Countercultures and Popular Music
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COUNTERCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC A translated and edited edition of a special issue of Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies (Éditions Mélanie Seteun). Additional articles published in both ‘countercultures’ issues of Volume! can be found at: http://www.cairn.info/revue-volume.htm and http://volume.revues.org. Volume! is the only French peer-reviewed popular music studies journal. Created in 2002 by Marie-Pierre Bonniol, Samuel Étienne and Gérôme Guibert, it is published independently by the Éditions Mélanie Seteun, a publishing association specialising since 1998 in the cultural sociology of popular music. Biannual special issues deal with various topics in popular music studies, in a multidisciplinary perspective. It is also included on the online international academic portals Cairn.info and Revues.org. Volume! is classified by the French AERES and abstracted/indexed on the International Index to Music Periodicals, the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale and the Music Index. This page has been left blank intentionally Countercultures and Popular Music Edited by SHEILA WHITELEY University of Salford, UK JEDEDIAH SKLOWER Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, France © Sheila Whiteley and Jedediah Sklower and the contributors 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Sheila Whiteley and Jedediah Sklower have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Countercultures and popular music / edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jedediah Sklower. pages cm. – (Ashgate Popular and folk music series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2106-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4724-2107-4 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4724-2108-1 (epub) 1. Popular music – Social aspects. 2. Counterculture. I. Whiteley, Sheila, 1941– II. Sklower, Jedediah. ML3918.P67C73 2014 306.4’8424–dc23 2013047641 ISBN 9781472421067 (hbk) ISBN 9781472421074 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472421081 (ebk – ePUB) Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita IV Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD Contents List of Figures vii General Editors’ Preface ix Notes on Contributors xi Preface: Dissent within Dissent xv Jedediah Sklower INTRODUCTION Countercultures and Popular Music 3 Sheila Whiteley Reappraising ‘Counterculture’ 17 Andy Bennett PART I THEORISING COUNTERCULTURES 1 Break on Through: The Counterculture and the Climax of American Modernism 29 Ryan Moore 2 The Banality of Degradation: Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and the Trash Aesthetic 45 Simon Warner 3 Were British Subcultures the Beginning of Multitude? 65 Charles Mueller PART II UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS AND THE APOCALYPTIC 4 The Rock Counterculture from Modernist Utopianism to the Development of an Alternative Music Scene 81 Christophe Den Tandt 5 ‘Helter Skelter’ and Sixties Revisionism 95 Gerald Carlin and Mark Jones 6 Apocalyptic Music: Reflections on Countercultural Christian Influence 109 Shawn David Young vi COUNTERCUltURES AND POPULAR MUSIC 7 Nobody’s Army: Contradictory Cultural Rhetoric in Woodstock and Gimme Shelter 123 Gina Arnold PART III SONIC ANARCHY AND FREAKS 8 The Long Freak Out: Unfinished Music and Countercultural Madness in Avant-Garde Rock of the 1960s and 1970s 141 Jay Keister 9 The Grateful Dead and Friedrich Nietzsche: Transformation in Music and Consciousness 157 Stanley J. Spector 10 Scream from the Heart: Yoko Ono’s Rock and Roll Revolution 171 Shelina Brown 11 From Countercultures to Suburban Cultures: Frank Zappa after 1968 187 Benjamin Halligan PART IV COUNTERCULTURAL Scenes – MusIC AND PLACE 12 Countercultural Space Does Not Persist: Christiania and the Role of Music 205 Thorbjörg Daphne Hall 13 A Border-Crossing Soundscape of Pop: The Auditory Traces of Subcultural Practices in 1960s Berlin 223 Heiner Stahl 14 Music and Countercultures in Italy: The Neapolitan Scene 237 Giovanni Vacca Bibliography 251 Discography 275 Filmography 281 Index 283 List of Figures 12.1 The entrance into Christiania. Photo: Thorbjörg Daphne Hall 210 12.2 The stage by Nemoland. Photo: Thorbjörg Daphne Hall 211 12.3 Outside Loppen. Photo: Thorbjörg Daphne Hall 214 12.4 The tourist information hut where guided tours are offered. Photo: Thorbjörg Daphne Hall 215 This page has been left blank intentionally General Editors’ Preface Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s popular music. Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognises and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilises a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies. Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo & Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds This page has been left blank intentionally Notes on Contributors Gina Arnold received her PhD in Stanford’s programme of Modern Thought and Literature in June 2011. She is the author of two books, Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana (1993) and Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense (1997). Her contribution to the 33 1/3rd series Exile in Guyville is forthcoming. Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited numerous books including Music, Style and Aging, Popular Music and Youth Culture, Cultures of Popular Music, Remembering Woodstock and Music Scenes (with Richard A. Peterson). Bennett was lead chief investigator on a three-year, five-country project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled ‘Popular Music and Cultural Memory’ (DP1092910). He is a faculty fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and an associate member of PopuLUs, the Centre for the Study of the World’s Popular Musics, Leeds University. Shelina Brown was born in Vancouver, Canada, and raised in Kyoto, Japan. She is bilingual in Japanese and English and has a keen interest in Japanese literature and music. Since 2008, she has been pursuing doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centres on feminist cultural resistance in punk music from the late 1970s to the present. For her dissertation project, she plans to focus on Yoko Ono – the grandmother of punk and new wave. In her spare time, Shelina plays guitar and drums in several DIY post-punk bands in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Gerald Carlin is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton. He has published on modernism, critical theory and aspects of 1960s popular culture. Christophe Den Tandt teaches Anglo-American literature and cultural theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He is the author of studies on the representation of the urban scene in American fiction as well as of articles on popular culture – fiction, film and music. Thorbjörg Daphne Hall is an adjunct and a program director of musicology at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. She holds an MA in Musicology from the University of Nottingham and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Iceland and Bifrost University. Her research interests focus on classical and popular music xii COUNTERCULTURES AND POPULAR MUSIC of the twentieth and twenty-first century in connection to images, identity, place, space and nationalism. Benjamin Halligan is the Director of Postgraduate Research Studies for the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Salford, and lectures in the areas of critical theory, media studies and performance. Publications include Michael Reeves (2003) and, as co-editor, Mark E. Smith and The Fall (2010), Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (2012) and Resonances: Noise and Music (2013) and The Music Documentary (2013) in addition to numerous articles and chapters on audiovisual practices. Mark Jones is Senior Lecturer in English and Award Leader for MA Popular Culture at