We Gotta Get Out of This Place

Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture

Lawrence Grossberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136639326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Bringing together cultural, political and economic analyses, Lawrence Grossberg offers an original and bold interpretation of the contemporary politics of both rock and popular culture.

A NOTHER BORING
DAY IN …
PARADISE:
A ROCK
FORMATION

5

ROCK CULTURES AND ROCK FORMATIONS

At the beginning of the 1980s, rock critic Simon Frith wrote: “The most disturbing thing … is how little the establishment as such acknowledges what is a kind of continuous guerilla warfare … Rock is the only medium that makes any sense of life—aesthetically or politically—at all.”¹ Ten years later, I am struck, not only by Frith's faith in rock, but also by his confidence in assuming a common understanding of what is meant by “rock.” After all, there is no essence to rock.

As a historical event, rock itself has a history which cannot be reduced to the history of its sonic register. Although an account of rock cannot ignore its musical effectivity, it is also the case that rock cannot be defined in musical terms. There are, for all practical purposes, no musical limits on what can or cannot be rock. Of course, particular fans may have their own sense of constraints on its musical possibilities, but there will always be other fans with different boundaries. What sounds like rock to some will not to others. There is nothing that cannot become a rock song or, perhaps more accurately, there is no sound that cannot become a part of rock. Its musical limits are defined, for particular audiences at particular times and places, by the alliances constructed between selected sounds, images, practices and fans.

Any description of rock must recognize that it is more than just a conjunction of music and lyrics, commodity production and consumption. The popularity and power of rock depend upon the fact that particular musical and verbal practices—often taken from other traditions and cultural forms—are always received as already having been inserted into a specific formation (and within the formation, a specific alliance). Particular musical and lyrical practices—which will be articulated differently in different alliances—are always located in a complex set of relations, not only to other musical practices but also to images of performers and fans, structures of social and economic relations, aesthetic conventions, styles of language, movement, appearance and dance, ideological commitments, and sometimes media representations of the formations and alliances themselves. In this sense, one might speak of a “rock culture,” recognizing of course that there are different—sympathetic, overlapping and antagonistic—articulations or alliances coexisting within this culture. Rock culture cannot be identified with any single alliance, for such an identification would merely normalize one alliance as the “proper” definition of rock. Descriptions of rock culture tend to focus on musical events and relations, and those practices and structures which can be directly correlated with the music itself (e.g., dance, fashion, etc.).

Such descriptions always involve isolating or decontextualizing musical practices, reproducing the structure of a communicative relation between an identifiable set of texts and audiences. Such descriptions are usually interested in commenting on the texts, practices, genres or trends within rock culture.² But if one begins to explore the articulation and deployment of these practices, it becomes obvious that rock culture is itself always articulated into relations that extend beyond even a broadly defined musical culture, into the even broader terrain of popular culture and media practices. Cultural studies has to locate rock culture in its articulations to and within the contexts of postwar popular culture. In this sense, one might speak of a “rock formation,” which is as much a formation of television, film, advertising, comics, etc. It is this rock formation which in fact has colonized significant spaces within the daily life of contemporary society. Its identity and power cannot be separated from people's relations to popular culture, from the fact that people “live in” popular culture. But of course, there are numerous formations of postwar popular culture, and numerous ways in which rock culture—or different alliances within it—are articulated to them. A full understanding of the rock formation would involve trying to describe the complex set of relations between the rock culture and different popular formations. I am concerned with what I take to be the most powerful articulation of the rock formation; I might even describe it as dominant, in the sense both that it has been the “mainstream” of rock culture and that it has become the “mainstream” of American popular culture. Two characteristics may help to establish its specificity. The first involves the place of rock culture and music within the formation. Rock culture does not serve the same functions nor hold the same positions within every formation of postwar popular culture. However, within this “dominant” rock formation, I believe rock's place is central in a number of different ways: it is literally at the center of the formation, defining the most commonly shared ground and the most heavily invested sites; it is actively involved in constructing the shape and densities of the formation; its mode of functioning, its effectivity, defines the principles by which the entire formation works. In the end, rock culture is a metonym for the rock formation.

The second characteristic of this specific formation is the articulation of a very powerful and immediate link—which was never necessary or guaranteed—between specific forms of popular music and youth culture. This goes beyond the common statement that “rock” was produced for a particular audience which was located within a self-consciously defined system of generational-social difference. It is of course true that rock culture was largely produced for and marketed to a youth audience, an audience whose identity as youth (and as a youth market) was constructed not only by the members of that audience, but also by the industry, and by other commercial and political institutions, as well as by a wide range of social discourses. In this sense, rock is perhaps the only musical culture in which the identity of its audience (perhaps even more than that of its producers) bleeds into the music. But this ignores a number of issues: first, the significance of youth remains unclear: what are the relations between youth as a chronological and generational marker, a measure of historical differences, and an affective state or attitude? Second, if rock is to be defined by its audience, isn't that audience always articulated in different ways, at different times and places, to structures of class, race, ethnic, gender and sexual differences?³

It is not merely the fact of its audience that defines the articulation of rock and youth cultures, for in this articulation, the interaction between economic, generational and musical structures becomes a new principle by which the social and cultural fields were restructured. This articulation inscribed a generational seam across the surface of daily life and ultimately (at least for a while) across the social formation itself. To describe a rock formation in these terms is to point to its specific conditions of possibility: economic, technological, sociological, cultural, political, ideological and experiential.

More accurately, this rock formation has to be thought of as a historical event which emerged under and in response to specific conditions. Its identity—which is constituted as much by the way it works as by any set of musical parameters—was enabled by a set of conditions which have been and are being dismantled and reshaped, partly as a result of its very success. These conditions, and the specific forms which rock took in response to them, have always been changing. Understanding how rock functions requires that it be continuously placed back into its context to ask what were its conditions of possibility and what were the conditions constantly constraining its possibilities. As its context has been significantly transformed over the past forty years, the conditions which have defined its specificity and its effectivity have themselves been rearticulated. As the structures of its determination have changed, the determined structure of the formation has changed as well.

The possibility of this articulation in the 1950s cannot be explained by merely summing the various (too numerous) elements of its context; there are no simple causal relations linking specific aspects of the context to particular characteristics of the rock formation. Instead, I will identify (in the following chapters) three interdependent vectors which, together, enabled the emergence of this particular formation and, at the same time, constrained its possibilities and effects: (1) the political compromises and contradictions which defined the horizons and grounds of society's sense of politics, as well as its political horizons; (2) the baby boom and its relation to the changing place of youth in postwar society; and (3) the contradiction between the dominant ideologies of the white middle and working classes, and the postwar appearance of a set of apocalyptic experiences and rhetorics describing the so-called “postmodernity” of contemporary life.⁴

6

ROCK, THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS AND EVERYDAY LIFE

The political possibilities of rock are not inscribed within its musical forms and social relationships. The politics of rock cannot be read off the surface of its texts, or from the economics of its production, or from the social positions of its fans. There is nothing intrinsic to its practices (including its place vis-à-vis the “mainstream”) that guarantees that it delivers its audience to a specific political position. This does not mean that rock, or specific practices, cannot be articulated to political positions and struggles. Particular practices may in fact aim to construct some articulations rather than others. But one cannot specify in advance what form such articulations will take. There certainly have been moments when, in different ways and for different reasons, particular sounds, practices or alliances were closely tied to specific ideological and political positions, sometimes even becoming explicit statements of resistance. These positions have been extremely diverse: restructuring the relations between good and bad taste, between pleasure and respectability, between public and private; reconstructing the lines of social differences—across class, gender, sexualities, age and race; constructing new forms of identity, without knowing whether they will be forbidden; offering new narratives of emotion; giving voice and legitimacy to silenced feelings and experiences; politicizing the body and the pleasures of the body; building new systems and languages of values, relations and activities; and even occasionally, but only rarely, taking explicitly political public positions.

In order to make sense of this, one has to take account of the fact that the rock formation emerged out of and was articulated into the particular social, economic and political context of postwar America. It was a time of apparent economic prosperity, and even the “discovery” of poverty and the declaration of a bureaucratic war against it in the 1960s did little to challenge the experiential optimism of the majority of the population. The economic optimism of this moment, which was lived out in the consumerism of the various fractions of the middle and working classes, was symbolized by the U.S.'s unchallenged economic leadership of the “free world” and, most controversially, by its commitment (e.g., in the Marshall Plan) to rebuild the economies, not only of its allies, but of its conquered enemies as well. But it was also lived in the optimism of daily life. As Time magazine reported in 1955:

The people of the U.S. had never been so prosperous… Never before had the breadwinner taken home so much money;… Not since the first delirious, mistaken weeks after V-J day had there been so much expectancy—with caution, this time—for peace. The fishing was good, too. In the gulf, off the coast of Louisiana, speckled trout were swarming in the bays and bayous, and tarpon appeared a full month earlier than usual. Said Bill Tugman, editor of the weekly Reedsport (Ore.) Port Umpqua Courier: “The salmon are running and the trout and striped bass, and they even say the shad feel like taking a fly this year. So let Moscow do its worst.”¹

This prosperity was real, especially for those located in the space between extreme wealth and poverty. Americans' personal income rose 293% between 1940 and 1955, and as if that wasn't enough to finance their consumerist desires, consumer debt rose 55% between 1952 and 1956. In 1950, there were 1.5 million televisions in households; by 1954, there were over 30 million. In 1954, the U.S., with 6% of the world's population, had 60% of the world's cars, 58% of the telephones and 45% of the radios.

It was, however, a radically unstable prosperity, built on a continued war economy (through Korea and Vietnam) which sustained high production at the cost of inflation and low investment, and the forced evacuation of women from the labor pool after the Second World War. (In fact, much of American postwar life has been based on sustaining the “strategic mobilization” of the war effort, a mobilization of both production and population.) And it was a radically inequitable prosperity, excluding large segments of the Black and working-class populations. This economic boom—partly real, partly artificially sustained and partly illusory—was predicated on the increasing conversion of the economy's productive apparatus to consumerist goals; at the same time, it had to continue sustaining the public cost of military production, rhetorically visible in the cold war but economically hidden. (In fact, it was Johnson's later decision to continue hiding the military costs of Vietnam by borrowing the necessary funds rather than raising taxes that began the current debt crisis.) Expanding the economy depended on realizing the “plan” that had driven much of U.S. capitalism through the century: namely, expanding the market for consumer goods. This meant, not only following Keynes to challenge the middle-class propensity to save, but also expanding the real base of a consumer market by increasing the number of people who had access to that market. It was the logical continuation of Henry Ford's recognition that he could make a greater profit if his workers could also be his consumers. But realizing this required that the competing interests of labor and capital be put aside in favor of a common effort; it required a certain “corporatist” compromise between capital, labor and the government.²

This compromise assumed that by linking increased wages to increased productivity, the cycle of productivity would expand and the rate of profit increase. Business and labor were united in a common economic struggle, with the state negotiating the limited power and benefits to be claimed by either side. But the project also required a real political (social-democratic) compromise, for the expanding market demanded that those who had traditionally been excluded from the mainstream labor force, especially Blacks, would now be integrated. Such integration into economic prosperity required the extension of political and civil liberties as well. Once again, the state became the agent of such changes: remember that it was a Republican president who first sent troops into the South to enforce the Supreme Court's 1954 antidiscrimination decision. Because the state seemed to be operating in everyone's best interest, it appeared to be the neutral guardian of a fair and equitable society. In reality, the state, while not simply controlled by capitalist interests, was still largely subordinated to those interests.

Perhaps even more importantly, this compromise formation—in which the state mediated between the competing but, it was now assumed, basically compatible interests of capital, labor and the underclasses—took on an explicitly ideological form: “American liberalism.” The ideological compromise implicit in liberalism can be seen at two levels. At the level of state politics, the two dominant political parties agreed not to disagree, at least over the terms of the economic strategies described above. It was truly the “end of ideology” insofar as the ideological differences between the political positions of the parties no longer carried any real consequences for the activities of the state. It was a moment so compelling that even those on the Left were often swept into its exhilarating rhetoric. For example, the increasing tendency among Left intellectuals throughout the 1950s and '60s to transform ideology into common sense or the lived experience of people helped to erase notions of ideology as explicit political positions, and thus to disarm questions of real political antagonisms.³ Ideology was transformed into the question of the existence and construction of consensus.

At the level of social politics, liberalism involved a complex solution to questions of the existence and significance of social differences.⁴ It entailed the construction of a deeply resonant, highly emotionally charged difference between democratic capitalism and the external threat of communism. Here was the real site of ideological difference, a difference that threatened America's existence, not only from the outside, but as a disease within the liberal soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theory, Politics and Passion
• Cultural Studies: Theory, Power and the Popular
• Another Boring Day in … Paradise: A Rock Formation
• “Where the Streets Have No Name”: Hegemony and Territorialization
• “Real Power Doesn't Make Any Noise”: Capitalism and the Left
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index