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Title: Rock for Beginners
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: August 5, 2013
Language: en
Topics: music, culture, youth, US
Source: Retrieved on 11th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/rock-beginners-miguel-amor-s
Notes: Translated in January 2018 from a revised copy of the original text entitled, “Rock para principiantes”, obtained from the author in December 2017. Published in Spanish in a paperback edition by Ediciones el Salmón /Argelaga, 2014. The original Spanish text may be consulted online at: Part one: http://kaosenlared.net/rock-principiantes-primera-parte/][kaosenlared.net]] Part two: [[http://kaosenlared.net/rock-principiantes-segunda-parte/

Miguel Amorós

Rock for Beginners

Shake, Rattle and Roll

“Rock”, properly speaking, refers to a particular musical style created

by Anglo-Saxon youth culture that spread like wildfire to every country

where the modern conditions of production and consumption had reached a

certain qualitative threshold, that is, where capitalism had given rise

to a mass society of socially uprooted individuals. The phenomenon first

took shape after World War Two in the United States, the most highly

developed capitalist country, and then spread to England; from there it

returned like a boomerang to the country of its origin, irradiating its

influence everywhere, changing people’s lives in different ways. To get

a better understanding of rock, we will first have to review the

concepts of subculture, music and youth.

The word “subculture” refers to the behaviors, values, jargons and

symbols of a separate milieu—ethnic, geographic, sexual or

religious—within the dominant culture, which was, and still is, of

course, the culture of the ruling class. Beginning in the sixties, once

the separation was imposed from above between elite culture, reserved

for the leaders, and mass culture, created to regiment the led, to

coarsen their tastes and brutalize their senses—between high culture and

masscult,1 as Dwight McDonald called them—the term would be used to

refer to alternative consumerist lifestyles, which were reflected in

various ways in the music that was at first called “modern” music, and

then pop music. The mechanism of identification that produced youth

subculture was ephemeral, since it was constantly being offset by the

temporary character of youth. In this volatile stage of life, without

either responsibilities or economic functions, with a proletariat that

was giving no signs of combativeness, the notion of subculture was

easily conflated with that of fashion, and of freedom, with that of the

look. The role of the communications media, which had previously hardly

shown any interest in traditional subcultures, would be decisive in the

spread of juvenile fashions. However, these fashions harbored a more

disturbing reality. While opposition to the adult world took the outward

form of a generation gap, it was in fact an unresolved social crisis. As

it turned out, the “age-old crisis of youth” ended up converging with

crises of other kinds—students, labor, race, politics—and forging an

authentic ethical, artistic and social alternative to the values and

lifestyles of domination. Rock was its soundtrack. It could no longer be

called a subculture, since it did not seek accommodation within the

dominant culture like its predecessors—such as, for example, the

American existentialists (hipsters), the neighborhood and biker gangs of

the United States, or the teddy boys and mods of Great Britain—but

rather sought to subvert it and overthrow it: it was a true

“counterculture”, only much more dangerous, because its popularity was

not restricted to young people.

Pop music, on the other hand, has almost nothing to do with what we

understand as music. While, technically speaking, it may be considered

to be an organization of sound in time, it is not an art, but instead a

product of the entertainment industry, a commodity of show business. We

would prefer call it “light music”, as opposed to great music or genuine

music (which began to be known as “classical music” after the onset of

“pop music”). It was characterized by simplification and

standardization; it was created as an accompaniment to dancing and to

serve as entertainment and means of escape. Its compositions were short,

repetitive and syncopated, predictable, without any aesthetic

pretensions. It did not claim to reveal the essence of reality at the

immediate level, like art, but to stimulate and amuse. It sought to

entertain, not to challenge the status quo. It was therefore a music for

passing, and killing, time, for consumption rather than for thinking. It

was a genre of music that became a Trojan horse for the rationality of

the commodity in everyday life. Theodore W. Adorno said that, “One is

forced to have fun in order to be well adjusted”, and that was just what

this kind of music essentially did: dance tunes represented the

musically sublimated rhythms of labor and of everyday misery. They

promoted conformism rather than revolt. Nor was the mass culture of

which it formed a part really a culture, either, but rather a particular

industry that infiltrated everyday life through the mass media. Those

who called the shots in the media played the leading role in that

culture which, far from spotlighting and exacerbating the contradictions

of capitalist society, obscured and blurred them, making them more

endurable. This was the principal characteristic of the new capitalism

based on consumption, that is, on the industrialization of life. Thus,

although pop music was by no means an expression of the social situation

of the exploited class, it could at any given moment and under certain

circumstances be transformed into a vehicle for expressing the demands

for freedom manifested by the least domesticated sector of the

population, the sector that was most aware of the crisis, the youth. It

therefore became the vehicle of truth, which, according to Hegel, is

also beauty, and spontaneously manifested, in a subjective and

incomplete form, appealing to the senses—or “good vibrations”—more than

just reason, the spirit of the modern social revolution.

Thirdly, youth, that period between infancy and adulthood, which lasted

longer among the offspring of the bourgeoisie, but was very brief among

the offspring of the workers, did not play any special role in classical

capitalism. Then, it was a period of initiation to “responsible” life in

which no other principles or tastes found a place beyond those that were

already established by tradition. The discovery of the existence of a

rebellious and combative youth that questioned the rules of the world of

its elders was traumatic not only for the ruling class but also for the

submissive members of the other classes, since these elements were all

in favor of patriarchy. For a few years, the movie industry allowed a

few intellectually honest directors to address some of the disagreeable

aspects of the cold, hard reality. World War Two was followed by the

“Cold War”, an era of political tension exacerbated by the Russian

manufacture of the atomic bomb, Mao’s seizure of power in China and the

beginning of the Korean War, events that unleashed a wave of patriotism

and anticommunism in the United States that was capitalized on by

Senator Joseph McCarthy, the organizer of a “witch hunt” that profoundly

affected intellectual and artistic work. The years of “McCarthyism”,

between 1950 and 1956, were disastrous for the formal liberties that had

once prevailed in the culture of a State that, by becoming the leading

world power, felt threatened domestically by a wave of dissent led by

intellectuals. In this suffocating climate, any display of dissidence

was tarred with the brush of communism and treated with the utmost

severity. Edward Abbey, however, an anarchist in the tradition of

Thoreau, a pacifist and practitioner of civil disobedience, dared to

publish an indictment of the horrors of industrial civilization in those

dark times, calling for desertion from that civilization, The Brave

Cowboy [1956], which was adapted for the screen in 1962 by Dalton

Trumbo, the most subversive screenwriter of his time. In movie industry,

the condition of the working class was taboo; trade unionists could only

be depicted as gangsters, and anarchists as solitary fugitives and

outlaws, while informers and snitches were portrayed as heroes, as in

Elia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront. The race question would not be

portrayed for a broad public audience until 1960 with the release of

John Ford’s film, Sergeant Rutledge, and Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a

Mockingbird, released as a film in 1962. The youth problem, however,

ignored by the new inquisitors, was openly addressed in the public

arena. In 1953, Laszlo Benedek’s The Wild One made its debut in movie

theaters, based on a true story: the invasion of a peaceful small town

by a violent motorcycle gang on a rampage. The contrast between the

townsfolk’s respect for law and order and the disrespectful and lawless

behavior of the young gang members reached its climax when, asked just

what he was rebelling against, the star of the movie, played by Marlon

Brando, replies, “Whadda you got?” The nihilism of the message

scandalized respectable opinion leaders; the motorcycle manufacturer,

Triumph, protested against the negative image associated with its

product, and the British government would not allow the film to be shown

in movie theaters until 1967; and even then it could only be shown in

X-rated theaters! In 1955, another film, entitled Rebel Without a Cause,

directed by Nicholas Ray, gave a new twist to the youth culture theme,

bringing it from the margins to the center of American society: a middle

class youth, played by James Dean, bored and dissatisfied, lost in a

social milieu that did not understand and did not want to understand why

he found it absurd, reacted by allowing himself to do just anything,

without any apparent reason, only because, “You’ve gotta do something”.

The image of a violent and wayward adolescent, convinced that he had no

future worth living and that all he could do was live intensely in the

moment as if he was going to die that very same day, turning his back on

the adult world that was insensitive to his anxieties, reflected the

moral decadence of a class society that offered dollars instead of

answers. The older generation, self-satisfied and resigned, incapable of

seeing anything beyond its own nose, had become alien to the younger

generation. The picture would be completed by Blackboard Jungle,

directed by Richard Brooks, which was also released in 1955 (in Spain

its title was “Semilla de maldad” [Bad Seed]). The action of the film

takes place in an inner-city school, where young people from working

class homes, which we would now call “broken homes”, trapped in an

educational system that taught them nothing useful for the hard life

that they could look forward to when they turned eighteen, turn against

their teachers and the school. Indiscipline and delinquency were their

response to the lack of perspectives and the fate reserved for losers.

Its soundtrack would distinguish this film from its two predecessors

mentioned above. The soundtracks of The Wild One and Rebel Without a

Cause were written by classical composers in the tradition of Schömberg.

In Blackboard Jungle, however, the students destroy the record

collection of a math teacher because his music means nothing to them.

What they wanted to listen to were songs like “Rock Around the Clock”, a

kind of swing tune with a negro rhythm performed by Bill Haley,

catapulted to instant success by the movie. A new style was born,

unknown to the older generation, but which created a great stir among

their children, rock and roll, and which was therefore a sign of a

profound generation crisis, or, more accurately, of a social crisis that

would have its greatest impact among the young people, to whom the

blacks had brought soul.

There Ain’t No Cure for the Summertime Blues

Willie Dixon, musician, composer, and blues singer, as well as boxer and

negro civil rights activist, once said, “The blues are the roots and the

other musics are the fruits”, condensing the history of rock into a

single sentence. The source of rock and roll was the American negro. It

was created in 1955 by a rhythm and blues guitarist named Chuck Berry,

when he recorded the hit song “Maybellene”, an adaptation of a country

music song. Rock was therefore born, as everyone knows, from a fusion of

rhythm and blues with American “country” music. The year before, Elvis

Presley had recorded “That’s Alright (Mama)”, a version of the song

first performed by the Delta blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but

it seemed that most people were not aware of this. The same was true of

“Shake, Rattle and Roll”, recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets. What were

the preconditions that paved the way for the appearance of rock music?

First of all, obviously, the social and moral crisis referred to above,

manifested primarily among the youth. Secondly, the music of a minority

that suffered from discrimination, the Afro-Americans. In 1947 the

journalist Jerry Wexler had christened as rhythm and blues a new style

of boogie that was more well known among its performers as jump blues,

which was a best-seller on the “race” record charts and had the

peculiarity of attracting white record buyers. In 1951, a Cleveland

radio program aimed at the youth market broadcast this music, calling it

rock n’ roll, an expression that would often appear in the lyrics of

these jump blues songs. Young white people had discovered a whole new

world in negro music. The blues provided a simple and effective musical

matrix in which feelings, desires, hopes and frustrations could be

expressed. A perfect combination of howls, moans and loud strumming on

the guitar, often arranged around a single musical phrase (riff) that

put some spirit into the pop rock inspired by it. As John Sinclair says

in his book, Guitar Army, the black musicians were the “freedom riders”

who infiltrated the homes of white people and seduced their children by

attacking every taboo. These children then felt much closer to the

people of color than to their white parents. Their music taught them a

new way of love and behavior, less inhibited, more fraternal and, above

all, much more erotic; it showed them an open sexuality and (it was this

that was so intolerable) it incited them to smoke pot. There was more to

life than work, more than school and more than sitting on the couch

watching television. In fact, this was real life, which, philosophically

speaking, erased the distinction between subject and object. Rock n’

roll was more than just entertainment; it was the music of refusal; the

refusal of the hypocritical morality and culture of the status quo, of

extreme individualism, of no-holds-barred competition and of the endless

changes determined by the iron laws of the commodity. By putting the

accent on rhythm rather than on harmony, it made the antagonism between

the passion to live and everyday boredom more apparent, an antagonism

that young people had tried to escape by way of violence and

transgression, but without ever grasping their situation rationally and

objectively. It was the music of protest against alienation, the music

of awakening (many blues songs began with the words, “I woke up this

morning”), the music of movement in search of meaning, but not of

revolutionary catharsis. The youth identity that it provided was not

enough to provoke social change, but it timidly pointed in that

direction. A contradiction prevented the awakening of social

consciousness. The rebellious young people despised work, but

nonetheless participated in consumption: they rejected the office and

the factory, but not the commodity, as the quest for an identity based

on music, clothing or a car, was simply fulfilled with an image whose

content was its exchange value. Young people really constituted a new,

expanding market. We must recognize that rock n’ roll, its musical

standard, was still a product of the culture industry, of hit records,

of new record companies like Modern, Atlantic, Chess and Sun Records, of

movies and radio; of the latest inventions in music technology, the 45s

and LPs, jukeboxes, record players and amplifiers. This was the third

precondition that brought rock to the bar, to the living room and to the

bedroom, that is, which introduced it to everyday life. For the first

time ever, one could listen to music at any time, anywhere, at any

volume, music whose main instrument was the guitar, not the piano or the

human voice, thanks to Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. For Leni

Sinclair, John’s wife, “The turning point in the history of western

civilization was reached with the invention of the electric guitar”. It

was the instrument of change. The first Gibsons and Fenders became

phallic fetishes suitable for composing short musical phrases or riffs

like those of that memorable electric blues song, “Mannish Boy”,

recorded in 1955 by Muddy Waters. The guitar rendered the orchestra

unnecessary; at most, three or four musicians were sufficient for

accompaniment. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley were the first rockers who

wrote their own songs to be played on guitar because they did not know

how to play any other instruments; they were models for their white

imitators and provided them with manifestos like the very emblematic

“Rock and Roll Music” and “Who Do You Love?” One of them, Buddy Holly,

performed to the accompaniment of a rhythm guitar, a bass, and a drum

kit, creating the basic quartet that would set the standard for most of

the pop rock groups of the sixties. Other, Afro-American, artists, like

Little Richard and Larry Williams, for example, went even further, in

“Lucille” and “Bony Marony”, paving the way for the prohibited display

of sensuality; Elvis Presley and independent local radio stations did

the rest. Elvis had the advantage of being white in a racist society

that could hardly tolerate negro success, which is why he was the

leading figure of the rise and subsequent fall of rock.

Rock preserved a certain degree of creative independence that protected

it from the manipulation of the spectacle, but not for long. Show

business got big enough to annihilate rock n’ roll’s negative power and

forced it to maintain a cordial relation with the status quo. The movie

industry was very attentive to this development. Beginning in 1957, rock

n’ roll was corrupted and transformed entirely into show business. All

kinds of rock musicians performed in banal Hollywood movies like Rock,

Rock, Rock, Let’s Rock and The Girl Can’t Help It. The rebel attitude

was replaced by a sociable identity that reconciled a juvenile audience

with the dictates of fashion instead of fostering the development of an

independent collective subject. The sentimentalism and melodrama of the

past expelled dissident attitudes. A gallery of interchangeable

adolescent “idols”, for which Pat Boone served as the prototype, were

pressed into its service with teams of producers, songwriters, composers

and sound engineers in order to create a perfect product for

consumption. Well-groomed, neatly-attired and cloyingly sweet, they sang

unimaginative and sentimental songs that, together with the fashion of

the dance styles that made their debut with the twist, dominated the

scene at least until the appearance of the Beatles. Rock returned to the

fold of fun-loving, entertaining commercial pop music, obscuring social

inequalities, unrest and dissatisfaction, moderating its language in

order to be acceptable to the dominant taste, the taste of domination.

Adorno said that “amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of

work”. Thus, from being the thorn in the side of mass culture, rock

became the rite of passage of youth in the capitalist system. Elvis

returned to civilian life from the army a changed man, transformed into

a grotesque caricature of his former self. Viva Las Vegas had nothing in

common with “Heartbreak Hotel” or “Jailhouse Rock”. The main figures of

rock disappeared; in February of 1959, Buddy Holly and Richie Valens

died in a plane crash; one year later, Eddie Cochran died when he

crashed his car into a lamppost. As John Derek said in Nicholas Ray’s

film, Knock On Any Door, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking

corpse”. Rock had burnt its candle at both ends and was literally dead,

but it was not allowed to rest in peace. A step forward for business had

the virtue of being a step forward for contradiction by allowing a new,

less complacent music to emerge from thin air: a second generation of

young people found in it sufficient stimulus to avoid being imprisoned

in mere identity and to carry on the battle against the old world, more

prepared to face a bigger crisis incubated in the preceding period, but

also more decomposed, more irrational and more unacceptable. With the

coming of the sixties, rock recovered its lost element of subjective

freedom that once again situated it as the antithesis of the statist

mass culture.

You Really Got Me

For rock, with the start of the sixties, the American scene saw new

contributions. On the one hand, there was a new crop of talented

songwriters, sound engineers and composers. And rhythm n’ blues had

acquired a complexity that gave rise to soul music, combining with the

rhythms and cadences of religious music, but with precise notes, and

without the flourishes of jazz. Performers like Ray Charles, Otis

Redding, James Brown, Wilson Pickett and the great Aretha Franklin soon

made their debuts. A toned-down version for white people, the music of

the Detroit-based label, Tamla Motown, acquired a spectacular notoriety.

Songs like “My Girl”, “Dancing in the Streets”, “Money” and “Louie,

Louie” were indispensable for any party. Finally, folk music underwent a

resurgence thanks to Woody Guthrie, who inscribed on his guitar the

words, “This Machine Kills Fascists”, and Pete Seeger, who made the song

“We Shall Overcome” famous. Due to its association with ideological

radicalism it gave rise to the “protest song”, ideal for performing at

the pacifist civil rights and anti-racial discrimination marches of the

era. A long list of politically engaged singer-songwriters participated

in the emerging social struggles, but Bob Dylan, who seemed least likely

of all to be a political figure, was by far the greatest influence. Some

of his songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone”, and

from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”,

became timeless anthems. What really revolutionized the music scene,

however, was his controversial appearance at the Newport Folk Festival

in 1965 with a Stratocaster electric guitar instead of an acoustic

guitar, together with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. When they began to

play the first notes of “Maggie’s Farm”, it was like a performance by a

Chicago blues band. His music built bridges connecting with sixties

rock, like Jimi Hendrix, Manfred Mann, Julie Driscoll, The Band, and

especially The Byrds, who took up the standard, and even with the mellow

pop of the Walker Brothers, and spread the spirit of dissent beyond the

politicized university milieu and its devotees of the folk song. His

songs were not “fun”, but shocking, because they clashed with every

conventional standard. They were not made to be consumed, but to be the

object of intense focus, on their poetry and on their message. Dylan’s

poetry linked up with the writers of the beat generation like Kerouac

and Burroughs, who began to attain some popularity. The poet Allen

Ginsberg was a bridge between them. Folk music elevated the supremacy of

the lyrics over the music to its highest level, and led its audience

towards social critique. In its convergence with rock it politicized it,

turning it into an instrument of non-conformism.

In Europe, which was still undergoing post-war reconstruction, the

social crisis that was taking place in America remained in an incipient

stage, although it did give some unmistakable signs of life. In the

United Kingdom, the novels, Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes, The

Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe, Baron’s Court,

All Change, by Terry Taylor, and Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, were

better introductions to the sixties than any sociological analysis. The

high demand for labor put money in the pockets of the suburban youth who

gladly spent it on clothing, shoes, motorbikes and blues, rhythm n’

blues, soul and rock n’ roll records. Consumption was extended to

younger teenagers because of the influence of television, which replaced

radio as the leading vehicle for mass communications. Black musicians,

still mistreated in their own country, gladly traveled to England, where

they were treated as geniuses, and the habitués of the music scene

dressed like them and imitated them. British rock rapidly took shape on

this basis, represented by groups of four or five members rather than by

solo guitarists who cultivated the image of misfits in the American

style. During the course of this transformation, rock lost its rural

roots and became entirely urban. In 1963, one of these groups, the

upbeat and likeable Beatles, were transformed overnight into an

unprecedented mass phenomenon, which the media dubbed “Beatlemania”. The

nearest approximation to this phenomenon, Elvis, was completely

overshadowed. “Singles” featuring trite songs like “Please, Please Me”,

“She Loves You”, and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, all released during the

same year, were sold in unimaginable quantities. In the following year,

another group, this one with an aggressive and rough image, the Rolling

Stones, added fuel to the fire. Its music was more arrogant, its lyrics

more provocative, and its attitude more contrary to accepted standards

of behavior. If the Beatles represented the Yin of British rock, the

Stones were the Yang. The “fans” of the former were high school

students, teenagers addicted to fashion, glossy illustrated magazines

and television programs, prone to herding together in their thousands to

get a glimpse of their idols, screaming like lunatics, which really

shocked the world. The spectacle of masses of hysterical children was

too tempting for a medium like television, and a TV show on this

phenomenon had an enormous impact in the United States, in anticipation

of a U.S. tour by the Beatles. In February 1964, their appearance on the

“Ed Sullivan Show” was watched by 74 million people, that is, by half

the population of the United States. The door was thrown wide open for

all the others, too: first the Rolling Stones, then the Animals, the

Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Who, the Hollies, the Spencer Davis Group, Van

Morrison’s Them, and many others, were disembarking on the other side of

the Atlantic and revolutionizing musical styles and ways of thinking

with their reinterpretations of black music. During this same period,

the doors of Britain and Europe were opened wide to brilliant bluesmen

who were almost unknown in America because they were black, like John

Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie

Dixon, etc. Any English rock group would have considered it an honor to

play on the same stage with such incomparable masters without whom they

would literally never have existed (the Rolling Stones, who had taken

the name of their band from a Muddy Waters song composed by Dixon,

recorded their second or third album on Chess Records in 1964, and chose

B.B. King, who called all his guitars “Lucille”, to accompany them on

their U.S. tour in 1969). Meanwhile, British pop music received a

powerful impulse in limiting the field of influence of the conservatism

that dominated the media executives of that country, which led to the

appearance of pirate radio stations installed on ships that broadcast

rock music twenty-four hours a day. The best example was perhaps Radio

Caroline, created in March of 1964. Three years later, in another

somewhat different situation, that of the “Summer of Love” in San

Francisco, California, the first “free radio” station appeared, an

experiment that was destined to have a very long life.

The so-called “British Invasion” unleashed a wave of “garage bands” that

obtained a public audience, and therefore a market, for the first time

ever. Rock returned to its dissident origins by providing a platform for

non-conformists. The success of a song like “Satisfaction” has no other

explanation. Two details not directly related to music played a part in

this. In Europe, the use of hashish, a concentrated form of marijuana

that encouraged sociability; the Beatles smoked their first joint in a

hotel in New York with Bob Dylan. In America, the longhairs so

scandalized the law-and-order types that, as Jerry Rubin claimed in Do

It!, long hair was for white rebels what skin color was for the negroes.

There was also a bad side to all of this, however; rock drove the

culture industry’s sales to new highs, generating huge profits, as was

verified by the recognition it obtained from the established

hierarchies, symbolized by the awarding of medals of the Most Excellent

Order of the British Empire to the Beatles. In Europe such commercial

imperatives were never so dominant, but it was otherwise in the United

States, the privileged scene of the revolt against consumer society.

On the Road Again

The March on Washington of August 1963 for negro civil rights had such

an impact that in less than one year, despite the assassination of

President Kennedy, legislation was passed that put an end to racial

discrimination, at least on paper. Economic and social discrimination,

however, continued, protected by the white police, as the preacher

Malcolm X had announced, assassinated in February 1965, and as the riots

in Watts demonstrated in August of the same year, which led Frank Zappa

to write a song about the days when people who were not black were

attacked for being white, “Trouble Comin’ Every Day”, which was later

released on the Mothers album, Freak Out!. Norman Mailer, in “The White

Negro”, pointed out: “Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger

from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no

Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence

will not visit him on his walk.” The need for self-defense led to a

radicalization of Afro-Americans, and the formation of the Black Panther

Party in October 1966. The marijuana used in the ghetto, the rebirth of

black pride and the new tactics of black self-defense had an enormous

influence on the white rebels of the sixties. Furthermore, the civil

rights struggle was reinforced by opposition to the War in Vietnam. By

rebelling against the war, young people were also protesting against the

society that provoked it, and indicting the class interests that lay

behind it. The demands for racial equality, peace, free dialogue, the

decriminalization of drugs and uninhibited sexuality, clashed with a

hypocritical morality created to defend inequality, exploitation,

political authoritarianism and the patriarchal family, the foundations

of the system. If anarchism and Marxism in their many versions were

insufficient to explain the modern revolt, Zen Buddhism, on the other

hand, advocated by the non-violent, socially self-marginalized types

that began to be called hippies—in the sense of Bohemians, followers of

the beat tradition and readers of Alan Watts—offered ways to disconnect

from the system, internally and externally, and to simultaneously seek

harmony with the universe, ideas that were not very congenial with the

idea of revolution preached by anarchism and Marxism. This contradiction

was not a cause of factionalism during the period of the build-up to the

crisis, when its exacerbation was assumed to necessarily lead to less

confused and more efficacious theoretical-practical perspectives. The

spread of Maoism, Fanonism and Guevarism, the outcome of the

identification of the dissidents with the false enemies of the system,

that is, communist China, the Castro regime and the national liberation

movements, helped prevent this confusion from being dissipated. There

were musicians like Country Joe [of Country Joe and the Fish] who fell

into the trap, as “Country Joe” was the nom de guerre used by Stalin; or

like Joan Baez, who paid homage to La Pasionaria, the worst kind of

Stalinist sleazebag; there were others, however, who did not fall into

the trap, like the sardonic Frank Zappa, who referred to both left

wingers and right wingers as people who were “prisoners of the same

narrow-minded, superficial phoniness”. For many people, however,

spiritual experience was more important than political experience. This

is why social liberation was reduced to “freeing your mind”, as William

Blake advocated in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, a poem quoted in

1954 by the essayist Aldous Huxley: “for when the doors of perception

are cleansed, ‘everything appears to man as it is—infinite’.” After

reading Huxley’s book about his experiences with peyote, The Doors of

Perception, Jim Morrison was inspired to call his group “The Doors”.

Morrison himself discussed the impulse that led him to explore what he

understood by the limits of reality: “I used to think the whole thing

was a big joke. I used to think it was something to laugh about. And

then the last couple of nights I met some people who were doing

somethin’! They’re tryin’ to change the world! And I wanna get on that

trip!” The grass, the LSD, the mescaline and the mantras were more

appropriate for this kind of liberating change, understood as a mental

“trip”, than the classic methods of agitation. This is why the ritual

good times of festivals were preferable to protest marches. The

counterculture press spoke of a “new concept of celebration” emerging

from within people in such a manner that the revolution could be

conceived as “a rebirth of compassion, conscience, love and the

revelation of the unity of all human beings”. This is the path that rock

followed. LSD, still legal, popularized by Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey’s

Merry Pranksters (the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and

Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road), produced in vast

quantities and distributed for free at the big hippie festivals, was the

vehicle that got musicians and their audiences—which were at first not

strictly separated, since the community environment was standard in

these milieus—high. The Grateful Dead, the death that announced

rebirth—and therefore something to be grateful for—were “the group” of

the hippies par excellence. In The Electric-Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom

Wolfe described the band through the mouth of one of his characters:

“The Dead’s weird sound! Agony-in-ecstasis! Submarine somehow, turbid

half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at

the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each

string on their electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a

room full of natural gas, not to mention their great Hammond electric

organ, which sounds like a movie house Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a

Citizen’s Band radio and an Auto-Grind garbage truck at 4 A.M., all

coming over the same frequency….” Eric Burdon ironically dedicated one

of his songs to Sandoz, the multinational corporation that manufactured

acid (its current name is Novartis). In January 1966, psychedelic music

lifted off with the LP, You’re Gonna Miss Me, by the garage band, the

13^(th) Floor Elevators, the first band to refer to their music as

psychedelic, created under the influence of hallucinogens. It should be

noted, by the way, that the letter, “M”, the first letter in the word,

“Marijuana”, is the 13^(th) letter of the alphabet. Drugs would not be

mentioned in the band’s lyrics, however; similarly, during the same

period, another trailblazing band, The Charlatans, saw how their record

label would not allow their version of the song, “Codeine”, written by

the folk singer-songwriter Buffy St. Marie, to appear on one of their

albums because it was about codeine addiction. The new philosophy was

summarized by Timothy Leary at the big hippie gathering in 1967 in

Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the Human Be-In, with a laconic

phrase: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Acid was the ingredient that made the fusion of rock, folk, blues, soul,

free jazz and country possible, producing the music of the American

revolution. It purged the frustrated urban middle class of its

negativity, giving the fugitives from the complacency which that

lifestyle offered a positive, simple and free vision of the future, but

which seemed to function in homogeneous, relatively small, collectives

that fed on the scraps of the empire. The radical yippie Abbie Hoffman,

in his book suggestively entitled, Steal This Book, recounted hundreds

of alternative experiences that functioned outside of the circuits of

money. In a leaflet entitled, “Plans for the Destruction of the

Universities”, reproduced in his other book, Revolution for the Hell of

It, he recommended building a radical community, while simultaneously

claiming: “Our message is always: Do what you want. Take chances. Extend

your boundaries. Break the rules.” Young musicians, both British and

American, were not far behind and sought new sounds to express

previously unexplored states of mind. To convey these states of mind,

two- or three-minute long songs were insufficient, as were the little 45

rpm singles; the big LPs were more suitable. In 1966, “Good Vibrations”,

by the Beach Boys, was released as part of an unfinished LP [Smile];

that same year, “Paint It Black” was released on the American version of

the Rolling Stones album, Aftermath; and finally, that same year, the

Beatles LP, Revolver, was released; seeking to cultivate a less

frivolous image, the Beatles abandoned their pop orientation and decided

not to perform at any more live concerts. Technology had a major impact

on the listening experience. Recording studios facilitated all kinds of

mixing. New sound effects for guitar were made possible by pedals that

the performer operated with his feet, producing the sounds referred to

as wah-wah and fuzz, as exemplified in the songs, “Voodoo Child” and

“Purple Haze”, by Jimi Hendrix. The Mellotron, the predecessor of

samplers, allowed the musician to use a keyboard to reproduce sounds

that had been previously recorded on tape (the trumpets of “Strawberry

Fields Forever” were produced in this way). We could recite a whole list

of various instruments like electric violins, twelve-string guitars,

various keyboard instruments, the theremin, banjos, sitars, bongos,

bottles, etc., which added their grains of sand to the forge of

psychedelic rock. One band, Lothar and the Hand People, which produced

an extraordinary Space Hymn, listed its Moog synthesizer (“Lothar”) as

the leader of the group. The main characteristic of psychedelic music

was improvisation. Songs were subject to momentary invention, live, on

stage, and gave way to long, spontaneous guitar solos, expressing an

escape with acid from the neurotic life of the city that absorbed

everyday reality. We may randomly cite as examples: “Eight Miles High”,

by The Byrds; “The Pusherman” by Steppenwolf; the album, East West by

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (the whole album is one long

instrumental song); “The End”, by The Doors; and all the live

performances of the Grateful Dead, from “Viola Lee Blues” to “Morning

Dew”. We could also cite the eerie song, “Sister Ray”, by the Velvet

Underground, but this band was situated at the extreme opposite end of

the spectrum from the world of the hippies, belonging instead to a

pessimistic and self-destructive scene that substituted heroin for acid.

Although Canned Heat and Janis Joplin instilled acid into the blues more

effectively than any other bands, and the Jefferson Airplane captured

the hippie spirit in memorable songs like “Somebody to Love”, it was the

charismatic performers of the Dead, a group whose members displayed

incredible musical talents, that served as the models for psychedelic

creation and music par excellence during the generalized decline of the

genre at the end of the decade. Listening to them these days, one

understands that without rock, life would have been a mistake.

We Are the Volunteers of America

San Francisco, and particularly the Haight Ashbury district, full of

dilapidated mansions where various well-known rock groups lived, became

a pole of attraction for the hippies. John Phillips, of The Mamas and

the Papas, composed a song for Scott McKenzie that began with the verse,

“If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your

hair”, perfectly capturing the beauty of the moment. The local

authorities were alarmed over the prospect of a possible invasion of

vagabonds and bohemian freaks, in expectation of which about thirty

counterculture collectives, including the Family Dog commune, the

Diggers, the Straight Theater and the underground newspaper, The San

Francisco Oracle, with the assistance of local churches, organized a

“Summer of Love”, a summer festival where everything would be free:

music, food, acid, medical care, clothing, sex…. The Monterey Pop

Festival attracted a huge crowd. San Francisco filled up with adolescent

runaways, curiosity-seekers, people with nowhere else to go, drug

addicts, drug dealers, small-time crooks, freeloaders…. The success of

the Summer of Love surpassed the expectations of even the most

optimistic of its organizers, threatening the very existence of the

Haight Ashbury community to the point that it staged a “Hippie Funeral”

in October, a festival where it was insistently recommended that the

dropouts should stay home and carry out the revolution in their own home

towns because the revolution in San Francisco was already finished. Now

it was the turn of the Flower Children, the children of the comfortable

classes who dressed up in garish multicolored flowery shirts on the

weekends and wore headbands in their hair. A rudimentary Zen for idiots

served them as a sort of alibi. The Seeds wrote an anthem for them. The

hippie style was transformed into a fashion and the freaks abandoned the

city, leaving it to the tourists. Music lost its soul, and once again

became entertainment. Concert organizers began to charge for admission.

The free and disorderly counterculture was transformed into a planned

product of consumption. The industry of the spectacle accumulated more

power, buying off the best artists in every band in order to turn them

into pop stars at the beck and call of the almighty dollar. If the

Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow represented the face of psychedelic

music, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band represented

its demise, its well remunerated rise to official status. The Mothers of

Invention depicted a grotesque parody of this Beatles album cover on the

cover of their own album entitled, We’re Only In It For the Money. We

would have been more forgiving of the Beatles if they had not accepted

the BBC’s invitation to write a song reflecting all the flower power

themes, “All You Need Is Love”, broadcast for the first time to the

whole world via satellite. Those were bad times for real peace and love;

the hawks who wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam were not impressed

by the hippie incantations. Deserters, however, were organizing, racial

minorities were engaging in armed self-defense, demonstrations were

organized to march on the Pentagon and Wall Street, the universities

were being occupied, and initially peaceful demonstrations ended in

violent confrontations with the police. In 1968, non-violence seemed to

lose its purchase on reality, following events instead of leading them.

The streets were in turmoil. In March, a huge anti-war demonstration in

peaceful London in front of the American embassy ended with many of the

demonstrators being beaten by the police. The Rolling Stones released a

single, “Street Fighting Man”, with an image of police violence on its

cover. The cover of the LP that included the song, Beggar’s Banquet,

featuring a photograph of a wall with offensive graffiti, was also

censored. A good background for what was probably the best song of the

decade, “Sympathy for the Devil”, the bastard offspring of “The Flowers

of Evil” and “The Master and Margarita” by Baudelaire, and Bulgakov,

respectively, the latter work having appeared posthumously in 1966, a

merciless denunciation of the bureaucratic paranoia of the Stalinist

regime, which for its part had silenced Bulgakov throughout his entire

life. The Rolling Stones was the only rock group that paid any attention

to the French May, and obviously that month did not serve as a theme for

any rock n’ roll repertoire.

In the United States, a police patrol opened fire indiscriminately in

Orangeburg, South Carolina, on a demonstration of black students,

killing three and wounding twenty-eight. Martin Luther King was

assassinated by a sniper. The FBI was engaged in its criminal enterprise

to put an end to what was designated as Public Enemy Number One of the

State, the Black Panther Party. With so many killings, the days of the

tactic of non-violence were numbered. Many people concluded that the

system could not be changed by way of good deeds, and began to plan

instead to change it by way of bad ones. The anti-war movement played

its last trump card in Chicago, however, where the National Convention

of the Democratic Party was scheduled to take place in August to select

the party’s presidential candidate. The radicals convoked a

demonstration of a festive type. Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash &

Young, later wrote a song about the events. No radio station in Chicago

dared to play “Street Fighting Man”, which had just been released prior

to the Convention, for fear of inciting violence, although no one had

called for any fighting. As usual, the demonstrators put their faith in

the media impact of alternative actions as an instrument of political

pressure. Various rock groups had indicated their intention to attend

the demonstration, but in the end only the MC5, the vanguard of the

White Panther Party, which considered rock music as a revolutionary

weapon, showed up. Norman Mailer covered the events for Harper’s

magazine and William Burroughs covered it for Esquire. At first

everything proceeded peacefully; the pig, Pigasus, was named as

presidential candidate amidst great merriment, but the repressive zeal

of the democratic mayor exacerbated the situation and the war against

the war ended in street fighting. There were large numbers of injured

persons and many people were arrested, leading to a trial of the most

famous radicals. In November, Richard Nixon won the presidential

election, which made it very likely that there would be more repression

and zero tolerance not just for radicalism, as was demonstrated by the

assassinations of Black Panther militants, but also of ordinary

delinquency, as was demonstrated by the sentencing of John Sinclair to

ten years in prison for the possession of two joints. With tempers still

running high, the Woodstock Music Festival was announced for August 1969

in New York State, with an impressive lineup of rock groups.

Approximately half a million people attended, many more than were

expected. The organization of the concert was chaotic, it rained the

whole time and some of those who showed up to see the show, including

the Motherfuckers, “a gang with an analysis”, were furious because they

were denied entry. They broke down the fences and everyone occupied

their couple of square feet in the mud. The monetary losses were

subsequently recouped by the sales of the record album and the box

office receipts from the movie. The radicals distributed their

propaganda, spoke of peace and love, and called for the release of

Sinclair; all with a sense of déjà vu. Jimi Hendrix “deconstructed” the

Star-Spangled Banner before an audience that was half-asleep. Woodstock

represented the new conformism of the American youth, comprised for the

most part of white people without any economic problems, incapable of

doing anything but keeping quiet, “going with the flow”, while watching

musicians who had been turned into stars by those who felt a fetishistic

devotion towards them, with the good conscience of just being there:

��There is never anything but the present”, as Alan Watts would say.

Herding together passed for fraternity, and getting high passed for

liberation. These “beautiful people” would commit themselves for nothing

in the world, nor would they participate in anything more serious than a

rock concert. Woodstock reproduced the spectacular separation between

audience and actors, between reality and image, the one being as

irrelevant as the other is profitable. It was nothing but a sum of acts

of no subversive importance at all in an atmosphere of cliché

rebelliousness and fictitious ecstasy, an apparent ruin that would later

give way to a real coup de grace, as if to confirm the pessimistic

vision of the film released that same year, Easy Rider, directed by

Dennis Hopper, which concludes with its hippie protagonists being gunned

down by “real” Americans. A little cross-country tour that ended badly.

A premonition. In September the Chicago Eight were brought to trial,

charged with conspiracy and incitement to violence. There was a great

deal of concern that the trial would prove to be an occasion for

rioting, and Nixon sent the National Guard to suppress demonstrations at

gunpoint. In court, the defendants took advantage of the opportunity to

turn the tables on their accusers and ridicule the American justice

system. Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panthers, called the judge

a fascist pig, which caused him to be tried separately and to be

sentenced to four years in prison for contempt of court. The other

defendants, without any convincing evidence of wrongdoing on their part,

were released. That same month, the apostle of LSD, Timothy Leary,

pursued his own private grudge against the government of the United

States by running for governor of California against the

ultra-conservative Ronald Reagan. The Beatles wrote the song, “Come

Together”, for his bizarre campaign. The song was boycotted by the BBC

because the censors thought that the line, “he shoot Coca-Cola” was a

reference to cocaine. Leary, who had in the meantime publicly repudiated

drugs, was later sentenced to ten years for two marijuana “roaches”

found in his possession during a police search.

This Is the End, My Only Friend, the End

Since bad things always come in threes, some geniuses thought there

should be a repeat of the Woodstock Festival on the west coast. The San

Francisco police had already closed off the city to any more festivals,

so that in the end the Altamont Speedway, in northern California, was

chosen as the site for the next Free Festival. The Rolling Stones were

the lead act at this festival, whose security was supposed to be handled

by the Hell’s Angels, a motorcycle gang that was an inveterate enemy of

the whole hippie scene. As it turned out, both the audience and the

Hell’s Angels were kept busy. Alcohol mixed with amphetamines, a

psychotropic drug that causes hyperactivity, was consumed in addition to

LSD, and this led to stampedes and fights that affected musicians as

well as members of the audience. Four deaths marked the end of the

“Woodstock Nation” only four months after its inauguration. And so the

groovy good-times scene came to an end. At Altamont, the drugged and

enraged creeps attending the festival could not even endure each other’s

presence and in their hysterical breakdown they suffered the

consequences of the lack of self-control of a security team that

performed its task in the same way that the police would have. It was

not just the worst day of rock, it was the death of rock as it had

existed up until that time. It was being transformed into just another

component of mass culture and a real business capable of profiting from

any situation. When, on March 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on

college students at Kent State University, in Ohio, killing four of

them, the cycle of the American revolution came to a close. Neil Young,

of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, wrote a moving protest song entitled,

“Ohio”. It was a hit, but it did no good; the murderers were never

brought to justice. Young later expressed his regret that in the end the

deaths of the students had only made money for him. On May 15 of the

same year, police opened fire on students at Jackson State University in

Mississippi who were protesting against the American invasion of

Cambodia, killing two and wounding fourteen. And on June 10, after

months of rioting, police sent by governor Reagan brutally attacked

students at the University of California at Santa Barbara who were

demonstrating in the Perfect Park of Isla Vista against the imposition

of martial law in the area, which was a major hotspot of radicalism.

After serious fighting, hundreds were arrested. A formerly clean-cut,

preppy beach-culture band whose music was improved by drugs produced a

song based on “Riot in Cell Block #9” [a 1954 R&B number one hit song]

and called it “Student Demonstration Time”, dedicating the song to the

rebel students, with no repercussions: a whole year had already passed

since the riots at Santa Barbara, the song was not released as a single

and … the group that recorded the song was the Beach Boys, the group

that, it should be recalled, got its start with another remake in a

totally different sense than the original, when it transformed Chuck

Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” into the cloyingly sweet “Surfin’ USA”.

Show business and the record industry had boldly stolen a march on the

dissidents (the forces of law and order and hard drugs had, of course,

already cleared the way for its success). That same month, in June 1970,

the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival took place in Ohio, featuring such

cutting-edge bands as The Stooges and Grand Funk Railroad. In August

1970 there was an attempt to reprise the “magic” of Woodstock at Goose

Lake, Michigan, sponsored in part by the White Panthers and the STP

Coalition—Serve the People or Stop the Pigs, depending on who was

asked—that were working for the release of Sinclair and all other

political prisoners. The date chosen for the festival was not mere

coincidence; it was the 25^(th) anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima

and Nagasaki, that is, the ostensible idea of the festival was to

protest against nuclear war. But this message was nothing but a

decorative excuse. Both old and new groups performed at the concert, all

composed of white band members, among which we will mention in

particular, besides the militant bands from Detroit, Chicago and Ten

Years After, before a crowd of two hundred thousand people, most of whom

were stoned and provided few opportunities for action on the part of a

friendly police force. The presence of heroin was notorious; drugs like

heroin seemed to bring about the virtual unification of everything that

in reality was separated. Oddly enough, people smoking joints, which

were visible in abundance during the marijuana harvest, were not

bothered by the police. Even for the least perspicacious individuals,

this gave the event a bitter overtone of a circus environment, of a

ghetto, of some kind of set-up, which without the slightest doubt marked

the end of an era. Such festivals followed in rapid succession, in

Toronto, on the Isle of Wight, and elsewhere, without causing the least

concern among the forces of order. This was not because Power retreated

before a fighting force that was itself not particularly avid for a

fight, but rather because Power had modernized its tactics. For many

people, hallucinogens were the only way to turn their backs on the

values inculcated by the system, the road to the unity of the liberated

individual, conscious of his innermost being, with the cosmos, and so it

seemed at one time that the system was also aware of this, since it

punished the individual’s transgression with fury. From the moment that

the system itself transformed its values and adapted those of its

critics, however, the function of drugs also changed: they were part of

the mechanism of escape, and not only the opiates and the amphetamines,

but also the sacred plants and mushrooms of the Indians, responded to a

perverse desire for intoxication, not for consciousness, and were

therefore so many tools of re-adaptation. The call to “drop out” was an

invitation to turn one’s back on conventions and mores, leading to

passivity, rather than to the revolutionary transformation of society.

The venue of the outdoor festival, tolerant towards narcotics, served as

an escape valve, a ceremonial of docile indifference, a relaxing pause

between two moments of submission. On the one side the performer, on the

other the drugged audience, and between them the bouncers. The stoned

audience was limited to reproducing stereotyped patterns of virtual

rebelliousness, foreshadowing models of integration that would later be

implemented by the cunning merchants of culture.

Advanced industrial society began to practice a kind of laissez-faire

that it called tolerance, which was more suited to its interests. It was

the kind of repressive tolerance that favored the tyranny of the status

quo, since it corresponded to the necessary capitalist transition from

conservatism to permissiveness. Consumer society is not ascetic and

regulated, but hedonist and transgressive. With unusual haste, the

spectacular-market society finally adopted a lax and utilitarian

morality that was more in accord with its developmental needs and was no

longer scandalized by anything. It did not even respect the dead: the

corpses of Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim

Morrison were mercilessly transformed into mythic figures. Live fast,

die young and leave a beautiful poster. And the system that had absorbed

rock, transcendental meditation, psychoanalysis, sex and marijuana, did

not have any trouble at all putting up with the messages of

disillusionment and the histrionic and self-destructive behavior of the

new rockers immersed in a rude and noisy musical style. Songs like Iggy

Pop’s “T.V. Eye” and Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” no longer triggered

censorship. The system, up to a point, looked the other way. There is no

future, meaning no revolutionary future. If there were any events that

clearly revealed the true face of the concealed fascism presided over by

Nixon, they were the assassination of George Jackson, one of the

“Soledad Brothers”, at the hands of the prison guards at San Quentin on

August 21, 1971, and the massacre of rioting prisoners at the prison in

Attica, New York, ordered by governor Rockefeller a few weeks later. Bob

Dylan recorded two acoustic versions of a song entitled, “George

Jackson”, and released them on a single, but they were never included on

an LP. Tom Paxton called attention to the events at Attica with a ballad

in the finest tradition of folk music, “The Hostage”, and John Lennon

himself composed a catchy little tune preaching an idealistic and

outmoded pacifism for those who remained unconditionally faithful that

dogma. It might have been the case that this was no time for singing,

but with hundreds of militants turning to urban guerrilla warfare, it

certainly was no time for upbeat pep-talks urging people to “come

together, join the movement, take a stand for human rights” [“Attica

State”, 1972]. Dylan’s advice from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was

more appropriate: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the

wind blows.” And in fact, “Weathermen” was the name chosen by the

largest armed organization in America during the seventies.

The higher you go, the harder you fall. Like every epochal transition,

the early years of the seventies saw the most authentic rock bands reach

the peak of their creative powers during the worst years of the

counterrevolution, producing works that satisfied the tastes of the

moderately rebellious masses that comprised their fan base, before

deciding to form part of the “silent majority” of Nixon and Agnew. Many

of them refused to accept the role of idol which reflected the new

conformist values, so they had no other recourse than to break up (The

Beatles, The Doors) or become parodies of their former greatness (the

Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone). The Rolling Stones, after Exile

on Main Street, never stopped repeating themselves. Heroin, consumed by

the ton, did not help much in this regard. Heroin elbowed acid out of

circulation. There were some bands that gradually faded away, went into

decline or ran out of steam (The Band, The Byrds, The Kinks, The Who),

not to mention others that bequeathed to posterity a boring and

pretentious “opera rock”. Finally, there were groups that radically

changed their style; as in the case of the Jefferson Starship, the

shameful wreckage of the crash of the Airplane. On the other hand,

legitimate rock music, whose representatives include Captain Beefheart

(“Electricity”), Tom Petty, Lou Reed, Pattie Smith and the New York

Dolls, went into decline and gradually became depoliticized. In a

destructive, nihilist and angry context, where Chaos was the most

appealing goal, the very word, “hippie”, acquired connotations of

senility, idiocy and impotence. Beyond certain narrow circles of

resisters, rock had lost its aura and, whether it remained faithful to

its former commitments or yielded to escapism, was becoming predictable

and routine, ostentatious and theatrical; a decadent music performed by

narcissists for the entertainment of an onanistic youth that demanded

its dose of symphonic alienation, or indeed alienation of any other

kind. There was a total break with the blues, a loss of the connection

of rock music with its negro roots, and consequently a complete

dissipation of the rock n’ roll identity. The result was a certain kind

of optimistic, intellectualized music, a music that tranquilized and

relaxed the listener, the kind of music that exactly suited the new

order. The mass concert was revealed to be the ideal way to congregate

masses of young spectators prepared to rally around any progressive

stupidity. Then, noble causes took the stage (like the concert to raise

funds to help the massacred population of Bangladesh, organized by the

former Beatle, George Harrison), where they were transformed into so

many spectacles, allowing a passive audience to exhibit its hypocrisy

and its fake commitment for the modest price of a concert ticket. The

technological innovations of the seventies, such as samplers,

synthesizers, and drum machines, swallowed the guitar, the bass and the

drum kit. “Family Affair”, by Sly and the Family Stone, was the first

song to be made with these drum machines, which became very common a few

years later with the onset of disco. The new rock, moreover, was not so

much music as circus: it established a relation with its audience

mediated by the image and glamour. The rock star [vedette] relied on

hairstylists, make-up artists, costumers, canned gestures, and

television, more than on his or her talent. Separation is the rule in

the spectacle that is preserved in the holy communion with the image of

the “idol”, whether by way of staged sensationalism [“shock”: in English

in the original] or by getting high on drugs. At home, the promotional

music video acquired great importance; at live performances, the show

was revolutionized with all kinds of special effects, logos, light

shows, fireworks, fog machines, visual projections, cranes, catwalks,

platforms, choreography…. The “fan” became the perfect domesticated

animal. The deafening noise of the increasingly more powerful speakers

combined with the drugs, the pills and the mineral water to induce a

kind of autistic frenzy in the audience, a masturbatory form of

stupefaction. This self-induced masochistic frenzy became generalized

with the resurgence of discotheques, only now bigger and more

well-designed than their predecessors, which gave the coup de grace to

live music in pubs, theaters and music halls. A repetitive and simple

kind of music emerged that became enormously popular, dance music,

organized by a new master of ceremonies, the DJ. Lyrics and chords were

reduced to a minimum. The rhythm was simplified as much as possible and

replaced the melody, which degenerated into a monotonous drone. A new

audio device called the cassette tape promised to democratize the

recording industry by making it accessible to any group, but it did not

turn out that way because the function of pop music had changed. Now,

the least important factor in pop music was creativity; now pop just

filled the vacuum of a life that was subject to the imperatives of

consumption. The final result was always the same: conformism. In fact,

the cassette constituted just one more step towards enclosure in private

life and cocooning, bringing this kind of music where vinyl could not

go, especially to the automobile, the prosthesis of the modern alienated

individual and the symbol of his overwhelming powerlessness. Audiences

became fragmented, diversifying the markets according to the age group

and the type of consumer. It was the apotheosis of the hedonism and the

permissiveness of the commodity: of the “rave”, of fun, of cool poses,

of hip clothing. In short, the complete epiphany of the spectacle.

Television increasingly performed the function of promoting this whole

pile of musical trash. Authenticity came only at the cost of

marginalization. This was the power of mass society. No alternative with

pretensions of integrity could escape the narrow circle in which it was

inscribed, succumbing to repetition and triviality at the hands of its

followers, who were transformed into urban tribes. This is what happened

to heavy metal, reggae, and punk. Rock music no longer served as a

bulwark against modernized barbarism: it was a dead genre, a sterile

medium, a ghost, a relic, a fraud. It was the music of the other side.

Rock music used to exist because there were once many other interests at

play, born in the shadow of the industry of escapism. The revolution and

entertainment no longer walk hand in hand, the former having lost its

playful-popular dimension and the latter having lost its subversive

character. To be convinced of this you need only watch the incredibly

mind-numbingly silly and superficial movie, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.

The failures of the revolutionary movements of the recent past can be

more readily understood with reference to the regression that affected

rock music, which reflected the victory of spectacular culture and the

dissolution of the dangerous classes into masses of consumers. It is

true that all the basic elements of this transition were already present

in the sixties, but it was only in the subsequent decade that it

developed exponentially. Since then, many musical styles with better or

worse intentions, or with better or worse luck, have come and gone. None

have broken out of their particular ghettoes, because none were able to

express the universal hopes for freedom and self-realization like the

rock music of the sixties; none have taught us how to unlearn so much,

or to so effectively question the status quo, or spurred so much

protest. Rock caused two or three generations to stray from the beaten

path all over the world by serving as the vehicle for a vital rebellion

that was capable of leaving an indelible mark on the culture of a whole

epoch.