III. ORIGINS OF THE GROUP

After the specter of Brian Jones vanished, we plied on. Surely there were more ghosts to speak with. Then it hit us: We had delved into quite sophisticated “group” issues immediately. If one is to instruct, one must initially address the fundamentals. Not just how to start a group or how to perform in a group, but the very questions: “What is a group?” “Why is a group?” “Where did the group come from?” and “Why would someone in this day and age want to engage in such an archaic and possibly irrelevant task?”

We thought it would be best to summon one of the progenitors of the form to explain it to us. After a little finagling, our spirit medium was able to contact someone who claimed to be the spirit formerly known as Richard Berry. As the composer of “Louie Louie,” he seemed uniquely qualified for our purposes. Berry didn’t appear, per se, but the table rattled and distant chains were heard. Finally, there was a deep moan like a strong wind in the boughs of an ancient tree. We went ahead with our questions.

 

 

What exactly is rock ’n’ roll?

Richard Berry: Rock ’n’ roll is originally a product of American culture and therefore its history is marked with the same particularities and circumstances as its parent nation. Since the USA is a nation founded on the ideas of individualism, rebellion, evangelism, white supremacy, black slavery, expulsion of native peoples, expansionism, commerce, and industry, these values all play a part in the formation of the USA’s primary and arguably greatest cultural export.

Besides fast food, the rock ’n’ roll group is what America is best known for, and its model is enthusiastically reproduced across the globe, at much cost to the individuals involved and for little apparent reward. The rock group being designated as cultural ambassador—despite its reputation as an amoral organization, and the encouragement it receives to “behave badly,” with specifically allotted transgressions such as Herculean sodomizing and extravagant use of contraband drugs—is a significant and peculiar arrangement.

The origins of the rock band, its use as primary cultural export, and its international popularity can only be understood in the context of the time it rose to prominence. This was during the Cold War and the USA’s post–World War II military occupation of so much of the globe.

From the start, America’s history is a story of expansion. The Louisiana Purchase, the “Indian Wars,” the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, the Northwest Territories, Alaska, the annexation of Hawaii, the Philippines War, and so on were typical operations of imperial growth—which often involved criminal, even genocidal, behavior. Therefore, an ideology was needed to justify these activities to the consciences of their perpetrators. This would be Manifest Destiny, a race-supremacy doctrine which proposed that whites, or Aryans, were entitled to the spoils of the Earth. It was taught at Harvard and the most illustrious schools of the ruling class well into the twentieth century.

After the war with Hitler’s Germany, however, white supremacy (or “the white man’s burden”) as a civilizing force was no longer an ideology which could be explicitly announced. Religion and race theory, the building blocks of imperialism and expansion, were out of vogue. The resounding victory of the USSR over Germany at Kursk, Stalingrad, and Berlin seemed to reinforce Soviet claims of inevitable proletarian victory in a titanic, prophesied class struggle against imperialistic capitalism.

Fascism, also called “corporatism,” had been capitalism’s emergency measure against the threat of socialism, and was widely instituted in the wake of the First World War, when Soviet republics had been declared in Russia—and briefly in Bavaria, Hungary, and Berlin—leaving the ruling class terrified of extinction. Fascism appropriated some of the rhetoric and social programs of socialism, but mixed it with a mystical nationalist sensibility and the collusion of private capital with state authoritarian structures. Results of the Fascist experiment were mixed. While Roosevelt’s version, called the New Deal, was a resounding success, the German, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Japanese models were less so—though they effectively staved off the feared “red” insurrection.

Despite fascism having effectively countered the ascension of the proletariat, the Communists still held the cosmopolitan avant-garde enthralled with their radical model, which promoted woman’s rights, rejected nationalism, and promised universal health care and education. The films of Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and the collages of El Lissitzky and Rodchenko helped cement such loyalties.

The USA, in order to contrast itself favorably with now vanquished Nazism, was reinvented as the “melting pot,” a place where all cultures dissolved together into the unum (as in “e pluribus”).

 

Yes, and rock ’n’ roll came from this collision—

Ahem . . . let me continue, please.

 

Yes, of course.

During the era of imperialism, religious missionaries, trade agreements, military invasion, and/or co-opting of governments had been the capitalist’s tools to subjugate the preindustrial world. However, in the new climate of the Cold War, their strategy had to metamorphose. The rhetoric of the civilizing white race now had a competitor—Soviet propaganda—and anti-colonialists, who would have once fought machine guns with machetes, now had a patron and arms dealer: the USSR. The Soviets singly financed the great movement toward decolonization, which characterized the second half of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, Communist partisans had been at the forefront of anti-Fascist resistance movements, so in the immediate post-war landscape, theirs were the parties with credibility and workers’ support.

 

Thus the power of the Soviet Union in that part of the world.

The “Western” elite felt bedeviled by what had once been Russia, the traitorous former associate of their club. After hundreds of years of uninterrupted exploitation, their ability to plunder and shame the less mechanically developed peoples of the world had hit a stumbling block. Confrontation seemed inevitable, but marching on Moscow, historically, was folly. Winning “hearts and minds” was determined to be the key—waging a “cold war” of propaganda, payola, and insidious cultural infiltration. The ruling clique of the USA had to find an export that would convince would-be Bolshies all over the world that “There Is No Way Like the American Way.”

The Marshall Plan, or “European Recovery Program,” was the first step, encompassing the USA’s financing of the continent’s recovery from the ravages of war, Allied bombardment, and punitive post-war treaty measures. This took the form of a massive subsidy of American raw materials for use in recreating Western Europe as a junior partner in a global, US-led anti-Communist hegemony—as well as principle consumer of US culture and products. The Marshall Plan was also a bribe to reject Socialist ideology and a bid to create an infrastructure that would ensure a dominant American role in the region.

The utopian “Euro-Communist” governments which came to power in those halcyon days instituted a pastoral existence for their people, with socialistic programs like free education, health care, long vacations, art for the masses, and tolerant police. Western Europe became a shop window designed to showcase the glory, comfort, and ease in a life of submission to the US capitalistic order.

These governments seemed idyllic, but they were never revolutionary. Bereft of a nemesis with a competing dogma, the European welfare states—once the envy of the world—were slowly dismantled after the Soviet collapse, much to the dismay of their populations. With the dissolution of the USSR and the defeat of communism, the ruling class was free again to degrade its minions without fear of any coherent or organized ideological resistance.

Universal health care and benevolent governance in the NATO countries was a brief propaganda campaign which served its purpose in promoting a fantasy of capitalism as a moral and decent system. Once that struggle was done, the familiar mantra of strained budgets, evil foreigners, corrupt unions, and a spoiled, bovine workforce was heard. Next came the austerity measures. The “dolce vita” of the post-war West was all window dressing for the sake of the Eastern/Slavic voyeur.

But the capitalistic welfare state in and of itself wasn’t enough to defeat the Soviet threat. All those nanny “Social Democrat” governments were, after all, mere concessions to the allure of Bolshevism. They had to go hand in hand with an American export which could instill both sexual longing and respect for the brutality of capitalism.

Americans had to introduce an art and a lifestyle which could seduce Bolshevik sympathizers in the capitalist nations and also fill the inhabitants of the Soviet bloc with envy, dread, and shame. They had to tie it in with the promise of a “way of life” which was linked to the individualism and mystical “freedom” of the capitalist world, and cause those affected to rationalize the brutality of systemic unemployment, grotesque race discrimination, and an indefensible class system with naked privileges extended to an anointed caste.

 

And what would this new weapon be?

What could bewitch both the intelligentsia and the hoi polloi? There was only one thing that could really do it. Rock ’n’ roll would be the new, insidious weapon.