Rock and the Politics of Memory Author(S): Simon Frith Source: Social Text, No

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Rock and the Politics of Memory Author(s): Simon Frith Source: Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60's without Apology (Spring - Summer, 1984), pp. 59-69 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466535 . Accessed: 03/02/2014 17:51

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n Britainas well as theUSA, the 60s havea bad reputation.They're the leading targetof Tory demonology;for Margaret Thatcher and her col- leagues the 60s were when Britainwent bad. And thisis not justa party-po- liticalpoint. The Labour governmentsof 1964-70 were, it's claimed, as much an effectas a cause of the generalmalaise. Britain's 60s sicknesswas cultural;it was mostclearly articulated by thecult of permissiveness-public license, privateindulgence, pleasure withoutconsequence. From the Toryperspective the consequences were, in fact,appalling: the cementof society (the authorityof age and family,church and class, culture and nation)was corroded. Britishsocial democracyturned out to mean a soft, do-gooding,"welfare" state used (like the pill) as a way of avoiding any moral accountingsystem, blurring the disciplinaryrole of the marketplace. There's an oddly Gramscianring to such assaults on the 60s. Tory thinkersare as aware as socialist thinkersof the politicalimportance of ideas, culture,common sense, and they'reequally concerned with the class role of intellectuals.They thus explain the effectsof permissivenessby referenceto a systematictrahison des clercs:at the heartof the rotwere all those teachers,lawyers, clerics, artists, critics, politicians, academics leaping on board the pop culturebandwagon, gorgingthemselves on immediate sensation, fawningupon youth. And it was the reversalof proper age relationsthat marked Britain's long-term loss of disciplineand enterprise. For all theirexport earnings, the Beatlesbecame nationalheroes because of theirfrivolity, because theirsound of chirpyoptimism concealed a loss of nationalwill. To read these argumentsnow is to be overcome withnostalgia-the Toryclaims as to whathappened so exactlyecho what I thoughtwould and should happen at the time-and theirony is thatthis (backhanded) celebra- tion of the 60s should come fromthe right-frommy currentleft perspective,the theoryof countercultureseems like dippyidealism (the greening of America!)and the theoryof the RevolutionaryYouth Movementsimply a romanticgesture at politics.But nostalgiaworks on feelings,not arguments, 59

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 0 SIMONFRITH and what I suddenlyremember is the feelingthat music matters,that records, sounds, songs, rhythmscan have all these consequences. Take one of the 60s' key symbols,the Beatles' Sgt.Pepper. All we've got now is a collection of well-manneredpop songs in a fadingpop art sleeve, but at the time the record was an event, the most orchestrated event,indeed, thatpop had ever known. It was, accordingto itsproducer George Martin,"the watershedwhich changed the recordingart from somethingthat merely made amusingsounds into somethingwhich will standthe test of timeas a validart form: sculpture in music,if you like."This was, wroteKen Tynan,"a decisivemoment in the historyof WesternCivili- sation." The Lonely Hearts Club Band representeda new movementof youth-classless and ageless too. Pop had a new purpose: to make out of pleasurea politicsof optimism,to turnpassive consumptioninto an active culture.Such ambitionderived from the Beatles' authorityas superstars- not just skilledpop musiciansbut skilledpop artists,self-conscious, calcu- latingtheir entertaining effects. Sgt. Pepper was more thanjust another LP. In makingtheir own styleout of the streetsounds of 1967,the Beatlesgave these sounds a shape, an aestheticform; they made the optimismconcrete and so gave pop fanssomething to judge the momentby. The Beatleswere not the leadersof a culturalmovement but itssymbols-they were as keen as everyoneelse to be followersof fashion.Their importancewas to use theirpublic positionto legitimateBritain's nascent hippie ideology. Sgt. Pepper wasn't the firstrock LP (Bob Dylan had made that in 1965) but it markedmost clearlythe pop to rock move, the shiftin the termsin which mass music was explained.The key word was "progress." The Beatles' own career-from homespun rock'n'rollersand hit ditty makersto subtlemelodists, acute lyricists-wasthe model of such progress. It was obvious that "A Day in the Life" matteredmore than "She Loves You," addressed issues otherthan teenage fun. Rock, in otherwords, de- scribed a more ambitiousmusic than pop, in termsof form,content and impact. Rock ideologues (in Rolling Stone, forexample) wrote about records' politicaland poetic significance;rock musiciansboth representeda subversivecommunity (making the public sounds of the youthcountercul- ture)and realizedcomplex privatedreams and feeling.Rock was presented to itsaudience as somethingto work on and commitoneself to as well as a sensationto be immediatelyconsumed. This ideologyturned out to be a wonderfulsource of sales rhetoric- rock commitmentmeant buying lots of records,rock belief in progresssent people out to buy new releaseseven more reliablythan the pop concern fortrends and fashion.But thatdidn't come clear to me tilllater. What was most obvious at the time(1967, 1968) was thatrock was "progressive"po- liticallytoo. The rock sensibility- the combinationof aestheticand social assumptionspeople took to theirmusical choices, used to account fortheir tastes-had at its cuttingedge a critiqueof mass culturewhich drew impli-

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citly(and, via Marcuse,sometimes explicitly) on FrankfurtSchool positions. Rock argumentsfocused on the problemof commercialcooptation, on the transformationof culture into commodity ("selling out"), the music's relationshipto organizedpolitical struggles, to protest.Rock's artisticclaims were inextricablefrom its political claims (hence its centralrole in the counterculture)-therewas a moment when even the most mindless groups (the Bee Gees, say) had to presentthemselves as somethingother than "entertainers." This was a briefmoment (from Woodstock to Altamont?).By the end of the 60s I recall the Britishleft taking for granted the failureof rock to realize its counterculturalclaims (though,ironically, the most straightfor- wardlypolitical rock records were still to come). In Britain,at any rate, therewas an obvious migrationfrom the Undergroundto Trotskyism,from age to class politics.Sex and drugsand rock'n'rollwere dismissedas mid- dle-class,male indulgences,while the few commentatorswho paused to wonder what had gone wrongpointed to the incorporationof rockinto the leisurebusiness on the one hand, to the fragmentationof the rockaudience on the other.In short,rock's claimsto be differentfrom pop, to evade the logic of mass culture,turned out to be baseless. Rock was tied inevitably into the process of commodityproduction: the rock communitywas simp- ly an easily manipulatedconsumer group. This conclusion-a kind of traditionalleft told-you-so-has had a de- bilitatingeffect on subsequentMarxist analyses of rock (of 60s rock,in par- ticular).For example, it has reinforcedthe sour Frankfurtview. The music which at the timewas experiencedas a challengeto notionsof passive con- sumptionis now cited as confirmationof them,and concepts of traditional leftanalysis (authenticity, realism) discredited in debates about other cul- turalforms, remain central to discussionsof pop and rock. Thus in 1976-77 the Britishleft had its interestin music revivedby punk, which was inter- pretedas an attemptto seize themeans of recordproduction, as a rank-and- fileexpression of class interest,and lost thatinterest the momentpunk was "coopted," the momentits audience "fragmented."And so pop is stillde- finedas "escapism"--as ifsuch a descriptionprecludes the need forfurther attention-just as it was in the 60s. What happened to music thenappears to account fornothing at all in contemporarycritiques of mass culture. One reason forthis is thatrock ideologists'own claims(which, as I've suggested,anyway drew on the Marxistaccount of mass culture)are taken at theirface value (the idea of progress,for example) so thattheir failure is easilyshown. Whatis not consideredis whethersuch claimsmade sense of the politicsof pop in thefirst place, and thismeans a peculiardenial of people's 60s memories.The exhilaration,the sense of change and purpose,the emotional underpinningsof the experienceof liberationare dismissedas fraudulentbecause of what happened next-just as the genuinelydisrup- tive,ideological effects of our druguse in the 60s are concealed by blanket

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 62 0 SIMON FRITH referencesto drugs' "inevitable"evil consequences. The "failure"of rock thus becomes equally inevitable- which makes it impossibleto explain why we were all deluded in the firstplace. This is particularlya problem now because of the currentideological role of historyand mythand memory.The Thatcheristattack on the 60s feedsinto an attemptto reconstruct Britishcommon sense,and theleft's muted response is thereforedamaging. There may be good reasons why socialists and feministsare wary of permissiveness,reluctant to celebrate the 60s, but not to presentsome positiveaccount of themis to cede an argumentunnecessarily, to deny the 60s' continuingeffects. Hippie ideology,hippie music,may be discredited but it survivesin importantinterstices of youthand leisureculture and, if anything,increases in importanceas we move fromstruggles in the work- place to struggleson the unemploymentline. Put it thisway: Rastafarian gigs in the 1980s are the closest thingto GratefulDead concerts in the 1960s. My own critiqueof the 60s is thatthey left us a legacyof good music but bad theory-I don't doubt rock's achievementsbut its claims. The problemis not thatrock failedto breakout of the pop formbut thatits ide- ologistsmisunderstood the significanceof thatform in the firstplace. By rock ideologistsI don't mean rock criticsbut the people who articulate rock's common sense, the musicians,journalists, promo departments,disc jockeys,A-and-R men and recordproducers, who turna sales processinto a culturalprocess, who providethe termsin whichproducers and consumers alike explain theirchoices. Rock criticism,as such, developed as a critique of thisideology as much as of the music itself.And indeed, by the end of the 1960s the mostacute criticsin both the USA and the UK seemed margi- nal to rock culture,their position cutting across the usual rock discoursein its refusalto accept the pop-rockdistinction. This became clearerin the 1976-77 debateson punk I've alreadymen- tioned. Criticswelcomed punk preciselybecause of its contemptfor rock sensibility."Rock," indeed, was much more clearlythe punk enemy than capitalism-the "old farts"under attackworked in recordcompanies and radio stationsand musicpapers-and by theend of the 1970s "rockist"was a regularterm of abuse, a shorthandway of dismissingrecords and performers."Rockist" referred not just to a sound (the guitar-based"progressive" blues of the late 60s supergroupswas the basic referencepoint) but also to an attitude,to the use of pop music as a sign of sincerity,a markof community,a formof culturalopposition. Though fromthe post-punkper- spectiveany musicalclaims to expressiveness,collectivity or anti-commer- cialismwere obviouslyfalse, the responsewas not to dismissthe musicbut ratherto reject its claims. Musicianswho presenttheir performances as "authentic"are evading the interestingissues of pop politics-the ways in which musics and meanings,performers and listenersare constructed artificially.It is preciselypop's artificethat allows it be a site of conflict.

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The problemis not cultureversus commodity but thecontradictions of the cultureof the commodity. From this perspective,60s rock people seem remarkablynaive. I cringeat my own rememberedbelief in "the natural"(whether applied to music or sex or desire generally),which standsin patheticcontrast to the knowingpostpunk assumption that everything is constructed(can be de- constructed),desires too, thatthere is nothingto be foundin music,only the pleasureof being definedby it. Pop, it now seems, mustbe momentary (can't be progressive),represents nothing but itself(not youth,not class, not subculture)and thismust be the startingpoint of any discussionof how it has effects.This certainlycasts new lighton the 60s. Sgt. Pepper,for example,gives me pleasurenot because it was thefirst hippie art work but because it was the finaltriumph of mod. It is SwingingLondon music,a shop- ping style,the sound of consumption(male boutiques,sitar echoes and in- cense blurringin the trafficnoises of CarnabyStreet, the KingsRoad, Satur- day afternoonsin the shoppingcenter). I realizenow thatall my favorite60s songs were mod songs-play as hard work,work as just a chore-smart, restlesssongs fromthe Kinks,the Small Faces, the Stones. The roots of the postpunkpop sensibilitylie in these ironic,distanced records, in theiruse of formas content.The game was to apply pop rules to any subject--mining disastersas well as love disorders.Pop songs about pop songs- the theoristshad arrived(David Bowie was beginninghis career as a would-be mod pop star,Bryan Ferry was studyingpop art with RichardHamilton). The best of Britain's60s pop bands was the Who because Pete Town- shend was the smartesttheorist. The Who Sell Out (note the title)was a buoyant,funny record with a much sharperconcept thanSgt. Pepper and a much clearersense of how pop worked- Townshend's songs were about musicas commodity.The group took theirlinks and jinglesfrom a real sta- tion,the pirateRadio London, and wrotetheir own linkingads-Odorono! Medac! - but the point was thatthe "real" songs could just as well have been ads too-"Welcome to my life,tattoo!" The Who Sell Out was a pop art LP, a mockingpresentation of the group as productwhich by drawing attentionto thistruth (the groupwas a product)seemed to deny it; by pro- vidingtheir own commercialsetting the Who distancedthemselves from it. But Townshend's argumentwas that teenage solidarityand excitement derived preciselyfrom pop's commercialpresence, and the real ironyof The Who Sell Out, fromhis point of view, was thatthe teenage rebellion had been won. The mod generationhadn't gottenold but had takenpop over (hence Radio London) and as mod pop was routinizedso disputes over definitionsof pleasureshifted ground: mods went mainstream,stylists went hippie, and pop went psychedelic. Psychedelicpop had the mod concernfor looking smart, but theshift of drugs,from speed to grassand acid, meanta shiftof aesthetic.Pleasure

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 64 0 SIMONFRITH became more laid back, sensualspace matteredmore thanemotional imme- diacy,and dance flooraction no longerinvolved the mods' intenseabsorp- tion in theirown bodies but a more abstractabsorption into a sound. Psy- chedeliawas essentiallyelitist, but the joy of psychedelicpop was thatit in- vited everyoneto join the elite-the music was friendly,its mysteriesstill framedby hooks and an easy beat. There was a tensioninvolved, though, as thereis in all pop move- ments- on the one hand the push to democracy,the attemptto please everyone;on the otherhand the push to exclusivity,to make consumption a matterof individualdifference. And psychedelicpop (partlybecause of its drug base) developed much more formallythan previous movementsits own musical language,its own coded sets of referencesand attitudes,its own journals.Such articulateness,the sheer weight of hippiewords, turned a pop cultinto an explicitcounterculture, and counterculturemeant artistic self-consciousness,not in termsof money-makingbut in termsof creativity. Hippie musiciansbegan to identifywith romantic artists generally-writers, painters,poets; theybegan to assume a culturallywell educated audience even while proclaimingtheir own superiorityto it. As musicianslike Jimi Hendrixand Cream(named to stresstheir elite status) displayed their tech- nical skills in lengthyimprovisations, complex harmonies,opened-up rhythmsthat had never been dreamtof in three-minutepop songs, pop starsbegan to move fromshow-biz to bohemia,and bohemiansseized on pop music as one more means of self-expression. It was this self-definitionof pop musicians as artistswhich really markedthe ideologicalshift from pop to rock. At issue was the purpose of musicmaking-to please and put togethera mass audience or to please and put togethera coterie,and, ironically,it was thereforeprecisely at the moment when musicianspresented themselves as political(because autono- mous, serious)that they ceased to addressthe onlypolitical issues on which popular music has any bite-issues of pleasure,escape, banality. The same sortof shiftof attitudelies at the core of the historyof pop in the USA. Theremod pop was based in Los Angeles,which in themid-60s functionedas London's twintown-in itsboutiques and clubs,on itsradio shows and records,the latestAnglo-styles were posed and sold. LA's great 60s hit,Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth,"seemed less to protest the youth-policebattles along Sunset Stripthan to celebratethem as style wars. BuffaloSpringfield's songwriters and singers,Steve Stills and Neil Young, began theirmusical lives as folksingers, and theirmove into pop was an example of the Beatles' most importanteffect on Americanmusic: thousands of disillusionedrock'n'roll fans (from Bob Dylan on down) who'd abandoned teenage music at the end of the 1950s for the "adult" concerns of folk,were convinced by the Britishsound thatrock and roll was stillan excitingform, and AmericanBeatlemania further suggested that

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROCKAND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY0 65 it was preciselyits vast popular appeal thatmade rock and roll (compared to folk)an urgent,relevant, political medium. As Bob Dylan soon discov- ered,there's no greatermusical power thana numberone AM radiohit, and by 1967 Americantowns were filledonce more with would-be pop stars, teenage garage bands, punks, making theirown version of post-Beatle, post-Byrd,post-Yardbird psychedelic pop - fuzz tones, electric twelve strings,screamed vocals. The problemwas thatat the same time(on campuses,in clubs) pro- testsingers and poets were usingthe new rock sounds withoutwanting to be associatedwith pop at all. The folkuse of rockincreasingly meant taking over the pop formwhile denyingthe pop context,and the pop-to-rock move in the USA meant a triumphof bohemia- the Americanrock argu- mentscame most clearlyfrom San Francisco,a self-consciouslyanti-pop, anticommercialcommunity. I rememberbeing sold San Franciscoin songs (Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco,"the FlowerpotMen's "Let's Go To San Francisco," Eric Burdon's "San FranciscoNights") as if it were a natural product,like sunshineand flowers,but available,like all pop, only to the young at heart.I duly set offand was deeply shocked by my firstconcert, the GratefulDead in Berkeley--to my mod pop tastesthey looked and sounded so scruffy.The basis of the San Franciscocommunity, it turned out, was not pop but art. San Franciscomusic was made out of nonpop forms,blues and folkand jazz, and addressednonpop issues; the San Fran- cisco sound was the sound of Beatniks. The Beats' post-Beatlesdiscovery was thatthey could read poetryto a rock and roll beat much more easily than they could to the more intel- lectual sounds of contemporaryjazz. If Britain'shippie movementsome- timesfelt like a rerunof the 1950s self-discoveryof teenagersby more affluent,more pretentiousyouth, the USA hippiemovement felt to me like a re- run of the 1950s beat fantasyby more affluent,less guiltyyouth. In the resultingcountercultural terms, what matteredmost about the San Fran- cisco sound was not itscontent (loosely meaningfullyrics went withloose- ly meaningfulmusic) but itsform. The musicthe bands made metthe needs of acid-droppingaudiences. It was rambling,loud, multitexturedand raw; it used simplemelodies and beat, but electronicallydistorted, to sound more difficult.The SF bands always seemed to have a relentlessdetermination to exhaust theirlisteners; our aim on the floorwas to followone theme,one sound, throughthe haze. This was a new sort of popular music which defineda new sort of popular audience, reflecteda new organizationof popular leisure.Hippie ideology itselfstressed the music's bohemianism,its independenceof the usual commercialpractices of Americanpop, but what emergedfrom San Francisco most obviously was a new style of commercialismitself. The most significantpeople in the Bay Area turnedout to be not musiciansbut entrepreneurs-TomDonahue, the disc jockey who pioneeredFM rock ra-

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 66 0 SIMONFRITH dio; promoterBill Graham,who laid down the rules of the stadiumrock show; Jann Wenner, who started Rolling Stone. The most important rock'n'rollimpresarios previously had been outsiders,seizing on starsop- portunistically(like Colonel Parkeron Elvis Presley).The San Francisco operators,in contrast,emerged from within the new audience itself,and so disguisedthe exploitationinvolved in the rock marketplacein the name of "the rock community."The politicalsignificance of thiswas not thatrock was coopted, but that the termsof its cooptation were concealed. Pop commercialismwas so blatantthat pop fanscould never forgettheir con- sumerstatus; rock fans,by contrast,could treatrecord-buying as an act of solidarity. The ultimateexpression of thisidea was the rock festival.Unlike the traditionalpop package show, put togetherfor the fansout there,the rock festival-in its length,its size, its setting,its referenceto a folktradition- was an attemptto providematerially the experienceof communitythat the music expressedsymbolically. This put a new sortof burdenon the stars: they had to make themselves"known" to theiraudiences directly.Thus JanisJoplin was probably the most remarkablefestival performer I saw because of her abilityto use her emotions(which touched on self-loathing) to bind her listenerstogether. What came across fromthe stage(on record Joplin'stechnical and imaginativeweaknesses are more obvious) was the feelingthat she so trustedus that she was holding nothingback. Rock performance,in short,came to mean not pleasingan audience (pop style) nor representingit (folkstyle) but, rather,displaying desires and feelings rawly,as if to a lover or friend.The appeal of the other great festival performer,Jimi Hendrix, rested on thesense thathis apparentlyuninhibited pursuitof pleasureswas on show, forall of us to see and share. Joplinand Hendrixset the intensivenorm for rock shows, fed the rock audience's need forthe emotionalcharge that confirmed they'd been at a "real" event. The questions theyposed were centralto rock: how to guaranteethe emotionalimpact of theirperformances night after night after night(the answerlay in technology,volume, a graduallyevolved repertoire of rock signsof emotion);how to relatepublic and privatelife when rock audiences expected no distinction(the answerwas to ignorethe audience, to deny thatthere was such a thingas a separatepublic persona-musicians soon foundthat they could make lots of moneyby apparentlyplaying only to please themselves). This sense of self-importancewas most obvious in the singer-song- writersinspired by Bob Dylan. There had always been perfomerswho wrote theirown songs but theyhad not previouslybeen regardedas dis- tinctivepopmakers. Paul Anka's "Diana," for example, had never been thoughtto expresshis own experienceexcept in termsof clichesso general thatthey could be used by everyone(the point of pop). WhatDylan and his successors broughtinto pop, then,was the concept of authenticity.Folk

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROCKAND THEPOLITICS OF MEMORY0 67 singershad always been contrastedto pop singersbecause theywrote and sang about the "real" world-the real world of politics,the real world of personal feeling- and it was this conventionof realitythat singer-song- writersbrought to rock. The ramificationswere immediate.Singer-songwriters'confessional mode, the appeal of theirsupposed "transparency," introduceda kind of moralisminto rock--faking an emotion (which in postpunkideology is the whole pointand joy of pop performance)became an aestheticcrime; musicians were judged fortheir openness, their honesty, theirsensitivity, were judged, thatis, as real,knowable people (thinkof that pompous rock fixture,the RollingStone interview).Once again,the problem was not thatperformers sold out the rock communityby becoming starsbut thatthey presented themselves as if theyweren't. And so avoided a centralpop issue. There was a similarevasion of pop responsibilityin attitudesto fans, in the argumentsabout what it meant to be popular. The most obvious example of thiswas the Doors, the mostmilitant exponents of the counterculture's romantic individualism.Jim Morrison's self-imageas a poet referrednot just to his lyricsbut also to his personality,to his obsession withhis own perceptions.He seized on the romanticideal of decadence-it was Morrison's experience of rock performancethat mattered,not his audience's. Given the rightmusical form Morrison's narcissismcould indeed be compelling, but the rock audience became increasingly unimportantto him as a source of sensation.In the end, his legacy to rock was a style of contempt,the Californianversion of the old bohemian argumentthat the pain of one "artist"is worththe boredomof any number of "ordinary"people. JimMorrison is a representative60s figure(and remainsone of thekey models foryoung Britishrock performers)precisely because of his self-importance.He stood forthe claim thatrock became an artform through its pursuitof the extraordinaryand the extreme,through the veryprocess of self-indulgence.The Doors' music was actuallypretty banal (which is why it sometimesworked) and my point is thatthe banalityof groups like the Doors remainsa more interestingaspect of the 60s than theirpretensions (thoughas JimMorrison continues to be mythologizedthis distinction gets harderto make-his pretensionshave been fed into the pop parade as a sort of bohemiankitsch). The 60s stillstand ideologicallyas a momentof greatmusical significance, but it workedat the timeas a seriesof momentsof moreor less triv- iality.Rock was certainlycentrally important to my lifethen, but to my private lifenot my public one. Rock didn'tcause me to be politicalbut rather confirmedmy politicsas backgroundmusic, as a permanentsound trackof angerand hope and joy-the rock "community"was a communityof feeling. Music matteredto 60s politicsfor its openness, its ambiguity.It was possible, forexample, forsome performers(the Doors, JimiHendrix, the

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 0 SIMONFRITH

Stones,the Dead) to be a source of solidarityand enthusiasmfor both the antiwarmovement and the Americansoldiers in Vietnam.The politicsof pop lie in whatpeople do withit, how theyuse it to seize a moment,define a time,cull meaningaround officialknowledge. If pop offersprivate grief forpublic use, it also offerspublic words forprivate use. Its effectsdepend on itsability to resonatethrough different circumstances. Rock theoristsgot the public-privateinterplay all wrong, claimingthe music as a publicly importantphenomenon early on, givingmusicians (John Lennon is the obvious example)a misleadingsense of theirown significance.Rock became a sortof officialculture, lost itsfurtiveness; songs whichshould have worked as a fleetingsubversion of moods became too didactic to be used by anyone. The politicalissues thatpopular music can explore--the ways in which people's "private"lives are public constructions--weredropped for the delusionsof a rock "movement." The songs that shaped my 60s worked not because of their "authenticity"but because of theirplayfulness-it was thesheer silliness of Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco" that made the hippie life seem so appealing.Songs thattook it forgranted that they didn't matter registered much more preciselythan progressive rock the essentialmood of the 60s, the sense of change and possibility.The 60s music thataffected me made me laugh, implied a certaincarelessness - Phil Spector's and the Beach Boys' soap operas, Bob Dylan's move into rock which made available a new tone of voice, the Stones'Beggars' Banquet, ironiccommentary from the politicalsidelines. And above all, Motown music,soul, whichlay at the heart of Britishmusical experience in the 60s even if it doesn't fitthe category"60s music." Soul music matteredto me more thananything else because I understoodmy desiresand fantasiesby referenceto it-fallingin love wasn't accompanied by Otis Redding's"My Girl" but definedby it. What I'm describinghere is the use and meaningof pop music now just as much as in the 60s (or in the 30s, come to that).What made the 60s differentwas not that this use of music changed, but that such pop meaningswere in competitionwith the lightningraids of the self-styled artists,bohemians, folkies and hippieswho claimed to do somethingwith rock altogetherdifferent. I didn't really believe thembut there'sno doubt theiractivities heightened music's importance.What was misleadingwas the suggestion that this involved "progress"- pop isn't a form that progressesanyway and the suggestionthat rock somehow went beyond pop, did thingsit couldn't do, concealed the way in which rock too was reallya music of transitoryprivate pleasures. This is not to say thatmusic has fixedmeanings or values. Like all mass media it depends forits effectson its context,the responseof active audiences, and more obviously than the othermedia, it also depends on memory.Music is such a powerfultrigger of rememberedemotion that it is probably more widely used for nostalgicreasons than for anythingelse. The politicsof musicalmemory-the struggleto determinewhat the music

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ROCKAND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY0 69 meantthen, why thatmatters now-is complicatedby itsdouble setting:to play Sgt.Pepper is to hear it as music now (in the contextof corporaterock and postpunkpop) and as music then(memories, good in my case, of the summerof '67). Then Sgt. Pepper seemed to express most joyously the sense thatwe were on the move. Now (afterthe 1970s, the Sex Pistols,the new aggressionof the right)I can't help thinkingthe move hita dead end, and the 60s record I listento all the timeis The VelvetUnderground and Nico, a record I don't even rememberhearing at the time. San Franciscoideologist Ralph Gleason once wrote aftera VelvetUn- dergroundperformance in the city that"Andy Warhol's Plastic Inevitable, upon examinationturns out to be nothingmore thana bad condensationof all the bum tripsof theTrips Festivals." Warhol's offense was thathe wasn't concerned to inspireor representa communitybut simplywanted to stir people up and see what happened-he'd been drawn to the Velvets because theymade such an unbearabledin. For him theywere not a rock group but a commentaryon a rock group and the miracle(not Warhol's doing) was that theirmusic was remarkableanyway. Lou Reed's songs picked at the undersideof bohemia-drugs as sicknessand money,sex as jealousy and pain. JohnCale had an avant-gardeobsession withtextural re- petition,with the impact on monotonyof the slightestdissonance. The Velvets' sound was harsh, loud, unpleasant in its use of feedback and screeching;the Velvets'music was made not out of melodies, hooks and choruses but out of riffs,repeated phrases that built up theireffects in layers, made their rhythmicand harmonic impact simultaneously.Each Velvet Undergroundsong used a small clusterof notes thatbattered and batteredagainst each otheruntil feedback, a screech,was the only logical place to go. The Velvet Underground'smusic, unlike most other 60s sounds, offeredno escape. It was indubitablypresent, unavoidable, which is why it became such a profoundinfluence on the 1970s developmentof a critical pop sensibility,a sensibilityconcerned with the politics ofform-the Velvetsstill stand for the idea thatthe politics of music involvesthe struggle to make meaningsin the firstplace, to definesomething stable in the ever- shiftingplay of pop signifiers.The VelvetUnderground's first LP, then,like Sgt. Pepper, offerednew argumentsabout what popular music could do, but where the Beatles' message was thateverything was possible, the Vel- vets' was thateverything was in doubt. It's paradoxical to rethinkthe 60s with such pessimism(though I'd guess thatthe Velvet Underground's music is played thesedays as much as anythingelse from then) but in retrospectthe point is that the Rock Revolutionwas far too easy. It proclaimeda utopia withoutstruggle; it invoked disorderwhen the politicsof pop reallyinvolves (did then too, which is what we must recall) the day-to-day,commonplace attemptto graspreassurance from the realizationthat everything-love, sex, pleasure, power-is in doubt.

This content downloaded from 137.110.41.128 on Mon, 3 Feb 2014 17:51:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions