CHAPTER 3

Commodity

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: ON THE POST-POSTMODERN ECONOMICS OF CLASSIC ROCK

The Rolling Stones lasting twenty, thirty years—what a stupid idea that would be.

Nobody lasts that long. —LESTER BANGS, 1973

The Song Remains the Same

A decade into the new millennium, my American college-town life remains positively saturated with 1960s and ’70s “classic rock.” On the way to the gym the other day, I couldn’t find anything but classic rock on the radio. Even our student radio station programs mostly classic rock throughout the day because, so they say, it’s what people want to hear. So I got to listen to a nineteen-year-old kid intro Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” as if it had never been played on the radio before. I arrive at the gym only to recall that even here classic rock plays all day, every day. Am I the only one who thinks that drug music is a little strange as a sound track for working out? (I heard the stoner anthem “White Rabbit” before I got my iPod up and running, a few seconds of “Comfortably Numb” on the way out the door.) This is all made even odder by the fact that the gym is owned and run by fundamentalist Christians. I get the impression that Jerry Falwell didn’t work out much, but if he did, I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t to the dulcimer tones of the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’.” When I was a kid, serious Christians railed against the excess of rock music. No more, I guess. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Back in the car, inspired by the Dead, I decide to stop at the state-run liquor store. No respite there, though, as the state store also plays classic rock. As I search for bargains, I’m treated to a Doors two-fer: “Peace Frog” (you remember, “blood in the streets / It’s up to my ankles”) and “Five to One” (“trade in your hours / for a handful of dimes”). I wonder, should a state-run facility be playing music that, on the face of it at least, constitutes a sledgehammer critique of both the state and capitalism? But no one bats an eye. I’m back in the car just in time to hear Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” playing under an ad for the local attorney who sponsors the classic rock show on the college radio station (“When that night of partying turns into a world of trouble, call us”). When I stop to fill up the gas tank, Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” pours out of the speakers at the self-service pump.

Watching a little TV after dinner bookends my day of classic rock. Surfing through the news stations, I find that nearly all US political candidates shake hands with supporters over the beats of classic rock, consistently dredging up the unpleasant reminder that Fleetwood Mac was the (white) house band of the Bill Clinton era. Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin, Blue Oyster Cult, and Aerosmith play over commercials for cars, while the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and Bachman Turner Overdrive help to hawk office products, and Beatles songs play behind Blackberry and Target ads (“You say good buy / I say hello”). Oddly, though, it’s not just the commercials that are saturated with classic rock. The Who has become the official theme-song provider for CBS’s CSI franchise—“Who Are You?” functions as theme song for the original CSI; “Won’t Get Fooled Again” introduces CSI: Miami, its first spin-off (clearly something’s going on there, as the spin-off is a genre dedicated, one would think, to fooling you again). Finally, there’s “Baba O’Reilly” for CSI: NY—“teenage wasteland” for the electronic wasteland? Turning to my Netflix queue for relief, I recently watched the futuristic drama Children of Men; but even circa 2027, the film suggests, we’ll still be tapping a toe to Deep Purple, King Crimson, and the Stones.

Indeed, if you listen closely, as I have for the past few months, it seems that classic rock is everywhere—Santana in the doctor’s office waiting room, Janis Joplin at the hamburger joint, the Eagles in the grocery store, Crosby, Stills and Nash in the dentist’s chair (as if a root canal weren’t painful enough).

As an everyday occurrence more than forty years after classic rock’s summer-of-love heyday, all of this is quite puzzling. In a series of culture markets dedicated slavishly to “the latest thing” (industries like advertising, music, and television), how can such decades-old popular songs remain this ubiquitous? Much of my puzzlement around this question is undoubtedly personal—I’d thought the reign of classic rock was over by the time I graduated from high school more than thirty years ago. My sophomore year of high school, 1979, seemed like the end of the line: it saw the release of Aerosmith’s pathetic Night in the Ruts (Right in the Nuts, get it?) and Led Zeppelin’s tepid last gasp In through the Out Door. Pink Floyd’s The Wall was also released that year, and while it was a gallant attempt to restage the consumer-friendly alienation of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon (fourteen-plus years on the Billboard album charts—talk about legs!), it did seem pretty repetitive and formulaic, even to high school ears. Bad Company’s unintentionally hilarious 1979 single “Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy” (“Here come the jesters / One, two, three”) seemed pretty much to nail the coffin shut. It must have seemed to anyone who was listening that the Clash’s London Calling (also released in 1979) was right: “phony Beatlemania” had indeed “bitten the dust.”

In fact, the category “classic rock” was invented by US radio stations in the fateful year 1979, precisely as a bulwark to protect this sagging, increasingly anachronistic musical entity against the dominance of disco, on the one hand, and against an emergent punk music, on the other. At the dawn of the 1980s, it seemed that so-called classic rock was a bloated, irrelevant self-parody. In fact, the very invention of a name and retro radio format for it would seem enough to signal its loss of cultural currency—“classic rock” being a thinly veiled updating of the familiar “oldies” format, in somewhat punchier language (any variant of the word “old” being poison throughout the contemporary culture industry). Just as the popular music of the 1950s had faded into the background by the late 1960s, the classic rock of the ’60s and early ’70s was, it seemed, largely a cultural throwback by the dawn of the 1980s. Classic rock seemed headed the inevitable way of the Vegas Elvis, destined to be forgotten by all but the most loyal fans by 1985—just as the music of Bill Haley or Chuck Berry had rendered the crooners of the 1940s anachronistic in their day. For better or worse, that’s the inevitable consumer dialectic of popular music—almost by definition, nothing can last for long in the viciously trend-driven business of popular culture. Already by 1975, for example, underground rock critic par excellence Lester Bangs wrote of the superstars of the late ’60s: “They’re washed up, moribund, self-pitying, self-parodying has-beens” (2002, 39). Indeed, as early as the summer of 1973, when Mick Jagger had just celebrated his thirtieth birthday, Bangs suggested that the Rolling Stones were already finished. He called Goat’s Head Soup “the epitaph of old men. . . . In other words, why don’t you guys go fertilize a forest?” (143, 151).

However, classic rock did not go gentle into that good night of cultural oblivion. Quite the opposite. In fact, classic rock to this day remains a stubborn, really quite singular exception to this otherwise iron rule of culture-industry anachronism, the rule of the “new.” Hence for me the impetus for this chapter—trying to understand the unprecedented success and longevity of this cultural product called classic rock. Besides asking questions concerning whether or not the staples of classic rock are any good or not on aesthetic terms, we’re left to deal first and foremost with the raw cultural fact of their absolutely unprecedented longevity—the spectacular long-term success of “Ramblin’ Man” or “Black Magic Woman” within a viciously short-term market for cultural commodities. What exactly do I mean by that unprecedented quality? Think about it this way: if you turned on the TV in 1965, you most certainly wouldn’t see ads with songs from the ’20s playing under them. College students in the 1970s didn’t routinely listen to music from the ’30s or ’40s, and the TV shows of the ’60s wouldn’t think of using Rudi Vallee or Al Jolson tunes as theme songs. Will anyone in the near future be listening to ’80s-era Mission of Burma on “all-punk radio”? One doubts it.

Or, as a more concrete example, think about this conundrum: the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” universally acclaimed as one of the finest works of classic rock, was released in 1965 and quickly climbed the pop charts in the US and Britain. It was a number-one hit in the US for four weeks in the summer of 1965, until it was knocked out of the box by “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” by Herman’s Hermits. In England, the single likewise went to number one, displacing Sonny and Cher, until it was in turn displaced by a Burt Bacharach song recorded by the now-forgotten Walker Brothers. The point, you ask? Well, how is it that, several decades hence, the pop sensibilities of Herman’s Hermits or Sonny and Cher have gone the inevitable way of musical obscurity—becoming degraded and even laughable markers of cultural old-fashionedness—while tunes like “Satisfaction” continue not only to sell themselves (“Satisfaction,” a song ostensibly about the alienation caused by rampant consumerism, is happily being consumed somewhere on classic rock radio right now), but to brand everything from beer to cars to TV shows? How can or does classic rock survive the seemingly iron laws to which other popular cultural phenomena are subject? I’d venture to say that few college students today think of Herman’s Hermits as “cool” or would be willing to pay to download any of their songs. Not so the Rolling Stones. Leaving aside for the moment the puzzling question of why today’s teenagers happily consume a “youth culture” that was originally produced over four decades ago, somehow or another the music of classic rock continues to thrive. It’s speculating about the status of that “somehow or another” that will interest me here.

The Beat Goes On

In broad outline, the musical youth culture story of the past half century in America seems pretty clearly a story of innovation and obsolescence. The birth of mass-appeal popular music in the Al Jolson–Rudy Vallee era gave way to the swing of the late ’30s and the crooners of the ’40s, who in turn faded into the background in the rockin’ ’50s, paving the way for the folk and soul of the early ’60s, which waned during the waxing of the second wave of rock in the late ’60s and ’70s. In its turn, that so-called classic rock seemingly should have made way for the disco of the late ’70s, the punk of the ’80s, the grunge and rap of the early ’90s, the hip-hop and emo of the late ’90s, and so on.1 So my initial question here is simply this: Why has everything else on this list been subject to the popular dialectic of innovation and obsolescence, while classic rock has somehow remained not only immune to anachronism but actually continued to thrive far beyond its initial successes, with several new generations of mass consumers? Kate Smith, the Slits, Sam Cooke, the Weavers, MC Hammer, Frankie Valli, Fats Domino, Michael Jackson, the Partridge Family, Minnie Ripperton, Jerry Vale, Conway Twitty, and the Gun Club: all of these artists, and hundreds more like them from widely varying traditions and decades of the twentieth century, enjoyed some measure of popularity in their day, followed by a slow slide into cultural obscurity. Not so classic rock: Aerosmith is more popular and culturally ubiquitous today than it was in the late 1970s; one certainly can’t say the same for the disco and punk music of that same era.

In beginning to answer the question of classic rock’s longevity, it’s always tempting to fall back again on its internal aesthetics—maybe classic rock has lasted so long because the songs are in fact what the gray-haired, pony-tailed DJs on the radio say they are: just plain great, timeless classics. Classic rock songs survive for the same reason other cultural classics have survived—they stood the test of time. And “You Really Got Me” does have a great hook. But surely one would also have to agree that Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” or “Maybellene” are likewise great songs with memorable rhythms, but I haven’t heard either of them on commercial radio lately, much less playing under TV ads for cars or makeup (for which they would seem particularly ripe pickings). However great the cornerstones of classic rock are, one would have to admit that intrinsically or aesthetically (as songs qua songs), they are at the end of the day no “better” than the best of Nat King Cole (listen again to “Straighten Up and Fly Right”), Buddy Holly, the Ramones, Grandmaster Flash, or Benny Goodman for that matter. But the great songs of the ’40s, ’50s, early ’60s, and even the ’80s and ’90s, have gone the inevitable way of cultural anachronism, while the classic rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s has positively flourished. This cultural fact would seem to call for explanations that are not simply internal or aesthetic ones—explanations that attempt to grapple with the cultural uses and functions of classic rock rather than (or at least in addition to) its internal aesthetic makeup. That is, I’m interested here in thinking primarily about classic rock’s unique long-lived status as a cultural commodity.

I should also make it clear that in treating classic rock as a commodity, I don’t harbor any interest in denunciations concerning classic rock’s having “sold out”—an odd claim on the face of it in our era of totalized commodification. Rock music may be all kinds of things in addition to being a commodity—it may be a way of life for people, a personal investment, a sound track for driving or partying, a nostalgia trip, or a new discovery. But in any case, such popular music most assuredly is a commodity. Indeed, what you might call the “way cool / sold out” dialectic of authenticity is, in my view, the least helpful—and, unfortunately, also the most ubiquitous—way to begin (and end) a discussion about popular music. “They were cool when I liked them back in the day; then they became popular and sold out.” Of course, anyone who’s ever been in a band, or thought seriously about cultural production of any kind, can see the dead-end quality of this thinking—where authenticity can only be purchased (and make no mistake, authenticity too is a commodity) at the price of utter obscurity.2 It would seem odd indeed to make a record, produce a sculpture, or write a play hoping in your heart of hearts that no one will ever support it materially, so that you can save your prized authenticity. Ironically enough, it’s precisely classic rock’s stubborn attachment to a discourse of subjective authenticity—“I’m Not like Everybody Else,” as the 1966 Kinks song insists—that helps it to survive and thrive in culture markets several decades removed from its native historical moment.

Of course, when one insists on treating classic rock first and foremost as a commodity, one has to be ready for an onslaught of objections. Initially those disagreements come from people who stubbornly refuse to think of rock music as a commodity at all (fans of varying intensities), but resistance to commodity-talk comes even more often from academic critics of rock music, who tend to object to that vocabulary as being tainted from before the fact by the specter of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “culture industry” thesis. To treat rock as a commodity seems for many critics to have already (dis)missed much of what interests people about popular music—how various fans use and respond to the music. As Larry Grossberg sums it up, academic rock criticism has been premised on the “belief that music had the potential to serve as an organizing site if not force of resistance and alternative possibilities” (2002, 30). To talk about cultural products primarily as commodities inevitably conjures the specter of “vulgar Marxism,” which treats the music as simply one product among others (Skittles, tires, classic rock) and thereby inevitably casts the rock consumer as a passive dupe of marketers and sinister business executives.

I think we’ve learned from a few decades of very good academic rock criticism—the work of Simon Frith, Grossberg, and Greil Marcus, among many others3—that consumers of cultural products like rock fans are anything but dupes for the Man, and there’s very little understanding to be gained by treating them as such. This strikes me as absolutely true, and the starting point for any analysis of rock music’s place in the present. Following along from those insights, however, I think a somewhat less-commented-upon parallel lesson should have been gleaned from this work: namely, that consumers of tires or Skittles are likewise not simply dupes, passive robots manipulated by Machiavellian businessmen at M&M Mars or Michelin. In short, I think we’ve learned from several decades of crucial work in cultural studies that the word “commodity” is no longer simply a fighting word, one that signals a top-down model of cultural force-feeding. Methodologically, thinking about contemporary culture is not confined to rooting out the inauthentic commodities (e.g., Boy Bands) and pitting them against the authentic flowerings of spontaneous creativity (e.g., DIY Punk). Certainly, the lightning-fast turnaround time between an innovative cultural phenomenon and its mass-market repackaging (“turning rebellion into money,” as the Clash song puts it) is an interesting phenomenon to study. But the terrain of cultural studies, for rock music as much as for Skittles, is no longer well described by the old-fashioned lingo of inauthentic commodities versus authentic cultural expressions of uncommodified desire.

Classic rock is—like it or not—a commodity, and in that sense it is just like candy, tires, academic essays, and virtually everything else in our market-take-all world. If anyone still wants to fight this battle, I’d point out that in July 2008, Condé Nast estimated that the ultimate classic rock standard, “Stairway to Heaven,” has by itself generated more than $562 million for Led Zeppelin (see Datskovsky 2008). Here it’s probably worth noting that like the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” probably its only serious contender for most revered tune in the history of classic rock, the lyrics of “Stairway” quite overtly function as a critique of such rampant commodification: the song opens with “a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold”—she is so commodity obsessed that she envisions even the afterlife as a shopping mall. “Stairway” rejects this opening image of a life (and death) territorialized on “buying” in favor of the fuzzy, aneconomic affects of subjective authenticity, that “feeling you get when you look to the west.” Luckily, “there’s still time to change the road you’re on,” and the sonic progression of the song itself functions as a kind of allegory: from the grammar of the commodified pop tune (the opening section, recognizable and radio-friendly enough) to the unfettered jam-anthem that takes up roughly the second half of the song. In the end, the thing that “Stairway” wants to avoid at all costs is stagnation or commodification, “to be a rock and not to roll.” As with its older sibling “Satisfaction,” it’s the song’s commitment to personal authenticity as bulwark against stifling consumerism that, without the least hint of irony, helps make it one of rock’s most enduring consumer products. To paraphrase Marx, if classic rock commodities could speak, they’d say “commodities suck”—which is partially what makes them such enduringly salable products.⁴

That classic rock is big business, however, doesn’t mean that classic rock is inherently uninteresting, sold out, crappy, or anything else in particular—just to say that it swims in the same sea that most everything else does these days. The remarkable thing about classic rock, from this point of view, has been its ability to swim so far, wide, and long from its original historical moment—not only to buck the seemingly inexorable trends of cultural obsolescence, but to foil them outright. Indeed, one of the biggest differences between tires, candy, and popular music—considered strictly as commodities—is that successful brands of tires and candy can expect a certain market longevity, while successful rock bands almost by definition cannot. Lemonheads, the Ferrara Pan candy invented in 1962, still sells briskly today; while Lemonheads, the “alternative” rock band du jour of 1992, has not been so lucky.

I’m trying here neither to celebrate nor to denounce classic rock, but to try to understand classic rock’s continuing and singular place in American cultural life—and to think about whether its unprecedented continuing popularity suggests any changes in what cultural studies theorists have to say about the fraught relations among American cultural production and economic production. To anticipate my conclusion in this chapter, I’ll argue that classic rock’s longevity can be read as a symptom of Fredric Jameson’s famous understanding of postmodernism (in shorthand, the complete collapse of cultural production into the logic of economic production, and vice versa); but in addition, the continuing reign of classic rock as a cultural commodity shows us the emergent logic of something else: not necessarily something “new,” but a different, more intense mode of production/consumption that I’ve been calling throughout, for lack of another word, post-postmodernism.

Iron Man: A Case Study; or, Now He

Has His Revenge

Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” (from 1970’s Paranoid) has always been a bit of a puzzler within the classic rock canon. In my day, nothing could get a group of stoner teenagers more worked up than a post-bong-hits discussion of the song: He’s an iron man, but we learn that he was turned to steel in the great magnetic field (when he traveled time for the future of mankind). Just to add to the problem, he has boots of lead. Surely, Ozzy knows that iron, lead, and steel are not the same thing—what’s he trying to tell us? And why has the iron-steel man decided, upon return from his time travels, to turn on “the people he once saved”? Because “nobody wants him”? Do men of iron really care that much if they’re not loved by an adoring public? How do magnetic forces turn iron to steel, anyway? And steel is of course stronger than iron—it’s iron with most of its impurities removed. Is it the impurities that made us love Iron Man, and now that he’s Mr. Perfect Steel Man, people don’t like him anymore? Was he somehow disabled by becoming stronger? Bogus, man.

Hermeneutic complexities notwithstanding, “Iron Man” has had quite a ride. Its guitar riff is one of the most recognizable in the classic rock canon, and the song is now a standard pop cultural reference, showing up everywhere from commercials for Nissan to Christmas song parodies (“I am Santa Claus”)—and it’s become a staple on band playlists at high school football games and served as a theme song for the Hollywood blockbusters of the same name. “Iron Man” is, then, an excellent case study in trying to come to grips with the life and afterlife of classic rock—primarily because, if you had told me thirty-five years ago that any song from Black Sabbath’s drug-addled Paranoid album could be used to sell cars, or would soon become a favorite of high school administrators everywhere, I would have said you were high (and, it being the ’70s, you very well might have been). In the American business world of the 1970s, it would simply have been unthinkable that the music of loud, heavy-metal druggies from England could help you move Japanese pickup trucks. And anyone who was in an American high school at any point in the ’70s can, I think, attest to the fact that suggesting Black Sabbath songs be added to the school-band playlist would bring on a locker search rather than a nod of approval. So how does “Iron Man” go from being a confused underground stoner anthem about a mixed-media B-list superhero who goes on a killing rampage, to being a nifty way to sell products and/or boost school spirit?

Again, one could always attribute this (literally) commercial success to some version of “selling out”—Ozzy’s quest for fame in the wake of his reality-TV stardom. As I have intimated earlier, however, in our thoroughly commodified world this kind of accusation doesn’t make much sense: popular music is a commodity, so accusing it of being more or less of a commodity seems somewhat of an argumentative nonstarter. To vernacularize for a moment, one can certainly argue that X or Y song sucks, but it can’t suck simply because it’s a successful commodity—insofar as all recorded music is a commodity. Also, even if it’s true that Sabbath (or any other classic rock band) desperately desires to be featured in endless commercials for all kinds of products, that could never explain why classic rock is in fact featured in endless commercials for all kinds of products. Regardless of whether or not you’re willing to sell out, someone first has to offer to buy you out—ad agencies, TV producers, the folks who put together sheet music for high school bands.

To suggest that Black Sabbath has sold out because they allowed “Iron Man” to be featured in a 2006 Nissan commercial doesn’t explain how or why anyone would connect a 1970 Black Sabbath song with selling pickup trucks in the first place. Indeed, authenticity-talk aside for the moment, the real oddity here is not that rockers approaching retirement age will accept big dollars for the thirty-second use of a song they recorded decades ago; the truly puzzling thing is that ad agencies are willing to pay huge coin for the thirty-second rental of a forty-year-old product. (I’m sure that Fats Domino, his life left in ruins by Hurricane Katrina, would happily have “sold out” his songbook to advertisers; problem is, no one was that interested in buying—while the remaining members of the Doors routinely continue to turn down million-dollar offers to use snippets of “Light My Fire” or “Break on Through” in advertising campaigns.)5

In short, it would seem that what’s changed in the last several decades is neither the imperatives of dominant discourses like advertising (sell stuff!), nor high school administration (keep order!), nor even really the imperatives of classic rock (which still promises to “come into your town, and help you party down!”), but the relation among these imperatives: what’s different, it seems, is the larger cultural and economic sea in which these discourses, once so very divergent or even antithetical, now somehow swim synchronously.

The Sun Is the Same, in a Relative Way, but You’re Older

The easy answer to this conundrum can be summed up in two words: “baby boomers.” The prime demographic target for crime dramas, classic rock radio, or luxury car commercials (forty- to sixty-year-olds with disposable income) has become one with the demographic of people running the advertising agencies, and they’re both sets of folks who grew up with “classic rock”; so an advertiser can easily and economically index all that “youth” supposedly stands for with one easy riff or song lyric: lust for life, just push play, start me up, been a long time since I rock ’n’ rolled. On the easy explanation, in other words, classic rock is all over the place because baby boomers are all over the place, on both the production and consumption side of much of our dominant culture. Sure, my crew-cut-wearing high school principal wouldn’t go for Black Sabbath, but he was born in the 1920s and came of age during World War II, well before the first wave of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. “Cool” was not his métier. However, today’s suburban high school principals, who one presumes follow CEOs and politicians in asking students to call them by their first names, would have grown up on rock ’n’ roll, and many of them were in fact weaned on the classic rock of the 1970s.

So, if you want to know why Cadillac plays classic rock under its ads, just think about Cadillac’s target market and who’s producing the ads: aging white baby boomers trying to recapture some of their rockin’ youth. Cadillac needs to rebrand itself, from your Uncle Bernie’s car to yours. What better way to rebrand a stodgy car line for baby boomers than to play Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin under your ads? In short, one answer to the question “how does ‘Iron Man’ end up as a truck commercial?” is quite easy: the riff from the song recalls for middle-aged, white, exurban consumers some sense of carefree nostalgia, being yourself, taking risks, having fun, rockin’ out. You’re cool, a little bit subversive, and so is the car, so throw away your inhibitions, like you would back in the day, and spend some dough! Classic rock, then, has migrated from its roots as site-specific music of the ’60s and ’70s and been reinvented as a kind of contentless cultural style: the mandarin commitment to an always “rebellious” subjectivity, identifiable by platitudes that are at this point as easily applicable to right-wing blather of Rush Limbaugh as they are to the music of Canadian power trio Rush. “Do your own thing” has become the Hegelian law of the whole.

This “authenticity nostalgia” explanation also holds for the unusual popularity of classic rock radio (oldies for people who hope they die before they get old) and helps explain why I had to suffer through the entirety of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” while looking for some hardware at Lowe’s the other day. Classic rock’s ubiquity is a sign of white suburban baby boomers stubbornly hanging on to the authenticity of their youth, in a series of spaces—the home-repair store, the orthodontist’s office, Cleveland’s classic rock station—that could hardly get any less authentic.

On this line of reasoning, the prescription for classic rock’s cultural longevity is then relatively easy to reconstruct: drain the leftist political stances and the druggy danger out of rock music, and conveniently forget or downplay rock’s roots in African American culture, and there you have it—not exactly the “durable Republican majority” that Karl Rove had openly dreamed about, but something parallel. Let’s call it a durable cultural style of subjective empowerment, perhaps—one that Robert Christgau (1991) lays out (with maximum prolixity) in his discussion of “how politically retrograde the classic-rock mindset is”: “Not for nothing did classic rock crown the Doors’ mystagogic middlebrow escapism and Led Zep’s chest-thumping megalomaniac grandeur. Rhetorical self-aggrandizement that made no demands on everyday life was exactly what the times called for.” In other words, classic rock at this juncture functions in popular culture as little more than an endless incitement to become who you want to be, being your own person, not following everyone else, and all the other stuff that cultural subversives like Miss America contestants and former sports stars talk about in their Sunday prayer breakfast speeches.

What’s changed most radically in culture at large is the very status of authenticity itself—or, more precisely, the relation between consumption and authenticity. In the not-so-recent past (even in the classic rock past, if songs like “Satisfaction” and “Stairway to Heaven” are to be believed), there was an outright antagonistic relation between commodity consumption and personal authenticity: the more you consume, the more you’re like everyone else, the less authentic you are, mostly because you’re simultaneously buying stifling social norms when you buy products (as “Satisfaction” ironically puts it, “he can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke / the same cigarettes as me”). In the past twenty or thirty years, however, the work of commodity consumption has been rebranded as part and parcel of the work of individuation and subversion, and thereby a certain style of consumption has become a royal road to authenticity (rather than an assured off-ramp).

In the process, the concept of authenticity in and around rock music has become completely portable and completely personal—it’s not so much located anymore in the music or even the ostensible “scene” surrounding the music; nor is authenticity to be found in keeping up with the Joneses, or in the collective consciousness of the age, but in you, whoever you may be. The commodities you collect around you are authentic signs of the real you, not evidence—as the Buzzcocks would have it—that you’re “hollow inside.” Classic rock has become, for better or worse, the sound track of choice for becoming who you already are, and as such it mirrors and extends the baby boomers’ slide from the “We” generation of the ’60s to the “Me” generation of the ’70s, a generational ethos proving to have legs far beyond the usual ten years allotted. And wild, wild horses couldn’t drag your authenticity—or your classic rock—away.

Following along after Jameson’s mammoth analyses of postmodernism as a phase where the innovation-driven logic of cultural production (“make it new!”) becomes central to the logic of economic production as well (consumer capitalism that has consistently to churn out new objects for consumption), one might venture something like the following thesis about the longevity of classic rock as a cultural commodity: It’s the workings of capitalism itself that have changed most radically over the past forty years. The rock ’n’ roll style of rebellious, existential individuality, largely unassimilable under the mass-production dictates of midcentury Fordism, has become the engine of post-Fordist, niche-market consumption capitalism. Authenticity is these days wholly territorialized on choice, rebellion, being yourself, freedom, fun; and these, what one might call the “values” of classic rock, today hold for your choices in music as for your choices in cars (Saab: Choose your own road), computers (Microsoft: Where would you like to go today?), and virtually every other commodity you can think of. Even hyperconservative, fundamentalist Christian political candidates these days run as “mavericks.”

In short, capitalism today promises the same subjective authenticity as the once-outlaw commodity called classic rock. So it’s not at all that classic rock has “sold out” to capitalism, but that capitalism has morphed into the kind of thing that, at its center rather than at its margins, now has a use for classic rock. Fly high, free bird.

Young Americans

This explanation makes some sense of classic rock’s long-lasting run in what seems to be a short-term market for cultural commodities, but it does leave at least one bustle in the hedgerow completely unexplained. I certainly see why people like me (b. 1963) might remain invested in classic rock—nostalgia for authenticity, the days of carefree teenage discovery, sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, and so on. The more puzzling question is why anyone born in the meantime would culture” that was originally produced by people who are now old enough to be their grandparents? (Alas, both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards became eligible for full Social Security benefits when they turned sixty-six back in 2009.)

In other words, this analysis helps explain why someone like me might listen to classic rock radio or be interested in buying a truck because Sabbath plays under its commercials, but it doesn’t necessarily shed any light on the enthusiasm that younger folks feel for classic rock. If indeed the classic rock canon was pretty much set when the moniker was invented in 1979 (with many of its cornerstones more than a decade old even at that point), it’s hard to imagine how today’s freshman class of college students would have much investment in this music. How can today’s teenagers and young adults receive another generation’s music as relevant any more than the crooning of Perry Como struck young people as timely in the late ’60s?

Surely, the pull of a nostalgia-based “authenticity” has something to it for younger folks as well, but for people who are today in middle age, that “authenticity” at least has a tenuous referent, even if it’s only the vague memory of bell bottoms, bongs, or disco demolition night at the local ballpark. In other words, if you’re over forty-five, you may have a classic rock past to romanticize—not so much if you’re presently in high school. So, about the only thing that’s left for young folks, on this “classic rock’s longevity = baby boomer nostalgia” reading, is that they function as the Adorno and Horkheimer–style cultural dupes who have been patiently waiting in the wings of this story.

While I suppose that this a tempting conclusion (people who grew up during the last decade or two in the US have no “authentic” or common cultural identity to speak of, other than as a consumer), at another level, this also strikes me as ridiculous, yet another manifestation of baby boomer exceptionalism. Commercial radio or arena rock reunions are probably not the right place to go looking for “what’s happening” in popular music today. Surely, young people listen to classic rock. But that’s not all they listen to, by a long shot.

Ironically, it’s precisely this new eclecticism of musical tastes that presents a problem to the founding assumptions of rock criticism, which holds as an article of faith that subjects’ investments in the music are supposed to be deeply felt and strongly held markers of cultural identity: you can’t wear your “Disco Sucks” T-shirt on Thursday and head for a disco on Friday. But it’s just such an “anything goes” aesthetic that seems on the ascendancy today—download them all, and let the iPod shuffle sort them out. According to Larry Grossberg’s “Reflections of a Disappointed Popular Music Scholar,” this emergent youthful eclecticism of musical taste (what he sees as the new “dominant apparatus” for consuming music) is less a progressive evolution of musical listening habits than it is a retrograde reversion to a ’50s-style “Top-40” model of corporate force-feeding:

The apparatus that is becoming dominant is a new mainstream that actually looks a lot like and is committed to much of the logic of the Top 40. . . . Top 40 has always been hybrid, bringing together in a statistical sample the disparate tastes of various taste cultures. The result is a collection of music the totality of which no one actually liked, but that, given the alternatives, many people listened to. Yet I believe today the dominant apparatus embraces a similar kind of eclecticism. Rather than claiming some sort of rock purism, it celebrates rock hybridity at its most extreme and celebrates as well its own eclecticism. . . . In fact, this apparatus—and the individuals within it—embrace an extraordinarily wide and (at least to my musical sensibilities) jarring range of music. The fans within this formation may like some classic rock, some country, some punk, some disco, some rap, and so on. And because these fans happily switch among these genres from song to song, spending an evening with them can be a strange experience for someone who still lives within the becoming-residual formation. (2002, 47)

For Grossberg, what’s primarily lost in the withering of the “residual” formation of rock culture is a hard mediating logic of subjective authenticity. In the dominant “rock” cultural formation of an earlier era, investments in the music were inseparable from investments in identity: anyone who insulted your music’s authenticity also implicitly questioned your personal authenticity. However, for Grossberg, this is increasingly not the case. Within the new cultural dominant, he argues that younger music fans’

tastes are not taken as the grounds for other larger and more significant types of judgments of other people or groups. They have largely given up the differentiating function of rock even as they attempt to hold onto its “territorializing function” in relation to a politics of fun and everyday life. They are tolerant beyond anything that the once dominant, now residual, paradigm could understand. Taste is increasingly lived as if it were merely a site of individuality and shared entertainment, nothing more and nothing less. . . . People dislike what they dislike (or what particular individuals in the group dislike) but they do so largely without the mediations of a logic of authenticity. (48)

In short, young people still happily consume classic rock, but it’s precisely the content-free consumption of music that’s the problem for Grossberg. No one’s willing anymore to get into screaming matches about the relative merits of Wish You Were Here because people’s investments in Pink Floyd are now unmoored from larger claims to (their own or their group’s) subjective authenticity. Grossberg’s claim (or maybe his “disappointment”) is that classic rock is now just another product—“shared entertainment, nothing more and nothing less.” In the rock era, by contrast, it used to be a cornerstone of authentic identity formation and a potential site of oppositional cultural resistance.

The question of classic rock’s present-day “authenticity” has taken another somewhat bizarre turn in a recent flap among rock critics concerning the “whiteness” of contemporary “indie” music. In a 2007 essay called “Paler Shade of White,” New Yorker rock critic Sasha Frere-Jones wonders “why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed underwent a racial re-sorting in the 1990s. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?” Such “miscegenation” is yet another way to make a retroactive claim for the authenticity of classic rock—and quite a bizarre one at that: the claim seems to be that Led Zeppelin, with its full-blown appropriation of African American blues forms, was somehow racially more progressive than bands like the Decembrists or Arcade Fire, whose sound doesn’t rely heavily on such forms.

In responding to Frere-Jones, Slate critic Carl Wilson (2007) takes the opportunity to pile on, arguing that not only is contemporary indie music too “white,” but it also lacks classic rock’s broad class appeal (cue Springsteen, and obligatory shots of football stadiums full of white kids raising a fist to blues licks served up by Grand Funk Railroad). Wilson calls contemporary indie music “bookish and nerdy,” “blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based”: in short, “class, as much as race, is the elephant in the room.” Even though classic rock’s most successful practitioners are aging white multimillionaires whose primary talents consisted of repackaging black music for white audiences, classic rock nevertheless somehow continues to function in contemporary music debates as a kind of unquestioned, authentic gold standard for racial openness and the classless society.6

Regardless of how (in)accurate such estimations of contemporary indie music may be, what interests me here is the notion that both Frere-Jones and Wilson share with the substantially more sophisticated analysis of Grossberg: the contemporary sense that the classic rock era was an unparalleled harbinger of cultural authenticity. This stance is summed up by no less an authority than New York Times editorialist David Brooks (2007) in his two cents on the issue: “Musical culture,” he writes, “has lost touch with its common roots,” which Brooks helpfully limns out for us: “Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers.” For Brooks, the memory of those “throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin” function in the new millennium not as a pathetic portrait of aimless, white suburban stoners, but as the last vestige of a common culture that could “span social, class, and ethnic lines.”⁷ One could, of course, say much about the willful cultural amnesia of all this—more aging white male, baby boomer exceptionalism—but I’m particularly interested in noting here the myriad high-culture places where classic rock continues to function as a marker for authenticity of all kinds, ideological fantasies of both the left and right: classic rock functions as a common cultural heritage, a version of the classless society, a place of racial understanding and admixture, and a site of oppositional identity formation. It’s also worth noting that this authenticity is, on all these accounts, completely lost on the younger generation, even if they profess to “like” classic rock among a series of other musical genres.

Oddly, though, even if one accepts this kind of tsk-tsking reading of the new generation, the young music fans of today are both dupes and not dupes enough—insofar as they have been tricked into falling for a once-vibrant, but now flatulent and reified product (a Top-40 version of classic rock); but interestingly enough they haven’t fallen for the economic engine of these larger consumerist processes, the endless dialectic of commodity obsolescence. On the rock-critic reading, young people today are not supposed to like this product (yesterday’s classic rock); they’re supposed to like that one (today’s hip-hop or emo)—and all the while they’re supposed to be vaguely worried about the commodity status of music itself. But a product’s a product, and it’s getting increasingly hard to believe the baby boomer line that classic rock was ever anything but one—the fable that it actually had a great deal of political content that could somehow be siphoned off from its commodity status (for further skeptical ammunition, see here prepackaged protest songs like the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” or Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On,” which poignantly reminds us that “the rock band’s a business man today”).⁸ Ironically, it’s those of us cultural-critic types (those who still stubbornly believe in the ultimate trumping value of the “new”) who may be the real cultural dupes waiting patiently at the end of this story, as we are perhaps the last generation still holding out for the high modernist connection between stylistic/formal innovation and cultural value, where the culturally new functions as the vanguard moment of the dialectic, that emergence that has yet to be completely assimilated.

One might define authenticity, on this line of reasoning, as a certain kind of refashioned modernist “make it new,” that which remained most stubbornly left over from modernism in the work of postmodernism.9 For his part, Jameson succinctly defines the postmodern condition like this: “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation” (1991, 4–5). In terms of Jameson’s work on the concept, any number of critics have pointed out that his postmodernism remains driven by a kind of hypermodernism of avant-garde innovation—and this seems true enough. But, stepping from the diagnostic to the critical for a moment, I think we’d also have to locate the properly critical power of postmodern critique precisely in that same “make it new” modernism; that is, the critical moment in most economic or cultural analyses of the postmodern depends on the continuing sense of shock, indignation, or dislocation at the fact that cultural production does indeed share the same logic as high-end economic production; the impulse to point this homology out then functions as a kind of “aha” moment of critical revelation.¹⁰

So, you’re postmodern in this Jamesonian sense if this collapse of economic production into cultural production (and vice versa) still strikes you as something that endlessly needs pointing out. For example, Grossberg sums up his analysis of the musically eclectic, post-rock present, as follows: “If those within this [dominant] apparatus embrace commodification without illusions, it is because they cannot imagine an outside to or a way out of commodification” (2002, 49). I think it’s fair to say that you take up a “postmodern” position if such rampant commodification remains, strictly speaking, a “problem” for your analysis (in other words, if commodification functions as a conclusion or end point of your analysis, as it does for Grossberg). Conversely, if rampant commodification functions as a more or less neutral beginning premise for your analysis of popular culture, your position is “post-postmodern”: if the tongue-in-groove meshing of artistic and economic production is all you’ve ever known, the very thing we learned from folks like Jameson in the early ’80s, why should it shock or discombobulate you three decades later? In other words, insofar as today’s youth (and this is really a global story—there’s even a thriving heavy metal scene in Iran¹¹) still has a great investment in classic rock, cultural critics should be able to find something to laud (maybe even something ironically “new”) here. In embracing and recycling the rock music of the past, the current generation is simultaneously refusing the larger engine of the culture industries, the constantly updated tyranny of the culture industry’s obsolescence machine. If nothing else, it shows young people staring down the reality of their times, marked by “commodification without illusions.”

Ironically, though, in refusing the absolute tyranny of “authenticity” or “innovation” in their musical consumption patterns, today’s classic rock youth are not so much throwback figures in this story (Adorno and Horkheimer’s “victims” of the culture industry) or even ironic postmodern consumers who consume the faux authenticity of the old with a certain new cynical or knowing edge; rather, today’s classic rock fans seem to function as what we might call quintessential post-postmoderns—those for whom the entire economic and cultural logic that holds “newness = value” seems a suspicious holdover of something else, or at least something that doesn’t really name their experiences of consumption or life. And as we look back, it’s a little hard to explain how the 1960s story of discovering a commodity like rock radio that then inexorably changes one’s suburban white life—an experience enshrined in countless personal testimonies and in classic rock staples like the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” or Queen’s “Radio Gaga”—is qualitatively different from a subsequent generation’s discovery of iTunes or the shopping mall: they both allow a certain sense of atomized belonging mixed with the potential for constant updates of your self-branding through commodity consumption. One undoubtedly seems “cooler” than the other (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is which), but in the twenty-first century, it’s very hard indeed to suggest that knowing a lot about the Beatles is different in kind (or somehow more “authentic”) than knowing a lot about the various styles at Abercrombie & Fitch. In contemporary parlance, they both allow you to be a quintessential “prosumer,” that consumer who produces him- or herself through consumption.12

In strictly theoretical terms, the upshot of this would seem to be that Jameson’s postmodernism hasn’t at all failed or been overcome, but rather triumphed in a way similar to other classics of the late twentieth-century theory canon. Think of Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” or Judith Butler’s gender performativity: these are no longer concepts that you have to laboriously sell to freshmen. They already know this stuff; in fact, they live it. Postmodernism, performativity, and the death of the author are no longer “emergent” phenomena, but they’ve become “dominant” ones. For example, if you grew up with chat rooms and Facebook, the performative truisms that people have multiple identities and that identity is not “original” (it has to be cited and repeated from a social stock of available avatars) can hardly come as a shock. Concerning the death of the author, not even the most sincere freshman these days needs to be told that Emily Dickinson is not the ultimate arbiter of her poems’ meanings—quite the opposite (if anything, students today are a little too confident in their own ability to produce meaning). In terms of postmodernism today, the links that Jameson highlights between cultural and economic production/ innovation have hardly disappeared in the new millennium; rather, they’ve been smeared across a broad range of other commodities. The connoisseur’s care and attention that used to be reserved for wonking your favorite bands has made its way all the way up to the board room—where innovation and rebellion are touted as necessary to any healthy business model—and all the way down to the ever-changing minutiae of cell-phone applications and ring tones.

So, in the end, it may be that classic rock’s unprecedented longevity is not an exception to the iron rule of planned obsolescence, but oddly, in classic rock’s very obsolescent popularity, its long strange trip shows the cultural logic of authenticity and obsolescence itself becoming increasingly obsolete. Consumption in the present cultural market for music has largely become unmoored from newness as the ultimate test of authenticity and value; and in the offing this cultural shift gives us an inkling of the passing of the high postmodern phase of US cultural production into something not exactly new, hardly “better” or “worse,” but something that’s certainly different: cultural and economic post-postmodernism.