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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text. http://www.jstor.org 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 POLITICSOF MEMORY SIMONFRITH 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-pub- lic 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 perspec- tive,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 rec- ords, 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 rec- ords' 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- 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 61 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 peo- ple'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