Rock Music Studies

ISSN: 1940-1159 (Print) 1940-1167 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrms20

Introduction — Global Psychedelia and

Counterculture

Kevin M. Moist

To cite this article: Kevin M. Moist (2018) Introduction — Global Psychedelia and Counterculture,
Rock Music Studies, 5:3, 197-204, DOI: 10.1080/19401159.2018.1544355

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2018.1544355

Published online: 12 Dec 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2702

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrms20
ROCK MUSIC STUDIES
2018, VOL. 5, NO. 3, 197–204
https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2018.1544355

Introduction — Global Psychedelia and Counterculture

Kevin M. Moist
Penn State Altoona, Altoona, PA, USA

When we first talked about the idea of a special issue of Rock Music Studies on the topic
of “Global Psychedelia and Counterculture,” the journal’s editors advised maintaining
reasonable expectations about potential levels of interest, given the distance of the
subject matter from the usual beaten paths of popular music research. As it turns
out, we’ve found ourselves with a full slate of contents from a variety of scholarly
backgrounds, about fascinating topics from all corners of the globe – the southern
Pacific and South America to the Middle East and behind the Iron Curtain. The point
was well-taken though; I think it’s fair to say that when most people (including most
scholars of the era) think about anything “psychedelic” or “countercultural” from the
1960s and 1970s, the images in their mind look like Haight Street or Carnaby Street,
Woodstock or the Isle of Wight, more so than any of the regions mentioned above.
I can actually remember when it first dawned on me that psychedelia may have been
an international phenomenon, and I even recall the specific source that provided the
charge for the metaphorical light bulb that lit up over my head.
The occasion for the realization was a pair of reissued albums by a late 1960s/ early
1970s Peruvian rock group called Traffic Sound.1 I was already a fan of music from
that era, and a stint working in record stores (remember those?) had given me the
opportunity to come across some genuine obscurities. Those Traffic Sound discs,
though, they were something else. The music’s appeal was obvious – tight, well-played
acid rock with overtly psychedelic intent, memorable and unusually structured songs,
lush arrangements that integrated horns and Latin percussion into a rock-band setup
(and vice versa), and copious amounts of studio-effects freakery. On one hand, the
influences seemed familiar enough (earlier bonus tracks on one of the CDs even
included Latin-ized cover versions of Cream and Jimi Hendrix songs); but where the
group took those influences, and where they ended up, was somewhere very different,
and nowhere I had been before. Nowhere better heard than on the song “Meshkalina,”
which featured hard-charging percussion, wicked use of wah pedal as rhythm instru-
ment, dueling fuzz guitar/trumpet solos, and chanted lyrics (in heavily accented
English) that seemed to cast fifteenth-century Inca ruler Yáhuar Huácac as the
original psychedelic warlord (literally).
As a music fan and neophyte record collector, I immediately wondered how much
more of this stuff there was, and how I could get my hands on it as quickly as possible.
When I put on my “junior academic” hat (taking care not to bump it on the light bulb

CONTACT Kevin M. Moist kmm104@psu.edu Penn State Altoona, 101D Cypress, 3000 Ivyside Park, Altoona,
PA 16601, USA
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
198 K. M. MOIST

suspended up there), I had even more questions: What inspired this music? How was it
made, where was it made, who was listening to it, how far did it reach? Surely some-
thing so fully realized couldn’t have existed in a vacuum; so, what was the context, the
situation in which the music was created? And what did it “mean” or signify there? And
more broadly, was Peru alone in this, or had people all over the world been playing
psychedelic rock music, and I (and apparently nearly every other fan of psychedelia)
had just never heard about it?
Maybe not surprisingly, answering those questions at that point proved a bit of
a challenge. With some digging through rare record lists and collector’s catalogs, I was
able to confirm that yes, in fact, there was more of this stuff. Bands such as Laghonia,
Pax, El Álamo, Gerardo Manuel & El Humo, El Polen, and We All Together (among
others) apparently shared with Traffic Sound both concert stages and opprobrium from
the country’s military government; not to mention that a few years earlier Peru seemed
to have had a burgeoning garage and surf rock scene – so there was even more to this
than I had imagined. I also realized that tracking it down would depend either on
reissue record labels, or the search for rare and highly collectible originals – the
purchase of which, if found, would likely require an inheritance from some long-lost
wealthy relative.2 My curiosity as to whether the Peruvian scene was just a one-off was
answered more quickly, in the form of a reissue program of late 60s Brazilian Tropicália
that started to trickle into the U.S.A. soon afterward; at which point it became clear that
something was indeed going on there – and, apparently, lots of other “theres.”3
Answers to my scholarly hatted questions were even more elusive. According to
standard music histories, as well as the literature from musicology, popular culture, and
elsewhere, there appeared to be no record of Peruvian psychedelia having existed at all.
To some extent that was understandable; though the music was quite popular at the
time, it had been out of print for years and was genuinely hard to find outside of its
home country (and apparently quite scarce even there). In a sense, the record collectors
were out ahead of the scholars and historians. I’ve written previously about record
collecting as a kind of cultural anthropology (see Moist), finding, gathering, and
preserving the materials needed to document and develop a modern popular music
history in the first place (which would be true of other kinds of popular culture
collectors as well). In large part that remains the case, as information about many of
those scenes can be more readily found in discographical compendia aimed at
collectors4 than from official sources either popular or academic – which have often
remained stuck in myopic Anglo-American versions of “rock history” that really should
be called into question by the very existence of something like acid rock in Peru.
When I started researching and writing about the counterculture around that same
time, much of the available scholarly literature seemed equally limited in a different
way, weighted toward political and protest subject matter, and generally pretty polar-
ized in both tone and argument. “The Sixties” was often presented as a “Thing” one had
to be either “For” or “Against,” and the counterculture (and its creative output) either
dismissed or denigrated for its lack of commitment to some particular political project.5
(Fortunately, in the following decades, psychedelia and other countercultural manifes-
tations began to receive more serious attention; see for example Braunstein and Doyle;
Grunenberg; and Auther and Lerner; and the trend has continued since). Embarked as
I was on a project about San Francisco rock concert posters, the academic record’s
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 199

skewed focus was in many ways both unhelpful and perplexing, especially since it
seemed to me that there was much more of a spectrum of countercultural activity that
overlapped both psychedelia and the politics of culture.
I gradually discovered that more balanced and non-polarized assessments of the
counterculture did exist in the literature, though it sometimes took a bit of digging to
find them. One of the most enlightening was actually one of the earliest – a 1969 essay
titled “The Hippies: An American ‘Moment,’” written by a scholar from the UK named
Stuart Hall (best known for his pioneering later work as part of the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies).6
Rather than condemning the rebellious youth from the heights of his ivory tower, or
linking elbows with his comrades to storm the barricades, Hall set himself a seemingly
more modest goal – to try to understand the counterculture on its own terms, to “catch,
describe, and interpret the symbolic modes of life” of the movement “from the point of
view of the subjective meaning [it] seems to have for its participants” (170). Much of
the essay takes the form of a thoughtful examination of central countercultural ideas
and values – mysticism, pastoralism, voluntary poverty, “Love” (of various kinds), the
unlocking of the doors of perception, the apparent-but-illusory conflict between indi-
vidualism and communal living. He saw the counterculture’s activities as working
parallel to those of the protestors, an “expressive” pole of the revolution that was
a necessary complement to its “activist” wing, trying to “explore, live through and act
out in fragmented, broken forms the outer limits/inner spaces” of the countercultural
project (200). He described the counterculture as “some of the first enlisted troops in
a new kind of politics of post-modern post-industrial society: the politics of cultural
rebellion” (196).
Jumping forward four decades, historian Michael J. Kramer ascribes similar proto-
postmodern qualities to the counterculture in his excellent 2013 book The Republic of
Rock. Kramer discusses psychedelic rock music and the counterculture it represented as
fundamentally “hybrid and syncretic” – a pluralistic collage of ideas and expressions
drawn from various places and times, in an ongoing process of recombination into new
forms. Of course, rock and roll itself was already a hybrid musical style, growing out of
blues, country, rockabilly, and rhythm & blues. But the music of the psychedelic era
took that to a whole different level – blues songs featuring Indian sitars, folk music
crossed with avant-garde electronics, jazz-inspired improvisations on a theme by the
Beatles, and so on.
There’s nothing inherently subversive about any genre or type of music; meaning is
always going to be contextual. But it’s also true that, at the time, the sounds of Jimi
Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and so many others were widely understood as
representing and embodying a countercultural attitude toward the world. Music scholar
Sheila Whiteley discusses a process she calls “psychedelic coding,” referring to the ways
that certain sounds – fuzztone electric guitar, delay and phasing and other effects, as
well as those musical and stylistic juxtapositions – were semiotically coded to call up
and even recreate the psychedelic experience, and by extension via chains of connota-
tion to indicate a wider set of countercultural values and ideas that went along with
them (2–5). Michael Hicks makes a similar point in describing particular techniques
used by musicians to embody and signify the effects of psychedelic drugs (63–74). Hall
wrote in 1969 that “psychedelic art” – including related forms such as concert posters
200 K. M. MOIST

and light shows along with acid rock – “is best understood as a way of reproducing, or
re-creating through music and the new art forms the multi-media, multi-dimensional”
nature of the psychedelic experience (188).
Hall also observed with interest the extent to which countercultural art and ideas
managed to travel from place to place – despite the fact that the hippies obviously had
little direct control over major mass media systems – allowing for the development of
a “technologically-based tribalism” not limited by standard national or cultural borders.
Citing (favorably) the work of media theorist Marshall McLuan, Hall described the
counterculture as “heirs of the mass media revolution,” and observed that they had
managed to create a “quite complex substructure of communications networks” –
including underground newspapers, little magazines, and especially music and radio
broadcasts – that allowed ideas to “travel by means of this ‘modern bush-telegraph’
from one Hippie community to another, both across the country and between con-
tinents” (180–1). Some of those elements were effectively operating within the channels
of traditional mass media networks, as the popularity of psychedelic rock music
provided it with a reach that would not have been possible otherwise; while others
were early efforts to use available media technologies in an independent or “alternative”
fashion.
It’s worth keeping in mind that Hall’s countercultural bush-telegraph was in action
well before “world music” had been invented as either concept or marketing category
(see Feld). World music scholar Jocelyne Guilbault writes that the genre, as it came to
be established in the 1980s, was a product of globalization, characterized by “transna-
tional movements of musics and artists and the new alliances, both social and musical,”
that they established (191). However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, those networks
were still in the process of formation, and the movement of music and popular culture
was still largely in one direction. Young people in Peru were certainly hearing the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones, because that music was promoted there by international
media companies, played on the radio, and so on; however, those artists’ Peruvian
counterparts hardly received a similar amount of broadcast and promotion in the UK.
Regional rock music was at times recorded and released by branches of those interna-
tional record companies (EMI, Philips, RCA, and others all had outposts around the
world), though just as often by enterprising local independent labels; in either case, it
was generally marketed mostly within its country of origin. As a result, the psychedelic
music that developed usually remained limited to a national or regional reach.
Academics who study media have long been concerned (often with reason) that the
global spread of popular culture from the West might drown out or supplant local
traditions and styles, either intentionally or unintentionally functioning as a type of
cultural imperialism. However, Motti Regev points out that, at least with regards to rock
music, that viewpoint has been less common on the ground. More often, he writes, “rock
music is used to declare a ‘new’ – modern, contemporary, young, often critical-
oppositional – sense of local identity, as opposed to older, traditional, conservative forms
of that identity” (418). Néstor García Canclini describes this kind of process as “the cultural
reorganization of power,” as internal social patterns and hierarchies are intersected by new
influences from other sources, and societies shift “from a vertical and bipolar conception of
sociopolitical relations to one that is decentered and multidetermined” (258). In the 1960s
in particular, the embrace of rock music by young people was perceived as a statement of
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 201

generational identity and the ability to stay current with international trends. As such, it
was initially tolerated and even encouraged by local authorities, at least to the extent that
such modernization was seen as a desirable goal, which was definitely not always the case.
Regev points out that the music arising out of such new interactions can take
a myriad of different forms in different places, though he identifies three “ideal”
categories of the process by which rock music becomes incorporated into local cultures.
The first of these is the popularity of “Anglo/American pop/rock as such,” usually seen
as a sign of the openness of the local context to an engagement with currents of
international culture. In situations where such connections are frowned upon by local
authorities, “within conservative contexts or totalitarian regimes, attempts to prevent or
just control the dissemination of Anglo-American rock, invoke the use of this music as
a means to construct a local sense of autonomous identity” (419).
Regev’s second category is “imitation,” in which local musicians take up instruments
and create their own versions of international styles, often as sung in local languages.
This step, he says, often accompanies the “emergence of a bohemian-oppositional
‘counter-culture’ which considers itself to be an avant-garde;” this is especially common
“under totalitarian regimes, where the local rock scene declared itself to be a site for the
preservation of national artistic freedom” – the “subversive” international music style
becoming a rallying point for local resistance (420).
The third category involves musical and cultural “hybridity,” as “rock elements are
selectively adapted and mixed with traditional-local styles to produce” new musical
forms and new cultural identities. Combining Western rock instrumentation and
textures (fuzz, distortion, loud volume) “with traditional instruments, vocal styles and
‘ethnic’ rhythms, they create musics that sound as much ‘rock’ as planted in the local
culture” (422). Regev recommends against seeing the three categories as stages in
a linear process (i.e., from imports to imitation to hybrid, in sequence); there are places
where that did occur, but probably even more in which the three have coexisted and
even competed among themselves for popularity.
In the 1960s, as psychedelic music and its countercultural meanings dispersed like
spores across the world, many of the places they landed and took root were quite
different from the U.S.A. and UK in terms of both cultural background and con-
temporary politics. Being a longhaired hippie playing rebellious rock music meant
one kind of thing in San Francisco or London (though even those are perhaps not so
identical as consensus accounts have assumed), but something quite different in
Tokyo, Lagos, or Buenos Aires. Not a few of those countries were also going through
serious social and political upheaval at the time, in some cases even under author-
itarian rule. García Canclini points out that, in such situations, repressive govern-
ments will often attempt to limit access to potentially “subversive” outside materials,
while trying to impose an idealized and simplified “official” version of national
culture, such that “heterodox ways of speaking the language, making music, or
interpreting the traditions are rejected” (xxiii). Artists and musicians, on the other
hand, tend to lean into processes of cultural hybridization. García Canclini says that,
“For many artists, recognizing cultural hybridization, and working experimentally
with it, serve to deconstruct the perceptions of society and the language that repre-
sents it,” as those outside influences become symbolic resources that can be adapted
and mobilized for cultural and political purposes (246n).
202 K. M. MOIST

Simon Frith argues that popular music is always about more than just entertainment;
“what music offers people,” he writes, “is access to a social world, a part in some sort of
social narrative” (90). Music provides resources for identity, “gives us a way of being in the
world, a way of making sense of it: musical response is, by its nature, a process of musical
identification; aesthetic response is, by its nature, an ethical agreement” (272). Michael
J. Kramer suggests that the role of psychedelic rock music in the counterculture had both
cultural and political implications, “because as it offered spaces of aesthetic interaction in
the realm of leisure and entertainment, it also connected individuals to larger structures of
power” (11). People’s experience of the music was as an arena for countercultural expres-
siveness, as well as a way of “critically confronting the present” – while on the one hand “it
served as the setting for starting to live as if the revolution had already arrived, rock also
provided a medium in which to work through the conundrums of the moment” (21).
Kramer refers to this as the “countercultural imaginary . . . the visions, desires, and wishes
that people used rock [music] to express about their lives” (23).
The articles assembled in this special issue of Rock Music Studies take up various points
of that countercultural and psychedelic imaginary. I have intentionally avoided attempting
to lay out too specific of a narrative or process in this introductory overview; as Scott
Montgomery notes in his essay, the variety and complexity of the results suggest that we
should perhaps be talking about psychedelias and countercultures, plural rather than
singular. The examples discussed by the authors took very different forms and drew on
different elements both musically and culturally, often not following the same timeline,
chronology, or lines of development assumed in the standard unitary Western-centric
rock histories mentioned above. The work collected here is not so much an attack on those
consensus accounts as a de facto illustration of their partial and limited status.
Some places where one might have expected Western musical trends to take hold
(for instance, a comfortably Anglo setting such as New Zealand) instead found them-
selves constrained by culture and circumstance; while others that might initially seem
less likely spots for a psychedelic uprising (say, Turkey) had thriving countercultural
scenes that lasted through the 1970s. The approaches taken by the authors are equally
varied, with interdisciplinary backgrounds ranging from musicological to sociological to
cultural. Some of the examples (Italy, Brazil) have received a bit of previous scholarly
attention – though the analyses here show how much is yet to be learned about even
those – while others (Poland, the Philippines) have received almost no attention in
either popular or academic settings.
The work gathered in this issue is hardly the final word about global psychedelia(s) – in
fact, it’s more along the lines of an initial exploratory expedition. There’s nothing here about
psychedelic music in, say, Chile, Indonesia, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia, South Korea,
Sweden, Nigeria, Japan. . . you get the idea. Many parts of the countercultural map remain
obscure, and many lands are yet to be explored. But, as Lao Tzu says, a journey of a thousand
miles begins with a step, and the examples here represent six trips that are well worth taking.

Notes
1. The two albums were/are Virgin, from 1969, the group’s second LP, and their self-titled
1970 LP (sometimes called by the name of its first track “Tibet’s Suzettes”). Both have been
 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES 203

reissued multiple times, and are currently available in official remastered versions from
Peru.
2. Unfortunately the inheritance never arrived, but reissue labels have been increasingly busy
and influential over the intervening years. It’s worth mentioning that, especially early on,
in some cases those took the form of “unofficial” or pirated releases that existed in a legal
and ethical grey area (for both the label and, in a different way, the consumer).
Fortunately, over the last decade or so the tide has turned somewhat, and at this point
the standard leans more toward official releases – licensed, compensated, remastered, etc. –
though their shadier counterparts are still out there.
3. Music scholar Will Straw has argued that enthusiasm for such “lost” musics is driven primarily
by the search for novelty, “nourished partly by the thrill with which they seem scandalously
counter-canonical”; at the same time though, he does note that listeners’ embrace of them can
have the effect of inverting typical patterns of cultural respect, as those instances may seem to
“offer more interesting cross-fertilisations of influence than the original, canonical versions”
(Straw 2001). The first part of that quotation has always seemed a bit condescending to me, as
though expanding musical history and broadening cultural awareness were primarily moti-
vated by scoring “cool points” in some imaginary hipness contest. As for the second part,
I understand what he’s getting at, though I’m not sure that’s necessarily the most accurate way
to characterize it. The process of wrapping my head around the music of Traffic Sound didn’t
lead me to like the Beatles or Santana any less; if anything, it probably helped me to appreciate
all three of them even more, through seeing (well, hearing) how similar musical motivations
could be channeled and expressed differently in different contexts – more of a transvaluation
than a simple inversion.
4. I’m thinking here of the tomes written by author Vernon Joynson, such as A Melange of
Musical Pipedreams and Pandemonium, which covers 1960s/1970s rock music from Africa,
the Middle East, and the Antipodes, and A Potpourri of Melodies and Mayhem, which
includes Latin America and Canada (both published 2017). Those and other similar books
have often been the only formal sources to provide any documentation whatsoever both of
obscure music scenes within the US and UK, and the many developments outside those
centers. The Internet has helped with that situation somewhat, though not as much as one
might hope, as websites and blogs often end up recirculating the same unreliable
information.
5. As an example, Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage is both a fascinating
first-person-academic account of the decade, and fairly typical of what I’m talking about
here.
6. Hall’s essay has been more or less out of circulation since its 1969 book publication
(there is an earlier and much shorter “occasional paper” that can be found in incom-
plete form online as a PDF file, but the 1969 revision is the one to read), which is a
shame for a bunch of reasons. For those familiar with Hall’s later work, it is interesting
to see a number of his key ideas in more nascent form; for scholars of the 1960s, his
analyses of the various threads of countercultural thought remain insightful; and in
general the whole piece is just chock full of fascinating observations and enlightening
connections. An example, chosen more or less at random: “Instead of taking society
from in front, like the campus militants, or burning it, baby, to the ground, like the
black ghetto militants, [Hippies] mean to unravel it from within, destroying the ratio-
nale, undermining the legitimacy, the social ethic which is the moral cement which
holds the whole fabric together” (196). Or this one:1969)

“Thus, much as McLuhan prophesies that through the new electronic media we shall
‘return’ (or go forward?) to the more primitive/more advanced consciousness of the
‘global village’, so Hippies in their own way seek, through drugs and other ‘media’, to
go backwards and forwards in consciousness, recovering there worlds lost to techno-
logical civilization since industrial capitalism banished the so-called ‘primitive mind’ to
the reservations” (188-89).
204 K. M. MOIST

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Kevin M. Moist is an Associate Professor of Communications and head of the Communications
program at Penn State Altoona, where he teaches courses that focus on media technology,
journalism, media history, and popular culture. His research interests include the 1960s counter-
culture (particularly psychedelic rock music and concert posters), collecting as a cultural practice
(especially record collecting), and independent and alternative media. He is currently the
research area chair for The Sixties area of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture
Association, and is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals, including the Journal of
Popular Culture.

Works cited
Auther, Elissa, and Adam Lerner, ed. West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in
America, 1965–1977 U of Minnesota P, 2012.
Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle, ed. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture
of the 1960s and ’70s Routledge, 2002.
Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for ‘World Music.’.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Music
and Popular Culture Studies, Vol. II, the Rock Era. Ed. Simon Frith, Routledge, 2004. 62–86.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Harvard UP, 1996.
García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. U of
Minnesota P, 1995.
Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Bantam, 1993.
Grunenberg, Christoph, ed. Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era Tate Publishing, 2005.
Guilbault, Jocelyne. “World Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Ed.
Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, Cambridge UP, 2001. 176–92.
Hall, Stuart. “The Hippies—An American ‘Moment’.” Student Power. Ed. Julian Nagel, Merlin
Press, 1969. 170–202.
Hicks, Michael. Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions. U of Illinois P, 1999.
Joynson, Vernon. A Melange of Musical Pipedreams and Pandemonium. Borderline Books, 2017a.
Joynson, Vernon. A Potpourri of Melodies and Mayhem. Borderline Books, 2017b.
Kramer, Michael J. The Republic of Rock. Oxford UP, 2013.
Moist, Kevin M. “Record Collecting as Cultural Anthropology.” Contemporary Collecting:
Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things. Ed. David Banash and Kevin M. Moist, Scarecrow
Press, 2013. 229–44.
Regev, Motti. “Rock Aesthetics and Musics of the World.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in
Music and Popular Culture Studies, Vol. II: The Rock Era. Ed. Simon Frith, Routledge, 2004.
412–30.
Straw, Will. “Consumption.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Ed. Simon Frith,
Will Straw, and John Street, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 53–73.
Whiteley, Sheila. The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. Routledge, 1992.

Discography
Traffic Sound. Virgin, MaG Records (Peru), 1969; Repsychled Records, 2015.
Traffic Sound. Traffic Sound (aka “Tibet’s Suzettes”). MaG Records (Peru), 1970; Repsychled
Records, 2015.