Robert Miklitsch

Department of English Language and Literature
Ohio University
miklitsc@oak.cats.ohiou.edu

 

The following essay is structured like a record–a 45, to be exact. While the A side provides an anecdotal and autobiographical take on the origins or “birth” of rock (on the assumption that, as Robert Palmer writes, “the best histories are… personal histories, informed by the author’s own experiences and passions” [Rock & Roll 11]), the B side examines the work of Lawrence Grossberg, in particular his speculations about the “death of rock,” as an example or symptom of the limits of critical theory when it comes into contact with that je ne sais quoi that virtually defines popular music (“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it, I like it”). By way of a conclusion, the reprise offers some remarks on the generational implications of the discourse of the body in rock historiography as well as, not so incidentally, some critical, self-reflexive remarks on the limits of the sort of auto-historical “story” that makes up the A side.

 

A Side: The Birth of Rock, or Memory Train

 

“Don’t know much about history”

 

–Sam Cooke

 

In 1954, one year before Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock,” what Robert Palmer calls the “original white rock ‘n’ roll” song, became number one on the pop charts, marking a “turning point in the history of popular music” (Rolling Stone 12, emphasis mine); and one year before Elvis covered Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” (then signed, under the expert tutelage of Colonel Parker, with RCA); in 1954–the same year the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional–the nineteen-year-old and still very much alive Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service and cut Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

 

Elvis recollecting Phillips’s recollection of a phone conversation with him: “You want to make some blues?”

 

Legend has it that Elvis immediately hung up the phone, ran 15 blocks to Sun Records while Phillips was still on the line… and, well, the rest is history: by 1957, one year before Elvis was inducted into the Army, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard had crossed over to the pop charts, and the “rock ‘n’ roll era had begun” (Palmer, Rolling Stone 12).

 

The irony of the above originary moment–at least for me–is that I somehow missed the Mystery Train. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate Elvis’s music, especially the early Sun recordings (and, truth be told, later kitsch, cocktail-lounge stuff like “Viva Las Vegas”); however, to invoke the storied lore of “family romance,” Elvis is a formative part of my sister Cathy’s life in a way that he’ll never be for me. Though she’s only a year older than me, Elvis for her is it, the Alpha and Omega of rock. For me, Elvis has always been more icon than influence, and a rather tarnished one at that.

 

The seminal musical moments in my life are both later, post-1960, and less inaugural. For instance, I can still remember sitting with a couple of other kids in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, listening to a tinny transistor radio (one of the new technologies that transformed the music industry in the 1950s), and hearing–for the very first, pristine time–“Johnny Angel” [1962]). I’m not sure what it was about this song that caught my attention–the obscure, angelic object of desire does not, for instance, have my name, as in “Bobby’s Girl” (and “girl group rock,” as Greil Marcus calls it, was mostly about “The Boy” [Rolling Stone 160]),¹ but I’m pretty sure sex, however sublimated and pre-pubescent, had something to do with it.

 

I can also distinctly remember watching Shelley Fabares sing “Johnny Angel” on an episode of The Donna Reed Show, a program–like The Patty Duke Show–that was de rigueur, i.e. “Must See TV,” at the time. Though Ricky Nelson performed regularly on The Ozzie and Harriet Show (and even Paul Petersen had his fifteen minutes of fame with the lugubrious “My Dad” (1962)), Fabares’s small-screen version of “Johnny Angel”–sung, if I remember correctly, at a high-school dance–remains a touchstone of sorts for me.

 

Indeed, “if you were looking for rock and roll between Elvis and the Beatles” (as I no doubt was at the time), girl groups were–as Marcus says–the “genuine article” (Rolling Stone 160). Who can forget “hokey,” genuinely hokey, “teen morality plays” like the Shangri Las’ “Leader of the Pack” (1964), which my sisters, all four of them, would listen to over and over again on my cousin Karen’s plastic portable record player? Or the sublime teen romanticism of Lesley Gore, whose songs I still listen to (on my Sony CD player), returning to some fugitive, long-lost source of pleasure, replaying it over and over again like any good arrested adolescent.

 

"Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

 

In the interregnum–between, that is, Elvis and the Beatles–there were of course other standbys, like the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys (East Coast and West Coast, Italian-American doo-wop and So-Cal surf music respectively), but all this changed–forever, as it were–in 1964 with the British Invasion. In his Rolling Stone contribution on the topic, Lester Bangs contends that the Beatles phenomenon–set off by their first, tumultuous appearance on American television (February 9, 1964!)–was a belated, libidinal response to the national mourning and melancholia that ensued in the wake of JFK’s assassination (169).

 

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two more dramatic and diametrically opposed moments than the “depressive,” wall-to-wall television coverage of the JFK assassination and the Beatles’ first “manic” appearance on Ed Sullivan. The ’60s, in all its liberatory excess (“sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”), is born, like some Frankensteinian thing, out of this vertiginous moment.

 

Though Elvis had already appeared on Ed Sullivan–Ed’s now notorious reservations notwithstanding–with a “sneer of the lip” and a “swivel of the hip” (Guralnick 34), the Beatles, with their hook-happy songs and shaggy telegenic appeal, were made, like JFK, for network television. For one thing, unlike Elvis, or later the Stones, you didn’t have to shoot them from the waist up or expurgate their lyrics.

 

But even as the Beatles were producing pop-romantic masterpieces like “Yesterday” (1965), the Stones were making up for lost time fast with songs like “Satisfaction,” their seventh–count ’em, seventh–U.S. single, which not-so-subtly hinted that rock ‘n’ roll was not, in the final analysis, about romance but, as Mick’s snarling voice insinuated, that down-and-dirty thing: sex. If the lyrics of “Satisfaction” mime the slow, painfully pleasurable climb of sexual arousal (“Cause I try, and I try, and I try…”) only to climax with one of the most exhilarating anti-climactic lines in the history of rock (“I can’t get no…”), the rhythm–set by the steady four-in-a-bar beat–totally subverts the negation, aurally delivering what the lyrics ostensibly deny.²

 

Not that the lyrics were superfluous, mind you, since I spent many an hour listening to this song, trying to determine whether the third verse was, in fact, “about a girl who wouldn’t put out during her period” (Christgau 192).

 

Given that they’re still rockin’ (the 1997-98 Bridges to Babylon tour came complete with “tongue,” inflatable girls, and “lewd,” big-screen video cartoons), the Stones would probably be a convenient and appropriate place to conclude this, the auto-anecdotal part of this “record”; however, I would definitely be remiss if I did not at least touch on the third element in the holy trinity of post-’50s “youth culture”: drugs.

 

If the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll ends, according to received wisdom, around 1957, the second period–rock and roll (without the apostrophes fore and aft)–reaches its musical and psychedelic apex in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some thirty years later, I can still remember retreating to the basement of my parents’ home to play Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. I spent hours gazing at the cover, Elvis one face in a sea of famous faces, but the song that kept haunting me, déjà vu all over again, was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: with its surreal lyrics and trippy melody, it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. For some reason, perhaps the color of the back cover, I always associate it with the color red, the color of revolutionaries, and Sgt. Pepper’s, vinyl turning round and round on the turn table, turned me upside down, transporting me–like LSD later–to another, phantasmagoric world.

 

1967 was also the year a next-door neighbor–I can still recall his name, Donnie Glaser, if not his face–turned me on to Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? in the basement of his parents’ house, basements being the preeminent place of domestic refuge in the late ’60s, pre-mall suburbs. Hendrix was subversive not so much because of his psychedelia (though I certainly registered this aspect of his music) but because Donnie’s parents were racists, albeit the classic sub rosa Northeastern sort. In other words, it was a black and white thing. It was also, needless to say, a sexual thing, since I can vividly remember Donnie telling me about seeing Hendrix live in concert in Buffalo and how he would look at the white girls in the front seats. I wasn’t exactly sure what all this meant (I was thirteen, altar-boy Catholic, and definitely not “experienced”), but like Sgt. Pepper’s, Are You Experienced? spoke of mysteries of race and sexuality elusive as that sky-diamonded girl, Lucy.

 

Since rock, especially punk, is inseparable–as Dick Bradley reminds us–from the culture of amateurism (13, 15-16), I would also definitely be remiss if I did not somehow mention that I spent many hours in the mid-’60s playing drums on an incredibly cheap drum-kit (one snare, one bass drum, one non-Zildjian cymbal–no tom tom, no hi-hat), and that one of the things that the kid behind me in high school endlessly talked about (Miklitsch, Miniccuci… ) was Mitch Mitchell’s drumming on “Fire,” which percussive effects we would try to duplicate, no doubt to the consternation of our long-suffering Franciscan instructors, on our ink-scarred desktops. Given the rapid-fire drumming, it’s not surprising that this song became our standard. The point is: part–a very large part–of the kick of rock music for me was the “beat.” How else can one explain the fact that years earlier, at recess, out on the asphalt playground at St. Pete’s, my grammar school, I wanted to be Ringo: think of it, not John or Paul or even George, but Ringo!

 

I might add by way of a musical-historical peroration (and before I turn to the “B side” and the subject of the “death of rock”), that by 1970, even as Elvis was beginning to make his glittery way in Las Vegas, Hendrix was dead, the Beatles had disbanded, and the Stones–post-Altamont–were all “black and blue.”

 

B Side: Rock in Theory, or Paint It Black

 

Much like rock, [cultural studies] has always been for me empowering and enabling, and like rock, it is always fun.

--Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself

 

The Stones aside (though it remains almost impossible, when talking about rock, to set the Stones aside for very long), it would not be until that annus mirabilis, 1977, the year that Elvis finally left the building for good, that the world of popular music would begin to understand what had come to pass in the preceding decade–which is to say, in the 1970s, now freshly immortalized in all its sleazy glory in Boogie Nights (1997). “Sister Christian” anyone?

 

1977 was not only the year that the Sex Pistols celebrated Queen E’s Silver Jubilee with their outré version of “God Save the Queen,” the lyrics of which (“God save the Queen, the fascist regime….”) couldn’t be further from the faux-pastoral sentiment of Elton John’s threnody to Diana, “Candle in the Wind” (“Songs for Dead Blonds,” as Keith Richards put it [31]); it was also the year that Lawrence Grossberg first began teaching classes on rock music. This segue is not, needless to say, a little bathetic (i.e., from the national punk-sublime to the academic pedagogical-pedestrian), but it underscores an important theoretical moment in the discourse of cultural studies, a moment when–as in Resistance through Rituals (1976) and Subculture (1979)–British cultural studies began to examine the impact of popular music on “culture and society.”³

 

More to the point perhaps, while numerous critics associated with the field of cultural studies have written on popular music and, in particular, rock (too many in fact to name), Grossberg–unlike a lot of his American cohorts–not only studied at the Birmingham Centre (with Hall and Hoggart),⁴ he is now arguably the theoretician of rock in Anglophone cultural studies. As Neil Nehring remarks with not a little irony, even disdain, in Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism (1997), Grossberg is the “dean of academics writing on popular music” (47), the “CEO of cultural studies” (67). Though Grossberg cannot, of course, stand as some sort of synecdoche for either cultural studies or popular music studies (if the latter has only recently achieved any semblance of disciplinary coherence, the former remains a model of inter-, not to say, anti-disciplinarity), his writings on rock are nonetheless symptomatic, or so I want to argue, of a certain unexamined “death drive” at work in cultural/popular music studies.

 

In Dancing in Spite of Myself (1997), a recent collection that gathers together Grossberg’s work on popular music, he persuasively argues that rock is a necessary object of critical investigation because it has frequently been mobilized, often negatively (as in the neo-conservatism that he critiques in We Gotta Get Out of This Place [1992]),⁵ as a discursive token in the ideological contest over what he calls the “national popular” (9). Thus, in “Another Boring Day in Paradise” (1984), he contends that it is only with Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) that Bruce Springsteen emerges as a national popular sign of the body and sexuality as well as motion and mobility, a set of signifiers most economically constellated, according to Grossberg, by the figure of dancing: dancing not only bespeaks the body, it embodies release, from boredom, from ennui and anomie–from, that is to say, the sometimes repressive, imprisoning routines of everyday life. It is not for nothing, then, that the title of Grossberg’s collection on rock invokes the trope of dancing–dancing in spite, or despite, one’s self–since as he says in “I’d Rather Feel Bad Than Not Feel Anything at All” (1984), “someone who does not dance, or at least move with the music, is not prima facie a fan” (87).

 

Still, given Grossberg’s fascination with the body in motion, or what I think of as the “body in dance,”⁶ one of the retrospective ironies of his reading of Springsteen–virtually the only “close reading” in all of his work on rock–is that it somehow neglects to mention the infamous moment when the Boss, live onstage in St. Paul performing his top-ten single, “Dancing in the Dark,” pulled a pre-Friends Courteney Cox out of the audience and, in an MTV moment, became a fully-fledged pop-idol-cum-sex-symbol.⁷ Later, writing in the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election (when “Born in the U.S.A.” was opportunistically appropriated by Ronald Reagan’s campaign handlers), Simon Frith concluded that Springsteen’s Live (1985) was a rock monument, but–and this is the postmodern twist–a monument to the death of the “idea of authenticity” (98, 101).

 

I invoke the above MTV instant not to rehearse the familiar, now-dated critique of Springsteen, but because Grossberg, like Frith, has frequently seized on this national-popular moment in Springsteen’s career to deconstruct the idea of authenticity, replacing it with what Grossberg calls “authentic inauthenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 230). In fact, Frith’s account of the end of authenticity points up, if only by inversion, the privileged place of authenticity in Grossberg’s account of rock–say, the way in which early rock ‘n’ roll, drawing on the liberatory sexual subtext of rhythm & blues (itself a not-so-latent critique of white, “I-like-Ike” America), offered a highly effective cultural compromise formation, a way to both rock against, and roll with, the times.

 

Now, if rock assumed this particular existential function in the 1950s, it consolidated this position in the ’60s, so much so that the proper, analytical object of study for Grossberg is not so much rock music as the culture of rock, or what he calls the “rock formation”: “the entire range of postwar, ‘youth’-oriented, technologically and economically-mediated musical practices and styles” (Dancing 102). Although Grossberg has typically been more concerned, true to the Deleuzian-Foucauldian cast of his project, to chart the spatial element of this formation, I want to focus here on the temporal or historical register of his project because in his most recent work, such as his contribution to Microphone Fiends (1994), “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?,” he has been “obsessed” (his word) with the “death of rock.”

 

To be fair, in the revisionary introduction to Dancing in Spite of Myself, Grossberg observes that the proposition “rock is dead” is not so much an evaluative judgment about “particular musical practices or variants of rock culture” as a “discursive haunting within the rock formation” and (a crucial, if somewhat contradictory, afterthought) a “possible eventual reality” (17). Indeed, as Grossberg himself seems to recognize, his speculations about the death of rock are neither especially new nor news (Dancing 103). In 1971, for instance, in The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett had asserted the death of “rock ‘n’ roll,” if not “rock and roll” or “rock” per se.⁸ And, rather more recently, in “Everything Counts,” the preface to Music for Pleasure (1988), Frith composed the following epitaph:

 

I am now quite sure that the rock era is over. People will go on playing and enjoying rock music... but the music business is no longer organized around the selling of records of a particular sort of musical event to young people. The rock era--born around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols--turned out to be a by-way in the development of twentieth-century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass cultural revolution. (1)

 

For Frith as for Gillett, rock is now all but dead as a mass-cultural force because for all its revolutionary “energy and excitement,” anger and anarchism, it has finally succumbed to those twin demons: capital and technology.

 

Given that rock has not historically dominated the popular-music market (see, for example, Dave Harker’s analysis of the ’70s which convincingly argues that the “representative” sound of the era was not, say, punk but Elton John), one might counter that Frith’s reading here of the death of rock is predicated on a substantial misreading of the music industry. (Consider, if you will, Garth Brooks, who is not only the third top-selling act of all time but whose most recent CD, Sevens [1997], had the second-highest first week sales in the 1990s.⁹) Frith’s claim about the death of rock also betrays, it seems to me, a not-so-residual romanticism where, as in the ideology of high modernism, the artist-as-rocker steadfastly refuses the Mephistophelian commercial temptations of late capitalism.

 

This said, it might be useful–before I broach a critique of Grossberg’s claims about the “death of rock”–to review his account of the present “state of rock.” As Grossberg sees it, rock’s original historical conditions of possibility have undergone a radical transformation over the last forty years. Not only has the liberal quietism of the fifties, a political consensus that underwrote the affluence and conspicuous consumption of the period, been superseded by a neo-fundamentalist conservatism intent on destroying the last vestiges of the welfare state (one hyper-visible target of which has been rap music: think Ice-T¹⁰), but also youth culture–once the ground of the performative ethos of communitarianism–has been subjected to the micro-differentiation and super-fragmentation of the contemporary media-market. Call it, with appropriate adcult brio, Generation Next.

 

As for the “structure of feeling” (which in the ’50s could be summed up by one word, alienation), postmodernism has arguably gone from being an emergent to the dominant cultural-political formation, so that now everything–including and especially rock–has come under what Grossberg calls, courtesy of Benjamin, the “antiaura of the inauthentic” (117): in other words, not alienation but simulation, not parody but pastiche.

 

Finally, in the industrial-technological sphere, even as the “indies” enjoy a less contentious relation with the majors (to the point in fact where leisure-and-entertainment multinationals have come to view independent labels as their “minor league” [Negus, Popular Music 118]), revenues derive less and less from sales and more and more from merchandising and secondary rights associated with related “synergetic” sources such as film, TV, and advertising.¹¹ Put another way, in an age of digital reproduction (not LPs but CDs, or CD-ROM), rock has become a commodity like any other commodity, at best a depoliticized form of fun and, at worst, Muzak to divert you while you’re home shopping.

 

A number of these transformations–including the paradigm shift from aural-print to cyber-visual culture, not to mention the consequent lack of, for Grossberg, “any compelling images of rebellion” (Dancing 55)–are reflected, albeit with a perverse, “hermeneutic” twist, in the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon. Beavis and Butt-head not only mirror the politics of neo-conservatism (in reverse, à la Lacan), they arguably embody the enlightened cynicism associated with the ideology of MTV. I mean, what could be more postmodern than a couple of loser, latchkey kids who when they’re not loose in school or on the streets, sit around and crack wise on bad music videos?

 

Still, the irony of this example (which, oddly enough, seems lost on Grossberg) is that Beavis and Butt-head also represent, in however twisted or demented a form, the continuing vitality of rock. That is, if Beavis and Butt-head can be said to dramatize the demise of what Grossberg calls the “ideology of authenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 205), it’s pretty obvious that for all their benumbed, dumb-and-dumber behavior, they can hardly be said to be affectless when it comes to the subject of rock.

 

To be sure, the concept of affect as it is appears in Grossberg’s discourse is not simply a synonym for emotion or feeling, since it is a function of, among other things, cathexis and libidinal quantification (as in Freud and Nietzsche respectively).¹² Moreover, for Grossberg (as for Deleuze and Guattari), affect is a “structured plane of effects.”¹³ Affect in fact is the key to what he calls “mattering maps,” or the maps people fabricate in order to articulate what matters most to them in their everyday lives. Rock is therefore a fundamental “affective articulatory agent,” not least because–to recollect one of his favorite maxims–it “helps us make it through the day” (Dancing 20).

 

While Grossberg’s theorization of everyday life here, together with his neo-Gramscian elaboration of affect and the rock formation, represents, it seems to me, an important contribution to the critical discourse on rock,¹⁴ the irony–in this case, a critical, not to say fatal one–is that his writing on popular music tends to be extraordinarily “abstract and speculative” (Dancing 30). Or, in a word, affectless. Grossberg has freely conceded–too freely, for my money–the limits of his project, observing in the apologetic preface to Bringing It All Back Home (1997) that “almost everything he has written on rock music,” operating as it does on a “particularly high level of abstraction” (16), is “too theoretical” (27); that his work has become a “constant detour deferring the concrete.”¹⁵

 

One manifestation of this pervasive theoreticism is his persistent neglect of issues of race and sex-gender.¹⁶ Although John Gill’s and Angela McRobbie’s critiques of, respectively, “gay” disco and subcultural theory (to adduce only two examples¹⁷) indicate that rock is by no means a function of identity politics, I think it’s fair to say that Grossberg’s preemptive, categorical disregard of gender has also blinded him to recent transformations in rock music. To wit: Beavis and Butt-head may be a “negative,” comic-parodic instance of what sometimes seems like the hard-wired masculinism of rock (though as Robert Walser has shown, even heavy metal is not without its moments of “gender trouble”), but Riot Grrrl music suggests–if, say, Patti Smith or Joan Armatrading hadn’t already–that women can rock too.¹⁸

 

As for race, though Grossberg has summarily discussed the role of “Black music,” in particular R & B, in everyday life (Dancing 151-52), he has had surprisingly little to say about, for instance, rap. I say “surprisingly” because rap has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the “new internal site of authenticity” and/or “heir to rock’s vitality and potential as a nascent act of resistance” (Dancing 104). Accordingly, if it is in fact true, as Grossberg himself has claimed, that he is less interested in the death of rock than in “rock’s becoming something else” (Dancing 22), it strikes me that his work, “abstract and speculative” as it is, would benefit from a more thorough consideration of the specific preconditions and continuing longevity of rap and, more generally, hip-hop culture.

 

History is instructive in this regard, since the very first rap records–such as The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III” and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”–appeared in the immediate wake of the so-called punk apocalypse and can therefore be seen as part of the rebirth of post-“rock” popular music. (Significantly, both of the above rap records were released in 1979¹⁹). Though it would not be until well into the next disco-driven decade that Run-D.M.C. would catapult “rap into the crossover mainstream” (Perkins 14) when their Aerosmith-flavored, rap-‘n’-rock “Walk This Way” (1986) became hip-hop’s first MTV hit, thrusting rap “strategies of intertextuality into the commercial spotlight” (and, not so incidentally, rap music “into the hands of white teen consumers” [Rose 51-52]),²⁰ rap, it is clear, has irrevocably altered the rock/pop landscape.

 

The point is, from Afrika Bambaataa, one of the seminal old-school Master of Ceremonies, to Run-D.M.C. and “new school,” pre-“Walk This Way” rap-‘n’-rock tunes such as “Rock Box” (1984) and “King of Rock” (1985) to, most recently, Sean Combs and his Police-inspired ode to the Notorious B.I.G., “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997), rock has been part and parcel of that eclectic mix that is rap, a musical melange forever memorialized in the lyrics of “Payoff Mix”: “Punk rock, new wave and soul/Pop music, salsa, rock & roll/Calypso, reggae, rhythm & blues,/Master, mix those number-one tunes.”²¹

 

A recent exchange between Puff Daddy and Rolling Stone confirms the intimate/extimate relation between rock and rap. Rolling Stone: “What bands do you like now?” Puffy: “Radiohead” (78).

 

"Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

 

I hasten to add that if the relation between rap and rock is not one of simple exteriority (as the above parenthetical is intended to suggest), this is not to claim, as Grossberg does, that “for practical purposes,” there are “no musical limits on what can or cannot be rock” (We Gotta Get Out 131, emphasis mine). On this particular score, one must, I think, be vulgar: rock is, first and foremost, music–with the critical proviso that, to paraphrase a parody, if a little formalism turns one away from history, a lot brings one back to it.²²

 

I’m not talking about musicology here, useful as it is (especially in the proper hands).²³ Nor am I suggesting that the issue of reception, or even fandom, is negligible, since one of the real virtues of Grossberg’s work is its extensive investigation of the various, extra-musical contexts of rock reception. I am suggesting–as it were, to “bring it all back home”–that it’s difficult to talk about rock or popular music in the 1990s without engaging the issue of genre and production.

 

On the constitutive difference between rock and the pre-“r&r” tradition of popular music, Robert Palmer has, for instance, written:

 

Today's popular music could hardly have evolved out of "Your Hit Parade" and the pre-r&r popular mainstream.... Rap, metal, thrash, grunge, have different attitudes towards the organization of sound and rhythm. Their distance from pre-r&r norms cannot be explained by advances in musical instruments and technology alone. Far more than musical hybrids, these sounds proceed from what amounts to a different tradition, different from the old mainstream pop and different right on down to the most basic musical values. (Rock and Roll 9)

 

Given Palmer’s riff here on rock’s “traditional” difference from the “popular music” that precedes it (e.g., the late, great Frank Sinatra or, before him, Bing “The King of Croon” Crosby), it is clear that although one can speak of rock as a species of popular music, one cannot make the opposite claim (i.e., not all popular music is rock).

 

Such a distinction would seem commonsensical enough, but “rock imperialism,” as Keith Negus has demonstrated, is pervasive in English-language writing on popular music. The problem with this approach–of which Grossberg’s work is a paradigmatic example (as the above assertion about “musical limits” indicates)–is that it ignores, as Negus notes, “vast numbers of generic distinctions made by musicians and audiences across the world” (Popular Music 162, emphasis mine). The net result of this “imperialist” position, paradoxically enough, is a “rockist” methodology that is at once inclusivist and exclusivist, inclusivist because generically-different kinds of music (such as rap) are included as rock, exclusivist because generically-related kinds of music (such as country) are reflexively excluded.

 

This problem is compounded when the universalist category of “rock” is applied to popular music in the global context, so-called “world beat” or “world music.” (Examples of this music are the South African Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who are probably best known for working with Paul Simon on Graceland [1986] or, more recently, the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who sang with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on the soundtrack for Dead Man Walking ([1995]). Thus, if it is true, as Negus states, that there is a lot of music “being listened to by the ‘youth market’ that would be described using a label other than rock,” it’s equally true that “for many music fans across the world, there are numerous musics that cannot be rock” (Popular Music 161). One of the negative byproducts of this “methodological strategy”–of, that is to say, the “global” deployment of rock–is that it tends to reproduce the “classic” division between rock and pop, where rock refers to the “musical and lyrical roots that are derived from the classic rock era” and pop to rock’s “status as a commodity produced under pressure to conform by the record industry” (Friedlander 3).

 

The way this particular binary plays out in the context of the “rock/world music” opposition is, alas, all-too-predictable: North American, Western-style rock is “impure” and/or passé (or passé because impure), while virtually all, non-Western popular musics are “authentic” and, therefore, “vital.” Not so surprisingly (especially if one remembers that rock was originally black slang for “having sex”), this sort of racial-ideological thinking is a product of a not-so-residual colonialist mentalité. As Timothy D. Taylor flatly puts it in Global Pop (1997): “rock music, which used to be pure sex, has lost its grinding energy; musics by others (read: people of color) still have something to do with sex” (20).

 

Still, the real political-economic paradox, if you will, is that although world musicians are considered inauthentic if they begin to sound too much like their Western counterparts, they are effectively doomed to a discourse of authenticity, “since the structures of the music industry exclude virtually all world musicians from the venues, visibility, and profits that might make them appear to be sellouts to their fans” (Taylor 23). This, then, is the bottom line of the asymmetrical relations of production that subtends the global music marketplace. Due to the concentration of capital in a handful of multinational corporations (that are located, in turn, in a handful of “core” countries), Western popular music is increasingly available in the traditional peripheries, but the (semi-) peripheries do not have the same access to their own music. Hence the distinctly inequitable system of distribution that currently obtains, where, say, “it is much easier to buy… Madonna in China than Cui Jian, the leading Chinese rock musician, in the US” (Taylor 201).

 

I will return to these issues below in the context of contemporary youth culture, but this might be an appropriate place to mark the limits of the classical-Marxist account of the mode of production and propose, instead, what I take to be a more immanent, constructive model of the music industry. An innovative work in this regard–innovative because it draws equally on both reception and production studies without the theoretical baggage of either approach–is Negus’s Producing Pop (1992) which, in displacing the methodological emphasis from the “production of culture” to the “culture of production” (61-64) retains a role for what Marxists used to call the “primacy of production” even as it demarcates a space for what Negus calls the “cultural practices of personnel” (press officer, A & R person, studio producer, etc.).²⁴ Noting that writing on popular music often works from unexamined predicates about art and commerce, creativity and capitalism, Negus contends that such an approach not only tends to “overlook the temporal dimension which cuts through the production of commercial music,” it also tends to radically underestimate the extent to which the various personnel involved in producing music are actively “contributing to the aesthetic meanings employed to appreciate the music,” thereby defining the contours of what in fact popular music means at any given time (153).

 

The value of this approach is that by concentrating on what Bourdieu calls “cultural intermediaries” (qtd. in Negus, Producing Pop 62), it usefully blurs the typical, hard-and-fast distinction between labor and leisure, production and consumption. Rather more to the point, Negus’s perspective emphatically re-accentuates the music in the “music business,” foregrounding the sorts of music that people in the business actually listen to. To tender such a claim is not, of course, to proffer a covert defense of the music business, since one of the very real strengths of Negus’s work is that it provides an “inside” critique of the way in which the “recording industry has come to favor certain types of music, particular working practices, and quite specific ways of acquiring, marketing, and promoting recording artists” (and here issues of race and sex-gender re-materialize in all their social-institutional force [Producing Pop vii]). Simply put, Negus’s culture-of-production approach–attuned as it is to both the cultural and industrial demands of the music industry–elucidates the intricate, conflictual “web” of relations out of which popular music is wrought.

 

In Grossberg’s anxious swerve away from anything that smacks of Marxism or economism (which sometimes appear to be the same thing for him), he has been intent to develop what he calls a “spatial materialism” (Dancing 10). While this spatial-materialist perspective might conceivably offer a novel way to talk about the production and consumption of popular music, the aggressively theoreticist cast of Grossberg’s approach is evident in his inordinately “thin” description of his project: “to find a radically contextual… vocabulary that can describe the ongoing production of the real as an organization of inequality through an analysis of cultural events” (24). Put another, more critical way: if Grossberg’s analytical focus on space in rock provides a valuable complement to the general underdevelopment of spatiality in the discourse of Marxism,²⁵ this very same valorization also comes at the direct expense of a proper consideration of the dialectical other of spatiality–temporality or, more precisely yet, historicity.

 

Bluntly, it will not do, on one hand, to ruminate about the death of rock and, on the other hand, to confess that one has “given too little attention to the changing shape of the rock formation across space and over time” (Dancing 19). Given this performative contradiction, though, what, one wonders, is driving Grossberg’s “obsession” with the death of rock?

 

Reprise

 

"Drivin' around in my automobile..."
                 
--Chuck Berry

 

The above, not simply rhetorical question about the end or “death of rock” brings me abruptly back full-circle to the beginning of this essay–to, that is, the “birth” of rock and the formative popular-musical influences in my life. My life aside (for the moment), I want to submit that detailed, medium-specific attention to the temporality and spatiality of rock indicates that it has by no means died but has merely become, among other things, “more geographically mobile” (Negus, Popular Music 163).

 

The interest of this “geographical” perspective is that it assumes one of Grossberg’s signature Deleuzian themes, what one might call the mobility of rock (as almost any Chuck Berry song attests, “classic” rock ‘n’ roll is frequently about auto-mobility), and situates it in a particular, national-historical context. In other words, it’s not simply that rock has become part of transnational capitalism (though this proposition is undoubtedly true and has any number of implications for the present “rock formation” [vide supra]).²⁶ Rather, it’s more that a certain form of rock may well be dead, or at least embalmed, in the U.S. or North America but is alive and kickin’ elsewhere–say, in Cuba or China, Argentina or South Africa, Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union.²⁷

 

As for the U.S. or North America, it seems pretty clear that some form of post-“rock” music is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, given that it has become an indispensable part–along wth TV, movies and, most recently, the personal computer–of contemporary “youth culture.” I’ve already suggested that one, flamboyant manifestation of this culture is the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon, where this particular “franchise” comprises not only an animated series (that comprises, in turn, music videos–mise-en-abîme, as it were) but a profitable feature film, both of which mass-media “texts” have spun off various other commodities such as books, soundtracks, etc. But if Beavis and Butt-head and, more generally, MTV (as opposed to, say, VH1) is “youth-skewed,” what does it mean to invoke the category of youth today, late in the 1990s?

 

I raise this question here because although there is obviously a statistically-determinate audience–“defined by age”–for rock/pop music (say, conservatively speaking, 14-24), the idea of youth, as Donna Gaines comments, is simultaneously a “biological category,” a “distinctive social group,” and a “cultural context” (47). Though there is little doubt that age-driven demographics drive corporate marketing and advertising, it’s also no secret that in an age of Viagra, cosmetic surgery, and hyper-“health & fitness,” the “signifier ‘youth’ has gradually been detached from the age-grade and made available to everyone” (Weinstein 82)–which is to say, to anyone who has the desire and requisite economic resources.

 

One consequence of this process of “democratization” is that the concept of youth today retains only a residual, even vestigial, connection to its “biological” referent. In fact, the rapidly changing cultural construct of the term since World War II–from, say, “youth culture” to “counterculture” to “youth subcultures” (the last with a decidedly post-Parsonian emphasis)–has radically de-differentiated its social distinctiveness. On one hand, the category of childhood–of which youth is the “antithesis” and adulthood the “synthesis”–is “shrinking”: “people as young as eight or nine years old are sharing in the youth life-style in terms of consumption of products such as clothing, leisure activities from video games… to record purchases, and knowledge of the ‘real world’– sexual, political, ecological, etc.” (Weinstein 20).

 

On the other hand, the social idea of youth is rapidly expanding, so much so that it might not be too much to say, as Deanna Weinstein does, that young people “have become marginal to the idea of youth itself” (73). Since the “central feature” of youth culture, at least in the United States since the 1950s, has been music, rock music (Weinstein 69), this trend–what one might call, after Grossberg, the colonization or reterritorialization of youth–has had a profound influence on contemporary music. In an epigram: “Rock, like youthful looks, is no longer the province of the young” (Weinstein 75).

 

As in some grade-B werewolf movie, the rock-around-the-clock teenagers of the ’50s have become the “classic rock” baby-boomers of the ’90s, and the latter “constituency,” in turn, a prime grade-A target for the increasingly competitive music industry. More specifically, since the youth market cannot sustain long-term artistic development (and therefore new artists are no longer simply aimed at youth in the restricted, “biological” sense [Negus, Producing Pop 68]), there are powerful economic imperatives to cross-over and attract the expanding “class” of middle-aged consumers. In fact, data on consumption patterns circa 1993 suggest that while the “purchase of rock music declines with age,” this decline is “gradual across ages 25-44” (Negus, Producing Pop 100). With this in mind, it might not be too much to say–at least if these figures are any indication (and I think they are)–that rock is no longer simply the “music of youth” (Negus, Producing Pop 100).

 

Of course, “young people”–however one defines the term–have also actively resisted the wholesale appropriation of their subcultures. Sometimes this has involved distancing themselves from “adulterated” discourses such as, precisely, rock. (Hence the pejorative epithet “rockist.”) In other cases, it has involved a complex process of re-appropriation of the popular-cultural terrain. (Witness the revival of swing and lounge or “martini” music.) In general, it has involved the formation of subcultures that entail a determinate dialectical relation not only with the dominant “parent” culture (itself in the process of being made over in the eternal image of youth) but with the dominant, corporate-sponsored youth culture.

 

The “good news,” as it were, is that “genuine” youth subcultures have emerged by “marginalizing themselves from the leisure culture’s free-floating definition of ‘youth'” (Weinstein 83). (SNL aside, the new “goth culture” in all its queer mutability is, it seems to me, one instance of this resistance.) The “bad news” (as if the double alienation consequent on the above self-marginalization were not enough) is that young people are now free to choose from among an “array of confrontational youth subcultures” (Weinstein 82). In this overconsumptivist scenario, “free-floating” is not so much a term of liberatory potential, however slim, but a euphemistic signifier for the “forced choice” that is postmodern consumer capitalism. In a nutshell (to sample an Entertainment Weekly cover story): Hanson/Manson.

 

Although one might argue that the current musical culture is merely yet another moment in the ongoing cyclical history of pop/rock (where, to revisit the late ’50s and early ’60s, the choice between the Crystals and Chiffons, Ronettes and Shirelles, or–to adduce the “boy groups”–the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys was, for some, no choice at all), the difference between the immediate post-“rock-‘n’-roll” period and the present moment is the sheer volume of (recorded) music that is now available. For instance, in 1962, before the advent of the British Invasion (which is to say, pre-Beatles and pre-JFK assassination), “total industry sales were under $1 billion” (Goodman 29); now, circa 1998, “they’re almost 40 times that figure” (29).

 

That the impact of this economic and popular-musical “boom” on youth culture has been enormous goes, I think, without saying. Most obviously perhaps, the almost exponential increase in the production of rock/pop music has resulted in an almost infinite “array” of musical (sub-) genres from which people, “young” or otherwise, can “freely” choose. A recent postcard survey distributed by Atlantic Records illustrates the extraordinary range of music that one can now purchase: Children’s / R & B / Pop / Rock / Dance / Singer Songwriters / Traditional Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / New Age / Ambient / Classical / Country / Metal / Alternative / Rap / Theatre Music / World Music.

 

About this list, I would make only two observations. First, rock, it is important to note, is only one genre or category among a host of genres and categories; equally or more importantly, most, if not all, of these genres can be further subdivided. (Thus, to take just one genre, “New Age/Ambient” can–and probably should–be divided into two separate categories, where Ambient or, more properly perhaps, Electronica can then be divided into various subgenres such as Techno, Jungle, Trip Hop, Drum and Bass, or sub-subgenres such as Illbient and Ambient Dub). Second, in an informal survey that I conducted at Ohio University using the above survey (I chose a class composed of “freshmen” since they effectively straddle the teen/college music audiences), the participants answered–almost to a person–that they not only listened to rock but that they felt it remains a “viable form of music.”²⁸ In other words, the combo “youth and rock” may not be as tight as it once was, but “rock”–or what Grossberg calls the “rock formation”–still means something to young people.

 

Although the concept of “youth” is crucial, it is clear, to any future discussion of the “death of rock,” another, perhaps more pointed way to reframe this issue–to return to the larger, historical shifts in the meaning of “youth culture” (as well as the A side of this essay)–is to reconsider the generational axes of rock. Thus, to re-cite Frith, conventional wisdom has it that rock was born around 1956 with Elvis, peaked around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s, and died around 1976 with the Sex Pistols. Or, as Negus metaphorically puts it, in the mid-1970s, “the blooms start wilting, the body decays, and rock starts dying” (Popular Music 148).

 

This late-Spenglerian vision–Verfallsgeschichte made flesh–offers a peculiarly seductive image for some of the history of rock, with rock consuming itself, never mind Nirvana, in one final catastrophic conflagration with punk. Indeed, with the late Elvis and Sid Vicious in mind, the one bloated from food and drugs almost beyond recognition, the other an early poster-boy for heroin chic, it would appear, if only in retrospect, that the banks of flowers on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s were funereal after all, florid intimations of rock’s mortality or, to echo the Sex Pistols, “flowers in the dustbin.”²⁹

 

But could it be, given that Grossberg began teaching rock in 1977 (when, presumably, the corpse was still warm), that the historical claim about the death of rock is, as it were, auto-biological; that, not to put too fine a point on it, the mantra about the death of rock is merely a projection of the white male baby-boomer’s rapidly aging body?

 

To endeavor to be fair to Grossberg, he is by no means unaware of the paradoxes and potential pitfalls of writing about rock if you are old enough, now, to remember seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan in 1956, or the Beatles on the same venue, as I did, in 1964.³⁰ In “Rock and Roll Is Dead and We Don’t Care,” the Rubinoos-inspired conclusion to “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” he speculates about a baby-boomer imaginary haunting the real of Generation X, remarking that “images of youth and change” have been replaced by images of boomers trying to “deal with responsibility and ‘middle age'” (61). Grossberg’s reading here of the vampiric relation between the generations represents, it seems to me, discursive haunting with a vengeance, the return of the corporeal repressed, where the historiography of rock and roll is infused–like some ghost or specter–with all the ways of the flesh.

 

However, as Negus’s meta-organic metaphor makes clear (“the blooms start wilting, the body decays…”), it is probably inadvisable, critically speaking, to interpret musical genres such as rock “as if they were living bodies which are born, grow, and decay” (Popular Music 139). When it comes to contemplating and composing the history of rock, one would do better to attend, as Barthes advises, to the form of the music, a “turn” that inevitably returns one to history, to the form of history and the history of the form. While the former, “historiographic” locution signifies the various, sometimes radically divergent histories (such as rap) that have generated what Robert Palmer calls the “rock tradition,” the latter “formalism” refers to historicity–say, the “gospel,” blues-based, call-and-response of soul–in all its gross materiality.

 

Grossberg himself declares in the preface to Dancing in Spite of Myself that rock is “material” since it is lived, as he says, in the “body and soul” (15). However, if this is in fact the case, it must also I think be said that his work on rock–studiously attentive as it is to the body and dance, affect and sexuality–is surprisingly soulless.

 

But what’s a body of work without soul? It’s like rhythm without the blues. Rock without the roll. It’s dead, deader than dead Elvis.

 

If writing on rock in cultural studies is to matter today, it seems to me that it must remain alive to a veritable “forcefield” or constellation of factors–to the “culture of production,” at once micro and macro; to the body–raced, sexed, and gendered; to the various histories of rock with all their zigs and zags, swerves and curves; and, of course, to the music itself. As for theory, if it too is to matter, if it is to rock, it must not only continue to move with the times, it must also somehow remember that as in dancing or cruising (and this is the trickiest part), the point is, as Chuck Berry says, that there’s “no particular place to go.”

 

Notes

 

1. However, for the girls’ POV, see Bradby.

 

2. For my sense of this song, see Whitely 88-89.

 

3. For an informative and critical overview of this period of British cultural studies, see Middleton, “Subcultural Theory” 155-66.

 

4. On Grossberg’s intellectual itinerary, see “Another Story,” in Bringing 22-29.

 

5. See, in particular, the second section of We Gotta Get Out of This Place, “Another Boring Day in… Paradise: A Rock Formation” 131-239.

 

6. On the “body in dance,” see the introduction to my From Hegel to Madonna 9-36.

 

7. See Marcus, “Four More Years,” Ranters 269.

 

8. In “The Sound Begins,” Gillett argues that in “tracing the history of rock and roll, it is useful to distinguish rock ‘n’ roll–the particular kind of music to which the term first applied–both from rock and roll–the music that has been classified as such since rock ‘n’ roll petered out around 1958–and from rock, which describes post-1964 derivations of rock ‘n’ roll” (1).

 

9. On Garth Brooks, see Brunner, “By George, He’s Got It” and “Winner of the Week.”

 

10. On Ice-T and Time-Warner, see, for example, Ross on “Cop Killer” (1992) and Madonna’s Sex (1992) in “This Bridge Called My Pussy.” With respect to the rhetoric of the “death of rock,” it’s worth noting that after Ice-T decided to pull “Cop Killer” from Body Count (1992), “it was only a matter of time,” as Ross notes, “before an organ of record [i.e., the Source] announced the death of rap” (Microphone Fiends 3).

 

11. On social consumption and copyright revenue, see Negus, Producing Pop 12-14.

 

12. See, for example, Grossberg, “Affect and the Popular,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place and “Postmodernity and Affect” in Dancing, 79-87 and 145-65 respectively. As Grossberg comments in the introduction to the former text, “My studies of rock convinced me of the importance of passion (affect) in contemporary life” (2).

 

13. Grossberg provides a concise and popular-cultural gloss on his sense of affect in “Rockin’ in Conservative Times,” the penultimate essay in Dancing: “the affective logic, which I have described… as being at the center of rock culture,… is being reorganized and redeveloped in the service of a specific agenda [i.e., neo-conservatism]. What was… an empowering machine is turned (as in Star Wars’ image of ‘the force’ being turned to the dark side) into the service of a disempowering machine” (257). For a recent restatement of Grossberg’s understanding of affect, see the introduction to Bringing 28.

 

14. For a critique of Grossberg’s notion of affect with respect to rock (albeit one that tends to flatten out the positive, cultural-populist elements of his use of the term), see Nehring, Popular Music 47-52.

 

15. For a more elaborate take on the “detour of theory” (Marx), see Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” (1995), in Bringing 262-64.

 

16. Grossberg is adamant on this point: “In truth, I do have theoretical reservations about theories of identity and difference and strategic concerns about the efficacy of a politics organized around investment in cultural identities. Nevertheless, the mere absence of a topic from a discussion, however important, does not, in my opinion, necessarily constitute a serious weakness” (25). For Grossberg’s sense of identity politics, see, for example, “Identity and Difference” in Bringing 356-63; and “Difference and the Politics of Identity,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place 364-69.

 

17. See McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures,” first published in Screen Education (1980); for the Gill, which is in part a response to Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” (1979), see, for example, “Nightclubbing.” For a succinct overview of these issues, see Negus, “Identities,” in Popular Music 99-135, esp. 123-30.

 

18. On the Riot Grrrl movement, see White, “Revolution Girl Style Now” (1992), reprinted in Rock She Wrote; and Gottlieb and Wald. More recently, see Nehring, “Riot Grrrls and Carnival,” Popular Music 150-79; and McDonnell.

 

19. On The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III,” see Toop 81-82. For an update on the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (which has recently been re-recorded by Redman, Keith Murray, and Erick Sermon), see Brunner, “Birth of Rap.”

 

20. I might add that in terms of what one might call the semi-autonomy of rap with respect to rock music, Nelson George has pointed out that although Run-D.M.C. “recaptured a piece of the rock audience” with “Walk This Way,” they were able to do so “without dissolving themselves… into white culture” (194).

 

21. Afrika Bambaataa on the Bronx hip-hop scene in ’84: “I used to catch the people who’d say, ‘I don’t like rock….’ I’d throw on Mick Jagger–you’d see the blacks and the Spanish just throwing down, dancing crazy. I’d say, ‘I thought you don’t like rock!’ They’d say, ‘Get out of here!’ I’d say, ‘Well, you just danced to the Rolling Stones'” (cited in Toop 66). On “Payoff Mix,” Double D and Steinski’s mastermix of, inter alia, G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid’s “Play That Beat, Mr. DJ,” see Toop 153-54.

 

22. I am alluding here to Barthes’s “Myth Today,” in Mytholgies 12.

 

23. See, for example, Midddleton, “‘Change Gonna Come’? Popular Music and Musicology,” in Studying Popular Music 103-26; and the section on musicology and semiotics in On Record, in particular McClary and Walser 277-92.

 

24. The seminal text for the “production of culture” perspective is Peterson; for another, more recent example of this approach, see Crane.

 

25. For something of a corrective to this theoretical poverty, see Soja.

 

26. On rock and capitalism, see, most recently, Taylor, “Popular Musics and Globalization,” Global Pop 1-38. For a survey of rock with respect to media and cultural imperialism, see Negus, “Geographies,” Popular Music, in particular “Music and the Modes of Media Imperialism” and “Feeling the Effect: Cultural Imperialism and Globalization,” 168-71 and 171-80 respectively; and, in general, Robinson et al.

 

27. On Cuba, see López; on China, Argentina and South Africa, see, respectively, Brace and Friedlander; Vila; and Martin. On Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, see Ramet and Ryback. In general, see Denselow.

 

28. This survey was conducted during the Fall 1998 quarter; the class, titled “American Popular Culture,” was composed of 19 students, 11 of which were “female,” two “African American.” The other questions, in addition to those already mentioned (i.e., “Do you listen to rock?” and “Do you think rock, however one defines it, is still a viable form of music?”), were: “What is your favorite kind of music?,” “What, for you, is an example of rock music?,” and “Is rap a form of rock music?” Typical answers to these questions were, respectively, rock, pop, rap, and alternative; Beatles, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Guns ‘n’ Roses; and “no” (e.g., “I think rap is a whole different genre”). The majority of “negative” responses to the last question confirms Negus’s observation about fans’ sense of generic distinctions; as one student wrote about the difference between rap and rock: “A lot of music that is generalized (or promoted) as rock should fall under other categories.”

 

29. See Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin.

 

30. In the introduction to Dancing, Grossberg acknowledges that his “faith that rock is at the center of the relevant formations is probably more the result of [his] own position as a fan, and [his] particular generational identity as a baby boomer, heavily invested, in different ways and at different times and places, in rock” (15).

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