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"Tell Tchaikovsky the News": Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and the Emergence of Rock 'N' Roll

2002; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 22; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1519942

1946-1615

Bruce Tucker,

American Political and Social Dynamics

The contemporary notion of the postmodern, developed in the early 1970s and being argued almost to meaninglessness today, arose in the context of pop in the broadest sense of the term (Huyssen 1984). In its most significant manifestations, postmodernism has challenged the official culture of modernism and its underlying aesthetic categories and assumptions. One of the original inspirations for that challenge came from early rock 'n' roll performers, most notably Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, all of whom first appeared when modernism, having lost its original adversarial character, had become the basis of mainstream cultural authority in America. I want to argue that postmodernism, though a problematical concept, gives us a way of better understanding those early musicians and that those early musicians are our culture's proto-postmodernists. This will require a brief excursion into the history of modernism and its place in postwar America, a definition of the highly controversial notion of the postmodern, and a discussion of each of these early rock 'n' rollers in terms of one aspect of their postmodernism-their trafficking in significations of the Other and of marginality. As these terms suggest, I will be calling on a number of poststructuralist critical discourses to help unfold the postmodernist nature of some early rock 'n' roll, though I do not for a moment assume that poststructuralism and postmodernism are synonymous, that the former is merely the critical voice of the artistic practices of the latter. Finally, I will suggest some general ways in which a rereading of early rock 'n' roll in light of postmodernism may help unsnarl some of the conceptual tanglesthemselves rooted in modernist assumptions-that impede black music research.