Mapping The Rebel Image - Postmodernism and The Masculinist Politics of Rock in The U. S. A.

Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and the Masculinist Politics of Rock in the U. S.
A.
Author(s): Leerom Medovoi
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 20 (Winter, 1991-1992), pp. 153-188
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and
the Masculinist Politics of Rock in the U.S.A.
Leerom Medovoi
Postmodernism and the Great Divide
In his 1984 essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of

Capitalism," Fredric Jameson compares two paintings to p
vide a now-familiar pair of synecdoches for the modern and p
modern cultural moments. Vincent van Gogh's modernist pa
ing Peasant Shoes, Jameson argues, provided us with a hermene
depth, an invitation to reconstruct some raw material truth a
the world (such as the miserable poverty of peasant life) that it
reworked or transformed. In contrast, Andy Warhol's Diam
Dust Shoes allows us no comparable opportunity to restore its f
tened postmodern images to some larger lived context, a po
cally disturbing fact for Jameson given how Warhol's work t
centrally around commodification. In the cultural shift from
modernism of middle capitalism to the postmodernism of
capitalism, Jameson detects the abolition of critical distan
"aesthetic production today has become integrated into co
modity production generally" (56).1
? 1991 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Winter 1991-92). All rights reserved.
153
154 Leerom Medovoi
While Jameson's analysis has helped shift academ

rogations of postmodernism from the terrain of style t
the social, his essay leaves at least one surprisingly simpl
unasked: if modernism and postmodernism must be the
different moments in the cultural logic of capitalism, t
would those logics be mapped out across cultural categor
as elite, popular, mass, etc.? This is no trivial questi
analysis like Jameson's, which concerns itself with
modification of culture. If, for example, one consid
rather than elite culture, it becomes clear that aesthetic
tion has been integrated into commodity production
inception of modernity, a fact Jameson's essay can avoi
cause van Gogh stands in for the entirety of middle
culture. There is a slippage here between two meanings
ernism": the canonical artistic and literary (high modern
ments in Europe between the wars, and the entire cultu
duction of the same (modern) period.
Jameson's synecdochic use of two artworks to illustr
modern/postmodern distinction inadvertently erases th
elite (and mass) culture's shifting position within the evo
tural logic of capitalism. When discussing modernism, t
strictly considers elite culture (van Gogh, Munch, etc.).
comes to postmodernism, however, the essay repeatedly
impededly shifts its discussion from paintings to pop mu
tecture, or whatever else seems useful. Surely this mobi
dicative of more than just a new populist sentiment in ac
art circles, but Jameson's essay at no point asks whether
ernism may need to be explained as a moment when the
ships between different cultural categories (if not the c
themselves) are being rearticulated.
Andreas Huyssen has recently attempted what am
just such an explanation of postmodernism. He argues
cultural logic of middle capitalism was characterized by "
Divide," high modernism's policed separation from mass
with the avant-garde operating to subvert, for revolution
modernism's resulting status as autonomous art (vii-xii).
goes on to characterize postmodernity (our own late cap
tural moment) by the collapse of this configuration: (1) t
ical avant-garde has dissolved in the cultural wake of wh
Mapping the Rebel Image 155
jamin termed the aestheticization of politics in Nazi Germany, and

the politicization of art in Stalinist Russia; and (2) the boundaries
of elite and mass culture have increasingly blurred, stylistically as
well as institutionally.
While both Jameson and Huyssen tend to examine only what
I crudely call the "descent" of elite culture into pop, as in Warhol
and Lichtenstein's pop art, or the buildings of the "Learning from
Las Vegas" architects, the other side of the cultural equation has
yet to be considered. Should we care to trace the "ascent" of mass
culture in postwar America, however, we would quickly confront
one of the earliest and most evocative examples of the Great Di-
vide's dissolution: rock music. In order to complement Jameson's
and Huyssen's considerations of the possibilities for contempo-
rary cultural politics, I will attempt to map out the emergence of
postmodernism in popular music by suggesting that rock repre-
sents a peculiar historical confluence of high modernism and
mass culture.
To analyze usefully rock's political significance, however, on
must avoid the twin methodological pitfalls of (1) close readin
that ignore the social and institutional embeddedness of texts, b
also (2) sociological analyses of production and consumption th
dispense with any examination of the music itself. Paraphrasing
Raymond Williams, Tania Modleski cautions that
the study of texts is the most neglected aspect of mass culture:

"People study audiences; they study the history of the institu-
tions; and they study the technologies .... People have always
studied effects." What is most urgently required according to
Williams, is an approach "which tries to understand precisely
the production of certain conventions and modes of com-
munication right inside the form." But as the example of his
own work suggests, and as Williams reminds us later in the
interview, there is also the danger of narrowing our notion of
text too much, of analyzing "the discrete single work," and by
doing so of missing the normal or characteristic experience of
mass culture. (xiii)
In the case of rock music, such overnarrowness has typicall

meant reductive, political-content analyses of song lyrics. T
paper takes a broader scope by considering the rock star in t
156 Leerom Medovoi
same manner that Richard Dyer has the movie star, as a p

fictionalized subject whose cultural meanings are embed
and yet cut across-a wide variety of (frequently narrative
(songs, films, television appearances, magazine stories
covers, videos, biographies, or folk stories). Because the
construct ideological subject positions (i.e., imaginary r
ships between the image/character and the viewer/read
paper analyzes rock music in part by asking what the rock
signified to his (or, more rarely, to her) "implied fan."
However, this paper does not remain at the textual lev
subject positioning described above, but moves dialectic
tween it and the distinct historical level of lived culture, in
that some understandably will find premature. Specificall
moment of consumption or audience that must mediate be
textual analysis and cultural history is minimally represen
this study. Such a schematic account of rock music as
cannot help but oversimplify its account of the popula
meaning of any particular rock stars. The large but coarse
the map I draw of rock music needs therefore to be challe
refined, or revised by detailed reception studies. Neverthel
semiological history it provides of rock as a masculinist p
mance of generational rebellion should add to the criti
course on rock and postmodernism by clarifying how, in
to being a mass cultural form, rock is (uncannily) also an
both high modernism and the avant-garde.
Rock and Modernism
High modernism's rhetorically adversarial relationship

capitalism has been traditionally contrasted to mass culture's tol
ance, if not legitimation, of the economic system in which it i
produced. This facile generalization fails to account for rock m
sic, which, like modernism, has constructed itself as a subversiv
cultural force ever since its emergence in the fifties. Also l
modernism, rock has been attacked by a variety of cultural cons
vatives who find its adversarial rhetoric disturbing. As one stu
of public backlashes to the music has put it:
With its black roots, its earthy, sexual or rebellious lyrics, and
its exuberant acceptance by youth, rock and roll has long been
under attack by the establishment world of adults. No other
form of culture, and its artists, has met with such extensive
hostility. The music has been damned as a corrupter of mor-
als, and as an instigator of juvenile delinquency and violence.
Denounced as a communist plot, perceived as a symbol of
Western decadence, it has been fulminated against by the left,
the right, the center, the establishment, rock musicians them-
selves, doctors, clergy, journalists, politicians, and "good" mu-
sicians.... Rock has been blasted for promoting drugs and
sex; for destroying hearing; and, by insidiously adding back-
ward messages to records, pimping for Satan. And that's just
the beginning. (Martin and Segrave 1)
Finally, like modernism, rock's overt political allegiances vary:

both rock and high modernism represent themselves as opposi-
tional cultures, but this opposition can operate from the right as
well as from the left (Pound or Brecht, Guns n' Roses or U2).
It could in fact be argued that rock emerged as an adversarial
culture at the precise moment when high modernism began to
lose its own adversarial conviction. Historians and critics have de-
scribed how, in the context of the early cold war, as many radic
artists and intellectuals were "mainstreamed" into affirmative rep
resentatives of American elite culture, modernism itself under-
went a depoliticizing transformation into the ossified tradition of
Great Works in which contemporary neoconservatives now feel so
comfortably invested.2
The most distinctive point of convergence between modern-
ism and rock, however, is in their masculinist mode of cultural
self-articulation. In "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Oth-
er," Huyssen has argued that the way modernism enforced
Great Divide was by gendering "the traditional dichotomy
which mass culture appears as monolithic, engulfing, totalitaria
and on the side of regression and the feminine ('Totalitarian
appeals to the desire to return to the womb,' said T. S. Eliot) an
modernism appears as progressive, dynamic, and indicative
male superiority in culture" (58). Male high modernists bolstere
the autonomy of their art by rhetorically feminizing mass cultu
158 Leerom Medovoi
as in Flaubert's narrative construction of his oppositiona

persona through the counterconstruction of Madame
deluded victim of popular romances. Indeed, this pro
masculine/feminine onto high/low in American modernis
Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women" on,
particularly well documented in recent feminist scholar
Most rock music from the fifties until the end of the sixties
shared the misogynist narrative politics of male modernism in its
construction of a villainous feminine Other (mass culture/society)
against which it rebels. Like modernism, early (and some later)
rock provided a male preserve of masculine heroes whose story is
the struggle for authenticity against the ever-present danger of
selling out to the feminizing horror of pop. The statistics provided
by Steve Chapple and Reebee Garafalo are unequivocal:
The revolution in music that was rock 'n' roll effectively re-
moved women from the pop charts for seven years, until the
advent of the "girl groups." Prior to the beginnings of rock 'n'
roll in 1955, female artists accounted for one-third of the
positions on the year-end singles charts. Most of these women
were pop artists like Patti Page, Doris Day, and Rosemary
Clooney, who were not replaced by women singing rock 'n'
roll. By 1956 the proportion of women on the singles charts
had declined to 8 percent. (272)
Until the punk explosion of the late seventies, the only two mo-
ments in the rock era when women broke onto its charts in signifi-
cant numbers were: (1) the "girl groups" of the late fifties noted
above, like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Shirelles, and
(2) the female singer-songwriters of the early seventies like Carole
King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Rock historians have dis-
paraged both these periods as moments of musical decline into
pop. The former is referred to as the age of "schlock" rock, or
even "emasculated" rock. The latter is discussed as a steady de-
scent from rock's zenith in the late sixties toward commercializa-
tion. Furthermore, those individual female rockers whose music
cannot be dismissed as pop, such as Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, or
Joan Jett, have been simply deemphasized in the process of con-
structing the rock pantheon. This sort of rock history, I would
argue, parallels elite male modernist literary history (and crit-

icism), which despises the poetry of an Edna St. Vincent Millay for
being too "pop" or "soft," and subordinates the poetry of an H. D.
or a Marianne Moore to that of the Eliots, Pounds, and Stevenses.
Vulgarity: Rock as Post-Avant-Garde
Popular rock critics occasionally characterize innovative rock

music as modern, but more frequently they will refer to it as
avant-garde. I would argue that the reason for this is that, even
though Americans have tended to use the terms modernism and
avant-garde interchangeably in most contexts, rock participates in
the one feature of avant-gardism that does distinguish the latter
from modernism in popular discourse: the strategic use of shock
value. Like the avant-garde, rock is characterized by its intention
to offend the bourgeoisie.
It would be an ahistorical conflation, however, to simply as-
sume that rock, which emerged well after the historical avant-
garde's demise in Europe, somehow uses shock tactics for identical
ends. Peter Burger has proposed that the latter's project was the
self-criticism of art:
The avantgarde turns against both the distribution apparatus

on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in
bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy.
Only after art, in nineteenth-century Aestheticism, has alto-
gether detached itself from the praxis of life can the aesthetic
develop "purely." But the other side of autonomy, art's lack of
social impact, also becomes recognizable. The avantgardiste
protest, whose aim it is to reintegrate art into the praxis of
life, reveals the nexus between autonomy and the absence of
any consequences. (22)
This paper will argue that rock is to mass culture what the avant-
garde was to art: the historical emergence of its self-criticism. But
to avoid collapsing the cultural logics of middle and late capital-
ism, we must keep in mind an important difference between the
avant-garde and rock. As product of the culture industries, mass
160 Leerom Medovoi
culture has by definition never been able to claim, as eli

has, that its aesthetic develops autonomously from i
modification. One should therefore not expect rock to be
gle with an ideology of (mass) cultural autonomy that ha
existed.
While the avant-garde challenged the autonomy of mod-
ern art, rock's historical challenge has been to the autonomy of
modern life: the way in which middle and late capitalism have
"spared" modern (and postmodern) subjects from the critical
edge one finds in modernist art. Rock's rebelliousness, as this
study will show, consists of narratives in which its protagonists
rhetorically refuse those massified forms of human existence os-
tensibly lacking any room for oppositionality. In this way, rock
synthesizes the adversarial cultures of modernism and the avant-
garde because, as a form of mass culture, its opposition to un-
critical mass life under capitalism (a modernist project) is also the
self-criticism of mass culture (a parallel to the avant-gardist proj-
ect). Nevertheless it must be noted that rock's project becomes his-
torically possible only after the failure of the avant-garde's. Only
when it has become clear that deconstructing the autonomy of
elite culture has nothing to offer politically does it make any sense
to shift the locale of cultural politics to the arena of mass culture,
with an appropriate emphasis on the popularization of adver-
sarial lifestyles. Rock music is therefore postmodern in the addi-
tional sense that it is necessarily post-avant-garde.
Rock 'n' roll then utilizes shock tactics as had the historical
avant-garde, but its narratives aim them at a different target.
version of shock tactics might best be described as vulgarity: inte
tional rudeness that flaunts a refusal of blandness and conformit
through such devices as obscenity, crude irony, electronic feed-
back and distortion, sexualized performance, high volume, a
even screaming. But it directs all this not at the sanctity of art b
at the sanctity of life-at what it considers to be the banality of
pop existence.4 As I have noted earlier, however, it has done
through a misogynist discourse inherited from high modernism,
discourse whose mobilization can only be understood in terms o
its location on a historical map of the postwar American reb
image. This map I will now attempt to sketch.
The Context of Rock's Emergence
While managerial, middle capitalism had begun to consoli-

date as early as the 1880s in the United States (accompanied, as
Jackson Lears has shown, by the birth of an American modernist
sensibility), the 1950s provided the first opportunity since before
the Great Depression to come to cultural terms with America's
vastly expanded bureaucratic modernity. The evening of middle
capitalism brought on a highly developed social criticism of corpo-
rate life within what Eisenhower himself termed the "military-
industrial complex." But the social specificity of this criticism has
been less frequently noted. The problems that confronted
William Whyte's "Organization Man," David Riesman's "Other-
Directed" Man, Marcuse's "One-Dimensional Man," or even Sloan
Wilson's "Man In the Gray Flannel Suit," can clearly be distin-
guished as the dilemmas of the American middle-class white male,
which were qualitatively different from, for example, those to be
articulated by Betty Friedan for the white housewife. Sara Evans,
reworking the former in gender-specific terms, writes: "Bu-
reaucratic values emphasized 'female' traits of cooperation, pas-
sivity, and security. 'Getting along' and being well-liked became
new life goals. Yet the older definitions of masculinity remained
and few could recognize the contradictory fact that what one part
of their consciousness valued, another part judged unmanly" (12-
13). Both the fierceness of the debate over "conformity" and the
power of anticommunist rhetoric in the fifties are symptomatic of
this ideological crisis generated by the conflicting demands made
of men by bureaucracy (managerial capitalism) and individual
male autonomy (bourgeois patriarchy).
For the first time ever, American sociology began to take up
the issue of male "sex roles," and the contradictions involved in
their construction. In her 1957 article "The New Burdens of Mas-
culinity," Helen Hacker argued that contemporary men were ex-
pected to have feminine skills, particularly in the workplace, yet
were still expected to be masculine with women.5 Furthermore, as
Carrigan, Connell, and Lee have argued, during the fifties, "men
were also under pressure to evoke a full sexual response on the
part of women. The result was the growing social visibility of
162 Leerom Medovoi
impotence" (147). These anxieties were related to the basi

tradictions of postwar sexual relations. As Michael Rogin pu
For a society anxious about maternal power, World War II

[had] created a crisis. As the depression deprived men o
confident public lives, women came to play important nurtur
ing roles. Then the men went off to war. Encouraged to re-
place their men on the job, women were promised significant
work independence, and even sexual autonomy. Resurgen
postwar domestic ideology attacked mothers who abandoned
their children to work; it also attacked female sexual aggres-
sion. Women were driven back to domestic subordination in
response not only to their husbands' return from the war but
also to their own newfound independence. (241)6
It is no surprise that a misogynist anxiety over feminizat

and a masculinist youth rebellion against bureaucratic Americ
life converged with one another during the decade. While
mainstream adult discourse on youth stigmatized youthfu
bellion as "deviant" or "delinquent," it nevertheless legitim
that deviancy in terms of a boy's acknowledged need to en
that he grew into manhood under adverse conditions con
niently blamed on women. As early as the mid-forties, Philip W
lie's best-selling Generation of Vipers had viciously attacked m
for domesticating their boys and "stunting" American manho
Such arguments gained currency during the fifties. Ruth H
ley's influential article "Sex-Role Pressures in the Socializa
of the Male Child," for example, argued sympathetically in su
port of youth's grievances, claiming that the absence of father
the home-coupled with the unrelieved presence of mothe
caused "an anxiety which frequently expresses itself in an ove
straining to be masculine, in virtual panic at being caught doi
anything traditionally defined as feminine, and in hostility to
anything even hinting at 'femininity' including females th
selves" (8). Similarly, James Dean's celebrated character, Jim St
in Rebel Without a Cause is repeatedly called upon to defend h
masculinity by the other boys of the new neighborhood. His d
neering mother, by henpecking his father, prevents Jim f
locating an alternative model of masculinity to that presented
his peers.7 In rejecting parental hypocrisy, but blaming that
pocrisy misogynistically, on the allegedly matriarchal structure of

the social order, Dean's character and persona became the exem-
plary Hollywood Masculine Rebel. But the loudest such cultural
articulation was rock 'n' roll.
Rock: White Ladies, White Negroes
Rock 'n' roll of the fifties repeated in the realm of m

culture the gendered oppositionality of high modernism. H
ever, it also mobilized an American racial mythology ideologica
implicated in the exaltation of feminine domesticity, the s
domesticity that now seemed such a threat to white masculini
Both the civil rights movement and rock emerged at roughly
same time out of the South, and both were grounded in a reject
(though in very different ways) of the racist status quo in Ame
can, and especially Southern society. Sketching this ideolog
terrain, Sara Evans writes:
The necessity of policing the boundaries between black and

white heightened the symbolic importance of traditional do-
mestic arrangements: white women in their proper place
guaranteed the sanctity of the home and the purity of the
white race. As long as they remained "ladies," they repre-
sented the domination of white men. Thus the most brutally
repressed assault upon white authority became a sexual liai-
son between a black man and a white woman-culturally de-
fined as "rape" regardless of the circumstances. And the po-
lar opposition of the "pure white woman," rigidly confined to
her domestic sphere, and the animalistic black man, violently
pressed into subservience, represented classic elements in the
psychosis of southern racism. (25)
From roughly the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 until t

Freedom Summer of 1964, the civil rights movement battled t
mythology by presenting itself as a force for racial integratio
with "Black and White Together" as one of its principal slog
The movement actually included only a handful of whites in c
parison to the substantial number of African-Americans it mo
lized, but there were enough to make the symbolic case for bira
164 Leerom Medovoi
activism (particularly when the media attended to the m

white students by white supremacists as they did in the S
Chaney, and Goodman incident). The movement's de
the civil equality and free mixing of the races in the new
community" obviously threatened the white lady/black b
bolic order on the most fundamental level.
Rock 'n' roll also demanded "black and white together," but
on a very different ideological basis. The renewal in the fifties o
middle capitalist male anxiety also revived modernism's discursive
strategy: articulating opposition to modernity in a way that simul
taneously shored up masculinity by rhetorically feminizing mass
society and its social order. But now, in rock, this modernist strat
egy was brought to bear on the mythological narrative of Ameri
can racism.8 If Woman was somehow in charge of mass society
and if, as Philip Wylie had insisted, America was "a matriarchy in
fact if not in declaration," in which "the women of America raped
the men," then it could only be assumed that it was (white) Woma
rather than (white) Man who tabooed interracial liaisons (50,
188).9
In the early twentieth century, white male hegemony in the
United States was ideologically consolidated by this narrative,
most infamously in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the enor-
mously successful film in which the Ku Klux Klan rides to the
rescue of white women threatened in their homes by the black
male menace.'0 The early civil rights movement generally strug-
gled to subvert this narrative's cultural authority, while segrega-
tionists, of course, tried to uphold it. In the fifties, at a moment
when male power no longer appeared secure, constructing a posi-
tion for (white) male defiance within the racial narrative proved a
successful mode of modernist cultural opposition to bureaucratic
America. Rock neither refused the white lady/black beast opposi-
tion, as in civil rights discourse, nor defended the white lady
against him, as in white supremacist discourse. Instead, the re-
belliousness made available to white fans in a rock song like Little
Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly" or Bill Haley's "Rock Around
the Clock" (cinematically embedded in a narrative of juvenile de-
linquency) positioned its subject to identify with and join the black
male in his alleged threat to domestic white womanhood, symbol
of the despised (white) social order.1l Rock's inversion of Ameri-
can racial mythology allowed white teenage boys to insert them-

selves into a masculinist narrative, to perform a double reading in
which they identified themselves with the mythic figure of the
threatening black male, thereby both denying and asserting their
emasculation.12
While rock's inverted appropriation of the white South's r
cial narrative is textually modernist in its adversarial masculini
nevertheless the social conditions of its emergence and reco
tion serve to remind us of its commodified character. Rock 'n' roll
was not articulated by some change in the African-American mu-
sical tradition of rhythm and blues, nor simply by white musicians'
"appropriation" of it. Any such producer-based model of autono-
mous artistic development, when misapplied to mass cultural
forms, will miss the consumerist dimension of their history. The
racial narrative reversal articulated by fifties rock was accom-
plished by the "crossover" of a white teenage audience. White and
black music had been carefully segregated on the radio, but in the
fifties, young whites began tuning in their dials to black stations,
listening for R&B music sufficiently wild and energetic to provide
the appropriate sexual connotations. Of course, sexuality had
long been a principal theme of rhythm and blues, but the youthful
white audience now took an interest in exaggerating and redirect-
ing its sexual themes symbolically across the race line. Chapple
and Garofalo quote R&B artist John Otis recalling: "We found
that we moved the white audiences more by caricaturing the mu-
sic, you know, overdoing the shit-falling on your back with the
saxophone, kicking your legs up. And if we did too much of that
for a black audience they'd tell us-'Enough of that shit-play
some music!'" (234).
Independent white producers, sensing the possibilities in this
new market, began to find black male performers who could give
them what they wanted. However, given the profound threat that
a liaison between a white woman and a black man posed to the
symbolic order, the mass media (especially visual media) censored
and resisted this first wave of black rockers'-Fats Domino, Little
Richard, etc.-construction of their public rebel images for white
audiences. This dilemma was circumvented through a double dis-
placement. Ed Ward notes that music producer Sam Phillips had
often remarked to his secretary/assistant, Marion Keisker, "If
166 Leerom Medovoi
I could find a white man with the Negro sound and th

feel, I could make a billion dollars" (77). A white perfor
re-presenting the black male threat, could mediate betw
identification of the (white, masculine, juvenile) subject p
and the (made visually absent) black male protagonist,
constructing a politically acceptable signifier for the s
nified.
In Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips found the White Negro
he needed. As Ray Charles puts it:
When you get a guy who comes up and say, like Elvis Presle
let's face it, man, you had more people goin' out and shaki
their asses and stuff like that. You know where Elvis GOT that
from-he used to be down on BEALE street in MEMPHIS.
That's where he saw BLACK people doin' that. Ain't no w
they'd let anybody like us get on TV and do that, but
could 'cause he's white. (Chapple and Garofalo 246)
In addition to his R&B sound, Elvis maintained a layer

garity, of threatening sexuality in his performance (mos
ously, the famous hip gyrations eventually censored on "
Sullivan Show") that articulated rock rebellion for its a
With this second wave of white performers (Elvis Presley
Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, etc.) rock's narrative of rebellion
bolic sexual threat by a surrogate black man rhetorically
at white women, had constituted itself as a self-consciousl
sive cultural form assaulting bourgeois society.
Given the misogynist structure of this rock narrativ
necessary to consider in what respects white women coul
the rebellious space it had constructed. If rock articula
culine rebellion against what was constructed as white
society, how could a young white woman share in the reb
At the textual level of performance, rock's ideology of r
in fact made it nearly impossible. As previously note
pushed women off the pop charts, and even the girl grou
turned up in the early sixties were usually composed of A
American women, and thereby free from the symbolic c
tions of white womanhood built into the rebel rock i
(Chapple and Garofalo 246-47).
At the level of audience, however, rock unquestionably made

historically possible white female participation in youth rebellion,
a participation that can be theorized in (at least) three different
modes of engaging rock's masculine subject position. (1) The pre-
ferred mode of female fanship in rock rebellion was participating
vicariously as a groupie, by accepting the rock rebel's sexual ges-
tures toward white womanhood, and joining him. In fact, several
songs on the fifties rock charts sung by women, such as The
Crystals' "He's a Rebel," or the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack,"
actually incorporated this legitimated mode of vicarious identi-
fication into the music, constructing a feminine subject position
that celebrates a heterosexual identification with the male rebel
protagonist. (2) Female fans could "masquerade" as male in or
to identify directly with the rock star, repressing the gend
contradiction of their fantasy that they were male youth u
problematically articulated into rock rebellion. (3) It is also c
ceivable that female fans could combine these two modes of iden-
tification into a more subversive one. Rock's sexual overtness after
all did present male stars for the female gaze, thereby providin
possibility for young white female fans to move beyond the p
sivity of the groupie or the denial of the masquerade in order
claim their own sexual identities, pleasures, and, ultimately,
bellions. Though presumably present as a possibility from t
beginning, this mode of female identification with rock rebell
would become explicit in the late sixties and early seventies
second-wave feminism reconstituted the subjectivity of wh
female youth, and as androgyny transformed the rebel image
rock itself.l3
The Convergence with Elite Culture
The postmodernist thrust of these cultural developments is

clearer as we consider how the distance between contempora-
neous elite culture and rock music was contracting in the fifties,
anticipating the collapse of cultural boundaries that Huyssen ar-
gues is symptomatic of the Great Divide's dissolution. Virtually
identical gender-race ideological operations can be found in the
work of the Beat writers, whose subculture Norman Mailer was
168 Leerom Medovoi
already characterizing in 1957 as inhabited by "White

Not only did Beat writing, like rock, simultaneously ins
and deny, its emasculation by mass society, but it also (l
called for that act of rebellion to become part of live
ence rather than remaining ghettoized within the artwo
had been in high modernism. Just as Bill Haley challe
to "rock around the clock," the Beats defied their readers
"on the road." The Beat literature also shared with rock 'n' roll
the tactic of vulgarity. As Milton Viorst summarizes:
It was characteristic of the beats to be absorbed by the ques

tion of truth, not Keats' 'beauty is truth, truth beauty' but
something almost directly contrary, a truth that is unbeauti-
fled, unmodified, uncompromised by the false standards of
a corrupting civilization. It was no coincidence that the truth
of the beats was normally ugly, undisciplined, cruel. The
beats' conception was truth as protest-and so the conception
passed into the consciousness of a generation which seemed
convinced that the defining characteristic of America was hy
pocrisy. The generation took delight in being personally un-
kempt, using vulgar language, living in filthy pads. (70)
Beat writing, also like rock 'n' roll, turned to the black ma
especially the black male musician, as an inspiration for ma
revitalization. Its fascination with bebop mirrored white
relationship to R&B; in bebop, the Beats identified a libi
sexual energy they could use to threaten or challenge the c
rate life they rejected as emasculating.
The status of women in the Beat subculture also resembled
that of female rock fans. The only place women appear in Alle
Ginsberg's "Howl," for example, is as groupies seduced by
masculine Beats,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in

the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to
sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under
barns and naked in the lakes, . ..
who sent out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen
night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable
lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt wait-

resses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & espe-
cially secret gas-station solipsisms ofjohns, & hometown alleys
too.... (14-15)
At best, women could recognize the masculine vitality o

rebels and abandon their ladyhood by sleeping with them
bolically or literally) to the dismay of those who clung
priety. 4 The similarity of such beatnik or rock groupies an
"girls who say yes to guys who say no" in the anti-Vietnam
ment is a clue to ways in which the gendering of rock rebe
and political activism would parallel one another in the sixt
The Early Sixties: New Contexts
If the twilight of managerial capitalism and the dawn o

civil rights movement in the United States are treated as si
cant reference points for the articulation of white youth re
in fifties rock 'n' roll, then certain changes in the music
American sixties may begin to take on new meanings, parti
the gradual displacement of race as the symbolic locus of
cultural politics. Because fifties rock 'n' roll involved the id
fication of white youth with figures of African-American re
against the white social order, a wide spectrum of publ
courses had constructed powerful chains of signifiers linkin
music to the civil rights movement. White supremacists in p
lar collapsed the movement's agenda into the music's rhe
denouncing rock for abetting the civil rights workers' effo
"promote miscegenation." They were hardly unique, howeve
assuming that the popularity of rock among white youth so
referred to their sympathy to-and increasingly to their
support of-the African-American liberation struggle.15
into the sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, in his essay "The Whi
and Its Heroes," would celebrate fifties rock for facilitat
shift in white youth's allegiance from the bloody imperialist
of their ancestry to the new, global liberation movement of
of color (65-83).
But by the mid-sixties, rock's symbolic status as sympa
signifier for the African-American liberation struggle was i
170 Leerom Medovoi
tion. During the first four years of the Student Non-Violen

dinating Committee's (SNCC) existence, but especially d
Freedom Summer when a large group of northern white
teers headed south, students were actualizing what rock wa
bolizing; white women and black men were frequently s
together, thereby realizing the deepest fears of the "southe
ist psychosis." Not surprisingly, many white segregationists
the opportunity to remind everyone that, like rock, the civi
campaign's "real aim" was miscegenation. However, SNCC
discovered that these interracial sexual relationships fre
did more damage to African-American community than it
the white symbolic order. Sara Evans writes that in the tum
period following the summer of 1964, "some black wo
SNCC confronted black men with the charge that they cou
develop relationships with the black men because the men
have to be responsible to them because they could alway
up with some white woman who had come down" (81-88
cases of racial and sexual tension, coupled with the inc
concern that white membership was hindering the develop
of African-American leadership, so troubled SNCC member
by 1966 it had become a nearly all-black organization. The
morphosis of an integrationist civil rights movement into
power movement meant for many white activist students th
would have to begin organizing their own movements and
oping their own political agenda.
What became true for white political activism in th
sixties also became true for white adversarial culture: a
and generically entangled moment of oppositional music, f
rock 'n' roll, began to unknot along racial lines. In the mid-
the soul music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Red
and many others articulated an African-American mass
form distinct from rock music, and less oriented toward a
youth audience.16 Rock music meanwhile began to explor
to articulate white rebellion that did not rely upon the sig
tion of blackness as locus of opposition to the social order.
dering through San Francisco in 1967, Tom Wolfe could
the changes in countercultural practices:
The whole old-style hip life-jazz, coffee houses, civil rights

invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam-it was all suddenly dyin
I find out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the

bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the
"student-rebellion" and so forth. It had gotten to the point
that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as
totem figures. It was unbelievable. SPADES, the very soul
figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and
like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and so fine,
of civil rights and graduating from Reed College, and living
on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade cats-all
that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all
over the spades-all over, finished, incredibly. (Electric 9)
Just as white Berkeley activists had shifted their attention from

boycotting for civil rights to their own student rights in the 1964
free speech movement, and just as SDS had shifted its activities
from support of SNCC's work with rural African-Americans in
the South to ERAP projects organizing poor whites in northern
cities, so too did rock music begin to write into its narrative of
opposition various new white figures of masculinist rebellion.
Rock, Folk, and the Anglo-American Dialectic
The strange flow of rock back and forth across the Atlantic is a
given for rock historians, and rarely considered as a phenomenon
worthy of interpretation in its own right. But in the context of this
paper's arguments, the early years of the Anglo-American rock
dialectic can usefully be understood as a transnational exchange of
racial and class articulations. Dick Hebdige has suggested that
because Britain did not yet have a significant African-Caribbean
population at the time rock 'n' roll first arrived in the fifties,
the subtle dialogue between black and white musical forms

which framed the trembling vocals was bound to go unheard.
The history of rock's construction [in America] was, after all,
easily concealed. It appeared to be merely the latest in a long
line of American novelties (jazz, the hula hoop, the internal
combustion engine, popcorn) which embodied in concrete
form the "liberated" drives of New World capitalism. (50)
But, of course, "rock as black-white synthesis" is not necessarily

inconsistent with "rock as American commodity" in the way Heb-
172 Leerom Medovoi
dige suggests. Indeed, such a view problematically implies t

fifties rock 'n' roll was a form of "authentic" American folk culture
mistaken in Britain for an "inauthentic" commodity. If we d
pense with this authentic/inauthentic binary that urges us to d
rock's mass cultural status, however, then the relative absence
African-Caribbeans in fifties Britain may become precisely
fact that enables a suggestive reading of the significance of rock
importation: that America's culture industry sold British youth
(racial) product with which they could successfully articulate ma
culinist rebellion.
Some evidence suggests that the black beast/white lady roc
narrative not only circulated in British culture but remained pro
itable there even longer than in the United States. Jimi Hendrix
for example, who performed a psychedelicized version of t
threatening black male rock hero later into the sixties than any
of his contemporaries, failed to develop an American audien
in the early sixties and went to Britain, where he formed
caricatured sexual image and a more commercial guitar style" in
much the same way that the first wave of fifties American rocke
had. Chapple and Garofalo quote Eric Clapton on Hendrix's Br
ish audience: "When he first came to England, you know, Englis
people have a very big thing towards a spade. They really love th
magic thing, that sexual thing. They all fall for that sort of thin
Everybody and his brother in England still sort of think spades
have big dicks. And Jimi came over and exploited that to the limi
the fucking tee. Everybody fell for it. Shit" (257). But when
continued to cultivate white audiences in the fifties mode with
songs like "Foxey Lady" after his late sixties return to the Unit
States, Hendrix was pressured by black power activists to wr
songs for an African-American audience, an indication of h
rock's racial politics had changed in his absence (Ward, Stok
and Tucker 415-16).
If Britain had no substantial black community in the fifties
and early sixties, then so did the United States notably lack a
strong, self-identified working-class community in those years.
Working-class movements of the thirties, already weakened by
internal divisions and the CP's policy vacillation on fascism, were
decimated in the late forties by the state's brutal, cold war purg-
ing of labor union (especially CIO) radicals and communists. By
the early fifties those remnants of the old Left still surviving
had largely been forced to capitulate to anticommunism.17 By
the fifties, with the claim of consensus intellectuals that to articu-
late class conflict in this new post-ideological "age of affluence"
was undemocratic and highly suspect, many white Americans
had been (however uneasily) interpellated into an "all-inclusive"
middle-class identity that admitted no significant internal divi-
sions other than gender, and ultimately generation.18 Race, how-
ever, remained as a social category that visibly contradicted the
closure of a monolithically middle-class America, thereby provid-
ing white rebellion with a viable figure, the African-American, to
identify (with) as the "Other."19
In the mid-sixties, rock began to replace the African-
American man as the displaced endpoint of rock's identification
structure. The early sixties had witnessed one possible develop-
ment, an appropriation of the traditional music of thirties Ameri-
can working-class movements. Some folk musicians, such as Joan
Baez, became popular activist-musicians during the decade with-
out ever becoming rock rebels. But others such as Bob Dylan, Paul
Simon, and members of the Mamas and Papas, Lovin' Spoonful,
the Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield "abandoned the coffee house
scene and plugged in their guitars," synthesizing the music of
survivors Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger with rock personae and
rock sounds (Hibbard and Kaleialoha 30).
The folk guitar hero did not become the dominant replace-
ment for the white Negro, however, for a variety of possible rea-
sons. First, the working-class movement of the thirties that the
folkie represented no longer existed, thus making identification
with the folkie against the social order tenuous in its political
signification. Fan allegiance to fifties rock 'n' roll at least had
resonated threateningly with the civil rights movement as the im-
plied referent of its political opposition. Folk rock had no immedi-
ate parallel to this. Second, while folk rock signified political op-
position, its personae did not seem effectively embedded in the
still rhetorically powerful narrative of masculinist rebellion. Fi-
nally, it is possible that the folkie did not consistently signify gen-
erational rebellion, a potentially damaging "product defect."
In the fifties, the U.S. culture industry marketed racial my-
thology for British youth. In the sixties, the favor was returned as
174 Leerom Medovoi
the British Invasion sold American youth the image of the

self-identified urban working-class male. The Beatles he
working-class Liverpudlian reputation in a contradictory t
with their clean-cut pop look, but the Stones, Kinks, Anima
countless others followed them with a more unequivocal w
class rebel image. Some of them, such as the modish Wh
imported specific subcultural features of working-class re
Displacing "domestic race" with "imported class" in
narrative of rebellion did not in any way conclude the mo
strategy of feminizing mass society. Indeed, we can obs
persistence in the ongoing comparisons by fans of the Bea
the Rolling Stones. While the Beatles are usually admitt
the more brilliant pop artists, the Stones fit the new rock
image much better, and fans of the latter defended their f
by rhetorically domesticating the former. As Wolfe rec
enthusiastic groupie announcing before a concert:
Wait'll you see the Stones! The Beatles, well, you know, Pau
McCartney-SWEET Paul McCartney. You know what
mean. He's such a SWEET PERSON. I mean, the Stones
are BITTER- . . They're all from the working class, you
know? ... They're young. They're all young, it's a whole new
thing. It's not the Beatles. Bailey says the Beatles are PASSE,
because now everybody's mum pats the Beatles on the head.
The Beatles are getting fat. ("Girl" 180)
Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll
Though by "getting fat" the Stones' groupie meant that th

Beatles were "descending" into pop, others understood the Beat
les's transformation in the late sixties quite differently. Though
Beatles abandoned the working-class rebel image after the e
sixties, they helped to constitute an alternative countercult
form of white youth rebellion: acid culture. In addition to
formation of classed rebel figures imported from past America
present Britain, a new form of rock in the late sixties articulate
entirely new narrative of white American youth rebellion, one t
middle-class youth could attempt to literally live out themselves
Timothy Leary counseled, by "tuning in, turning on, and dropp
out." The counterculture offered something new: a self-

referential, first-person narrative of rebellion whose protagonist
claimed to be the fan him/herself, and whose antagonistic activities
were based on a drug only recently synthesized by laboratories.
In contrast to the British Invasion variety of rock rebellion,
psychedelia did not necessarily rely on a masculinist mythology.
Long hair on white men, for example, was a highly ambiguous
symbol that could be interpreted as making oppositely gendered
social statements. If considered to be wearing one's hair like a
woman, it could imply an appropriation of femininity and values
such as love and peace that are traditionally associated with it.
Alternatively, if considered to be the freeing of one's hair from the
constrictive forces of conventional America, it could be an expres-
sion of liberated Samsonian masculinity. This tension lay at the
heart of countercultural practices and helps account for their am-
bivalent relationship to the masculinist working-class figures in
rock.
The countercultural impulse away from masculinism opened

up new possibilities in rock music. For the first time, acid rock
allowed for a (still limited) white female presence in its rebel im-
age with such figures as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick of Jefferson
Airplane. It also allowed bands like the Beatles to relocate their
narrative of rebellion from Liverpool to the newly created Straw-
berry Fields. Even the Stones explored the new rebel image in one
album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, before returning to their
former selves.
Of equal importance to the counterculture in the late sixties,
however, was a masculinist strain of rock music; while the coun-
terculture made a Grace Slick possible, so too did it make poss
ble the truly mythic narrative of a Jim Morrison, an example of
how successfully drug rebellion could be articulated into phall
threats against women. Indeed, this masculinist strain of the coun
terculture cut across the entire range of cultural levels, ensur
ing a further disintegration of the Great Divide. By 1962, future
acid-guru Ken Kesey had already published what would become a
countercultural sacred text, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The
novel presents the classic rock-style portrait of an insidious mothe
figure, Big Nurse, who cows and emasculates the men in her
asylum world, until an energetic masculine rebel, McMurphy, ap-
176 Leerom Medovoi
pears on the scene to challenge her. Kesey's own macho person

association with the San Francisco music scene through the
ful Dead, and his fraternization with the Hell's Angels, a
emplify this other tendency in the counterculture and its music
synthesized easily, perhaps even strengthened, the working
rebel image of rock in the early sixties.
Working-Class Masculinism and Its Self-Destruction
The avant-gardist use of shock value by rock music had

highly effective in the fifties because, given its political co
the "negritude" (of even white rockers) itself always already
porated a threat to bourgeois social and symbolic order. Aft
fifties made protagonists of white rebels, however, rock
could no longer mobilize a masculinist narrative as hegemon
the United States as that structured by racial ideology. I
sixties, it therefore became more difficult for rock to shoc
threaten the mainstream, to engage adult discourse in ways
made it suitable for constructing popular narratives of you
bellion.
Acid bands that did not rely on working-class personae could
still shock quite effectively by elaborating their psychedelic sounds
and by flirting with explicit references to drugs ("Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds," "White Rabbit," "Eight Miles High," etc.). But
for rock that continued to masculinize a working-class protagonist
and feminize the social order that he opposed, the capacity to
offend was maintained by steadily raising the level of his obscenity
(as in Country Joe McDonald's "Fish (F-U-C-K) Cheer"), his vol-
ume (as in many of the Who's songs), and in the explicitness of his
threat (as in the Stones's "Street Fighting Man"). The construc-
tions rock provided of middle-class white youths' working-class
heroes, as in Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," therefore pro-
duced an increasingly hyperbolic masculinist articulation of re-
bellion, to the point where Norman Mailer could seriously assert
in 1968 that what middle-class youth envied was:
all the good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the

working class like winning a truly dangerous fist fight at the
age of eight or getting sex before fourteen, dead drunk by

sixteen, whipped half to death by your father, making it in
rumbles with a proud street gang, living at war with the edu-
cational system, knowing how to snicker at the employer from
one side of the mouth, riding a bike with no hands, entering
the Golden Gloves, doing a hitch in the navy, or a stretch in
the stockade, and with it all, their sense of elan, of morale, for
buddies are the manna of the working class: there is a God-
given cynical indifference to school, morality, and job. (287)
Perhaps such extreme romanticization is not dissimilar to the

caricaturing of African-American men by White Negro rockers in
the fifties. What in the end proved different in the sixties' version,
however, is that rock's masculinization of the white working class
lacked any correspondingly substantive social movement to serve,
however problematically, as the implied referent for its rebel
image. In the fifties, the ongoing liberation struggle of African-
Americans mediated and politically inflected the cultural mean-
ing of rock rebellion. In the later sixties, despite the climate of
increasing political protest and rebelliousness by white middle-
class students, the United States still lacked a white working-class
equivalent of the civil rights movement that might serve to negoti-
ate rock's increasingly masculinist proletarian hyperbole. Todd
Gitlin analyzes the situation of radical white middle-class youth in
the turbulent late sixties:
Committed to a revolution it did not have the power to bring

about, the movement cast about for a link with forces that
might have that power. But none did. For all the slackening in
the loyalties which bound people to the social order, for all the
demonstrations and dropping out and divisions among the
governing forces, there was no revolutionary crisis. Yet to give
up the revolutionary dream would have been to confront a
situation without precedent in the history of the modern Left.
The working class was conservative, more or less, the priv-
ileged were radical. What could be made of THAT? Unwill-
ing to give up the revolutionary dream, the New Left factions
convinced themselves that The Revolution had already be-
gun, and proceeded to conjure up abstract and imaginary
allies. (381-82)
178 Leerom Medovoi
Rock music, caught in the same dilemma, pursued a para

narrative imaginary. The antiwar movement best approxim
the political referent of rock's rebellious signification. If
working-class men that the music glorified, however, were f
quently fighting the war in Vietnam or policing the nationw
antiwar demonstrations, then rock's threatening representat
of proletarian masculine opposition to the social order were m
fictions suspended in what (class-wise) amounted to a poli
vacuum. In an attempt to compensate for the hollowness of t
threat, rock's narratives of rebellion could easily escalate into
lent climaxes, vulgar conclusions for an "authentic" masculin
that rejects banal, peaceful existence. As Gitlin himself had fe
in a 1968 article for the Express Times called "Casting the
Stone":
Delicate judgments in these raging days are falling afoul of a

fetishism of the streets: that is why we have a hard time telling
the cops from the desperados. We are living through some
profound crisis of masculinity, explained but not wholly justi-
fied by the struggle to shake off middle-class burdens of
bland civility. The guy who hits hardest and moves fastest
begins to look like the biggest revolutionary cock. (337)
In search of a material referent for their proletarian person

some rock bands eventually found none other than the Hell's A
gels, hardly a political organization (let alone part of the antiw
movement) but certainly a formidable figure for macho rebellio
The biker rebel, found in youth culture as early as The Wild O
in 1953, had long been part of rock's association with juven
delinquency. But as the new icons of working-class masculine r
bellion, Tom Wolfe argued,
The Angels were too freaking real. OUTLAWS? They were

outlaws by choice, from the word go, all the way out in Edge
City. Furthur! The hip world, the vast majority of the acid
heads, were still playing the eternal charade of the middle-
class intellectuals-Behold my wings! Freedom! Flight!-but
you don't actually expect me to jump off that cliff, do
you?... In their heart of hearts, the heads of Haight-
Ashbury could never stretch their fantasy as far out as the
Hell's Angels. Overtly, publicly, they included them in-

suddenly, they were the Raw Vital Proles of this thing, the
favorite minority, replacing the spades. Privately, the heads
remained true to their class and to its visceral panics. (Electric
326)
If the Rolling Stones's bloody Altamont concert represents the

symbolic endpoint of the sixties, as some rock and cultural histo-
rians like to argue, then it is the playing-out of the decade's self-
defeating masculinist strategies that I would suggest makes it ap-
propriate as such a symbol. At Altamont, the desire to shock in
"Sympathy for the Devil," the call for violence in "Street Fighting
Man," and the misogyny of "Under My Thumb" all uncannily
harmonized with what the Hell's Angels represented. The double
irony, that in killing an African-American with a white girlfriend,
the Hell's Angels enacted the symbolic murder of the old rebel
protagonist by the new, further underlined the bankruptcy of
masculinist rebellion.20
Furthermore, oppositional discourse was itself being trans-
formed by second-wave feminists and gay liberationists, who ar-
gued that the social order, far from endangering heterosexual
masculinity by investing matriarchal authority in women, was pa-
triarchal, that America's brutalization of Vietnam exemplified
phallic diplomacy, and that misogynist "cock rock" rebellion mere-
ly reproduced its oppressive masculinist structures.21 Not only
was masculinist opposition to a masculinist social order politically
wrongheaded, but dangerous even for those who attempt it. As
even the end of Easy Rider proposed, biker-type prole rebels who
give the finger to America just might be gunned down by a power
structure eager for the opportunity to meet violence with even
greater violence, an analysis lent credibility by the positive public
reaction to the Kent State massacre (Viorst 505-44).
A Brief Survey of Seventies Rock
We have seen that postmodernist features in popular music

can be traced as far back as the fifties, when rock achieved what,
for middle capitalism, would appear to have been a (culturally)
180 Leerom Medovoi
logical contradiction: the incorporation of high modernism

positionality into the products of the culture industry itself
Furthermore, if, as Andreas Huyssen argues, modernism
ticulates itself through a misogynist discourse on mass c
then the convergence in the seventies of a full-blown w
movement with the rapid development of this new cultura
has implications for popular music as a complex site of stru
and accommodations with changing gender and social rel
Rock splintered in a number of different directions aft
sixties, but virtually all those different paths attempted re
ments for modernism's feminizing strategy of oppositio
Generally speaking, the rock problematic since the sixti
been to find bases other than acid for continuing the alter
countercultural project of constructing nonmasculinist mod
rebellion.
While some sixties survivors, such as the Stones and the Who,
never fully abandoned their old rebel image (though even the
Stones toned down the misogyny of their lyrics while the Wh
gave up their guitar-smashing antics), the only new groups t
adopt masculinist rebellion were the heavy metal bands, some of
whom retained the narrative structure of sixties rock without mis-
sing a beat. Proto-metal in the sixties (Hendrix, Yardbirds, Step-
penwolf, etc.) had generally been considered to be within th
mainstream of rock music. It is in fact indicative of the altered
cultural context that misogynist metal bands (such as Iron Maiden
or Poison), still performing the outdated narratives of phallic
guitar heroism, tend to have limited appeal to women, and are
typically dismissed by fans of most other variants of rock as lack-
ing in innovation. In recent years, however, metal has been able to
take over the pop charts by developing other options, such as
social protest (Metallica), and especially a glam/pop-romance ori-
entation (Bon Jovi) that solicits female identification. These popu-
lar successes signify a substantive transformation of the "genre"
that incorporates the narrative strategies of other forms of rock.
The recent example of Bon Jovi in fact points to the other
path out of the sixties that, like metal, did not pose a reconciliation
of rock rebellion with nonmasculinist narratives: the singer-
songwriter approach dispensed with rebel protagonists, imaging
its stars as affirmative pop or folk artists. Paul McCartney, for
example, turned singer-songwriter after the breakup of the Beat-

les, giving up any rebel discourse whatsoever. Cat Stevens, James
Taylor, and Van Morrison are other early seventies examples. By
abandoning rock rebellion, the singer-songwriter approach also
successfully managed to eliminate rock's narrative exclusion of
female performers. For the first time since the fifties, the early
seventies saw many women (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Helen
Reddy, Olivia Newton-John, and others) get on the rock charts as
singer-songwriters (Chapple and Garofalo 283).
Most other post-sixties approaches steered a path between
heavy metal and singer-songwriting by constructing new narra-
tives of rebellion against the social order. Perhaps the less dramat-
ic of these has been to retain working-class male protagonists, but
simply attempt to avoid feminizing the social order. John Len-
non's post-Beatles music typified this approach, as U2 has more
recently. Bruce Springsteen also represents a more carefully artic-
ulated adversarial politics that avoids misogyny, while continuing
to solicit identification with a white working-class male figure.
Slippages in meaning that jeopardize signification of rebellion
often arise, however, because with the relative weakness of class
consciousness in the United States, a working-class image can
quickly lose its specificity at the moment of reception, sliding into
a populist image of the common or little man free of any involve-
ment in class conflict. Not only has this made Springsteen's music
susceptible to conservative political appropriations, but its folk
tendencies have obviated the use of any shock tactics in Spring-
steen's rock sound or sexuality, a fact that leads some rock fans to
accuse Springsteen of being more of a singer-songwriter or folkie
than a genuine rock rebel.
The dominant post-sixties reconciliation of rock rebellion
with the critique of masculinism has been that begun by glam rock
in the early seventies and continued by punk and new wave. David
Bowie was perhaps the first to construct (elaborate) narratives
of a rebel who shocked by confusing genders, as in his song
"Rebel, Rebel," where he explicitly reconceptualizes rock rebellion
as threatening a straight world (rather than a feminine world)
with one's sexual undecidability, thereby avoiding the modernist
gender strategy. This threat parallels, and arguably was mediated
by, the gay liberationist struggle in the early seventies to dismantle
182 Leerom Medovoi
rigid gender distinctions in favor of a more polymorphou

verse sexual order, giving at least this segment of rock m
implied political referent.22 The New York Dolls and th
rock-in-drag phenomenon can be located in this traject
can Prince, who sometimes represents himself exactly
masculinized, sexually ambiguous rewriting of Jimi H
Disco too, different as it might be, can also be unders
nonmasculinist rock rebellion, if not gay male rebellion (t
different "Macho Man" of the Village People) or outright f
rebellion (think here of Donna Summer's musical orgas
alternative to guitar-waving, and of the Who's glee in the
"Sister Disco" at the collapse of the musical form).
The punk rock of the Sex Pistols and the Clash reac
part to a perceived commercialization of glam rock but,
Hebdige has argued, it must also be reckoned with as a con
tion of it. Because it reinstated an insistence on subversiveness in
rock, without necessarily retreating into the fallacies of the p
vious decade, punk also made room (for the first time ever) f
female rock rebels. Patti Smith, the Slits, Joan Jett, Lita Ford
Pretenders, and even Talking Heads all demonstrated that a m
ernist adversarial elite culture, using a masculinist discours
mass culture to consolidate itself, is being displaced by a postm
ernist adversarial mass culture increasingly less committed to
sogynist articulations.
Rock, Postmodernism, and the Critics
The continuing postmodernist confluence of modernist an

mass culture in the seventies is perhaps most striking because,
the first time, different cultural categories were collapsing in
gle performers. Though the Beats and rockers of the fifties w
converging figures, they did not associate with one another (i
deed they were of somewhat different generations). In the sixt
figures in the elite artistic and literary world and rockers bega
associate with one another (Kesey and the Dead, Warhol and
Velvet Underground), but it remained relatively clear who we
the elite artists and who were the pop artists.
As early as the mid-seventies, the art rock movement, cons
ing of such bands as Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, thema-

tized postmodernism by constructing narratives in which virtuoso
rock musicians single-handedly closed the Great Divide. Unfortu-
nately, the discursive strategy that these bands usually adopted
was to invest rock with what Walter Benjamin terms an "aura," by
synthesizing rock with a masterpiece conception of elite culture, if
not with an actual Brahms symphony or a Copland ballet.23 Rep-
resenting modernism in this neoconservative mode of affirmative
Great Works, the art rock movement's synthesis tended to erase
oppositionality from its narratives. In contrast, punk's emphasis
on postmodernizing rock as rebellion, rather than rock as art,
allowed Talking Heads in the late seventies and eighties dramat-
ically to close the distance between elite and mass culture. In a
figure such as Laurie Anderson, the possibility of distinguishing
the two has perhaps entirely disappeared. Performance artist?
Rock star? Composer? The high/low labels no longer seem to
apply.
What seems clear, however, is that as postmodernity con-
tinues to unfold, critics must adapt themselves to the altered pos-
sibilities and limitations of the new cultural and political land-
scape. Despite the increasing evidence that modernity's cultural
hierarchies are collapsing, too many leftist critics still spend their
time describing those hierarchies and pronouncing them to be the
cultural enemy of radical political change. Take, for example,
Pierre Bourdieu's often-cited book Distinctions, where he argues
that:
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile, in a word,

natural-enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of
culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who
can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested,
gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the pro-
fane. That is why art and cultural consumption are pre-
disposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social
function of legitimating social differences. (7)
This is a shrewd summary of how cultural hierarchy functions in

middle capitalism to maintain social and political hierarchy, yet
the cultural order it depicts is being left further and further be-
hind with every decade. While cultural hierarchy may still be used
184 Leerom Medovoi
as a means of legitimating social difference, a new mode

control not dependent upon it is clearly coming into its
In the context of this paper, rock music is a parad
example of how the "lower, coarse, and vulgar" has c
embraced rather than denied in white middle-class cultural life.
Yet this identification of white middle-class consumers with those
subordinated by racial and class domination has hardly meant
an end to those forms of domination. Similarly, the decline of
masculinist narrative strategies in rock music since the seventies
has hardly meant that the music industry is no longer male-
dominated, or that rock music no longer participates in the repro-
duction of gender inequalities. It is incumbent on radical critics to
begin describing this new model of social control and what it
suggests for the practice of contemporary cultural politics.
As middle capitalism established itself in the late nineteenth
century, cultural hierarchy understandably elicited a critique
much like Bourdieu's in the work of Thorstein Veblen. In the
emerging late twentieth century context of late, multinatio
capitalism, it is time to discuss how social and political hierarch
are still maintained in a world where "Art" is a category of gla
orous merchandise won on "Wheel of Fortune," and where repr
sentations of variously gendered, raced, and classed characte
can proliferate on television shows or in popular music with
substantive change in the control of the culture industries. W
need complex cultural studies that can simultaneously discuss in
dividual texts, the relation of cultural consumption to politi
action, the status of entire cultural categories, and the institutio
that produce them all. The contemporary rock scene, rich in th
complex postmodern fragmentation of its modernist and avant
gardist inheritance, and its gendered, raced, and classed subj
positionings, demands nothing less.
Notes
1. Modernism, both in my essay and in Jameson's, does not refer to

Enlightenment project of modernity, as theorized by the Frankfurt School
Rather it indicates the dominant aesthetic mode of middle (or manager
capitalism that followed the realist mode of early (entrepreneurial) capitalis
Postmodernism therefore refers not to the rejection of rationalist polit
thought but to the "cultural logic" of late (multinational) capitalism. Confusion

of these two usages has skewed many debates regarding the nature of postmod-
ernism.
2. For a good history of the deradicalization of the American modernist Left,
see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals. For an art historical account of
modernism's postwar co-optation, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Ide
of Modern Art.
3. For a study that accepted the modernist mythology, see Ann Douglas, The
Feminization of American Culture. For critical analyses of the mythology, see Jan
Tompkins, Sensational Designs, and Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Man
hood."
4. The analysis of rock music as vulgar in the double sense of crude an
popular has been most thoroughly developed by Robert Pattison in his book Th
Triumph of Vulgarity. He proceeds, however, in a highly idealist, ahistorical fas
ion, analyzing song lyrics in order to demonstrate that, in the realm of pur
poetic thought, rock is the spiritual realization of nineteenth-century romant
cism.
5. This account of Hacker's argument paraphrases Carrigan, Connell, a
Lee's summary in their brief but comprehensive survey of social scientific a
counts of male sex-role theory in "Hard and Heavy," an article to which this
section is deeply indebted.
6. For a comprehensive history of American women and ideologies of the
family during these years, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound.
7. See Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves, 213-17, and Peter Biskind, Seeing is Belie
ing, 200-17, for further elaboration of how these themes figure in Rebel Without
Cause and in many other films of the decade.
8. This is not to say that race as well as gender was not also at issue i
modernism's self-articulation. Though Huyssen writes only of Woman as mo
ernism's other, the questions of primitivism's centrality in modernist art an
literature, of the relationship of Greenwich Village modernism to the Harlem
Renaissance, and of the relation of the New Critics' antimodernity rhetoric to t
segregationist South all suggest a repressed history of modernism's racial unco
scious yet to be adequately recovered.
9. This particular juxtaposition of Wylie's quotations is borrowed from Mich
ael Rogin's essay "Kiss Me Deadly," 242.
10. See Rogin on Griffith, 190-235.
11. "Rock Around The Clock" was popularized as the overture to the hit mov
The Blackboard Jungle, a story about a high school teacher's struggle with a m
tiracial gang of high school boys whose leader has attempted to rape a femal
teacher. Similarly threatening is the refrain in Little Richard's song: "Good Gol
Miss Molly, you sure like to ball/When you're rockin' and a rollin,' you can't he
your mama call." In "Against the Wind," George Lipsitz has perceptively point
out the Africanist musical structures in this song (call and response, flatten
notes, etc.), yet oddly ignores the lyrics themselves, and what they (as well
Little Richard's performance style) might mean to a young white audience th
had suddenly adopted them.
12. White teenage girls also embraced rock as rebellion, but the music's typ
ically masculine (and misogynistic) subject positioning required of them an add
tional doubledness to their readings, this time against the grain of the narrativ
positioning of white womanhood. This crucial issue of white female fanship w
be addressed in some detail at the end of this section.
186 Leerom Medovoi
13. An account of Beatlemania very much along these lines-as a proto

nist phenomenon-can be found in Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth H
Gloria Jacobs, Remaking Love, 10-38.
14. For a meditation on the ambiguities and complexities of female ide
tion with "beatitude" and sexual radicalism in the fifties, see Joyce J
Minor Characters.
15. For a fictional exploration of how rock 'n' roll intersected with civil rights
through cross-racial identification, see John Waters's film Hairspray.
16. For a narrative history of soul music that takes seriously its status as mass
culture-the music's integration into commodity production-see Peter Gural-
nick, Sweet Soul Music.
17. See Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, 54-66. See also George Lipsitz, Class and Cul-
ture in Cold War America.
18. The term interpellation is used here in the Althusserian sense. Whites are
positioned as middle-class subjects by being hailed as members of that class. See
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," 127-88.
19. The category of Otherness was in fact directly invoked by Michael Har-
rington in the title of what is essentially his deconstruction of the "Affluent
Society," The Other America.
20. See the Rolling Stones's concert film Gimme Shelter for what amounts to the
band's own defensive account of the events.
21. According to Tommi Avicolli, the term cock rock was invented in a 1970 R
article. For a survey of new discursive positions that informed the emerging
critique of rock, see Kate Millet on Norman Mailer's writing, 440-69, Shulamith
Firestone on "male protest art," 176-91, Dennis Altman on the violence caused
by the consolidation of heterosexual masculine subjectivity, 152-238, and Mar
Fasteau on the Vietnam War, 158-89.
22. For an essay of the seventies that suggests the limits of such an argument by
considering the homophobic and sexist tendencies in the music of the decade,
see Tommi Avicolli, "Images of Gays in Rock Music."
23. I refer here to Benjamin's argument that the traditional work of art, by
virtue of its uniqueness, was invested with an ideologically produced aura of
sacrality, thereby making critical receptions difficult. We would be liberated from
this cultist power of the object, Benjamin claimed, in an era when art could be
mechanically reproduced. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction." I implicitly argue here that such an argument, while
suggestive, reduces the aesthetic mode too quickly into the technological. The
improvement of audio reproductive technology, for example, might actually
assist institutional attempts to inculcate a broader reverence for the "great mas-
ters," or for individuals to better worship at their technologically improved altar.
In the case of art rock, even a mass cultural, electronically (re)produced form
can attempt a recuperation of aura.
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Mapping the Rebel Image: Postmodernism and the Masculinist Politics of Rock in the U. S.

Postmodernism and the Great Divide

In his 1984 essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of

? 1991 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Winter 1991-92). All rights reserved.

While Jameson's analysis has helped shift academ

jamin termed the aestheticization of politics in Nazi Germany, and

the study of texts is the most neglected aspect of mass culture:

In the case of rock music, such overnarrowness has typicall

same manner that Richard Dyer has the movie star, as a p

Rock and Modernism

High modernism's rhetorically adversarial relationship

Finally, like modernism, rock's overt political allegiances vary:

as in Flaubert's narrative construction of his oppositiona

argue, parallels elite male modernist literary history (and crit-

Vulgarity: Rock as Post-Avant-Garde

Popular rock critics occasionally characterize innovative rock

The avantgarde turns against both the distribution apparatus

culture has by definition never been able to claim, as eli

The Context of Rock's Emergence

While managerial, middle capitalism had begun to consoli-

impotence" (147). These anxieties were related to the basi

For a society anxious about maternal power, World War II

It is no surprise that a misogynist anxiety over feminizat

pocrisy misogynistically, on the allegedly matriarchal structure of

Rock: White Ladies, White Negroes

Rock 'n' roll of the fifties repeated in the realm of m

The necessity of policing the boundaries between black and

From roughly the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 until t

activism (particularly when the media attended to the m

can racial mythology allowed white teenage boys to insert them-

I could find a white man with the Negro sound and th

In addition to his R&B sound, Elvis maintained a layer

At the level of audience, however, rock unquestionably made

The Convergence with Elite Culture

The postmodernist thrust of these cultural developments is

already characterizing in 1957 as inhabited by "White

It was characteristic of the beats to be absorbed by the ques

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in

rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt wait-

At best, women could recognize the masculine vitality o

The Early Sixties: New Contexts

If the twilight of managerial capitalism and the dawn o

tion. During the first four years of the Student Non-Violen

The whole old-style hip life-jazz, coffee houses, civil rights

I find out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the

Just as white Berkeley activists had shifted their attention from

Rock, Folk, and the Anglo-American Dialectic

the subtle dialogue between black and white musical forms

But, of course, "rock as black-white synthesis" is not necessarily

dige suggests. Indeed, such a view problematically implies t

the British Invasion sold American youth the image of the

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll

Though by "getting fat" the Stones' groupie meant that th

out." The counterculture offered something new: a self-

The countercultural impulse away from masculinism opened

pears on the scene to challenge her. Kesey's own macho person

Working-Class Masculinism and Its Self-Destruction

The avant-gardist use of shock value by rock music had

all the good simple funky nitty-gritty American joys of the

age of eight or getting sex before fourteen, dead drunk by

Perhaps such extreme romanticization is not dissimilar to the

Committed to a revolution it did not have the power to bring

Rock music, caught in the same dilemma, pursued a para