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Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America by Nicholas Tochka (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a928786

1534-150X

Brian F. Wright,

Music History and Culture

Reviewed by: Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America by Nicholas Tochka Brian F. Wright Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America. By Nicholas Tochka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. [xiv, 228 p. ISBN 9780197566510 (hardcover), $29.95; also available as ebook (ISBN and price vary).] Illustrations, bibliography, index. At the concert celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 30 October 2009, U2's Bono inserted a short sermon into his band's set: Thinking in this moment about all the pilgrims, all the pioneers that got us all here. The saints and the heretics, the poets and the punks that now make up the Hall of Fame. It's a dangerous thing, this business of building idols, but at least rock 'n' roll is not, at its best, about worshipping sacred cows. It's about the thousands of voices gathered in one great unwashed congregation, like tonight. For a lot of us here, rock 'n' roll just means just one word: liberation—political, sexual, spiritual— liberation. (https://www.u2songs.com/songs/i_still_havent_found_what_im_looking_for_live_nyc_rr_hall_of_fame_concerts_ [accessed 11 March 2024]) As the wild cheers from the assembled crowd attest, this idea—that rock music could be a gateway to personal freedom—was, by then, accepted wisdom for many rock fans. Yet, this was not how the music was initially perceived, either by its fans or its detractors. Instead, as Nicholas Tochka argues in his new book, Rocking in the Free World, this association between rock and personal freedom was the end result of a twisting, decades-long political discourse. In his prologue, Tochka articulates the two questions guiding his project: "What postwar conditions—cultural and demographic, technological and ideological—enabled musicians and listeners to imaginatively link rock music to certain kinds of liberal democratic values between the 1950s and the 1980s? And what have been the consequences, both at home and abroad, of telling these stories?" (p. 6). He then seeks to answer these questions by [End Page 698] exploring seven "key moments" (p. 5) in rock history. In chapter 1, Tochka contrasts the public's fear that rock 'n' roll would turn young fans into juvenile delinquents with those fans' embrace of the music as an escape from the political realities of the Cold War. In chapter 2, he then discusses rock 'n' roll's early reception abroad and how the music became tied to US foreign policy and its mission to spread liberal democracy globally. In chapter 3, Tochka traces how, in the early 1960s, "rock 'n' roll" transitioned into "rock," and with that, came to be "lauded as a serious expressive means for exploring the human condition" (p. 55). Expanding on this theme, in chapters 4 and 5, respectively, he chronicles how the counterculture of the late 1960s embraced rock music in its broader quest to "[live] life more fully, more authentically" (p. 105) and how the personal lyrics of singer–songwriters in the early 1970s were understood as expressing "meaningful political truths" (p. 108). In chapter 6, Tochka focuses on rock's canonization in the 1970s and the conflicting political viewpoints of the era's professional rock critics and punk musicians. Lastly, in chapter 7, he moves the story into the 1980s, situating the rise of Reagan-era conservatism as the backdrop to rock musicians' efforts to present their music as a globally significant artform, one that could be a gateway for listeners to achieve their own personal freedom. In Rocking in the Free World, Tochka traverses multiple, large-scale shifts in US political history and does an impressive job of highlighting how various constituent groups conscripted rock music into their political and cultural projects. As such, his in-depth archival research is undoubtedly the book's standout feature. For each chapter, he has unearthed a wealth of primary sources—including firsthand accounts from contemporary critics, journalists, politicians, sociologists, psychologists, and public moralists—and he effectively uses them to demonstrate how the rhetoric surrounding rock evolved from the 1950s onward. By bringing to light the underlying political...