Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism Mickey Vallee Published Online: 31 Jul 2014

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‘More than a feeling’: Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism

Mickey Vallee

Abstract This essay demonstrates how Classic Rock is a master signifier for the fantasy of the neoliberal autonomy of individualism. The argument presented is that Classic Rock is conducive with the seven cornerstones of Lacanian fantasy as postulated by Slavoj Zˇ izˇek (schema of wholeness, occlusion of antagonism, intersubjectivity, immersion in Law, gaze of the Other, inherent transgression, and the empty gesture), as coordinated by a select multitude of its subgenres that stand in as objects of desire for the Master Signifier of ‘Classic Rock’: soft rock, hard rock, glam rock, art rock, and punk rock. By analysing Classic Rock through the trope of the Master Signifier, the ideological coordinates of neoliberal fantasy could potentially weaken the transparency of free trade, realising a possibility of radical autonomy that denies the injunction to desire. This essay thus contributes to our understanding of the political significance of Classic Rock.

Introduction: The unconscious fantasy of classic rock The standardized products of today’s variety shows, hit parades, and show business are pathetic and prophetic caricatures of future forms of the repressive channelling of desire. (Attali 1985: 31)

With its emphasis on romantic fantasies of individualism, ‘Classic Rock’ pro- vides an ideological anticipation for the neoliberal policies and positions that dominated Western capitalist society in the last quarter of the 20th century. Classic Rock describes a musical genre that prominently featured album- oriented rock from the 1960s into the 1980s, with particular emphasis on music from the 1970s. Much Classic Rock can be identiﬁed in its ideal type by several stylistic features: ensembles of guitars, electric bass, drums, vocals

Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 (sometimes keyboards); romanticist and confessional lyrics obsessed with various narratives regarding individual freedom; anthemic and highly mem- orable choruses including epic dramatic musical climaxes; and, with some exceptions, a predominantly white masculine heterosexual perspective on the topic of interpersonal relationships and the sovereignty of the individual. Classic Rock is not necessarily a coherent entity, but a master signifier: a signifier of identity, but one that can only be identified with by way of its symptoms. Indeed, while in its historical context, Stevie Wonder and the Sex Pistols

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could hardly be aligned with the Album-Oriented Rock adopted by mainstream industry, for ideological reasons they are aligned with a new discourse of individualistic emancipation under a heterogeneous veil. Adorno may have called this the ongoing ‘pseudo-individuality’ or ‘interchangeability’ of the popular music culture industry: a mode of thinking that subsequent cultural studies and popular music studies scholars charged with hard determinism. The Zˇ izˇekian perspective I adopt here is conducive with Adorno’s original treatise, On Popular Music, yet is subtler by using the tropes of fantasy and sinthome in place of pseudo-individualism. Although Classic Rock connotes a timeless designation, its thematic of autonomous freedom is a political expression limited by ties to a set of historical developments in recording technology, political movements, and social (in)equality. But the freedom that Classic Rock espouses, though proclaimed as universal, is stained with questions regarding its universality. In relation to technological development, recording technology and overdubbing had become such standard practice in the late 1960s that rock musicians were able to elevate sound to the status of a sublime aesthetic in the 1970s. The introduction of the LP record likewise allowed for more expansive (read: expensive) work, resulting in musicians who increasingly referred to themselves as artistic visionaries, breaching the boundaries of the pop mentality regime – though it was an autonomy afforded by the far reaching and most profitable revenue generating decade for the music industry in the 20th century. These technological parameters combined with the socially progressive attitudes towards sexuality and individual freedom constituted a genre of music that was a particularly escapist philosophy, one that was particular to a set of emer- ging ethics that would eventually lay the foundations for neoliberal ideologies of self-determination. While the ideological edifice of such music has been handled by a variety of scholars, no such systematic criticism has yet been operationalised at the level specific to the decade that preceded what we know now as the fantasy of neoliberal freedom. My objective in this article is to identify new diagnostic targets for Classic Rock by analysing various texts using Zˇ izˇek’s concept of fantasy, a concept with which the thematic material of Classic Rock is strikingly aligned: the protagonist is liberated through the sacrifice of his interpersonal relations by telling the truth in an act of faith to the self. In Lacanian fantasy, one searches relentlessly for self-gratification, achieves it momentarily, yet is returned to the Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 same place where one initially wanted more ...‘more than a feeling’ (to quote Boston’s rock anthem). Classic Rock, in its relentless repetition of fantasy, enforces a feedback loop upon the listening subject that entraps him in the eternal return of always-wanting-more (or, always in pursuit of it). In this essay, I briefly examine various subgenres of Classic Rock as positions of neoliberal ideology in the autonomous subject, the conquering subject, and the spectacular subject, all of whom are guided through their own personal politics by the market forces of the post-counterculture music industry. The 1970s music industry introduced a novel aesthetic framework within which musicians could dwell in the time and space necessary to accommodate forms of reflective expression (Walser 1993). The studio was less a mode of capturing a live event than an instrument of sonic manipulation; transductions were stored for later manoeuvring and sculpting (Hodgson 2010). And if the Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 3

studio could be realised as the space of inner exploration, aligned with the psychic realignments that were so central to the counterculture of the 1960s, the festival became its radical opposite: a space where the social experimentation of communal living could couple with the anarchic space of psychic self-regulation, where the politics of inward self-formation could be found within everyday interaction (Echard 2011). The 1970s music industry fully endorsed the rebellious nature of rock, whereas in the 1950s rebellious music constituted an anti-conservative backlash and, in the 1960s, a countercultural war of position (Donnelly 2005). In the 1970s, the music industry as a whole profited by trusting the profanity that would sell, anticipating a minor moral backlash from conservative and religious groups, and benefiting from the unintended publicity that moral panics were known for producing. Grossing $2 billion per year, earning more than the film and sports industries combined, the music industry in the 1970s was the decade of the rock music spectacular (Garofalo and Bowman 2011). A musician could dwell in a studio stacked with the most expensive equipment, on some occasions performing every instrument themselves by dubbing and overdubbing, which implied that one could play with the sound of oneself playing – indeed the eventual listener was a listener listening to listeners being listened to. A culture of deep listening emerged alongside the recordists who laboured over the details of production in the studio. The term production was central and the studio was heralded as the beacon of creative music making, though in the process such a beacon was only accessible to those who had the initiative and the investment power to convince record companies to front the money for production (Garofalo and Bowman 2011). The countercultural movement may have tried to circumvent the monetary system, but Classic Rock rose above it, proclaiming a maturity that annihilated any of the elementary discourses regarding socialism that rebellious music of the 1960s possibly proposed. While the themes of Classic Rock tend to challenge the listener to seek out individual emancipation from arbitrary social contracts, there is nothing overtly subversive or anti-establishment about the genre. The results of my research provide further insights not only into the unconscious structures of fantasy through music, but into the specific fantasies of autonomous individualism that laid the foundations for particular neoliberal ideologies that continue to grip the contemporary global imagination. A crucial point Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 should be made here: the exceptions to this reside in the fact that I am pre- senting a theory of neoliberalisation through popular music in its private dimension of human subjectivity; the socially sanctioned spaces of disco bars, punk clubs, stadium events, street parties, and countless other social spaces within which musical activities occur lie outside of the purview of my argument for the neoliberalisation of musical subjectivity. Since the 1970s marked the most financially active decade of the music industry, it was obviously a more complicated tapestry than I’m allowing for here. My argument is specific, but the implications are broad: the economic climate of the 1970s precipitated a total alignment of musical consciousness that precipitated neoliberal values that would be heard in the digitised music of the 1980s. 4 Mickey Vallee

No alternative: The ideology of neoliberalism At its most basic, neoliberalism was an economic doctrine adopted in Western capitalist nations in the 1970s that called for limited state intervention in economic infrastructure (MacEwan 1999). Essentially overthrowing Keynesian economics, which beheld an economic principle of maintaining high employ- ment rates through state economic planning (Brenner 2003), the market-driven philosophy of neoliberalism espoused that only market specialists had the right to determine what was fair on the market (Bakan and MacDonald 2002). Fueled mainly by Friedrich von Hayek’s economic theory that markets must be privatised to function efficiently, the government was considered meddling, unions were seen as obstacles, and workers were considered flexible expenditures (Brunelle 2007: 18–19). In place of state regulations, sovereign bodies were created to regulate international finance and trade: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Fostering and fostered by competition, a neoliberal state required complicit consumers who perceive an ethical value in acts of consumption. Neoliberalism entails a widespread adoption of the ethical principles that are built upon the foundation of individual freedom (Harvey 2009). Individual freedom in Western North American discourse characterised the fear of state governance imposed by repeated restrictions on the Keynesian state, whose principles of social welfare and job security were perceived as a structure that weakened its citizens by treating them as dependents (Clarke and Newman 1997). The successful stimulus of the Chilean economy after 1973 became the benchmark for culture free of state intervention and one guided by the market as conceived by the Chicago School of neoliberal economic reform (Budds 2013), which is now the hermeneutic complex within which contemporary justification of capitalism is fully absorbed. Neoliberal ideology effectively won by using Chile’s economic stimulus as evidence that global investment was a freedom deserved to those seeking emancipation from state intervention. The restoration of upper-class power was crucial (Silva 2008). If neoliberal doctrines were enforced by the military in Argentina and Chile, in Britain and North America it was spread with far more ideological state apparatuses (Wright 2007). The Business Round Table, established in 1971, was mandated to infuse the good of business back into politics.

Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 During the 1973–1975 recession, for instance, monetary discipline was introduced that diminished the availability of public service and saw union dues invested in City Bonds (Harvey 2007). The ﬁnancial fastening meant that cities had to rely on new means of infusion in order to survive. Cities literally had no alternative but to abide by the free hand of the market; New York City was hit particularly hard. The rhetoric soon became entirely second nature: investment and trade could resuscitate a city (Harvey 2007). Critiques of neoliberalism abound, but it remains difﬁcult to assess any sort of universal character the condition bestows. David Harvey’s dominance in neoliberal critique is attributed to his short and accessible work on how the free market came to displace an economy determined by the state (Harvey 2005). His econocentric model of neoliberal critique focuses squarely on the need for change at the economic base. But since neoliberalism operates Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 5

ideologically at the level of value for the population, and since one of the neoliberal victories was the dismantling of the working class, what is lacking in Harvey’s critique is an analytic means of understanding how exactly subjects become aligned with principles of economic value, ideological principles that contribute to the injunction to consume in excess. This is why Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics poses a thoughtful extension. Before it became the dominant ideology that Harvey would later observe as the hegemonic ubiquity of contemporary politics, Foucault’s analysis is ben- eﬁcial not because his system allows for alternative strategies of resistance, but because these strategies mark the central ideological components of neoliberalism (Lemke 2001). The criterion for neoliberal governance is a limitless and far reaching power that constitutes a body of knowledge whose ideological schema informs its subjects that there is no alternative to the current system. The system as limitless resists and combats notions of totalism, so tota- listic analysis works against neoliberal ideology in that it feeds off the collo- quial fear of totalitarianism – the base is the universal condition of freedom, neoliberals might say (Friedrich 1955). That’s why the Foucaultian approach asks that resistance occurs within and not against the auspices of power. Although individuals are the direct line of conduct, their conduct’s operatives are in the service of producing models of conduct for others. If conduct is resistant to geneaological manifestations of power (school, church, culture, art), then conduct isn’t simply interpersonal but in the service of critique. Micro-struggles contain within them every thread of a shared connection with other struggles in other institutions (Lemke 2001). Resonant with Fou- cault’s famous maxim, that the body is the prisoner of the soul (Foucault 1990), the spirit is that which maintains the bridge between truth and subject in power. There is thus a spiritual if not a psychic domain to governmentality, which bridges the question of the divide that Foucault asks regarding the schematic of liberalism:

The idea of society enables a technology of government to be devel- oped based on the principle that it itself is already ‘too much,’ ‘in excess’ – or at least that it is added on as a supplement which can and must always be questioned as to its necessity and its usefulness. Instead of making the distinction between state and civil society into a historical universal that allows us to examine all the concrete systems, Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 we can try to see it as a form of schematization characteristic of a particular technology of government. (2010: 75)

The educational tendency of contemporary governmentality requires, in Lacanian terms, the Imaginary positioning of the subject; the conduct of conduct refers to technologies of self-control that serve as examples of inner regulation – bodies, then, are the bond through which the conscience collective is realised as an educative tendency. This is what lends credibility to the hypothesis that genealogical forms of enjoyment are the domain through which subjects become aware of the limitations of normality (Kurdys 2011). Although the tendency might be to view the rationalising agents of governance as producing subjects who are self-aware, the neoliberal paradigm asks that we consider the range of means by which a subject transcends said 6 Mickey Vallee

rational boundaries. What marks the surplus of the neoliberal subject is how they are the exception to the norm. Identiﬁcation with the Other positions the subject as the object of desire, yet neoliberal subjectivity is free within the domain that it acts out the process by which the subject discovers the answer to the question: ‘What do you want of me?’

The unconscious protagonist: Classic Rock’s neoliberal schemata In the context of music sociology, it’s a rarity to encounter the notion of fantasy, despite the fact that Classic Rock fits the criteria as little more than pure ideal- ism, the spectacle of transcendence, and the victory of the protagonist. It is less a concern of psychoanalysis to engage with social reality than it is to interrogate the desires and wishes coordinated by and through unconscious processes. For Lacan, fantasy marks the imaginary space wherein which the subject is informed of how their desire could be fulfilled as an imagined scene wherein which the dreamer (the subject) is the protagonist. Though they are limited in form, fantasies are endless in their content to accommodate the subject’s move from seemingly different to different positions in life in terms of (1) material reality, (2) the psychological reality of what is present to consciousness, and (3) the psychic reality of the unconscious wish (Lacan 1966). It is this latter territory that demarcates the fantasy. Freud (1987) had placed fantasy as a central preoccupation with sexuality. In recognising that some of his patients suffered from traumatic memories of events that had not happened, he posited that their memories were, although fantasy, no less severe than if the events had literally taken place. In this strictly Freudian sense, a fantasy stands in opposition to reality. But this offers us our first insight into the relations between fantasy and reality: reality is a discur- sive construct not an objective given. Fantasy plays a role in how one remem- bers the past and how memory is woven through unconscious processes. There are seven elements to fantasy, so says Zˇ izˇek (1997): its transcendental schematism, its intersubjective character, its narrative occlusion of antagonism, the fall into Law, its staging for the Other’s gaze, the inherent transgression, and the empty gesture. While fantasy is bound by these elements, by no means does each self-governing practice espouse them together at once. What follows is an explanation of the seven cornerstones of fantasy with reference to Lacan’s registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 Imaginary constitutes the realm of psychic wholeness, where the subject is confronted with mirror reflections of their ideal wholeness by way of a series of structurally homologous objects in the Symbolic (2006). The Symbolic is constituted of social institutions (the material world, socio-cultural processes, and signifying practices), and comes to be known as a world by way of the Imaginary’s projection into it (Lacan and Granoff 2003). Because this Imaginary projection is based on a misrecognition of wholeness and self- perfection, it is fragile and susceptible to traumatic ruptures by the unconscious category of the Real. Part of the Imaginary task (some say it is its sole task) is to prevent the Real from rupturing the order of the Symbolic. So the Imaginary constructs fantasy that allows only a semblance of the Real to pene- trate the Symbolic, thus in the face of threat sending the subject back into the innocuous retreat of Imaginary projections (Lacan 2011). Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 7

Briefly, so as to not let theory overshadow the actual workings of the 1970s music industry, my argument unfolds as such: the Classic Rock fantasy was facilitated by its symbolic economy of introspective and intersubjective politics. This turn towards the self relinquished social antagonisms of race and gender that were otherwise determinants of Rock‘n’Roll, thus giving a virtual stage to the self that allowed it to multiply in a variety of identity con- flicts, a confusing complex of identity staging that Punk Rock would eventually pose as a falsity in the most defiant blockage of the fantasy of desire in San Francisco in 1978.

Transcendental schematism and the reification of rock If the imagination of the 1960s counterculture presupposed an infusion of drug ingestion, free love, and communal approaches to work and leisure, this mix discharged horribly in such occasions as the famous Altamont Speedway concert, the substance-related deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, and the general malaise experienced by a generation whose opti- mism had gone, for the most part, unrealised. The 1970s Classic Rock schematic conditions a certain aesthetic framework that calls less for radical change than for introspective understanding – the symbolic order of Rock Music (its general modes of private and public consumption) evolved in a direction coterminous with developments in sound recording and dissemina- tion technologies, but the imaginary position of the new 1970s Classic Rock was acutely antithetic to its predecessors. Transcendental Schematism is a component of the fantasy that accounts for the manner in which a subject is inserted as an imaginary fixture in the symbolic order. It allows us access into the historical specificity of Classic Rock. Zˇ izˇek adopts from Immanuel Kant the function of the schema (or Des- cartes’ pineal gland), a coordination system for a subject inserted into the Sym- bolic order by way of Imaginary projections (1997: 7–8). The function of the Imaginary projection is to maintain the unity of elements within the Symbolic; by contrast, the function of the Lacanian Real is to disrupt the unity that the Imaginary projects onto the Symbolic. What fantasy does is protect the projection of the Imaginary in the Symbolic (an externalisation) by way of a fantasy that endows certain objects in the Symbolic with clairvoyance – it is imaginary identification with objects in the symbolic that sustain the subject’s fantasy of Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 ontological unity. Fantasy informs the subject of how to navigate the symbolic in such a way that still serves its needs. Transcendental schematism therefore does not connote a domain of thought as much as it does a series of actions the subject must absorb in order to effectively navigate the Symbolic. The first component of the Classic Rock Fantasy is in regards to its coordination of the culturally heightened and enlightened individual. This first component is signified by the shape of Rock Music as a whole in the 1970s as it absorbed leftist politics into the most saleable of commodities: Recall Colum- bia’s inaugural 1968 catalogue advertisement of The Man Can’t Bust Our Music, which depicts a group of rebellious youth held in a detention cell with protest signs scattered at their feet; Rolling Stone Magazine was started that same year by Jann Wenner in a coup to run the journal as a means of building a good business. The major labels, it will be remembered, solicited their products 8 Mickey Vallee

on the predilection that rebellious music can and will make more capital than that which remains within the boundaries of normalcy (Garofalo and Bowman 2011). It is a lesson the music industry learned when Rock‘n’Roll began to surpass the sales of otherwise mainstream Tin Pan Alley music in the 1950s. Rebellious music exchanges faster because the target demographic tend to have more spending power and are accustomed to viewing the parent generation with a certain degree of hostility. Thus, what was rebellious, outsider music from the 1950s on had, by the 1970s, completed its destination toward reiﬁcation, where individuals would relate to one another as things in a unique intersubjectiﬁcation.

Intersubjectivity and the confessional singer-songwriter In Zˇ izˇek’s paradigm for fantasy, intersubjectivity refers to the relation between the subject and the Other whose desire the subject is supposed to serve (1997: 8–10). By consuming oneself in the object of desire, one positions oneself in the prophylaxis of the Other’s approving gaze. According to Zˇ izˇek, intersubjectivity is not merely the space of interrogation between two unknowns, nor is it the notion that somehow the desire belonging to the Other of the subject can be uncovered or understood at any distance facilitated by the merging of subjects. Soft rock (or singer-songwriter) represents the introspective reflection that utilises such an intersubjective coordination, as the songwriters of previous decades emerged from behind their writing desks and pianos to take the spot- light in an alignment with their own words and music, assuming an intimate confessional quality through low fidelity and spontaneous recording techniques that revealed tracks as essentially honest and authentic. The feminist maxim, “The personal is political”, gained momentum in the mid- to late 1960s and by the 1970s was on the front line of every identity issue (Whiteley 2000). For instance, when Joni Mitchell sings of clouds, love, and life in ‘Both Sides Now’, a series of objects move from concrete to abstract, each confronted as one in a series of Symbolic unity, confounded by some sort of rupture in their coherence, then reassembled to become more ambiguous and complex; the process is ultimately reflective upon her own self-illusions and further self-knowledge. James Taylor’s ‘Fire and Rain’ was a polysemic text inter- twined with Taylor’s personal identity: his reflection on his time in mental institutions as well as his friend’s suicide and the breakup of his musical Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 group, Flying Machine (White 2005). Not only were Paul Simon’s lyrics prag- matic but were outright rational about the solution to ending a relationship: ‘50 Ways to Leave a Lover’ (Kaminsky 1992). Vulnerability is thus no stranger to pragmatism. Such confessions were inspiration enough for rock critic Lester Bangs to write: ‘DECIDE whether you want to jump and caper with music that’s alive or molder in the Dostoyevskian hovels of dead bardic auteur crap picking nits out of its navel and so sickly that to see it shake its ass would be a hilarious horror indeed’ (1971: 77). While intersubjectivity relates partially, in a phenomenological status, to that which gives the subject its struggle for recognition (akin to the Lacanian mirror phase, where the object becomes a site that gives the subject its legiti- mate means of struggle), it is, in a much more sophisticated sense, that the object is the subject itself, the precious object embedded in the psyche – the Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 9

agalma, that which sustains a fantasy in the subject’s very being, ‘the precious agalma perceived by him as the unique ineffable kernel which cannot be shared by others’ (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 50). When confessional singer-songwriters, for instance, wrote of failed relationships, they wrote from within a prevailing trope of neoliberal individualism: as the prime integer of political discipline in preserving the individual’s life, their liberty, and their property as the purpose of musical expression. A song of mourning is a song of learning to be more callous in forgetting. In other words, what Lacan terms the objet a is that which I perceive in myself that is something more than myself, that which deserves the desire of the Other as manifest in the object whose materi- alisation might lie outside of me but whose impression determines my attitude towards it. And with the antagonism being played out so intimately between the self and its Other, there was little room to acknowledge the social antagonisms that conditioned relations in the 1970s in the ﬁrst place.

The narrative occlusion of antagonism and the disavowal of ‘soul rock’ The narrative of fantasy acts as a blockage to the Real’s potential rupture of Symbolic unity (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 10–13). The principal strategy for the economisa- tion of neoliberal governance was the Thatcher and Reagan campaign to occlude class antagonism in historical struggle: from Thatcher’s infamous remark that ‘there is no society’ (Davis 2010) to Reagan’s dismantling of the air traffic controllers’ union (McCartin 2011) to the ‘war on drugs’ (Corva 2008) the working class was taken from a cohesive and identifiable unit in social order to one fragmented and divided into a biopolitical enterprise (Fer- guson 2010). Narrative thus emerges as a means of making sense of that fun- damental antagonism whose conflict has become numb and repressed. There was no issue in Classic Rock in the 1970s, for instance, in regards to the class and racial divides that marked the civil rights movements of the 1960s. For instance, the typical crossover successes of the music industry in the 1970s had all but disappeared. A cult of auteurism circulated around white musicians; and black musicians were chastised for ‘selling out’ after attempting a concept record (Morris 2013). There was still a general everyday rhetoric within the music industry itself saying that things were just getting way too white, that there needed to be some more prominent and pre-eminent black Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 voices in the mix. In 1971, only 24 percent of the top singles were produced by black musicians, then a year later 44 percent of the top singles were by black musicians – interest in black culture was making a comeback (Garofalo and Bowman 2011). By the early 1970s, the harsh realities of inner city life had become apparent: drugs, poverty, unemployment, riots, an influx of heroin in black neighbourhoods, etc. If in the 1960s it was everyday to point to social problems, in the 1970s musicians began to give advice regarding how to achieve solutions. Groomed by the Motown School, Stevie Wonder, an integral part of the popular music industry since 1960, oversaw his musical projects with keen precision, but also offered advice for solving social problems. Instead of renewing his contract with Motown, he enrolled in music theory classes at the University of Southern California in 1971 and discovered a newfound 10 Mickey Vallee

freedom as he became the sole musician, producer, and engineer for his own work, which was distributed through Motown’s Tamla label (Reeves 2001). His optimistic visions and new messages of positive and powerful healthy living are revealed in his album titles: Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervi- sions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Songs in the Key of Life. Songs like ‘Super- woman’, ‘Superstition’, ‘You are the Sunshine of my Life’, and ‘Living for the City’ exemplify an awareness of social problems of alienation but offer easy solutions for breaking free of them through individual means of emancipation (Williams and Brady 2002). Specifically, Wonder’s album, Innervisions, offers an inward look and is a remarkable accomplishment for someone his age (he was only 21 when his contract with Motown expired). Musically fascinating about this record is that Wonder plays every instrument himself, except for a few guest musicians on the occasional track. The opening track mixes funk rhythms with jazz improvisation and a sparse intermittent syncopation and tells the story of a woman who is faced with her own failure to achieve success in the city and so resorts to drug use to take away the pain from having not had enough chances in life, until in the end she dies of a drug overdose. With a funk emphasis on each beat in the bar, the narrative depicts a poor black man from ‘hard town Mississippi’ who gets framed in a drug deal when he moves to New York City, among themes of economic deprivation, urban ghetto life. The sister in the story serves as an example of individual pride over social adversity, a striking contrast to the Black Panther mantra which solicited collective uprising over individualistic (Self 2006). The final verse, belted out through a spiritual series of glottal stops, offers a word of warning not desperation: ‘If we don’t change the world will soon be over ... stop giving just enough for the city’, which offers just enough material to wrap up the past, background, present, spoken narrative, and the end where the protagonist serves as an example of social failure: there is no sys- temic failure, there is no alternative.

The fall into law and the spectacular subject of Ziggy Stardust This aspect of fantasy addresses how interpellation into the Symbolic is an act that constitutes the loss of the Imaginary phallus and the object within which the subject perceives a possible recovery (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 13–15). When the child Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 experiences anxiety that mother’s attention is not wholly devoted to satisfying his or her needs, and especially when the child sees that remainder of love directed towards another being, the child mimics the actions of those to whom that remainder is being directed. This is an act of being the phallic mother. As the first signifier of difference, the signifier of the phallus, enters into the child’s understanding of the symbolic order of difference through negativity, the child experiences the loss of an object that they never possessed in the first place (Homer 2004). The split subject thus emerges alongside the imaginary ego, patched together by the loss of an object that was only there as a fictional coordinate, which, for the subject, becomes the negative territory of certainty that something was once there. Different subjects have different ways of dealing with the loss, but no subject has direct access to the symbolic – they have means of dealing with the trauma of castration (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 13). Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 11

The story of self-governance begins with the presentation of the artifice in its most satiated form. David Bowie’s breakthrough album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, consisted of an entire production and stage show based on the story of a character Bowie had constructed out of the utter failures of the music industry. The album chronicles the brief career of an alien who arrives on Earth, becomes first a rock superstar then a victim of his own success. Ziggy, an androgynous and cross-dressing, lavishly made-up alien, was the complete opposite of rock heteronormativity (Latham 2009). It’s hard to imagine a more radical transformation of the core attitude and image of rock – instead of being more than a man he is so much less masculine that his own sexuality is cast into doubt. One well-known inspiration for Ziggy was Norman Carl Odom, the ‘legendary stardust cowboy’, whose talent was so below his own perception of it that audiences thought his act was comedy when it was in fact dead serious. Another inspiration was a burned out Elvis impersonator named Brian Holden who Bowie said was ‘not playing with a full deck at all’ (Buckley 2010: 112). Ziggy was the sum of all failure in the music industry, the exceptions to the norms (Goddard 2013: 156–58). If there was, within the countercultural stream of popular music, a discourse of experimentation that lost the ego in the moment of transcendence, the ego dissipation here was not a moment of progression beyond the bonds of history but regression into the state wherein which subject/object divide is no longer in need of being breached. The adoption of third person narrative thus at once alienates the performer from the audience and includes the audience with the performer as they all at once witness the spectacle – a kind of postmodern removal from the fidelity of the event itself, and one which includes the audience as mutual participants in a creative space. Though audiences did not necessarily believe that Bowie was actually an astronaut (personal correspondence with Alan Stanbridge, June 2009), they were exposed to the character and to Bowie at once, who wasn’t well known before the Ziggy (Goddard 2013). Rock in this context has a narrative quest, is no longer tied to the floating pool of verses that characterised much of the blues influenced music after World War II (Taft 2006). It anticipated gender and genre blurring that would become mainstream in the 1980s with the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, and Cindy Lauper (Gates 2010). Bowie’s turnaround for inti- Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 macy in the popular music industry was to constitute a mask or persona instead of a genuine link; it was to endorse artifice. Rock values were turned on their head, their seriousness and determinism in politics opening to a new politics of the androgynous body in a continuous state of becoming, in the words of Butler, a ‘kind of persistent impersonation which passes as the real’ (Butler 1990: xxxi). Bowie had constructed his edifice as an artifice, in a pop-culture style of montage and mask wearing, but in such a way that was nursery democracy, that rose above the audience and spoke for them as a collective instead of to them as recipients. Like the culture of participation that neoliberal ideology would later induce, the audience was let in on the experience, encouraged as active contributors to the event. The artifice of the 1970s was a necessary mask for the real-life traumas of those lives lost by way of the personal drug and alcohol experiments of the 1960s. It is little wonder 12 Mickey Vallee

that in the 1970s we witness a surge of nostalgia, or a vision of history without consequence. David Bowie is the perverse opposite of nostalgia, a futurism that experiences consequence without history.

The gaze of the Other (side of the moon) Recall that the symbolic register is infiltrated by both the Imaginary and the Real – the Imaginary operates to hold the symbolic together as unified, whereas the Real occupies a potential trauma, the X that confirms a radical negativity that installed the subject into its coordinates in the first place. Fantasy is what blocks this from occurring, which is why the injunction to enjoy is an urgency, because the Real is poised as making a breakthrough; at just that moment when one realises a truth behind their repetition compulsion, they repeat compulsively even worse than before. They must incorporate the Real into the symbolic, but doing so would distort the unity of the Imaginary. There becomes no alternative but retreat. Fantasy has a double function then: it supports the symbolic yet it stands for the inherent transgression within it. It arises as a defence against the possibility of jouissance, yet holds a promise for the subject that reconciliation with jouissance is possible. Fantasy thus acknowledges a truth in symbolic castration yet disavows it by counterfeiting a transgression. Reconciling the fact of repetition automatism is a central feature of the Pink Floyd fantasy; this group can be divided into two phases, the first from 1965 to 1968 fronted by Syd Barrett (an art student from Camberwell) who was an avid countercultural participant. Not really having any patience for what they called ‘countercultural wanking’ (Palmer 1995) the group fired Syd and expanded their music into explorations of simple chord progressions but really taking their time to experiment with space, sound, and time. And they used their music, especially Roger Waters, to express what they called a philosophy of empathy to modern existence (Reisch 2007: 41) – this kind of philosophy was expressed explicitly on Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1973, first appearing on the Top 200 album charts on March 31 and staying there for 740 additional weeks – it holds the Guinness Record for the longest stay in the top 200, almost 12 and a half years (Garofalo and Bowman 2011). The obvious question is: why does it have such staying power? Dark Side is a vast album in every sense, tackling the very existence of modern subjectivity: ‘Breathe’, ‘Time’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Money’ ...these Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 are foundations to modern existence – the bleakness vision of life, although it’s bound within some of the most listenable experiences resonant at times of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and the Plastic Ono Band. But what is particularly striking about Pink Floyd is the so-called ‘philosophy of empathy’ for the vacuous state of the middle class (Palacios 2010). If Lacan first identified the symbolic order in terms of the ‘Other’, his claim that ‘there is no Other to the Other’ has the implication that there is no zone of ontological support for the Other: law is only sustained by the subject’s investment in it. In this now ultimately intimate space, however, opened up by detailed aesthetic record production, sound has no bridge between the self and the external world. Thus, Pink Floyd’s music, a track like ‘Brain Damage’, for instance, cannot possibly explore matters as trivial as love lost, but rather plumbs the depths of the imploding self-character: ‘“Brain Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 13

Damage” doesn’t sing of love or other such themes; it is one single feedback between sound and listeners’ ears. Sounds proclaim what sounds have wrought and what surpasses all the effects Old Europe hoped to gain from the Book of Books or immortal poets’ (Winthrop-Young 2013: 56).

Law is transgressive and violent Installation into the Symbolic is violent and traumatic. To become a human, one never fully becomes a human, but instead relives the coordinate of one’s insertion into the Symbolic to renounce the unity that was never there, to experience the pain of attempting to create wholeness out of the promise for unity (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 13–14). Thus the example of Heavy Metal in the 1970s serves as the worst of the countercultural remainder, stained with the biker hair grease of Altamont Speedway (Van der Leun 2009). It was on Friday, 13 February 1970, that hard rock (also called heavy metal) would be unleashed, when Black Sabbath released their self-titled album (Christe 2010). In reaction to the counterculture, hard rock offered little in terms of peace and love, but instead manifested an on-stage representation of the real violence in the world: working class men whose long hair bore the grease stains of the 1960s, clad all in black with black painted fingernails, wailing through massive amplifiers to giant concert arenas packed with frustrated young men. Little wonder its alias was ‘cock rock’ (Hiwatt 1971). What partly lent credibility to its occult status was the fact that it was performed in large fields, that its albums were virtually unplayable on the radio, and that its members wore the traces of a failed counterculture. Here, as Weinstein (1991) writes, the singer in heavy metal groups was coded as a particularly emotional catharsis of Classic Rock in his emotional delivery in a manner entirely distinct from counter Classic Rock examples, such as punk music. Punk exemplified the empty gesture and the overidentification with what Lacan called the sinthome, a strategy that traversed the fantasy of neoliberal individualism.

The empty gesture Freedom of choice is a fantasy that we act according to the rules of free will: ‘by preventing the choice which, although formally allowed, would, if in fact made, ruin the system’ (Zˇ izˇek 1997: 29). The mutual acceptance of unwritten rules leads to the solidiﬁcation of that rule through the rejection of the Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 gesture which is meant to be rejected. The social link dissolves when the semblance of freedom is taken as actual freedom. Subjective destitution is a process drawn out in The Ticklish Subject, which frees the subject from the gaze of the Other, a possibility that the most authentic form of freedom can transpire, one wherein which the fantasy can be easily abandoned and traversed: ‘the moment the function of the dark spot which keeps open the space for something for which there is no place in our reality is suspended, we lose our very sense of reality’ (Zˇ izˇek 1999: 163), but it is one that fantasy works tirelessly to prevent. Punk witnessed an unfortunate demise at the hand of the empty gesture. The Sex Pistols initially were started by post-situationist activist Malcolm MacLaren to fuel a generation of angry unemployed youth in London’s poorest neighbourhoods (Vermorel 1987). They self-destructed in 1978 after 14 Mickey Vallee

a dismal tour in the United States where media images portrayed London punks brandishing swastikas. While to American audiences such a display signified neo-Nazi sympathy, London punks were accustomed to re-signifying repressed images to further shock the parent culture in their native land (Quinn 1994). Crowds in the United States became violent at Sex Pistols gigs. Sid Vicious, a recent addition to the group who was hired by MacLaren as a contender for Rotten (Reynolds 2005), had followed a path of self-destruction because he overidentified with his own role. Repeatedly at shows he became violent with crowd members, cut himself with broken beer bottles and spat blood onto the unruly crowd that were themselves fuelled by the media images of a more violent version of punk through the press (Strongman 2008). As Johnny Rotten slumped on stage at the Sex Pistols’ final concert in San Francisco moaning The Stooges’ ‘No Fun!’ monotonously over the steady din of the crowd, it became clear that someone or something unidenti- fiable, some Other, had been responsible for replacing excess with some kind of carbon copy. ‘Hahaha!’, he said indifferently into the microphone, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ (Sabin 2002). Johnny Rotten’s gesture is one of dis-identification. This example is inter- esting because it eludes the approving gaze of the Other, it lives directly within the façade of the performance. It is perhaps for this reason, for Rotten’s decision to sit down and mock the crowd, that he illustrates a figural negativity of the fantasy, that is its entire breakdown into the avenue of the sinthome, overidentification. This is the figure of negativity in the death drive that poses a similar threat to the subject as does the rupture of punk to Classic Rock. Such a figural alignment refuses compassion, confession, longing, belief, and ultimately refuses to ‘mean’ anything at all. In this sense, Rotten traverses the fantasy by queering it, by calling out its arbitrary associations. That Rotten occupies the same symbolic space as Pink Floyd (as his famous T-Shirt stated, ‘I hate’ Pink Floyd), marks a merging of meaning and the death drive that erupts in an incompatibility.

Implications for traversing neoliberal ideology Neoliberalism is guided by the principle that the autonomy of market forces is the greatest guide for individual ethical acts. Fair enough, but we have learned by way of employing the Lacanian trope of fantasy that capital is barred from Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 the subject’s self-reflection if capital constitutes the domain of the Real. As much as it was perceived as an intervention in state-determined Keynesian economics, neoliberalism was permeated through a decentralised ethos that coopted leftist politics from the civil rights movements in the 1960s. If the Clinton administration marked the second phase of neoliberal ideology with the ‘psychological internalisation of individual responsibilisation’ (Gill and Scharff 2011: 12), the anticipation of such a psychologisation occurs in the capital appropriation of Classic Rock’s individual freedom, its vital artery. Neoliberalism is context dependent, certainly, but it is consistently defined by conduct of action guided by self-knowledge on the well-worn terrain of autonomy: individual over the social, self-invention, self-reflexivity, disci- plined guides to knowing the self by way of an incorporation of a knowing authority. Classic Rock Fantasies and the Musical Imagination of Neoliberalism 15

Classic Rock fits the neoliberal conception of freedom and free trade by virtue of the fact that it was an essentially heterogeneous genre that espoused principles of particularised sovereignty. The fantasy of neoliberal freedom was afforded by a generous development in recording technology, which fostered a creative exploration of studio techniques, an access that afforded a subjectivity capable of self-knowledge. As the Classic Rock fantasy is aligned closely with the Lacanian fantasy as a form of escapism that protects the subject from the traumatic rupture of the Real, it is evident that neoliberal ideology is entwined with the fact that the genre promoted a universal ethic of freedom which pur- ported that (a) there is no alternative to Classic Rock, and (b) someone, some- where, has stolen access to pleasure. Neoliberalism espouses the virtue of a free market without state intervention, a strategy that secured the ruling class more than it increased accumulation. Justified by way of the 1973 restructuring of Chile’s economy, neoliberal doctrines rested on historically contingent evidence that the universal equation for freedom was freedom to trade. It becomes necessary, therefore, to interrogate this autonomous notion of freedom from a wider angle than that occupied by econocentric critique. The educational tendency of neoliberal governmentality offers us a conceptualisation of neoliberal power that is not imposed from above but is ongoing and negotiated between subjects who at once subjectivise and de-subjectivise one another and themselves in a mesh of biopolitical social interaction. The purpose here is to reveal how the preceding analysis possibly opens new means of decoding the ideological principles of neoliberalism as they persist in musical processes and to instantiate a confrontation with madness that various forms of Classic Rock raise as fantasy against the rupture of the Real – so the songs do not answer the question of what the Other wants from the subject, they pose a momentary fleeting retreat from obligation that marks the very fetish character of its product. The subgenres that have become global (blues rock, industrial metal, nu metal, post rock, desert rock, space rock, etc.) emerged from the decade under investigation, which grew under the banner of rock as transgression. Interrogation of the genesis of the coordinate might ameliorate in breaking the injunction to indulge in individ- uated fantasy instead of social accountability. Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014 References Adorno, T.W. 1947. ‘On Popular Music.’ Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9:1, 17– 48. Attali, J. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bakan, A.B. and MacDonald, E. 2002. Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left.Que´bec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bangs, L. 1971. ‘James Taylor Marked for Death.’ In Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic. New York: Random House, 53–81. Brenner, R. 2003. The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. London: Verso Books. Brunelle, D. 2007. From World Order to Global Disorder: States, Markets, and Dissent. Van- couver: University of British Columbia Press. 16 Mickey Vallee

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Mickey Vallee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. He is the author of Rancid Aphrodisiac: Subjectivity, 18 Mickey Vallee

Desire, and Rock‘n’Roll, co-editor of Demystifying Deleuze: An Introductory Assemblage of Crucial Concepts, has articles published in Journal of Historical Sociology, Cultural Politics, Popular Music and Society, and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and chapters in Zˇ izˇek and Media Studies: A Reader as well as Ecologies of Affect: Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope. He is currently engaged in a SSHRC funded research project on Glenn Gould, as well as a larger project on the cultural politics of Truth Commissions. He lives in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 13:36 23 October 2014