Rebellion is the stuff rock ‘n’ roll is made of. If there is a line between rock and pop – and I think there is – then it is this attitude, this stance of doing the wrong thing that is at its center. Elvis’ voice is too wild, his hips out of control; the Stones’ reference to brown sugar a little too obvious; and, well, Heroin, is about doing heroin. Society at large rightly objected to these public expressions of alterity because they flew in the face of our accepted habitus and dared even to revel in it. The youth are being corrupted, the world is going to hell. (Fade in Led Zeppelin…)
Or have we been living in hell all along? Prof. Dr Peter Wicke (Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin), one of Europe’s leading experts on popular music culture, has suggested that the seeming rebellion of rock music culture is a space in which nascent traits of the dominant society are variously celebrated and decried. In short, rock is the place of social contest, but contest of traits already endemic to the whole of society. Such a proposition might irk our ready-rocker who wants to be called an outlaw, feared and yet respected for his – yes, his – brash disavowal of society’s mores, but it is quite promising for the observer wishing to find more than visceral value in the music culture of rock. Rock is thus transformed into prominent stage for the analysis of new social and cultural formations, thus extending Attali’s argument beyond the economic realm.
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1999/1984 [1977]) the French economist, politician, and Marxist intellectual argues that the stages of the mode of musical production through European history always foreshadow the analogous change in the economy. The movement from noise to music is the gradual acceptance of societal norms already present. “Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. For this reason musicians, even when officially recognized, are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive (p 11).” Attali thus places musical rebellion in this liminal space between revolution and normativity: music is the rebellion of becoming normal.
Is the undulating, thrusting fascination of Elvis’ hips truly that radical to America culture of the 1950s? What about the dances of minstrelsy or the Charleston and the risque Josephine Baker? Sexualized dance was nothing new, but Elvis’ faux pas was to lay this bare and present it to a willing audience of teenage girls. Similarly, “interracial” sex and narcotic drug use are practically founding gestures of our great country given the liberties slave owners regularly took with their female property and the tobacco plantations of the colonies which supplied the Old Country. But these aspects of habitus remained proscribed from the dominant discourse , while rock dared talk about it and sell it to the little ones.
I will leave it to others to comment or reflect on this suggestion in relation to other examples. Further, I recognize the slight inconsistency of the theoretical position outlined above – is rock a true harbinger of new cultural artifacts or does it merely reveal what was already there? – but both demand a repositioning of rebellion in rock ‘n’ roll. Rock does not have the status of an Act in the Lacanian sense of initiating that which was previously inconceivable; it isn’t true revolution, but rather a ground on which very real, existing traits of the dominant society are contested.
