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Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free.
Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America?
Preface and Acknowledgments
Prologue: Popular Music as Political Theory
1 How Rock 'n' Roll Invented the Teenager
2 How Americans Rocked Cairo (and London, and Moscow, and Tehran, and ...)
3 How Trash Became Art
4 How the Rock Counterculture Dug Deeper
5 How Songwriters Revealed Our Inner Truth
6 How Rock Got Real Again
7 How We Taught the World to Sing
Epilogue: Rocking in the Free World
References
Index
Description
Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free.
Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America?
