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Michael J. Kramer. The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 304 pp. $29.99 (Hardcover). Devon Powers. Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism. Amherst

2014; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpms.12106

1533-1598

John McMillian,

American Political and Social Dynamics

What was the first rock ’n’ roll song? Scholars and enthusiasts have identified dozens of worthy contenders, including “That's All Right, Mama,” (1946), “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” (1947) and “Rocket 88” (from 1951). Suffice it to say, the debate will never be settled. But to just ponder the question is to be reminded how quickly and substantially rock music penetrated the cultural mainstream. When rock was first getting going in the early ’50s, it was considered louche, disreputable, and exotic; by the late ’60s, albums by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones were ubiquitous on most college campuses. Moreover, many youths took this music incredibly seriously (far more so than today). They scrutinized rock for profound meanings and hidden insights. They got their style cues from rock ’n’ roll, and it shaped their ideas about sex, relationships, politics, and authority. Given all that, you might expect that rock history would have by now emerged as a major academic subfield, but in fact the topic doesn't get nearly enough scholarly attention. Two new intellectual histories attempt remedy the situation. Michael J. Kramer's Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford, 2013) and Devon Powers's Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (UMass, 2013) both address the era when rock exerted its greatest degree of social impact. These books can, at times, make for frustrating reading, but they also reward careful scrutiny. Kramer, who teaches history and American Studies at Northwestern University, cleverly juxtaposes the flourishing music scene in late ’60s San Francisco with the consumption of rock by American soldiers in Vietnam. The two environments were of course hugely dissimilar, but Kramer point out some surprising connections. Much of the Vietnam War was planned at the Presidio, a military base at the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, and many GI's decamped to Vietnam from the Bay Area. When they returned, the first place many of them liked to visit was Haight-Ashbury. Various hippie accouterments—posters, beads, and trinkets—could be found in both locales. Kramer is more interested, however, in the powerful symbolic connections between the two regions, which were manifest in an imagined countercultural community that he calls “the republic of rock.” By the late ’60s, its manifestations could be found in various spots across the globe, but it appeared in particularly vivid form in Northern California and Southeast Asia. As the youth culture around rock ’n’ roll became increasingly commodified, denizens of the San Francisco scene confronted the well-known paradoxes of hip capitalism. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, American military planners tried boosting troop morale (and gaining greater control over their soldiers) by allowing GI's access to countercultural sounds, and by tolerating amounts of nonconformist self-expression. Kramer calls this dynamic “hip militarism.” Uniting all of this—the comparisons between San Francisco and Vietnam, and between hip capitalism and hip militarism—is Kramer's core argument: Rock in the ‘60s, he says, was deeply connected to notions of cultural citizenship. In order to better understand the counterculture, we need to pay careful attention to the processes by which people bonded into groups, and the impact that those groupings had—on individuals, as well as upon the broader society. Just as black nationalists believed that African-Americans could unite over their shared heritage of oppression, rock aficionados bonded over their commonalities of outlook, taste, and behavior. Many of them also assumed (perhaps a bit pompously) that their values were far superior to those of the dominant culture. The Republic of Rock has a lot going for it: it's a painstakingly researched, scrupulously documented, and handsomely packaged book. And Kramer is an intrepid scholar, taking up topics that would not at first glance seem so enticing, but that end up paying big rewards. For instance, the book's third chapter concerns the controversy surrounding the planning of a music festival that never took place. San Francisco organizers hoped to celebrate their city's cultural renaissance by staging an inclusive, three-day celebration of the arts—a “Wild West Festival,” which would be reminiscent of Woodstock. Their plans unraveled, however, after the Mayor's Office insisted that the music portion of the festival (which of course was the main part, featuring the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, and others) would be ticketed (at $3 per day). To many of the Wild West's hippie participants, that was intolerable. They concluded that the festival “seemed intent on generating profits and acclaim for rock industry leaders rather than benefitting the larger cultural milieu in which rock music was so loved,” and so they pledged a boycott, and the entire event was scotched (96). The Republic of Rock shines the most, however, when Kramer turns his attention to the proto counterculture that developed among American soldiers in Indochina. Even many specialists may not be aware that in an effort to raise the spirits of American soldiers, the US military went so far as to organize soldiers into rock groups, which were then sent upon brief tours of Vietnam. It was an inspired idea, but Kramer speculates that over the long haul, the Army's forays into hip militarism proved counterproductive; rock's rebellious energies could be sublimated, but never completely squelched. Another intriguing chapter examines an unlikely South Vietnamese rock band, called “CBC.” (the name came from the Vietnamese phrase “Con Bà Cu,” which means “Mother's Children.”) Made up primarily of siblings, CBC specialized in playing faithful renditions of American rock songs while touting countercultural ideals. “From their place as a Vietnamese family band,” Kramer writes, the group “communicated the vision of a universal family” (210). American GI's could, both literally and figuratively, flip a switchbetween sanctioned broadcasts and sanctuaries of dissent. Whenthey did so they used rock to foster a counterpublic in the unlikely space of a war zone. But this counterpublic was not a coherent one. Rather, it was comprised of streaks, eddies, fissures and shards. It consisted of uneven accelerations and decelerations of engagement, sudden lines of inquiry and blurts of anger followed by periods of passivity, numbness and acquiescence. It was atmospheric, a lurking commons for civic inquiry rather than an open space for outright democratic deliberation” (151). The book likewise falls short conceptually. Kramer holds that rock helped youths to explore the meanings of citizenship, and he reiterates the point dozens of times. “Rock raised issues of citizenship up for scrutiny,” he says (11). It “pull[ed] participants toward deep inquiries into … citizenship” (64); it was used “to confront questions of citizenship,” (139); people “drew upon rock to ask what kind of … citizenship was possible,” (166); “performances of rock music offered a new mode of citizenship” (177); “rock delivered a heightened engagement with citizenship” (220), and so on. Unfortunately, his attempts to get anymore specific than this—that is, to explain, in practical, real-world language, how this dynamic played out—often fall flat. That may be because “citizenship” is the wrong metaphor for Kramer to be exploring here. To be a “citizen” is to be vested with certain rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Most people across the globe are citizens of one country or another by birthright. If a person wants to acquire citizenship elsewhere, the process is usually arduous; you have to collect a bunch of documents, prove your identity, be interviewed, take a test, and then finally declare an oath of loyalty. (By the same token, it's often difficult for a person to renounce their citizenship.) Needless to say, the counterculture was nothing like that. It's impossible to say how many of America's 75 million baby boomers ever flirted with hippiedom, but we know with hindsight that most counterculturalists were merely going through a phase.1 “The republic of rock” is a grand-sounding formulation, but what Kramer really seems to be talking about are countercultural communities (or perhaps “affiliations,” “tribes,” or “groups”). It's true that for many youths in the late ’60s, a predilection for Jimi Hendrix or the Jefferson Airplane could serve as an identify marker, or totem, through which a person could telegraph certain beliefs and attitudes. But it's not always clear what this has to do with citizenship. Writing the Record is the debut monograph by Devon Powers, a former pop critic who is now an assistant professor of culture and communication at Drexel University. Powers cleverly situates the advent of rock criticism within the mid-twentieth century's mass culture debates. Since at least the ’80s, numerous prominent scholars, including Richard Posner, Morris Dickstein, and Russell Jacoby, have sounded alarms about the diminishing role of public intellectuals in American life. They've alleged that cultural criticism enjoyed a golden age pre-World War II, when iconoclasts like Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson exerted their influence. Although these men often wrote for “little magazines,” they were the nucleus of a broader community, and their prestige was enhanced by the fact that they operated independently, without patrons or university appointments. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, cultural criticism is said to have fallen into decline, partly because it was “professionalized” (as critics ensconced themselves in university settings, and began addressing fellow academics), and partly because of the rise of mass culture (especially television), which diminished the public's appetite for thoughtful commentary on politics, society, and aesthetics. But Powers shows that these complaints rest uneasily alongside the trenchant rock criticism that emerged from the Village Voice in the late ’60s and early ’70s. She focuses on Richard Goldstein, who was one of the world's first serious pop critics, and on, Robert Christgau, who cheekily anointed himself the “Dean of American Rock Critics.” Goldstein and Christgau were both energetic writers, with big reputations, and they inspired a great many imitators. And although other publications began taking rock music seriously in this period—Crawdaddy!, Creem, Rolling Stone, and numerous underground newspapers come immediately to mind—the Village Voice occupied a unique niche. Although it was always a commercially oriented paper, it had bohemian origins in New York City's Greenwich Village, and by the mid-'60s it circulated nationally, and enjoyed considerable leftwing clout. Meanwhile, the paper's editors granted its writers a tremendous amount of leeway to follow their passions. In an era when most newspapers were starchy and professional, the Voice was freewheeling and audacious. Goldstein came to the Voice in 1966, at age twenty-two – the same year that he published his first book, 1 in 7 (about the burgeoning drug culture on American campuses), and earned a graduate degree (from Columbia University's School of Journalism). In addition to being precocious, Goldstein was extraordinarily effusive about the emerging counterculture. He regarded popular music with the same type of reverence that critics had traditionally reserved for high art, and he sought to demolish longstanding cultural hierarchies. “[P]arochial critics face a practically insurmountable obstacle in their unwillingness to accept the fact that a poet can work in a medium such as rock and roll—that this is an age of electronic troubadours,” he wrote (67). Goldstein also believed that as a young writer, he enjoyed a kind of epistemological privilege. His “generational identity,” Powers writes, “became his best asset for establishing authority and credibility. It was also the prism through which new standards of evaluation would be refracted; rather than banishing standards altogether, youth would be the arbiters of a new sensibility” (67). In these ways, Powers says, Goldstein's column was itself a form of cultural politics. It was not long, however, before Goldstein's columns took on a despairing tone. As rock's promotional apparatus grew more sophisticated, he observed that it was becoming harder to distinguish between “authentic” cultural productions, and phony ones. Goldstein worried whether the media culture (which he was a part of) was sullying the rock community (which he cherished). He lamented reports comparing San Francisco's music scene to the creative ferment that had emanated out of Liverpool just a few years earlier, and he was annoyed by all the hoopla surrounding the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's album, which he found gimmicky and self-indulgent. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that the radical promises of the ‘60s would go unfulfilled. When rock lost its connection to a rising social movement, Goldstein lost interest in writing about rock. His influential successor, Robert Christgau, had greater stamina; save for one two-year hiatus, his Voice columns ran from 1970 to 2006, and he was also the editor of the paper's music page. Despite being married to the influential feminist critic Ellen Willis (who is also discussed in this book), Goldstein's writing only rarely addressed gender politics. It was not possible, however, for pop critics to disregard the thorny racial issues that surfaced in popular music in the late ’60s and early ’70s. A few black artists from the era had crossover appeal; white hippies were particularly fond of Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin. But other African-Americans seemed bent on addressing a specifically black audience; they weren't interested in white approval. Meanwhile, Black Power sensibilities held that blacks and white cultural experiences were so far removed from each other that whites were unequipped to critique black cultural productions. When it came to discussing black music, many white writers felt, and were made to feel, intimidated. As the audience for rock grew, it also became more diverse, and fragmented. The role of critics was enhanced as a result, but their work became more difficult. They “had to make decisions about how, and if, to cover music that was not expressly for themselves, and on what level to defend or chastise the musical miscegenation of others,” Powers writes (115). Whether he thought it through or not, Christgau responded in the postmodern fashion. He trumpeted his idiosyncratic subjectivity, and reveled in his candid self-awareness. “Christgau knew he was a critic,” Powers says, “and he wanted you to know that he knew it too,” (117). Many others have followed his lead. Writing the Record pulses with a keen intelligence, but at times it can seem unwieldy. Some readers might have preferred a more direct style, without so many qualifications, digressions, and precursory remarks. By narrowing her focus to the Voice (as opposed to writing about rock criticism more broadly), and by addressing herself to a professional audience, Powers may have missed an opportunity to amplify her argument. That's a pity, because her claims are important. It wasn't so long ago that rock criticism didn't even exist.2 Before long, however, smart young rock enthusiasts were reaching huge audiences. They helped to dignify mass culture, and they carved an important, but overlooked, niche in American intellectual life. I do not believe that point has quite been made before. If I may channel Robert Christgau, and cop to my own biases for a moment: I'd like to see the academic study of rock ’n’ roll really take off. And why shouldn't it? Rock has been a consequential force in millions of lives; it's had a broad and substantial impact upon art, fashion, politics, commerce, and social attitudes. We all know this. Nevertheless, most university curricula tread lightly over the topic. That may be because too many high-ranking academics—the ones who make hiring and tenure decisions, and who dole out grants, fellowships, and prizes—consider rock history a bit soft, or frivolous, compared to more traditional subfields. And I fear that in response, rock writers may feel compelled to present their work in a high-flown style. (Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the situation?) Either way, it can be frustrating when rock ’n’ roll—one of the most popular and accessible of art forms—is discussed with some of the tedious prose mannerisms that plague cultural studies. The Republic of Rock and Writing the Record are both edifying and valuable books, but I wish they'd been pitched to a bigger audience.