technologically mediated artistic practice that bespoke the possibility of a fundamentally different form of society, one grounded in less destructive, more immediate, and more authentic forms of collective being-together. The mangled, tortured howls of Hendrix’s guitar in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in which you can almost hear the bombs dropping on North Vietnam, remains the high-water mark for rock as a politicized art: the political message is inextricable from the wildly dissonant, abrasive noise emanating from the amplifier and distorting the traditional patriotic meaning of the song beyond recognition, if not outright inverting it. The musical form and its political content are fused into one at this point.

As with my previous post, this post only scratches the surface of a rich tradition of cultural practice. And obviously I cannot get into a full discussion of the fate of the 1960s counterculture, the complex subsequent development of rock by and through the culture industry, or the historical limits of the critical consciousness that emerged alongside it. But my aims have been broadly the same: to suggest the ways in which the emergence of forms of consciousness that point beyond the present might emerge from the confluence of particular media technologies, aesthetic practices, and forms of alienation unique to the present. To better understand what was truly revolutionary about the 1960s, it is important to grasp how a potentially revolutionary critique entered the domain of practice through the mediation of mass-cultural phenomena in the realm of music and the arts.