The Rock Rebellion
What has been repressed, no matter how forcibly and thoroughly, often finds a way of resurfacing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Anglo-American culture was struck by an outbreak of “hysteria” or “mania” described by alarmed observers as obscene, disruptive, and even criminal. Neither the United States nor England was, in the mid-twentieth century, a likely site for such unrestrained behavior. Both societies were heavily burdened by the puritanical legacy of the sixteenth century; each had contributed to the suppression of festive and ecstatic traditions among colonized—or, in the case of the Americans, enslaved—peoples. But it may be that their very success in expunging “foreign” ecstatic traditions heightened their vulnerability to the call, when it came, to get up and move and dance and shout.
From the beginning, the rock rebellion manifested itself as a simple refusal to sit still or to respect anyone who insisted that one do so. Wherever the “new” music was performed—and it was new at least to most white people—kids jumped out of their seats and began to chant, scream, and otherwise behave in ways that the authorities usually interpreted as “rioting.” Most of these incidents,
according to Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave in their book Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll, “just involved kids dancing in the aisles at theaters; jiving in their seats; and stomping, clapping, and yelling a lot—having a good time, in short. The authorities thought an audience should sit quietly and sedately, perhaps clapping a little at the end of the performance.”1 In 1956, performances by Bill Haley and His Comets, who were at the moment the most popular rock group in the world, provoked “a national outbreak of dancing in the aisles, chanting in the streets, and deliberate rudeness toward assorted figures of authority.”2 In both England and the United States, managers of the theaters and concert halls where rock groups performed responded by enlisting the police to control the “rioters,” so that early rock concerts evolved into a kind of slapstick ritual: Kids would stand up and begin dancing in the aisles; the police would chase them and stuff them back into their seats; the kids would get up again.
Throughout the 1960s as well, rock concerts were routine settings for confrontations between young fans and the police. Members of the Jefferson Airplane complained that “as soon as kids got up to dance in the aisles the cops would disconnect the amps.”3 Rolling Stones concerts almost invariably led to “riots,” with the Vancouver chief of police, for example, complaining that one of the group’s concerts provided the “most prolonged demand of physical endurance I have ever seen police confronted with during my 33 years of service.” In Vancouver, as in other cities, the police began to demand and get complete control of the curtains, lighting, and sound systems for rock concerts.4 Audiences responded with still more “riotous” behavior, such as rushing the stage or counterattacking the police with fire extinguishers and missiles. Jim Morrison of the Doors blamed the cops: “If there were no cops there, would anybody try to get onstage? … The only incentive to charge the stage is because there’s a barrier.”5 Barriers of any kind only served as a provocation to the fans, who sought a freedom of motion and physical self-expression horrifying to the adult world—a chance to
mingle with one another, to move to the music, and later to assert themselves in the streets outside the concert venues.
Of course the rock performers had to take some of the blame for their fans’ unruly behavior, if only because they too moved—dancing and jiving to their own music in ways that shocked and offended adult viewers. Pop singers like Eddie Fisher had moved too, but only from one conventional, operatic gesture to another—clasping their hands together on their chests or stretching their arms out, palms up. A good part of the frisson of early rock lay in the rhythmic and often sexually suggestive movements of the performers—grinding their hips, thrusting their pelvises, rolling their shoulders, leaping and falling on the floor—“rocking,” in short, as a way of announcing that the “new” music was inseparable from creative, free-form, beat-driven motion.
Among white performers, Elvis Presley pioneered the new physical expressiveness, requiring the family-oriented Ed Sullivan Show to censor out his lower body from the TV screen. Bo Diddley, a black performer, was not so lucky. His contract for a 1958 nationwide TV booking stipulated that he had to perform without moving, in order to “preserve decency.” Once on air, he forgot this rule or, more likely, simply found it impossible to hold his body separate from the music, and was docked his entire fee.6 Little Richard probably got away with jumping, prancing, and climbing on his piano only because of his over-the-top, manic, seemingly asexual persona.
But it was, again and again, the audience that stole the show, often to the consternation of the performers. The rock historian James Miller reports that the better Elvis Presley got at performing, “the less he got to do it. The problem was the tumult he now routinely provoked.” Describing a 1957 concert, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that “Presley clung to the microphone standard and staggered about in a distinctive, distraught manner, waiting for the noise to subside a bit.”7 A few years later, Beatlemaniacs—the just-pubescent followers of the Beatles—effectively silenced their
heroes with their frenzied screams. At no time during their U.S. tours was the group audible above the shrieking, which forced the band to abandon the concert stage in 1966, only two years after their first American appearances.
By the late 1960s, rock performers were negotiating their own security arrangements with the managers of concert venues, partly out of fear that they would be crushed by their fans, should the latter succeed in actually conquering the stage. Even the gentle, cerebral Grateful Dead eventually got “sick of out-of-control fan behavior” and distributed a flyer to concertgoers forbidding gatecrashing, bottle throwing, kicking down fences, and “miracling,” or begging for free tickets outside the venue.8 When the content of the spectacle was rock music, young people were no longer willing to accept the spectacle form, with its requirement that large numbers of people sit still and in silence while a talented few perform.
The rock rebellion can be interpreted in all kinds of ways. It was an uprising of the postwar generation, bored by affluence and stifled by the prevailing demands for conformity in lifestyle, opinion, and appearance. It was a challenge to the racial segregation that divided not only communities but music, which could be “pop” (for whites) or “race music” (for everyone else). And as the 1960s wore on, it fed into a widespread counterculture, which in turn helped animate a political movement countering war and domestic injustice.
But the rock rebellion was also something simpler and ostensibly less “political”—a rebellion against the role of the audience. In the history of festivities, the great innovation of the modern era had been the replacement of older, more participatory forms of festivity with spectacles in which the crowd serves merely as an audience. In the two centuries leading up to the twentieth, even audiences had been successfully tamed. If you went back to seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century France or England, you
would have found theater audiences, for example, that were disruptively rowdy, interrupting the actors with their own comments, milling around during the performance, or actually sitting on the stage in the midst of the action. By the end of the eighteenth century, aristocratic ideas of decorum—along with the innovation of reserved seating—brought, according to sociologist Richard Sennett, “a certain deadness into the theater. There were no more shouts from the back of the hall, no more people eating food while they stood watching the play. Silence in the theater seemed to diminish the enjoyment of watching the play.”9
Utterly missing from the audience’s new role was any kind of muscular involvement beyond the occasional applause, and this prohibition extended to musical performances as well as the theater. From the nineteenth century on, all forms of Western music were being consumed by immobile audiences. At a military parade, for example, the martial music might be stirring and the marching soldiers might themselves be caught up in the pleasures of rhythmic synchrony, but the good spectator—as opposed to the occasional exhibitionist—stood perfectly still and, except when straining to see better, remained as unobtrusive as possible. Concerts had become the most common setting for musical performances, and at these the role of the audience was to sit quietly and refrain from any motion at all. Even the most covert forms of dancing—foot tapping and head nodding—could disturb one’s fellow listeners; audience members had learned how to hold themselves in a state of frozen attention.
The motionless perception required of an audience takes effort, especially when the performance involves the rhythmic motions of others. As we saw in chapter 1, recent research in neuroscience suggests that the neuronal mechanisms underlying the perception of motion by another person are closely linked to the execution of that motion by the perceiver.10 To see a man marching or dancing, swaying as he plays the saxophone, or simply waving his arms to draw melodies from an orchestra is to ready oneself internally to join in
the marching, dancing, swaying, or arm waving. Infants automatically imitate the actions of others; with age, they acquire the ability to inhibit the imitative impulse. So the well-behaved audience member—who does not snap her fingers or nod her head in time to the music—is not really at rest; she is performing a kind of work—the silent, internal work of muscular inhibition.
It is sexual inhibition that rock is usually credited—or blamed—for challenging, as in one writer’s explanation of rock as “the unleashing of generations of repressed sexuality,”11 with the music serving only to convey a less inhibited, African American sexual sensibility to the repressed white middle-class “mainstream.” No doubt mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American culture was sexually repressive—homophobic and skittish about heterosexual sex as well. There’s no doubt, too, that sex had a lot to do with the rock rebellion, if only because of the irresistible appeal, at least from a female point of view, of stars like the “sleazy,” working-class Elvis or the witty and vaguely androgynous Beatles: They represented romantic possibilities that went well beyond necking in a car with the khaki-clad, buttoned-down, young white men of the time. But there is more to the story than sexual repressiveness and the perhaps inevitable revolt against it. Mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture was deeply restrictive of physical motion in general, whether or not it had anything to do with sex.
Entertainment, for example, meant sitting and watching TV or movies. There were still “carnivals,” but these no longer involved dancing or sports other than, say, throwing objects at a target. At a mid-twentieth-century carnival or fair, machines did the moving for you; all the carnival-goers had to do was sit in a seat and let the roller coaster or Ferris wheel propel their bodies along a preexisting path. Religious worship was, in the dominant Protestant tradition, equally sedentary, allowing participation only in the form of hymn singing. There was dancing too, of course, but before rock’s emergence into white culture, this typically meant ballroom dancing—decorously choreographed fox-trots and waltzes that allowed for
little group interaction or individual variation. Even walking had been made largely obsolete by suburbanization and the automobile culture it spawned. At the time, of course, no one reckoned the eventual price of all this routine immobilization in the form of obesity and other health problems.
In the mid-1950s, sports still offered an opportunity for physical expression, primarily for the athletes and cheerleaders. Most people, though, were merely spectators, encouraged at high school pep rallies to stand up in the bleachers and cheer for an occasional good play, but otherwise to remain motionless. The restrictions against physical motion weighed particularly heavy on girls: Not only were there no school sports for girls, but those sports that were open to girls, usually under the sponsorship of YWCAs and churches, had been redesigned to limit the amount of motion involved. In the official girls’ version of basketball, for example, players were allowed only two dribbles in succession and were prohibited from crossing the center line. For females, even sex was meant to be motionless and passive. The leading marital advice book of mid-twentieth-century America warned against female “movements” during sex—the idea being disturbing enough to merit italics.12 Insofar as sexual activity was described at all, it was in terms of static “positions.”
Hence, in no small part, the particular appeal of rock mania to teenage girls. Elvis and especially the Beatles inspired a kind of mass hysteria among crowds of young white women, who jumped up and down, screamed, cried, fainted, and sometimes wet their pants in the presence of their idols. To adult commentators, Beatlemania was pathological—an “epidemic” set off by the Beatles as carriers or “foreign germs.” In a particularly ingenious, partly tongue-in-cheek explanation offered by the New York Times Magazine in 1964, the girls were merely “conforming” and “expressing their desire to obey.” They wanted to be subsumed into the mass, which, in the author’s view, was the same as being “transformed into an insect.” After all, he observed triumphantly, there had been an
earlier craze of “jitterbugs,”o and “Beatles, too, are a type of bug.”13 But former Beatlemaniacs report that the experience was empowering and freeing. Brought together in a crowd, girls who individually might have been timid and obedient broke through police lines, rushed stages, and, of course, through their actions, determined that the Fab Four would be the most successful and best-known band in world history.
Rock struck with such force, in the 1950s and early 1960s, because the white world it entered was frozen over and brittle—not only physically immobilizing but emotionally restrained. In prerock middle-class teenage culture, for example, the requisite stance was cool, with the word connoting not just generic approval, as it does today, but a kind of aloofness, emotional affectlessness, and sense of superiority. Rock, with its demands for immediate and unguarded physical participation, thawed the coolness, summoned the body into action, and blasted the mind out of the isolation and guardedness that had come to define the Western personality. To the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, white rock fans were simply trying to reclaim “their Bodies again after generations of alienation and disembodied existence.”
They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the cold ass, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints with the spark of life.14
Possibly there would have been a youth revolt in the mid- to late twentieth century without rock and roll. As Daniel Bell observed in
the 1950s, mainstream American culture stood poised unstably between its puritanical legacy and the hedonism encouraged by the expanding consumer culture. People were enjoined to work hard and save, even as advertising conveyed the steady exhortation to spend and indulge oneself in the here and now. Similarly, their premarital sexual explorations were supposed to proceed no lower than the neck, despite the fact that the commercial culture was already heavily—although by today’s standards, somewhat coyly—sexualized. These contradictions, or examples of gross societal hypocrisy, might eventually have touched off a widespread cultural revolt on their own.
Rock’s contribution was to weigh in decisively on the side of hedonism and against the old puritanical theme of “deferred gratification.” First, because it was a kind of music—rhythmic and heavy on the percussion—that almost demanded an immediate muscular response. And second, because the kind of dancing evoked by rock—unlike such European varieties as polkas or waltzes—bore traces of a centuries-old ecstatic religious tradition. At first, in the 1950s and early 1960s, people danced to rock music in couples—a form of dancing that originated in Europe in the nineteenth century and served largely as a courtship ritual. As rock evolved, people began to move to it more freely, dancing individually or in lines and circles. A person might get up and start dancing alone, another might follow, women might dance with women, men with men, couples might dissolve and re-form—until the entire gathering was swept up by the rhythm.
There is no doubt, among scholars, that such distinctively African American contributions as jazz, gospel, the blues, and rhythm and blues all have roots in indigenous African music. The common characteristics of African, African American, and much Caribbean music—polyrhythms, antiphonal responses, and a capacity for both repetition and creative variation—delineate a singularly hardy musical tradition, one that had endured the Middle Passage and centuries of enslavement. Even particular stylistic themes—like the famous “Bo Diddley beat”—which inspired white
performers including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Mick Jagger, and Bruce Springsteen—can be traced to West Africa via, in this case, Cuba.15
And as we saw in chapter 8, one hallmark of African-derived musical traditions is their intimate connection to dance. Within the western and central African societies that supplied the Americas with slave laborers, music was performed to be danced to, not just listened to, and the performers themselves often danced as they played their instruments. So inseparable were African music and dance that many African languages lack distinct words for the two activities, although they possess “rich vocabularies for forms, styles, and techniques.”16 As the cops who attempted to maintain order at early rock concerts perhaps should have realized, rock and roll is part of a family of music that it is almost impossible not to respond to with dance or some other form of rhythmic involvement.
In the Caribbean and in Brazil, African traditions of music and dance had found a home in new religions, like Vodou and Candomblé, that mixed elements of both European Christian and African theologies. In North America, however, the same traditions were preserved within the unlikely environment of Christian theology, which slaves embraced in part because Christian worship was the only form of communal activity they were allowed, outside of laboring together in the fields.17 Segregated from white worshippers and for the most part ignored by them, black Christians developed their own distinctive forms of worship based on African religious traditions of music and dance. One of these was the holy dance, or ring-shout, involving “hand clapping, foot stamping, and leaping”—and dating from at least the early-nineteenth-century revivals in Virginia.18 A black plantation preacher wrote that “the way in which we worshipped was almost indescribable. The singing was accompanied by a certain ecstasy of motion, clapping of hands, tossing of heads.”19
Nothing like this had occurred in the context of Christian worship since dance was prohibited in European Catholic churches
in the thirteenth century. Other accounts make it clear that the ring-shout involved not only an “ecstasy of motion” but an ecstasy of the spirit, as in West African pagan rituals. The historian Albert Raboteau reported that the ring-shout would typically proceed to the point where “the individual shouter stood outside himself, literally in ecstasy, transcending time and place as the rhythms of the chorus were repeatedly beat out with hands, feet, and body in the constant shuffle of the ring.”20 A nineteenth-century white observer offered this description of a ring-shout performed by African slaves:
One by one of the congregation slipped out into the center of the floor and began to “shout”—(that is whirl around and sing and clap hands, and so round and round in circles). After a time as this went on, the enthusiasm became a frenzy and only the able bodied men and women remained—the weak dropping out one by one, returning to the “sidelines” to clap and urge the “shouters” on.21 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many newly freed African Americans had sought respectability by toning down their religious services—“banning the shout, discouraging enthusiastic religion, and adopting more sedate hymns.”22 But as mainstream black religion became more staid, “Holiness” sects sprang up to celebrate the old ecstatic forms of worship, featuring “healing, gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and religious dance.”23 The Holiness churches, which gave birth to interracial Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century, took the added step of bringing more secular black sounds back into church—ragtime, jazz, and blues—along with drums, tambourines, saxophones, and guitars.
Gospel music, arising in the 1930s, was smoother and more professional than the old spirituals, but still invited physical participation by congregations and performers alike. “Don’t let the movement go out of the music,” warned gospel bandleader Thomas
A. Dorsey. “Black music calls for movement!”24 Mahalia Jackson wrote, “I want my hands … my feet … my whole body to say all that is in me. I say ‘Don’t let the devil steal the beat from the Lord!’ The Lord doesn’t like us to act dead. If you feel it, tap your feet a little—dance to the glory of the Lord!”25 By the 1950s, when the civil rights movement began to break through segregation, and on the very eve of rock and roll’s emergence into white culture, African American intellectuals had claimed the African-derived tradition of religious music and responsive motion as a means not only of artistic expression but of collective survival. In Juneteenth, for example, Ralph Ellison has his hero, Reverend Hickman, tell a crowd: “Keep to the rhythm and you’ll keep to life … Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won’t get weary. Keep to the rhythm and you won’t get lost … They couldn’t divide us now [thanks to our music]. Because anywhere they dragged us we throbbed in time together.” 26 In a musical tradition featuring rhythmic participation by the congregation, it almost goes without saying that the “audience” is no longer confined to spectatorship. As one scholar observes, the “Western barrier between performer and audience” had been breached, making way for “an inclusive, communal, communicative event.”27
This was rock and roll’s heritage: a participatory experience, rooted in an ecstatic religious tradition. Black rock, or “rhythm and blues,” performers of the 1950s and ’60s—including such stars as Little Richard, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and many others—acknowledged their obvious debt to black church music, often moving effortlessly from religious to secular songs and back again. Except for Elvis Presley, who was devoted to gospel music, white performers were not always so gracious, often simply stealing their songs from black performers, unaware of their religious origins. But one way or another the chain was completed—from pre-Christian African ecstatic rituals, through African American Christian forms of worship, to African American secular rhythm and blues, and finally to the mostly white rockers who inspired white
kids to “riot.” The early rock audiences who stomped and jumped out of their seats to dance were announcing, whether they knew it or not, the rebirth of an ecstatic tradition that been repressed and marginalized by Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries.
The establishment reaction to rock and roll was swift and almost universal. “No other form of culture …” the rock historians Martin and Segrave claim, unaware of the Europeans’ suppression of indigenous cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “has met with such extensive hostility.”28 With the passage of decades, the late 1950s and early 1960s opposition to rock has acquired a quaint comicality, but at the time it was daunting to the music’s purveyors, if not to the performers and fans. Clergymen joined psychiatrists in calling for bans of the “obscene” and disruptive new music. Disk jockeys vowed never to play the stuff, sometimes burning stacks of the offending 45s to advertise their commitment to “good” music, as opposed to the faddish new “junk.” Cities, as we have seen, mobilized their police forces against the fans, and some did their best to discourage visits by rock musicians. Civic leaders denounced rock as an incitement to juvenile delinquency, violence, and sex. No wonder, then, that most of the major record companies initially eschewed rock and roll, leaving it to smaller, independent companies to test the new music’s profitability.
Unnoted at the time was the way antirock commentary almost precisely echoed the language that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans had used to denounce the “native” ecstatic rituals they encountered during their phase of imperialist expansion. Aware only of its black roots, the enemies of rock attacked it as “jungle music,” “tribal music,” and even, weirdly, “cannibalistic.”29 The conductor of the BBC symphony orchestra opined that rock wasn’t really new, because it “had been played in the jungle for
centuries”—never mind the later centuries of African American innovation, carried out in the fields of the American South. Similar references to “jungles” and “savages” peppered antirock rhetoric, with the industry publication Music Journal editorializing that teenage rock fans were “definitely influenced in their lawlessness by this throwback to jungle rhythms. Either it actually stirs them to orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves), or they use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions and the complete disregard of the conventions of decency.”30 Images of undisciplined “savages” losing control under the influence of a compelling rhythm reinforced the idea of rock and roll as a threat not just to public order but to civilization itself. To complete the historical parallel, some clergymen raised the possibility that rock and roll would “turn young people into devil worshippers.”31
In one way, the critics were right: Rock was much more than a musical genre; it was becoming, by the mid-1960s, the rallying point of an alternative culture utterly estranged from the dominant “structures,” as the anthropologist Victor Turner would term them, of Government, Corporations, Church, and Family. Spilling out of theaters, rock drew the fans to more expansive and congenial venues—“psychedelic ballrooms” lit by mind-dissolving strobe lights, and the outdoor sites of rock festivals from Monterey to Woodstock. In these settings, young people began to assemble all the ancient ingredients of carnival: They “costumed” in torn jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, granny dresses, feathers, and billowing scarves. They painted their faces and perfumed themselves with patchouli. They shared beer, wine, vegetarian snacks. They passed around joints. Young antiwar activists, like myself, could take a holiday from our usual work of persuasion and organizing, because peace was already in the air.
The hippie rock fans had re-created carnival—and more. To most participants rock festivals were something beyond temporary interruptions in otherwise dull and hardworking lives. These events were the beachheads of a new, ecstatic culture meant to replace the
old repressive one—or, as Jim Miller puts it, “a bucolic and cosmopolitan utopia, a world of benign liberty, happy nonconformity, and miraculously nonpossessive individualism, an egalitarian city-state where the dancers with the face paint freaking freely in the crowd were now as much the stars as anyone’s music up on the stage.”32
One way to expand the festival into an ongoing community was to take to the road and go from one concert or festival to another. “Deadheads,” fans of the Grateful Dead, formed a floating community that followed the band from city to city in “elderly bread vans and decommissioned school buses painted with rust primer and furnished with curtains and the kind of mattresses that are chucked under lampposts at 3 A.M. On their windows were stickers showing skulls or tap-dancing skeletons, talismanic to the Dead.”33 A former Deadhead writes of his fellow fans:
I would see them again at the Meadowlands, at Madison Square Garden and up in Boston, all the way across the country to San Francisco and back east again. I would find things to love in the parking lots, and in the hallways of the arenas. Strange, clumpy pyramids of naked deadheads writhed intertwined in asexual hallucinogenic ecstasy. Angel boys stood wide-eyed and grinning on the same square of asphalt for hours. Angel girls spun in the same tight circle all night, bells jangling on their ankles … Food and drink were shared freely, drugs and even tickets too. You could count on running into the same people from city to city, grubby nomads who would find you among thousands of unknowns and greet you with unfeigned warmth.34 The counterculture’s dream of an ongoing ecstatic community incensed Victor Turner. He could see the parallel between rock festivities and the ecstatic rituals of small-scale societies; he understood rock’s challenge to the dominant society, stating, somewhat woodenly, that “rock is clearly a cultural expression and instrumentality of that style of communitas which has arisen as the antithesis of the
‘square,’ ‘organization man’ type of bureaucratic social structure of mid-twentieth-century America.”35 But, as we saw earlier, Turner rejected the rock culture’s aspiration to replace “square” culture with a permanently festive way of life. Communal ecstasy, or communitas, as he put it, could only be “liminal,” or marginal and occasional. Any attempt to make it a daily experience would be destructive of structure and hence of civilization. Quite possibly, this distaste for the hippie counterculture helped shape his anthropological theories, or at least his insistence that collective ecstasy be consumed only in measured and scheduled doses.
Opposition to rock persists into our own time, only in less egregiously racist and sometimes more historically sophisticated forms. Political conservatives tend to categorize it as a manifestation of the “permissiveness” of the “toxic 1960s,” during which “traditional values” were supposedly undermined by hedonism and self-indulgence. On the occasion of Jerry Garcia’s death, for example, the right-wing Washington Times dismissed rock as “merely the sounds they [the Grateful Dead] made in worshipping an infantile hedonism that infests the culture yet,” and went on to sound the “jungle” theme: Rock is a reminder of “how fragile civilization always is, how close the darkness of the forest surrounds.”36 Or we find on the Web site of Pastor David L. Brown today an attack on rock for its “sexuality” and “lawlessness,” followed breathlessly by: “But that is not the only problem! The beat of rock is nothing new. Pagan, animistic tribes had the ‘rock beat’ long before it came to America. They use the driving beat to get ‘high’ and bring them into an altered state of consciousness … You see, the beat ‘is a vehicle for demon infestation.’”37
Rock, of course, survived to see its early enemies eat their words. Most important, it proved to be a moneymaking commodity, capable of enriching recording companies and performers, while its live audiences, no longer containable in theaters, moved on to fill football stadiums and even larger venues in what were often truly ecstatic events. The market had spoken: By the late 1960s the
no-longer-new music not only rocked but ruled. Having become a successful commodity itself, rock was quickly enlisted to market other commodities, from cars to financial services. Rock was, by the 1980s, almost inescapable—offered around the clock on thousands of radio stations, sampled in commercials, bowdlerized as Muzac, or deployed in its original form to provide shopping-friendly background music at stores like Kmart, the Gap, and Express. At the same time it was evolving into so many diverse forms—acid, disco, punk, heavy metal, alternative, house, techno, et cetera—that “rock and roll” became an almost impossibly large and blurry target. Rock and rock-derived music was everywhere, from sports events to churches; in fact, the above statement by Pastor Brown was actually directed at “Christian rock.”
Certainly commercialization had a debilitating effect on rock. The defiant self-assertion of a song like “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is lost, for example, when that song becomes part of the background noise in a shopping mall. Worse still, businesses sought to appropriate the defiance itself, as when, in the 1990s, “new economy” companies used it in commercials to project their newness, coolness, and all-around impatience with the old. There is no better way to subvert a revolution than to enlist it in the service of moneymaking.
Quite apart from its employment as a marketing tool, rock’s sheer ubiquity may have had an even greater taming effect simply by severing its life-giving connection to physical participation and collective pleasure. Rock that can be heard everywhere is rock that can be heard largely in places where a physical response is impossible. What better way to desensitize people to a beat than to force them to hear it in scores of settings, like shopping malls, where no response is acceptable or permitted? Since you can’t start dancing to the tunes pumped into a RadioShack or Winn-Dixie—at least not without risking the interference of a security guard—you learn to sever the neural connections linking the perception of rhythm to its expression through muscular motion. This lesson is repeated in our
lives every day: Resist the rhythmic provocation. No matter how tempting the beat, you must stand still or remain in your seat.
But something happened in the rock rebellion, traces of which persist not only in today’s club scene but in the most banal settings for rock, like shoe stores and supermarkets. Rock and roll reopened the possibility of ecstasy, or at least a joy beyond anything else the consumer culture could offer. Drugs, particularly marijuana and LSD, contributed to the revival of the ecstatic possibility; so did the sexual revolution, which meant, in the 1960s and ’70s, not just male exploitativeness but women’s demand for female orgasms too. People of course continue to seek pleasure through shopping, drinking, and forms of prepackaged entertainment that are mildly engaging at best. But the news is out, and has been at least since the 1960s: We are capable of so much more.
Rock and roll no doubt encouraged indulgence in drugs and sex, but it hardly needed them as accompaniments, speaking as it did from ancient traditions of collective ecstasy achieved solely through rhythmic participation. As no less an expert than Joseph Campbell remarked of a Grateful Dead concert he attended—rather soberly we must imagine, since he was a conservative and already elderly man at the time: “That was a real Dionysian festival.”38 Dionysus had briefly deigned to visit the cultures of his historic enemies, and, every so often, when an otherwise dreary “classic rock” station lets loose with Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” or Junior Walker and the All Stars’ “(I’m a) Roadrunner,” it is possible to imagine that he will come again.