Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies North-American Culture Studies Bc. Timur Kagirov Psychedelic Rock (Lyrics) and American Culture of the Sixties: The Doors and Jefferson Airplane Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D 2020 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… Bc. Timur Kagirov I would like to thank my supervisor doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. for his kind help and guidance during the writing process of this thesis. I would also like to thank my dear parents for their lifelong love and faith in me, without them my journey to the Czech Republic would not be possible. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 1. Rock Music in America of the Sixties. The Core of the Genre ................................ 8 1.1. Prerequisites and Formation ............................................................................. 8 1.1.1. Rock ’n’ Roll ................................................................................................ 8 1.1.2. Albion’s Musical Formation ....................................................................... 14 1.2. American Comeback ....................................................................................... 18 1.2.1. Folk Rock .................................................................................................... 18 1.2.2. Countercultural Society .............................................................................. 20 1.2.3. Defining Psychedelia and Psychedelic Rock .............................................. 26 1.2.4. Acid Rock. Subgenre or Synonym? ............................................................ 31 2. Lyrics vs. Music ...................................................................................................... 35 3. Songs and Society: The Mutual Impact .................................................................. 41 4. Comparative Analysis of The Doors’ and Jefferson Airplane’s Lyrics .................. 44 4.1. Corpus Analysis .............................................................................................. 44 4.1.1. General Corpus Analysis and Identification of Main Themes ................... 44 4.1.2. Defining Central Themes of Each Album .................................................. 47 4.2. Subject Matter Analysis .................................................................................. 50 4.2.1. Subject Matter Analysis of Jefferson Airplane’s Albums .......................... 52 4.2.2. Subject Matter Analysis of The Doors’ Albums ........................................ 56 4.3. Comparison of Results .................................................................................... 60 4.4. Love and Sex .................................................................................................. 61 4.5. The Socio-Political Aspect ............................................................................. 73 4.6. Transcendence and Escaping from Reality ..................................................... 92 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 105 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 109 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 115 Resumé .......................................................................................................................... 116 Introduction Nowadays, rock music has become an inalienable part of global modern culture. In contrast to the past, the continual presence of rock music in our everyday life seems natural and enables people to just listen to it without thinking about any context. Rock compositions are played along with pop songs or other genres and, as a rule, there is no cultural protest or any other subtext. At present, it seems unlikely to generate an image of a rock-listening person due to the simple fact that this person could be anyone. The boundaries of the cliché are erased, the style is no longer linked to a social group, class, or subculture and has become the product of mass consumption with subsequent formation as a universal musical phenomenon. Such a vast category as rock music of the 20th century, and hereto I write “category” as there is no other way to describe it, cannot be framed by musical genre only. “Rock was the organized religion of the sixties–the nexus not only of music and language but also of dance, sex, and dope, which all came together into a single ritual of self-expression and spiritual tripping” (Dickstein 185-186). First of all, rock music that gripped the Western society in the Sixties was not only the exacerbation symptom of social contradictions. Music of those times, along with poetry, philosophy, and many other diverse world-view forms of the youth movement, became a part of certain spiritual processes, which were based on the principles of heterogeneity. Kramer writes that “[rock music] sustained a hyper-charged interplay of identity and community, personal experience and public participation, self-expression and collective scrutiny, cultural exploration and political engagement” (5-6). In the course of a single genre and style flow, sharply polar phenomena were formed. On the one hand, there was a concentration of negative, destructive energy along with undisguised social protests that sounded hostile to culture. On the other hand, there was an arising interest 5 of the world comprehension in its complexity and diversity; young rebels tried to understand traditions of European humanism in their own way, to put them in a different, more intense sound attitude. This could not but affect the original genre model, making rock more sophisticated in content and more diverse in form. In other words, “rock defied typical definitions of outside and inside, rebellion and incorporation, escape and engagement” (Kramer 11). Such colossal changes in the concept of rock music could not but affect its offshoots, changing old subgenres and forming new ones, among which was psychedelic rock. The newly minted subgenre, which broke out in the mid-Sixties, was the quintessence of the counterculture of the Sixties. Psychedelic rock, like psychedelic culture, emerged in San Francisco, the heart of the counterculture movement. This subgenre, as well as rock in general, absorbed all the current issues of the countercultural environment of the Sixties: promotion of the expansion of conscious boundaries that was encouraged by the use of psychedelic drugs, social and political tensions, rethinking of values and ways of life, etc. – all these happenings transferred to this genre of music. This thesis will try to elucidate the interrelation between psychedelic rock and its lyrics and American culture of the Sixties. At the beginning, this thesis will examine the concept of rock music in general, indicating its origins, the path of development, and its mutual influence with society. Then it will consider the mechanism of interaction between song lyrics and music in general, as well as their correlation with society since song lyrics, among other things, are written “to encode lessons that we’ve learned and don’t want to forget, often using metaphor or devices to raise the message up to the level at which art meets science” (Levitin 114). Thus, having covered theoretical background, the research is based on the juxtaposition of the quintessential psychedelic rock bands The Doors and Jefferson 6 Airplane, namely on their first five albums recorded between the 1960s and 1970s. The hypothesis of this research is that a specific culture within time and historical periods can be comprehended through some form of art. In this case, that the imagery of American culture of the Sixties and its central issues can be provided by psychedelic rock songs, namely their lyrics. Besides, the thesis will examine the process of interaction between song lyrics and society. It will answer the question of whether the song lyrics were able to influence the consciousness of listeners, that is, whether they could form new ideas, fresh thoughts, and provide the impetus for certain actions. 7 1. Rock Music in America of the Sixties. The Core of the Genre 1.1. Prerequisites and Formation First of all, it should be noted that the historical path of rock genesis closely correlates with the development of jazz, which in turn reiterates the evolution of the folk music that infused into the space of elite music. Indeed, jazz and rock are affined between each other, their common background could be seen in such unremarkable entities as social tonus, close connection with everyday life, experience, fashion, etc. In other words, it is a collective and mostly oral nature of creativity and the birth in a simple-genre environment with its subsequent separation. In general terms, the formation of rock, rock ’n’ roll, and jazz has the same layout, it is simply a bidirectional movement from the spontaneous and elementary to complex and highly-organized, or in reverse. That is, from folk to sophisticated and professional, from entertaining to serious and conceptual, from specifically African American to international. These