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Textbook Historical Theory and Methods Through Popular Music 1970 2000 Those Are The New Saints 1St Edition Kenneth L Shonk Ebook All Chapter PDF
Textbook Historical Theory and Methods Through Popular Music 1970 2000 Those Are The New Saints 1St Edition Kenneth L Shonk Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Historical Theory and
Methods through Popular
Music, 1970–2000
“Those are the New Saints”
Series Editors
Steve Clark
Graduate School Humanities and Sociology
University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo, Japan
Tristanne Connolly
Department of English
St Jerome’s University
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Jason Whittaker
School of English & Journalism
University of Lincoln, Lincoln
Lincs, United Kingdom
Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial
and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually
evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining vari-
ous forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation,
class, gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity
investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celeb-
rity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and
accelerates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging
and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisci-
plinary approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the
informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies.
Historical Theory
and Methods through
Popular Music,
1970–2000
“Those are the New Saints”
Kenneth L. Shonk, Jr. Daniel Robert McClure
University of Wisconsin–La Crosse Chapman University
La Crosse, WI, USA Orange, CA, USA
Kenneth
Many of the arguments advanced herein were during my HIS
102 courses taught between Spring 2015 and Fall 2016 at the
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. As such, I would like to offer
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Daniel
The idea for this book emerged while teaching historical theory and
methods seminars at California State University, Fullerton. As both a
long-debated pipedream and a blatant venture into commodifying our
Ph.D.s, this book is a reflection of my friendship with Ken as well as a
conjunction of our interests. Ken’s influence on my teaching and my
own work is immeasurable.
I would like to thank the following mentors-friends who helped shape
and critique my approach to history over the years: Winston James, Jochen
Burgtorf, Natalie Fousekis, Nancy Fitch, Gayle Brunelle, Touraj Daryaee,
Laura J. Mitchell, Bridget R. Cooks, Jared Sexton, Tiffany Willoughby-
Herard, Sohail Daulatzai, Mark Levine, Vinayak Chaturvedi, David
Igler, Emily Rosenberg, Victoria E. Johnson, Steve Topik, and Sharon
Acknowledgements ix
V. Salinger. I would also like to thank those who read through drafts of
various chapters: Ernesto Bassi, Jessie McClure, Nahum Chandler, Mark
R. Villegas, Robert Wood, Robert Chase, Robert McLain, Nicholas
Schlensker, and Jana Byars. I would also like to thank my brother, Richard
McClure, for his support and editing over the years. Finally, I would like to
thank my wife, Jennifer, and our children, Everett and Ani, for having the
patience to endure the abrupt changes in musical selections that occurred
with the completion of each chapter.
Contents
xi
xii Contents
11 Conclusion 291
Index 295
CHAPTER 1
in May of that year, shootings at Kent State effectively ended the so-
called Age of Aquarius, as youthful protest provoked a reaction of mar-
tial violence; in August, Lou Reed, one of the founding members of the
Velvet Underground (arguably the first alternative rock band), left the
band; artists Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (and Jim Morrison the fol-
lowing year) died in the fall, marking an end to the psychedelic hippie
rock music symbolicaly inaugurated by the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Finally, 1970 witnessed David Bowie’s ascension to iconic status as his
album Space Oddity, though released in late 1969, helped to create an
audience for a music of, by, and for, the weird.2 Very quickly, Bowie
helped to initiate glam rock with his The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
and the Spiders from Mars in 1972, while producing two other key
albums: the glam-influenced second solo album, Transformer, by former
Velvet, Lou Reed, and the third album by The Stooges—a crucial fore-
runner to punk rock—Raw Power.3 Speaking more broadly, the 1970s
followed in the wake of massive cultural shifts across the Atlantic world,
helping to create space(s) for a wave of musical genres and artists engag-
ing in explicitly anti-hegemonic aesthetics. Aspects of this discontent
may be seen at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, where the social distance
between 1960s performers and their audience grew so far it snapped the
idealistic non-hierarchical, anti-establishment stance driving the era’s
musical counter-culture. Rock and roll had become big business by the
late 1960s, with the 1970 Isle of Wight festival—loudly protested by ele-
ments radicalized by the events of 1968—appearing as a poorly organ-
ized production with highly paid performers and a significant number of
non-paying attendees. Festival MC, Rikki Farr, proved to be the vessel
of the era’s collapse of idealism, as he screamed at the audience: “We
put this festival on for you bastards, with a lot of love. We worked for
one year for you pigs. Now you wanna break our walls and you wanna
destroy it? Well you go to hell!” The audience discontent was evident
to one young man, who noted the new era of hierarchy: “and our plas-
tic gods, the musicians, are coming and taking away like, uh, £80,000,
you know? So, those are the new saints.”4 This gap between performer
and audience, emerging as the music industry entered an era of corpo-
rate conglomeration in the 1970s and 1980s, created a vacuum for new
restless energies of youth rebellion discontent with former idols. In the
wake of this symbolic end to the 1960s, various genres of music arose
counter to mainstream music: an alternative to a popular music that
appeared to stop speaking to the youth culture from which it emerged.
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROCESS AND PEDAGOGY OF HISTORICAL THEORY 3
As George Lipsitz suggests, “Much more than the culture of the more
celebrated 1960s, the popular culture of the 1970s has become a foun-
dational source and an informative archive for succeeding generations,
because, even in its excesses, it registered the effects of a historical turn-
ing point.”5 The breach in the edifice opened to an enormous flood.
Studying popular music outside the mainstream unveils parallel narra-
tives elucidating cultural movements that actively sought to distinguish
themselves from the mainstream. Most importantly, the space between
these two fields tells a deeper story about culture, power, and aesthetic
artistry. The result reveals a general tension between the status quo
and those who seek to operate outside—if not alter or redefine—social,
political, cultural, and/or economic constructs. In the divergent space
between the mainstream and marginal exists a tension clearly delineat-
ing an alternative from the mainstream, the weird from the “normal,”
the rebellious from the conservative. In other words, between 1970
and 2000 there occurred a splintering of popular music that produced
a multi-faceted assault on the mainstream. This piecing apart is revela-
tory of an era in which the politics of the weird, the voice of the willing
and forcibly marginalized, the young, and the hitherto voiceless actively
pushed back against the hegemonic forces of the mainstream. Historical
Theory and Methods through Popular Music, 1970–2000 explores how
alternative music(s) rebelled against the mainstream, while simultane-
ously finding themselves opening markets for music, which, ironically,
regenerated the mainstream—in short, in its struggle against the main-
stream, weird started selling, inadvertently becoming the seeds for a new
mainstream.6 This book outlines these various layers through case studies
wrapped together with historical theories. Historical theory facilitates an
analysis of historical phenomena using sets of language and concepts in
a critical manner largely absent from traditional empiricist narrative his-
tory.7 The movement away and criticism toward empiricist history has
had the added effect of making historical inquiry self-conscious of its
own limitations in its truth-making. The main sets of historical theories
used include: critical race theory, gender and sexuality, nationalism and
identity, class, post-colonial and post-slavery, post-industrial, post-mod-
ern, ideas of authenticity and nostalgia, as well as the overarching frame-
work influencing the entire era: modernity and its cultural influence on
popular music via the centuries-old, longue durée processes of colonialism
and imperialism, capitalism, the Atlantic slave system, the enlightenment,
and the nation-state (or nationalism).
4 K.L. SHONK AND D.R. McCLURE
States. Demographically, we were born towards the end of what has come
to be defined as Generation X, and were raised in middle to lower-middle
class families. It is important to state that up front, for it will do much
to explain the historical context within which we, the authors, developed
our understanding of popular music and its relationship to the disci-
pline of history. What has been labeled as “alternative” music for us was
our norm—alternative stations were an option on our radios and, if we
waited long enough, we might see on MTV a New Order or Cure video
wedged in between the latest from Def Leppard or Janet Jackson. If we
wanted a more concentrated dose of alternative music, we could program
our VCRs to record MTV’s The Cutting Edge or its successor 120 min,
or we could watch Request Video each afternoon on KDOC in Orange
County, California.8 Born in the early to mid-1970s, an alternative music
soundtrack layered our adolescence in sounds confronting more main-
stream expressions on the radio and in record stores. We became men at
a time when there was a full spectrum of masculinities: from the stand-
ard masculinity of athletes, politicians, and entertainers to the alterna-
tive masculinities of Morrissey, David Johansen, David Bowie, Chuck D,
Kurt Cobain, and Robert Smith. In addition, women artists such as Joan
Jett, Madonna, Grace Jones, Siouxsie Sioux, Kathleen Hannah, Queen
Latifah, and Cyndi Lauper, among others, taught us about the broader
spectrum of femininity and feminism(s). In short, we grew up in a golden
age when alternative music was available to us, the disaffected.
Both of us were athletes—football, baseball, basketball, and track
and field—and instead of listening exclusively to hard rock and metal,
we found ourselves also listening to N.W.A, Suicidal Tendencies, or
the Alarm to get ourselves physically and mentally prepared to engage
in the “battle” of sport. As we underwent the physical rigor and mental
training to become a part of what we call the warrior class (the capital-
ist business soldier of the 1980s United States), alternative music fueled
and facilitated our developing sense that what was mainstream—from
expectations of our masculinity to historical norms and myths taught in
public school—was a prescribed routine: safe, predictable, and a con-
sensus generating consumer product shaping one’s identity, offering an
exchange of security for assimilation into the narrative of the new morn-
ing in America. The scent of bullshit was too noticeable, however, and
we slowly began to object to the prescribed rules of acceptable musical
consumption—one of us took refuge in 1960s and 1970s classic rock
and the other in “college rock” and hip-hop. Upon reflection and the
6 K.L. SHONK AND D.R. McCLURE
exchange of notes over the years amidst the consumption of too much
coffee, we noted how our search for alternative music coincided with our
bristling against the ordained inheritance of the American masculine tra-
dition. Why did we rebel against the warrior class, and why did alterna-
tive music become the background music for this revolt? These questions
circulated through graduate school, and, upon a dare, we set out to map
these contours through this book. Ultimately, we recognized ourselves
within the larger framework of rebellion stoked by various forms of
alternative music—from Jamaica to the U.K. to the South Bronx to Los
Angeles, soundtracks that reflected the will to transgress societal expecta-
tions. Accordingly, we identified with the iconoclasm of hardcore punk,
British shoegaze, Alt. Country, Native Tongues hip-hop, reggae, and
Riot Grrrl—all musical alternatives, at one point or another, to the main-
stream consumption channels.
While we situate the music we analyze within the framework of alter-
nativity, this should not take away from the fact that some of these art-
ists were and are internationally renowned, in some cases selling millions
of albums. The irony of using international renown and album sales to
warrant a study of alternative music is not lost upon us. Indeed, it rep-
resents the strength of theory discussed above: although some artists
developed within alternative frameworks outside the mainstream—often
performing the very antithesis of mainstream music—their music often
“crossed over” to the mainstream. Does this make it less alternative?
What does this tell us about the ever-shifting tastes of mainstream audi-
ences? What does this tell us about the mainstream’s need for alternative
music—and by extension, what does this tell us about society’s need for
radical ideas assimilated into the lifeblood of society, in an act of cultural
regeneration? Thus, alternative music is both an aesthetic stance against
a mainstream, as well as a category of music not yet mainstream; or, at
the very least, the music has the potential to become mainstream. This
book works through these questions, highlighting the post-1960s music
world—an era less studied as a whole across the past 40 years.
Alternative music reached a series of peaks between the 1970s and the
end of the twentieth century, ebbing and flowing, embracing and reject-
ing, coopting and innovating its way through independent and corpo-
rate platforms of capitalism. Alternative music provided a language and
identity through which one could express disdain for conventional cul-
ture while offering a space that provided one with “a comforting feel-
ing of belonging to a subculture with more genuine values than the
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROCESS AND PEDAGOGY OF HISTORICAL THEORY 7
Alternativity
At this point it is important that we discern what we mean by alternativ-
ity and alternative music. The two are neither mutually inclusive nor are
they mutually exclusive. When we speak of alternativity, we are referring
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROCESS AND PEDAGOGY OF HISTORICAL THEORY 9
for reasons discussed later, artists of this ilk are far less prevalent than they
were in the era between 1970 and 2000.
Pedagogy
This book does not intend to be either a definitive or an authoritative
history of each aspect of alternative music. In this regard, some read-
ers might be tempted to point out any number of artists that do not
appear below, and we certainly recognize the fact that we exclude more
artists than we include. Nonetheless, our intent is to create a starting
point for viewing the alternative era as a cohesive whole, in turn mov-
ing away from the atomized and specialized studies that tend to view
any number of sub-genres of alternative rock as an insular “movement”
unencumbered by historical forces. Indeed, the work at hand seeks to
situate and contextualize alternative music within the long- and short-
term historical processes forging the very socio-economic and political
frameworks from which these sub-genres—if not movements—emerged.
In this regard, this book is meant to be a starting point from which to
reassess and recontextualize alternative music as reflective of histori-
cal phenomena. General histories of alternative music are usually rel-
egated to a single chapter in narrative-based histories of rock and roll.
Moreover, such chapters tend to construct alternative music as a syno-
nym for “College” or “Indie/DIY” rock from which Black Flag begat
R.E.M. who begat Sonic Youth who begat Nirvana. Rather than taking a
chronicle approach to the story of popular music’s alternative moments,
we embrace a more systematic approach, rooting changes and innova-
tions in music to previous musical efforts as well as larger changes in the
socio-economic realm of the artists. Thus, post-punk, hip-hop, and reg-
gae share a kinship with shared interests in recording technology, critical
rhetoric on contemporary politics, and the embrace of hybrid expres-
sions pulling together layers of artistic influences across the Anglo-Black
Atlantic and beyond.
In addition to being a history of the alternative era, this book has a
pedagogical purpose, which is to use the “language” of popular music
to introduce readers to a selection of significant and useful theoreti-
cal approaches to historical inquiry. Works on historical theory tend to
present these approaches in an esoteric way so readers must struggle to
learn both the historical theory and the historical context in which they
are presented. As such, these works tend to be esoteric and inaccessible
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROCESS AND PEDAGOGY OF HISTORICAL THEORY 13
and the all-male, patriarchal space reserved for what Sven Beckert calls
“war capitalism.”21 Masculinity defined the default moniker, “man,”
anchoring the colorblind phrase “all men are created equal” that in prac-
tice only applied to men of European descent. Indeed, the construc-
tion of gender and sexuality out of the processes of modernity utilized
the experience of colonialism and slavery to stabilize meanings of white
womanhood, with enslaved women of African descent anchoring this pil-
lar of civilization. Black women (along with other women of color) were
described as ugly, hypersexual, strong, and able to work, while white
women were defined as beautiful, pure, vulnerable, and domestic (a
“lady” should never work outside the home).22 These constructions were
defined through the default prism of the patriarchal Eurocentric expres-
sions of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the set of thoughts
and philosophy born at the dawn of the sugar era of capitalism between
the early 1600s and the late 1700s.23 Dividends from the Atlantic slave
system—particularly the Royal Africa Company—paid the bills for some
Enlightenment thinkers, while the deeper ideas about humanity and race
arose from the experience and need to justify the Atlantic slave system
and colonialism. From the Atlantic slave system, the binary of freedom
and slavery rooted ideas of whiteness and blackness, while the relation-
ship between colonizers and the colonized formed the base ideas of
civilized and savagery—and, thus, strengthened the need for a strong
patriarchal society able to defend women and children (particularly in
settler societies such as in the United States).
The outcome assumed that the true agents of history, of progress and
civilization, belonged to those of Northern European “stock”: those
who became “white” against the “objects” of history, people of African
descent or natives. Moreover, the Enlightenment found its material base
among those organizing and profiting from European expansion, coloni-
alism, capitalism, and the Atlantic slave system: the European bourgeoisie.
The masculinity questioned in Chap. 3 found its root amidst this fallout,
where ideas like “individualism,” “rights of man,” and “rights of prop-
erty” were thoroughly the domain of European men, while the possession
of women and control over enslaved or colonized peoples existed as an
unquestioned prerogative.24 Consequently, nation-states comprised of the
representatives of capital slowly emerged out of older kingdoms rooted in
the landed elite and aristocracy of feudal Europe. The nation-state pro-
vided a more efficient organization of society that could operate interna-
tionally, enforcing contracts and trade agreements, international relations,
16 K.L. SHONK AND D.R. McCLURE
and using the power of the nation-state to go to war. From the ideas of
Enlightenment thinkers, nation-states also created laws regulating the
enslavement of Africans, the status of free blacks and indigenous peoples,
and the rights of women—all determined through the normalization of
the privileged and entitled status of white, propertied masculinity.
Accordingly, the contemporary ideas circulating through Historical
Theory and Methods through Popular Music, 1970–2000 about race, gender,
sexuality, and class evolved from these centuries-old processes, weaving
their way through mainstream society and alternative voices along the mar-
gins. For example, the burdens of blackness cultivated from colonialism
and slavery created an afterlife of slavery, where imperilment and devalu-
ation wrought by the “racial calculus and… political arithmetic” of the
Atlantic slave system engineered the ontology of anti-blackness and ongo-
ing racial antagonism.25 Most reggae and hip-hop artists create and cre-
ated their music through this coding of human beings. The nation-state,
in turn, would define black people as not citizens—in the United States
this took until the 1960s to rectify, despite the Fourteenth Amendment
in 1868. Indigenous peoples, Chicanos/as, and other non-white, non-
European peoples were also categorized as second-class citizens up to and
through the 1960s. The alternative music era, in many ways, expresses
this momentous shift after centuries of modernity created interwoven lay-
ers of oppression with Europeans—or white people—defined as divinely
ordained and naturally occupying the top of the social-economic hierar-
chy. As people of color gained an even greater expressive voice in popular
culture after the upheavals of the 1960s, the 1970s literally became the
first decade in the history of the United States when white men, espe-
cially white men with property, were forced legislatively to share politi-
cal and economic opportunities with everyone else—particularly half the
population: women. As popular music took shape in the twentieth cen-
tury, women’s roles were largely constricted to singing or dancing or being
the object—literally—of men’s frustration or sexual conquest. While a
few marginal examples existed in the 1960s and before, from the 1970s
through to the end of the century women picked up guitars, basses, and
drums and created music within a space previously reserved for men.
These intersectional qualities of modernity found shape and evolved over
the centuries following the 1500s, periodically shifting language according
to the political and economic needs of the era. To foreground the various
artists associated with alternative music within their appropriate trajecto-
ries of modernity, another concept is needed to provide the historian with
1 INTRODUCTION: THE PROCESS AND PEDAGOGY OF HISTORICAL THEORY 17
The genus Zygophylax, from 500 fathoms off the Cape Verde, is of
considerable interest in having a nematophore on each side of the
hydrotheca. According to Quelch it should be placed in a distinct
family.
Order V. Graptolitoidea.
A large number of fossils, usually called Graptolites, occurring in
Palaeozoic strata, are generally regarded as the skeletal remains of
an ancient group of Hydrozoa.
The principal genera are Monograptus, with the axis straight, curved,
or helicoid, from many horizons in the Silurian strata; Rastrites, with
a spirally coiled axis, Silurian; Didymograptus, Ordovician; and
Coenograptus, Ordovician.
Fig. 136.—A portion of a branch of Cryptohelia ramosa, showing the lids l 1 and l
2 covering the cyclosystems, the swellings produced by the ampullae in the
lids amp1, amp2, and the dactylozooids, dac. × 22. (After Hickson and
England.)
Spinipora is a rare genus from off the Rio de la Plata in 600 fathoms.
The branches are covered with blunt spines. These spines have a
short gutter-like groove at the apex, which leads into a dactylopore.
The gastropores are provided with a style and are situated between
the spines.
CHAPTER XI
HYDROZOA (CONTINUED): TRACHOMEDUSAE—NARCOMEDUSAE—
SIPHONOPHORA
During the growth of the Medusa from the younger to the adult
stages several changes probably occur of a not unimportant
character, and it may prove that several genera now placed in the
same or even different families are stages in the development, of the
same species. In the development of Liriantha appendiculata,[325] for
example, four interradial tentacles appear in the first stage which
disappear and are replaced by four radial tentacles in the second
stage.
The character of the manubrium and the position of the sexual cells
suggest that Limnocnida has affinities with the Narcomedusae or
Anthomedusae, but the marginal sense-organs and the number and
position of the tentacles, showing considerable similarity with those
of Limnocodium, justify the more convenient plan of placing the two
genera in the same family.
Fam. Geryoniidae.—In this family there are four or six radial canals,
the statorhabs are sunk in the mesogloea, and a tongue is present in
the manubrium. Liriope (Fig. 137) is sometimes as much as three
inches in diameter. It has a very long manubrium, and the tongue
sometimes projects beyond the mouth. There are four very long
radial tentacles. It is found in the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean
Sea, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Geryonia has a wider
geographical distribution than Liriope, and is sometimes four inches
in diameter. It differs from Liriope in having six, or a multiple of six,