Music was integral to the profound cultural, social and political changes that swept the globe in 1968. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the role that music played in the events ...of that year, which included protests against the ongoing Vietnam War, the May riots in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From underground folk music in Japan to antiauthoritarian music in Scandinavia and Germany, Music and Protest in 1968 explores music's key role as a means of socio-political dissent not just in the US and the UK but in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa. Contributors extend the understanding of musical protest far beyond a narrow view of the 'protest song' to explore how politics and social protest played out in many genres, including experimental and avant-garde music, free jazz, rock, popular song, and film and theatre music.
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, ...aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious ...project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.
Experiencing the Rolling Stones draws together a broad swath of postwar history as it covers the band's origins in Swinging London through to their recording sessions outside of England. Malvinni ...takes an especially close look at Keith Richards' guitar work and its effect on the band's music, as well as the multiple changes in the band's members.
Can a type of music be "owned"? Examining how music is linked to racial constructs and how African American musicians and audiences reacted to white appropriation,Blues Music in the Sixtiesshows the ...stakes when whites claim the right to play and live the blues.In the 1960s, within the larger context of the civil rights movement and the burgeoning counterculture, the blues changed from black to white in its production and reception, as audiences became increasingly white. Yet, while this was happening, blackness--especially black masculinity--remained a marker of authenticity. Crossing color lines and mixing the beats of B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Janis Joplin; the Newport Folk Festival and the American Folk Blues Festival; and publications such as Living Blues, Ulrich Adelt discusses these developments, including the international aspects of the blues. He highlights the performers and venues that represented changing racial politics and addresses the impact and involvement of audiences and cultural brokers.
Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis’s watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew . Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before ...its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis (1926–1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis’s new music projected rock and roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s’ counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African-American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction.
Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew . It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis—his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album, and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero’s archives and Bitches Brew’s original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.
A Social History of Early Rock 'n' Roll in Germany explores the people and spaces of St. Pauli's rock'n'roll scene in the 1960s. Starting in 1960, young British rockers were hired to entertain ...tourists in Hamburg's red-light district around the Reeperbahn in the area of St. Pauli. German youths quickly joined in to experience the forbidden thrill of rock'n'roll, and used African American sounds to distance themselves from the old Nazi generation. In 1962 the Star Club opened and drew international attention for hosting some of the Beatles' most influential performances. In this book, Julia Sneeringer weaves together this story of youth culture with histories of sex and gender, popular culture, media, and subculture. By exploring the history of one locale in depth, Sneeringer offers a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on space, place, sound and the city, and pays overdue attention to the impact that Hamburg had upon music and style. She is also careful to place performers such as The Beatles back into the social, spatial, and musical contexts that shaped them and their generation. This book reveals that transnational encounters between musicians, fans, entrepreneurs and businessmen in St. Pauli produced a musical style that provided emotional and physical liberation and challenged powerful forces of conservatism and conformity with effects that transformed the world for decades to come.
Out of the Vinyl Deeps Willis, Ellen; Aronowitz, Nona Willis; Frere-Jones, Sasha
2011
eBook
In 1968, the New Yorker hired Ellen Willis as its first popular music critic. Her column, Rock, Etc., ran for seven years and established Willis as a leader in cultural commentary and a pioneer in ...the nascent and otherwise male-dominated field of rock criticism. As a writer for a magazine with a circulation of nearly half a million, Willis was also the country's most widely read rock critic. With a voice at once sharp, thoughtful, and ecstatic, she covered a wide range of artistsùBob Dylan, The Who, Van Morrison, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joni Mitchell, the Velvet Underground, Sam and Dave, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Wonderùassessing their albums and performances not only on their originality, musicianship, and cultural impact but also in terms of how they made her feel. Because Willis stopped writing about music in the early 1980sùwhen, she felt, rock 'n' roll had lost its political edgeùher significant contribution to the history and reception of rock music has been overshadowed by contemporary music critics like Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Dave Marsh. Out of the Vinyl Deeps collects for the first time Willis's Rock, Etc. columns and her other writings about popular music from this period (including liner notes for works by Lou Reed and Janis Joplin) and reasserts her rightful place in rock music criticism. More than simply setting the record straight, Out of the Vinyl Deeps reintroduces Willis's singular approach and styleùher use of music to comment on broader social and political issues, critical acuity, vivid prose, against-the-grain opinions, and distinctly female (and feminist) perspectiveùto a new generation of readers. Featuring essays by the New Yorker's current popular music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, and cultural critics Daphne Carr and Evie Nagy, this volume also
provides a lively and still relevant account of rock music during, arguably, its most innovative period.
This book reveals the ideas behind the Beat vision which influenced the Beat sound of the songwriters who followed on from them. Having explored the thinking of Alan Watts, who coined the term ‘Beat ...Zen’, and who influenced the counterculture which emerged out of the Beat movement, it celebrates Jack Kerouac as a writer in pursuit of a ‘beatific’ vision. On this basis, the book goes on to explain the relevance of Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder to songwriters who emerged in the 1960s. Not only are new, detailed readings of the lyrics of the Beatles and of Dylan given, but the range and depth of the Beat legacy within popular song is indicated by way of an overview of some important innovators: Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Van Morrison and Nick Drake.
In Experiencing Led Zeppelin: A Listener’s Companion, musician and writer Gregg Akkerman looks behind the curtain of “rock gods” sensationalism at this performing acts musical legacy through their ...studio and live recordings. Drawing on his many years as a rock musician and music scholar, Akkerman peeks under the hood to explain not just the when and the where of Led Zeppelin's music, but the why. Putting readers right there, in the times and places where the band was recording and performing its iconic numbers, Akkerman is the voice whispering in the ear of anyone interested in understanding how Led Zeppelin's music works.
