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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American Literature, Film and Technoculture Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65f2825x Author Young, Mark Thomas Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American Literature, Film and Technoculture A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Mark Thomas Young June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Dr. Tom Lutz Copyright by Mark Thomas Young 2015 The Dissertation of Mark Thomas Young is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As there are many midwives to an “individual” success, I’d like to thank the various mentors, colleagues, organizations, friends, and family members who have supported me through the stages of conception, drafting, revision, and completion of this project. Perhaps the most important influences on my early thinking about this topic came from Paweł Frelik and Larry McCaffery, with whom I shared a rousing desert hike in the foothills of Borrego Springs. After an evening of food, drink, and lively exchange, I had the long-overdue epiphany to channel my training in musical performance more directly into my academic pursuits. The early support, friendship, and collegiality of these two had a tremendously positive effect on the arc of my scholarship; knowing they believed in the project helped me pencil its first sketchy contours—and ultimately see it through to the end. Susan Zieger also played an important role in helping me shape the project’s focus; the professionalism with which she comported herself in response to a graduate student’s “epiphany in the desert” emails was matchless, if not entirely devoid of amusement. Her early advice about the scope, focus, and testing areas necessary to prepare for the task proved extremely valuable. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to James Tobias for his help in compiling a sound studies reading list during the pre-dissertation phase; our weekly dialogues in preparation for the qualifying exams formed a solid theoretical foundation for my research and helped me find my own contribution to ongoing scholarly debates. At a time, too, when I iv was too poor to get one of my own, he was generous enough to let me borrow his iPad, so I could study Björk’s recent interactive “app-album,” Biophilia. Small gestures of kindness such as this are part of what great mentorship is all about, and as I step into my own full-time role as an educator, I hope to emulate his example and give a hand up, whenever possible, to those in need. It almost goes without saying, but I’d be remiss not to mention how much of a joy my dissertation committee was to work with. Their unflagging support and intellectual rigor (not to mention their willingness to plant a boot in the “pitoot”) simply made me a better scholar than I was before I began this dissertation. Chief among the committee members, but not officially credited due to administrative circumstances, Rob Latham deserves fanfare for his guidance and mentorship at every stage of this work; in one way or another, his influence touches every page of the manuscript, and I thank him for all his hard work and belief in my ideas. All writers need great editors and critics to bring out their very best. At UCR, many colleagues volunteered precious time to read chapter drafts and offer constructive, and/or lovingly destructive, feedback. The sharp eyes and wits of Alan Lovegreen, Jerry Winter, Jeffrey Hicks, Matthew Bond, Richard Hunt and Annie Schnarr all helped improve the chapters herein, and I truly appreciate their contributions. Dissertations by anyone—let alone first-generation college students—don’t get written without the material support to fund travel and archival research, or to simply stave off the many bouts of financial precarity (i.e., poverty) that distract from the highest-level demands of intellectual labor. So I’d like to thank the following people, v institutions, and organizations for investing in my project through generous grants and fellowships at various stages of its completion. A workshop grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded through UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS), allowed me to design a first-of-its-kind public Science Fiction and Sound Studies colloquium with the funds to draw renowned SF scholar, Istvan Csicsery-ronay, Jr. The CIS also awarded me a Graduate Student Research Grant to facilitate travel to Yale University’s Beinecke Library, where I performed archival research for Chapter 1 in the James Wheldon Johnson Collection, in which Langston Hughes’s complete drafts and notes for Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz reside. I also offer sincere thanks to the Barricelli family and UCR’s department of Comparative Literature for awarding me the generous Barricelli Award; it’s funds allowed me to purchase an iPad of my own, as well as a range of innovative music-production apps that directly improved my arguments about contemporary technoculture in the dissertation’s concluding Coda section. Thanks, too, go out to the editorial board of Science Fiction Studies, who selected my project for the R.D. Mullen Fellowship, which allowed me to partially forgo summer employment and perform archival research in UCR’s Eaton Collection, investigating the connections between pulp magazine stories in the Fifties and Sixties and the emerging musical technocultures of the time. The subject of retro music tends to activate everyone’s antennae on one wavelength or another, and over the years I’ve been grateful to the many people who’ve shared their experience, opinions, suggestions, and kind words on the subject. Amongst the academic set, I thank Rich Calvin, Brian Attebery, Istvan Csicsery-ronay, Jr., Nalo vi Hopkinson, Sydney Brown, Bill Nericcio, Jerry Farber, Art Evans, Carol McGuirk, Rita Raley, Lysa Rivera, and Grace Dillon, among others, including Giulia Hoffmann, who deserves mention for being so darned nice. Amongst the music makers and dreamers of dreams, I thank Sam Boukas, Robert Netcoh, Jr., Kevin Fuller, Brian Murray, Kris Wardwell, “Shirtless” Steve Andersen, Dan Deaton, Rose Puntillo, Justin Kaput, John Flood, and Jason Chaney. Their creative input, expertise, and/or friendship has made a lasting impact on my both my life and work. To my family, I offer enormous thanks for their patience, good humor, and encouragement. I couldn’t have done this without them. Finally, I thank the “fair use” protections of the U.S. copyright code, section 107; all images contained within this dissertation are in the public domain and used solely for the purpose of scholarly research. vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Sonic Retro-Futures: Musical Nostalgia as Revolution in Post-1960s American Literature, Film and Technoculture by Mark Thomas Young Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson This dissertation examines the ongoing influence of retro music cultures on post- 1960s American artists and their representations of social, political, and economic change. Through a roughly decade-by-decade analysis of poetry, novels, film, and emerging technocultures, I make the case for a pendular dynamic of nostalgic art in the wake of the Civil Rights era—namely, a hope for revolutionary futures based on the past coupled with a backward-looking dirge for a Rubicon crossed, a moment of potential irretrievably lost. These twinned poles of optimism and pessimism share a nostalgic center in the music cultures of the past, emblematized in American art as agents of change and revolution, high water marks against which artists measure progressivism or cultural regression. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Audio-Didactic Postmodernism: Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz 21 Chapter Two: SF’s Degenerative Nostalgia in the MTV Era 60 Chapter Three: Faces of Orpheus in Twenty-first Century American Literature 113 Chapter Four: Xenochrony: Aural Media and Neoliberal Time in Shane Carruth’s Primer 164 Coda: Digital Aurality and the Science Fictional Public Sphere 201 ix LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 Newport Jazz Festival revelry gives way to rioting 25 1.2 Police lay down the law during the Newport riot 25 1.3 The aftermath of the riot 26 1.4 Hipsters get “jazzy” on a mansard roof in Newport 26 1.5 The Moondog Coronation Ball 33 1.6 The book of poetry as LP record 38 1.7 Ask Your Mama's dialogic columns 38 1.8 Ask Your Mama's twin musical epigraphs 40 2.1 “Dropout Mediocrity,” New Worlds (1968) 64 2.2 Jerry Cornelius on the cover of New Worlds (June 1969) 66 2.3 A promotional ad for Privilege 68 2.4 Paradise Camps, still from Wild in the Streets 70 3.1 The Sankofa bird 151 4.1 “Primer-chart.” A neurotically-detailed fan infographic of Primer’s plot 185 4.2 “Movie Narrative Charts.” A more figurative rendering of Primer’s plot 185 4.3 The opening shot of Primer, from inside the garage 187 x Introduction The man who has no self-respect … will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice…. And when one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will show him every observance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our State.