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This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

SONGTEXTS / CONTEXTS:
RHETORIC AND IDEOLOGY IN THE
DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF ROCK MUSIC

presented by

Larry R. Juchartz

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph .D . degree in English

 

 

Major professor

Date April 24, 2000

 

MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

 

.. LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 chlHC/DatoDuepGS—p. 15

._———

SONGTEXTS/CON TEXTS:
RHETORIC AND IDEOLOGY IN THE
DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF ROCK MUSIC

By

Larry R. Juchartz

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

2000

ABSTRACT

SONGTEXTS/ CONTEXTS:
RHETORIC AND IDEOLOGY IN THE
DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF ROCK MUSIC

By

Larry R. Juchartz

While rock music has become an established form of text for use in many
higher-education classrooms, the contexts behind the musical texts (songtexts)
offer more insight into rock’s varied discursive practices than does a mere
examination of the lyrical messages and their delivery within certain social
spheres. Beyond its musicality and lyricism, contemporary rock has become a
discourse community in its own right, presiding over the identity formations of
numerous diverse groups who use rock as their central point of connection.

By applying critical lenses and scholarship from the fields of both cultural
studies and rhetoric, this dissertation explores a number of discursive genres—
theatrical rock, heavy metal, grunge, hip-hop and others—and illustrates some
of the contexts grounded in the corresponding social and historical settings for
each genre. It further provides a critical analysis of concrete manifestations of
rock’ 3 rhetorics and ideologies, including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where
rock’s ”official” history is not only kept, but also created. Written from a
pedagogical standpoint, the dissertation ultimately focuses on classroom
applications of rock discourses and the challenges faced by teachers engaged
with—and engaging students with—those discourses.

For Robert and Helga IuChartz,
whose favorite refrain was to ”Turn that noise down, now!"

AND

For Christy—
without whom, not.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In one of Alanis Morissette’s recent songtexts, the artist thanks India, terror, and
disillusionment for their abstractly-defined roles in her life. It’s a great track, but I’d like
to make my own note of gratitude is a bit brighter and more focused:

My first true mentor, Nancy Nelson, saved me from a slow Death by Trigonom-
etry by encouraging me with a simple suggestion to “do what you’re best at” and sup-
porting me through all the years since I followed that advice. Elizabeth Capwell’s many
articulations ofa mature lived experience through the 19605 music scene added depth and
texture to my own dim memories of a decade I’d witnessed only through a child’s eyes.
My own children today continue to add a wealth of musical diversity to my otherwise
limited ability to keep up, while my other “kids”—-—my students—have opened their CD
cases, video boxes, and underground ’zines to me along with their classroom observations,
office conversations, and written explanations of rock’s role in their lives. And my wife,
Christy Rishoi, has provided four years of pushes, pulls, prods, props, and especially
patience during times of both intense work and intense avoidance of work. She rules.

Finally, Diane Brunner, Dean Rehberger, Kitty Geissler, and David Stowe have
earned my immense gratitude for their vast understanding and empathy, gentle guidance,
warm friendship, and endless kindness while sharing their expertise and knowledge with
me—both within, and far beyond, the scope of this immediate project. And Russ Larson
provided the final spark needed to set the project itself into motion.

Much more than mere friends, students, family, and teachers, I count all of these

people as true blessings in my life.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
INTRODUCTION: Once, There Was—~Now There Is

OVERVIEW: Ideological Rhetoric/Rhetorical Ideology:
What Is Rock, and Why Should Teachers Care?

KEEPIN’ IT ‘REAL’: The Controlling Metaphor Of ‘Authenticity’
In Rock Discourses

—No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Strange Case of Pat Boone
—More Difficult Cases: In This Case, Yes—That Is, Unless. . .
Difficult Case #1
Difficult Case #2
Diffith Case #3
Difficult Case #4
Difficult Case #5

—-—“The Worst Crime I Can Think Of”: The Sad Case of Kurt Cobain
and the ‘Death of Grunge’

—Of Services, Talent, Payments, and Power

CROSSROADS: History at the Impending Merger Between Rock
and Rap

——Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Part 2: (Steal That Funky Music,
White Boy)

-———White Mythology, Black Containment

—Black Faith, White Negotiation

vii

17

43

55

58

59

61

61

61

63

71

91

108

113

121

THE POLITICS OF POWER: Case Studies on Metallica and Rage
Against the Machine

-—Reading Metallica: A Pedagogy of Agency
——Reading Rage: A Pedagogy of Confrontation

MAKING GENTSSENSE: Telling Stories at the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK: Radicalism, Resistance, and Reading
in the Classroom Arena

——Join Together with the Band: Radical Pedagogy and the Rock
Teacher’s Speaking Position

-—Join Together with the Band, Part 2: The Rock Classroom and
Conceptions of ‘Discourse Community’

—-—Ain’t Nuthin’ but a G(iroux)-Thang, Baby: Rock, Radicalism,
and the Corrupting Influence of Corporate Education

—Finale: New Adventures in Hi-Fi

Notes

Works Cited

133

140

164

184

213

219

234

241

254

257

260

 

 

Figure. 1:

Figure 2:

Figure 3:

Figure 4:

Figure 5:

LIST OF FIGURES
Metallica (from lefi)——Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich, and
Newsted as they appeared until 1995
The old “barbed” logo (left); the new “plain” logo

(From left) Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett, and Newsted as
they appeared on Load in 1996

Rage Against the Machine. (From left) Tom Morello,
Zach De La Rocha, Brad Wilk, Tim Cummerford

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

vii

154

155

157

173

189

INTRODUCTION:
Once, There Was—Now There Is

Closing time—
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning‘s end.

- Semisonic

The parents forced the boy to take a nap, even though he felt much too old for
napping; they promised a “special treat” later in the evening. So he feigned sleep long
enough to earn the prize: a stay-up with the folks to watch something called the Ed
Sullivan Show. The night’s “treat,” it turned out, was Mr. Sullivan’s introduction of a
strange-looking group of British musicians who called themselves The Beatles.

Is this how it begins?

Although his parents were obviously huge fans, the boy was uninspired by the
group. (Later, re-remembering, he wonders if the disinterest and dislike existed mainly
because his parents were such big fans—but so soon rebellion?) His negative response to
these Fab Four lads from Liverpool stayed consistent, even after the band completely
alienated his parents by its drug use, increasingly scruffy appearance, and gradual turn
toward both Eastern mysticism and “psychedelic” music. Other kids in school,
especially girls, toted the White Album around with their portable record players. With
some remorse, he declined their invitations to come and listen. The potential sixth—grade

romance wasn’t worth the ordeal of such awful music.

-1-

So maybe it begins here:

Meanwhile, other things were happening. War things. Protest things. Anti-
authority things. Long hair, low-slung jeans, love beads. Drugs; overdoses. Riots. One
night a police car rode through his suburban Detroit neighborhood at seven o’clock, its
PA horn cautioning everyone to go inside, close the curtains, lock the doors.- The suburb
rolled up its sidewalks; just ten miles and two drawbridges to the north, the National
Guard rolled its tanks down the main streets of Motown, home of Marvin Gaye (who
asked, on Top-40 radio: What '3 gain ' on?), and the Temptations (who answered, on
Top-40 radio: Ball of Confusion ) Some kind of dialog was happening out there,
broadcast to the boy’s nascent political awareness by a tin-sounding AM transistor radio
which he and his fiiend James took to a park at river’s edge every chance they got during
summer vacation. They sat, watched freighters pass, and listened to music.

On rainy days, they visited one or all of the three “head shops” that had come to
town. Neon posters, black lights, incense. Bead curtains and American flags instead of
doors. And music: Loud, clear, non-transistorized, stereophonic heavy music, with bass.
Santana. Led Zeppelin. The Stones. Uriah Heep. And then, one day, Iggy and The
Stooges. “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Iggy Pop sang from the gloriously loud and clear
speakers. The allowance money of a lifetime came out of its glass piggy bank that night,
went into the hands of the head shop owner the next morning. “They’re all on drugs,” the
boy’s mother announced as soon as he showed her the album cover. “Take it back. I

don’t approve.” Which, of course, didn’t matter at all.

 

-v v
I
1

Or maybe it starts this way:

Encouraged to listen to lighter fare like Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell, who
were approved by his parents, the boy slipped further into darkness. Record stores were
heaven. The Stones came out with their LP Sticky Fingers, with its Warhol-designed real
zipper at the crotch of a photographed pair of jeans. The sexuality of the cover alone was
strong; combined with songs like “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar” playing overhead it became
almost overwhelming—in an extremely confusing way. He was not yet twelve. He
didn’t know this world. It was the world of older kids, high school kids. It scared the
hell out of him. And at the same time, it intoxicated him.

He began to live at James’s house, because James had a brother. Seventeen.
Nearly expelled from high school for refusing to cut his hair. Wore a T-shirt sometimes
that said “fuck amerika.” Had a poster that asked, “What if they gave a war, and no one
came?” Announced often that he’d move to Canada if the draft board came calling after
graduation. Went to a rock festival where the Stooges played. And was, in the boy’s
eyes, a god because of it all. Even more so when he loaned The Who Live at Leeds and
Grand Funk Live to the boy for “as long as you want,” and finally achieved Godhood
Unlimited when he invited the boy to a neighborhood yard concert.

It didn’t matter that the audience was only about forty people, or that the police
came to stop the “concert” after only a few songs. There was enough time to see actual
teenaged boys playing actual electric guitars through actual amplifiers, singing into actual
microphones, and actually disturbing the hell out of neighbors for blocks around. The
band played the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son,” Led
Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.” The police arrived during “Helter Skelter” and cut it short,

but no problem; it was a Beatles song.

 

Or maybe this is how it begins:

The boy, ecstatic and awed, went home. Now almost fourteen, he’d decided on
his next major purchase. The guitar was a Les Paul knockoff, sunburst paint job, dual
chrome pickups, chrome whammy bar; the amplifier, basic black, kicked out all of eight
watts. The whole package was department-store grade, Sears & Roebuck, but man, did
that distortion and feedback sound good.

A slight problem: Having faked his way through several years worth of piano
lessons by simply imitating what the teacher did, he couldn’t read a lick of music. Worse
yet, he found that he couldn’t force his fingers into the contortions required for traditional
guitar chords. But after fooling around long enough, he discovered the magic of open
tuning, setting the instrument strings to one major chord so that a single finger across the
frets created the same chord in a higher note. (There are limitations to such a system, but
it’d be many years before he encountered them.) Open-tuned chords let him hammer
away to Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Humble Pie, and every other group using raw power as
its basic musical foundation. Trying to be courteous, he did his chord-hammering in the
basement; his parents yelled to turn off the noise. Restricted to playing when they
weren’t home, he hammered in his room; neighbors came from as far as five houses away
to knock on the window and yell to turn off the noise. And so he did the only logical
thing one can do under such hostile circumstances.

He bought a bigger amp. And with it, moved his music into a garage across town.
His network of friends having grown quite a bit since his enlistment into counterculture,
he teamed up with Tim (lead guitar), Ronny (drums), Joe (keyboards), and a series of

bass players at the home of an overweight, unpopular boy named Chuck who contributed

-4-

his dad’s garage, a home-made mixing board, and some makeshift lighting made of coffee
cans, colored cellophane, and a frightening jumble of wires and circuits.

Ten minutes into the first jam session, the police arrived to shut it down. Music
took a back seat to carpentry for a week as the boys collected egg cartons from local
grocery stores, nailed them to every board inside the garage, then covered them with foam
panels. Finally, they plugged in their instruments once again and played, not realizing
that the garage door, made of steel and incapable of being soundproofed, worked as a giant
transmitter to the neighbors. Again the police arrived, this time with citation booklets out
and ready to write up the band for disorderly conduct. Finally, one of the more
compassionate officers suggested a wall of foam in front of the metal door as a sound
barrier.

Chuck’s dad wasn’t happy about parking on the street, but he was a cool guy, and
he understood. Out stayed the car, in went foam cushions from dozens of junkyard
couches and chairs. Although the band fully expected sirens to override guitars during the
third session inside this now sweltering and stifling but fully soundproofed practice
space, the police stayed away. At last, the boy and his friends could rock freely.

Very quickly, other kids came to listen and hang out. Then, magically, girls came
to do the same. Girls from neighboring suburbs, girls in grades two and even three levels
beyond the boys’. Girls who quickly started to “go with” someone in the hand, then
eventually broke up: the lead guitarist, then the rhythm guitarist, then the bass player.
But never with Chuck, who only worked the lights and mixing boards.

A lot of teenagers populated the garage every night. Sometimes, when the number
was particularly high, the police came because the neighbors got scared. But most times it

was just powerful, incrediblefim, courtesy of bands like F oghat, the James Gang, T. Rex,

-5-

and Deep Purple, who provided the songs and the lyrics that worked as a talisman to
bond the group into a tight, unbreakable circle.

Then one night the band and its circle headed off to a nearby burger joint for
dinner. Dozens of happy teenagers returned to the garage for a night of music. But the
door was open; the instruments were gone. Every piece of equipment, even the
cellophaned coffee-can lights. All that remained were foam panels and egg cartons to
amplify the silence. For the first time, the police arrived at the band’s request. “We’ll
take a report,” they said. “But realistically, you’ll probably never see those instruments
again.” The circle broke up, went home, began the search for another place to hang out,
another band to attach itself to. The band itself sat in the empty garage for a long time.
“Screw it,” the boy finally said. “We weren’t really all that good anyway.”

The band’s lead guitarist became a table-soccer star at the local arcade before
quitting school for a job at the steel mill. The drummer sold his spare drum kit for a rusty
but reliable motorcycle. And Chuck went on to become the concert lighting director for a

number of internationally-famous rock groups, culminating with Pink F loyd.

Or perhaps this is the real beginning:

Cars. First an embarrassing hand-me-down from his parents, then, after he took
weekend work washing tanker trucks at an oil refinery, a 1966 Mustang. Gigantic tires in
the back; the sound of gigantic power from the tricked-out engine up front. Machines
like this one tended to get lots of attention, and soon he and the car were surrounded by
others like him, others like it. Cultures blended easily: Ford, GM, Chrysler existed
peacefully side by side, differing only in the size of their engines, the style of their

custom chrome wheels. They were all lifted to the breaking point in order to fit the back

-5-

tires. For the drivers, difference was harder to spot. All had long hair, cut-off shirts,
ragged jeans; all preferred rock ’n roll at maximum volume. One day they decided to form
an organized group, calling themselves Street Freaks. They even got T-shirts made with
the name and a ready-made logo on the front (a sneering mouth with a heavy mustache,
chosen only because it was the least silly of the in-stock, and thus cheap, available
choices). The group’s sole purpose: to cruise, with radios—and exhaust systems—
tumed all the way up. The activity turned a lot of heads at county parks, but it also got
the attention of police officers during the trips to and fiom those parks. Citations for
excessive noise mounted up; more expensive tickets for drag racing on city streets did,
too. Which may be the reason that the group disbanded after only a couple of months.
But even as a solo act, the boy could think of nothing more self-defining and empowering
than the feeling of that Mustang growling down a deserted street late at night, pawing at
the concrete and wanting to scream ahead now. while Deep Purple filled the night with its
song “Highway Star” and Roger Glover’s incessant bassline seemed to push, unaided, on
the accelerator pedal. Without the music, it would have been just a late-night drive. With

it, that drive was an event.

Or perhaps, ultimately, it begins here:

The fast cars gave way to practicality, and the band went away, but the music
remained constant. The radio played always as Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” gave way
to Rush’s “Working Man,” but work collapsed with the auto-and-steel economy a few
years after high school ended, so the boy, now married, went to college. He intended to
go into the sciences, but then calculus came along to suggest a serious reconsideration. In

the middle of a What-Now phase, he enrolled in an English Composition course and was

-7-

told to write something called a “definition essay” about an abstract word. So he wrote a
paper citing dozens of rock songs with love in their titles. Then, told to examine the
character of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll ’s House, he framed his central argument within the
lyrics to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s guitar opus, “Free Bird.” There was a little trouble with
comma splices, but the professor overlooked them enough to suggest that he make English
his calling.

At home, fatherhood attached itself to work and school with the arrival of a
daughter. He took some personal time from the job to be with the child for her first
month. The two of them listened to old Stooges and new REM. records together while
he held her formula bottle in one hand and his college textbooks in the other. As her
language progressed over time, the girl developed a list of favorite songs, which he put
onto tape for her. She had a fondness for George Thorogood and the Destroyers, but also
an affinity for the 19505-era rock on the Stand By Me soundtrack. He admired and
encouraged her varied tastes.

He’d earned two degrees by the time graduate school ate his marriage. He drove
around for weeks listening to Metallica’s “Fade to Black,” then Queensryche’s “Silent
Lucidity,” then “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. All were terribly sad and depressing songs;
each gave him greater resolve to push forward toward one more round of schooling at the
same time that he began a full-time teaching job. The job gave him confidence in his
teaching; the schooling gave him the tools to see beyond lyrics, to avoid simple nostalgia,
to beware of idealized constructions of the music that had surrounded him since that day
long ago when he’d been forced to nap just to see a band that his parents, for some

reason, admired.

He took these tools into the classroom, where he engaged students in lengthy
discussions of the endless topics in rock music. When he’d mention a paper he had in
progress, students sometimes asked to read—and critique—his work, often going on to
offer extensive suggestions for further reading, listening, and MTV-viewing in their margin
comments to him. A young man whose clothes reeked of marijuana every morning
brought him collections of European death metal to instruct the teacher in the sounds of
“real” heavy metal music; in return he loaned the young man the latest recordings of
Johnny Cash, who had done slightly countrified covers of songs by Soundgarden, Danzig,
Beck, and Tom Petty and earned the respect of a whole new generation of grunge-rockers
as a result.

As had happened in the Top-40 Motown songs that played during the riots long
ago, another form of dialog was taking shape through music, but this time the boy—now
the Teacher—was an active participant in it, rather than an interested observer of it. Yet
in another way, the converse was true as well: Once upon a time, as a performer in a
garage, he had talked—forged a discourse—through his guitar, and others had listened.
Now, as a performer in the classroom, he’d learned to reverse that process, to listen as
others reshaped, refreshed, and ultimately reclaimed that same discourse as their own.
The students thought he was teaching them; he knew that he, too, was being taught.

This dialectic—more specifically the discourse surrounding it, vast and far-
reaching, shot through with a vital and richly-textured rhetoricity, is the focus of my work
here. But the music is the magic that made it possible in the first place. It’s been a long
and winding road on the way from all of the other beginnings to this one, but for every
turn, there’s been a songtext. Beethoven and Mozart, Hank Williams, Jr. and Lacy J.

Dalton, James Taylor and Indigo Girls, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Enya

-9-

and The Orb, Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson, Megadeth and The Cult, Ice-T and
Public Enemy, Slade and the New York Dolls: All of these have been my teachers, just as
surely as all of the professors who ever allowed me to bring rock into their classrooms.
My hope now is that I may give back to them as much as they have given me.

To begin that process requires putting on a number of the hats described by
Stephen North in his groundbreaking The Making of Knowledge in Composition-l must
work simultaneously as Historian, Philosopher, Critic, Ethnographer, and Practitioner—
much as a student engaged in the production, consumption, and ultimate analysis of rock
discourses will likewise operate concurrently in multiple spheres of critical practice. But
why choose rock as the subject of serious analysis? Surely this is a question, a
complaint, an objection to be raised by traditionalists, but while the objection is easily
anticipated, its refutation requires a bit of patience and willingness to traverse into fresh
sites of inquiry where value and commonality with tradition will reveal themselves only
slowly. When I began this project, industrial/hardcore musician Marilyn Manson had
become the national press's favored whipping boy for his alleged role in motivating the
winter 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and members of
Congress spoke of publicly "shaming" Manson's record company into withdrawing his
music from the market. This despite the fact that there had been no concrete evidence
that the two teenaged Colorado assassins had any particular affinity for Manson's music
at all. Wlmt could be verified was their fondness for the German industrial group,
Rammstein—and for a variety of other things Gennan—but the American public had little
familiarity with this group, much more with Manson. The story goes where the public

knows, and the only things lost in that process are accuracy and relevance.

-10-

To put my argument into the simplest of terms: While an awareness of post-
structural semiotic slippage prevents me from claiming that any capital-T truths are to be
found in rock, there are nonetheless relevant discoveries to be made about it, discoveries
that illuminate and reflect the conflicts and contradictions of everyday life within the
larger culture. While rock has steadily pushed its way toward serious scholarship in the
last decade under the meticulous guidance of cultural theorists like Lawrence Grossberg,
Andrew Ross, and especially Simon F rith, conservative defenders of the faith like George
Will, Rush Limbaugh, and others, themselves fully immersed in popular culture and
deified by the faithful as pop icons, have been there to sound the alarm bells whenever
studies of pop-cult artifacts make the transition from scholarship to news—and to reduce
the scholarship to rubble through a scorched-earth campaign of mockery. Michael Bérube’
has recently acknowledged that other criticisms of using popular culture materials in the
classroom—criticisms more intellectually and ethically grounded than those of media
squawkers like Will and Limbaugh—are on their faces “reasonable” at times, but he notes
that those criticisms tend to break down along two lines. In the first charge, based
squarely in the High Art tradition, popular culture “is unworthy of serious study, lacking
the textual and cultural density that defines the masterworks of the arts and humanities”
(B4); in the second, pop cult is something students already, through a lifelong exposure
to it, know much too well, so why teach it? Bérubé argues that the latter argument
“overlooks the vast difference between being immersed in the stufi‘ and looking at it
critically,” while neither line of criticism “take[s] into account how complex and

contradictory contemporary culture really is” (BS). But isn’t this the typical pattern for

-11-

High Art preservationists? By flatly ignoring possibilities for value, any value becomes
impossible. The Sharif (to paraphrase the old Clash tune) don’t like rock in the Casbah,
so the only way through the defensive razor wire is to get jiggy with it, emulate the
Beastie Boys, and fight for the right to party.

While I have no intention here to provide a “How to Teach Rock” for other
classroom practitioners, I do hope that other educators will glean from this study the
ingredients for creating their own pedagogical methods when using rock in the classroom,
and especially for avoiding the easy trap of merely substituting one form of practice for
another (e.g., trading model essays for model lyric sheets). Trying to determine exactly
where my work fits beyond this is a bit of a problem, since the same lack of a knowable
“beginning,” in Derrida’s terms, which overwrites my travels back through time to
identify where the work itself may have come from also keeps me from naming a precise
originary narrative or, if you will, a primary knowledge tree upon which to graft my
contributory branch. Nevertheless, if there is a particular niche being filled by this work,
it may be that I have tried, from the fragmented history informing my own lessons learned
and costs extracted from a lifetime of immersion in rock, to focus exclusively on rock’s
potential pedagogical applications, while those many other works about rock and music
which have already been published, and which have greatly informed my own work, have
not focused on the specific reachable aspects of rock discourse which I address here. Nor
has there been a lengthy analysis thus far, from a purely pedagogical standpoint, of the
intersections of rhetoric and ideology that exist within rock discourse or a prominent
illustration from the same standpoint of the existence and application of rhetorical

concepts in the discursive practices of rock culture.

-12-

Toward these ends, following a comprehensive overview of the theory informing
my study, the chapter entitled “The Controlling Metaphor of ‘Authenticity’ in Rock
Discourse” continues a discussion of the authenticity trope which I begin in the overview,
tracing the notion of “authentic” experience to a Romantic notion of the self and
illustrating the contradictions present in rock’s attempts to construct authenticity within
a collective ideology. These contradictions are illustrated by cases involving Milli Vanilli
and the Sex Pistols, Pat Boone, Marilyn Manson, and Kurt Cobain, among others, with
those cases illustrating the ways in which the rhetorical and ideological systems behind
rock discourse have created—and continue to preserve—a tightly-codified discursive
practice demanding both change and stasis, both intennusicality and confined genre, both
poverty and wealth, both deep roots and a magical self-genesis. That such impossible
expectations and desires are somehow rendered as both possible and natural is testament
to the hyperactivity of the hegemonic systems controlling such a contradictory narrative.

In regard to musical genres and the fixed boundaries those genres will often
inherently create, “History at the Impending Merger Between Rock and Rap” examines
the ongoing negotiations between a relatively new and particularly racialized form of
contemporary musical discourse and the older, more tightly defined form that has reached
out to rap for revitalization through “street cred” (and again, a renewed authenticity) in
exchange for commercial assistance. These negotiations reveal the continued tensions of
racial difference while at the same time suggesting a tentative hope for easing those
tensions as the two rock forms cross each other’s borders toward a cautious discursive
co—existence. This focus on difference gives way, in turn, to a chapter titled “Making
Sense at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” where I provide a rhetorical analysis, primarily

Foucaldian, of rock’s largest physical artifact, the I. M. Pei-designed riverfront shrine in

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Cleveland which, as a literally concrete manifestation of rock’s official history, reveals in
tangible forms the ways in which race, class, and gender politics appear everywhere in
rock’s ongoing attempt to discipline itself into a coherent grand narrative. Similarly, in
“The Politics of Power: Case Studies on Metallica and Rage Against the Machine,” I take
discussion of the political in rock to a further level by examining the perceived rise and fall
of Metallica, one of heavy metal’s longest-lived acts, within a continued focus on
hegemony and attempts to resist its desires. Such a motivation—to resist existing power
structures and narratives—constitutes the whole existence of another group, Rage Against
the Machine, which allows for a discussion of what I’ve termed a “rhetoric of rage”
(double entendre intended) when a politically-focused rock performer (and, as I argue,
educator) succeeds at working against hegemonic norms from a vantage point fully within
another such norm. The key difference, as I attempt to show by putting Metallica and
Rage Against the Machine side by side, may lie in the focus of one’s protest.

Finally, since theory is the guiding tool for making sense of not only research
methods but also classroom practice, my concluding chapter titled “Radicalism,
Resistance, and Reading in the Classroom Arena” ends this study with an extended
discussion of the pitfalls facing educators who desire to teach rock without sufficient
awareness of the extremely delicate balance of power—more aptly, the delicate
negotiations of power—required when teaching a discourse removed, by several degrees,
from the teacher’s lived experience, and when the goal of such teaching is the promotion
of collaborative knowledges and shared values while engaged in forging a vital “pedagogy
of the contemporary” (Bérube’ BS). Since I have produced this study at a time when
higher education is moving steadily toward a corporate, competition-based model of

increasingly isolated forms of knowledge transmission, the promotion of any form of

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pedagogical praxis which can be both democratic and dialectical, and thus by necessity
communal, may be the most valuable contribution that previously non-canonical
resources, like the songtexts of rock, can make to current sites of institutionalized
learning.

In regards to stylistic matters, I need to offer only a couple of explanations. First
of these is a minor stylistic adjustment in my decision to follow an American spelling and
diction system for all citations. This does not change meaning, and it is intended only to
prevent the momentary distraction for readers who would otherwise stop to note: “Ah,
s/he’s a British critic,” or “Hey, I always thought that musician was from the States.”
(It’s possible that I may be making too much out of very little here, but I know that such
distractions have been exactly the case as my own reading has taken place through the
years.) Second, due to the persistence and prevalence of the singular masculine pronoun
in writings up through the early l980s—and in a few cases, through the present day—I
have simply converted those gender-specific/exclusive pronouns to gender-neutral/
inclusive plural constructions. Toward an aesthetic of less visual clutter, those
conversions do not appear in brackets; nor is there any loss or change of meaning to the
original work. An exception to this lies in the case of very old works, old voices speaking
from a distance of centuries before the present; in these instances a stylistic change
would result in a strangely modern syntax that cannot ring true to the original (authentic)
contexts of the writer’s time and place. Back then, it really was a “man’s world,” and to
eliminate the sexist language of that world would be to alter an important, but
unfortunate, reality.

Finally, regarding method, I should explain that although I do take popular,

corporate, “mainstream” rock journalism to task on several occasions in this study, there

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needs to be a distinction between rock journalism and rock joumaltsts. As Robert Palmer.
Reebee Garofalo, Annond White, and others will all illustrate here, mainstream rock
journalism in the forms of Billboard, Rolling Stone, Spin, and the like is a site where a
blatantly commodifying, racist, and misogynistic set of practices has frequently operated
under the guise of an alleged objectivity and a liberal, progressive, wide-open ethic. But
the individual writers/critics contributing their ideas and insights about rock on the pages
of those magazines are nonetheless highly capable and adept at illustrating the same
conflicts and issues which F rith, et al. have explained in the pages of more distinguished
(and academically favored) research-library hardcovers. Moreover, rock journalism is the
site where musicians speak, contributing their own voices to a conversation that would
otherwise take place only about them, not with them. Granted, those voices can at times
be filled with dense ideological silences, the perceptions clouded by a mist of nostalgia
and mythology, but even those blinders can make a significant contribution in forming an
answer to Marvin Gaye’s classic Motown-era question, “What’s Going On?” As Robert
Christgau has written: “If [schools] ever teach Rock 101 like they oughta, such informal,
idiosyncratic, yet intellectually legible” rock writings as the ones I’m discussing here will
form the core curriculum for the course (Stranded x). It is for all of these reasons that I
have included in my research the arguments and insights of both professional rockers and

those mainstream writers who earn their livings writing about them.

fis‘ls‘l

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0 VE R VIE W: Ideological Rhetoric/Rhetorical Ideology—
What is Rock, and Why Should Teachers Care?

Rock and roll should corrupt kids enough to think. There’s nothing wrong with thinking.
- Alice Cooper in The Decline of Western Civilization, Part I]: The Metal Years

[I]t should be one of our central obligations to teach our students how to think critically about the present.
- Michael Bérube' (BS)

Any new idea . . . is asked two questions. The first is asked when it’s weak: WHAT/(1ND OF AN IDEA
ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a
niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that
would rather break than sway with the breeze7—The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out
of a hundred, be smashed to bits: but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (335)

If I had to choose between rock and Marxism, I’d choose rock.
- Simon Frith (“Beggars” 38)

Although I am primarily a practitioner in the field of English composition, my
heart lies with rock music. Even as I write, from a small and secluded “gentleman’s farm”
in very rural Jackson, Michigan (proud “Birthplace of the Republican Party” as the road
signs all say), I am literally surrounded by rock, not only in the form of tattered LPs,
cracked cassette-tape boxes, haphazard piles of CD cases—and of course the infinite and
appalling jumbles and heaps of articles, magazines, and books about “my” music that are
necessary for the writing taking place—but also by my rock neighbors: Metallica bassist
Jason Newsted came up in Kalamazoo, 50 minutes to the west; Iggy Pop and Bob Seger
in Ann Arbor, 45 minutes east; The Verve Pipe emerged from Lansing, 45 minutes north;

and Ted Nugent, that puzzlement of hard-rocking, headbanging advocacy for Gibson

guitars, gun ownership, bowhunting, jacked-to-the—sky 4x45, and ultraconservative

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politics, lives right here in sleepy little Jackson. (As for my southern neighbors: Corn
and soybeans, cattle and hogs—all the way to Indiana. Along with a very special and
magnificently odoriferous verification of being deep in. . . well, farm country.)

But long before I ever settled down in a locale where the local “burgers and rock ’n
roll” bistro has an ominously heavy-looking John Deere tractor hanging from chains on
the ceiling over the jukebox—and long before my formal education ever began in
composition, rhetoric, and literature—the germinal texts in forming my world view were
found not on bookshelves, but on the radio and turntable. Artists like The Who, Pink
Floyd, The Stooges, Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper, through both their lyrics and the
accompanying mood created by sound, taught and encouraged me to examine my life and
the lives of those around me. When I first began to question the concept of God, it was
Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, not Nietzsche, who caused it. The war in Vietnam was over, but
the music it had generated lingered as the huge social force which had affected my friends’
older siblings so profoundly. Edwin Starr and Country Joe McDonald had condemned
the war; Creedence Clearwater Revival had exposed the hypocrisy of the draft system;

J imi Hendrix had massacred the National Anthem itself by forcing it through a hellish wall
of feedback and distortion. When all of this power and glory (as I saw it then) of 19605
music gave way to the art rock/disco/pop-rock mutations of the mid-70$ and early
SOs—yes, punk happened then, too, but in my Detroit suburb punk was only a vague
rumor, unsupported by radio or local clubsI—it created for me a huge textual void. This
was, afier all, a time when, as Nick Kent puts it, “[a]ppalling groups with names like
Supertramp and Gentle Giant were selling millions of records with their hideously insipid
‘hey nonny no’ concept crap. The Bee Gees were on the comeback trail; Peter F rampton

was about to come alive” (254). And so I took a time-out from rock, turning to classical,

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folk, and even country music as background sounds while attending college and studying

9

 

other forms of discourse. But then came the 90s and an explosion of “altemative’ to
mean non-formulaic—rock music, and my radio once again came alive after a long
cryogenic freeze. By now I was a teacher, and in my newfound enthusiasm for rock, I
found myself focusing on it more and more in my writing and literature classrooms.

In his book Disturbing Pleasures, Henry Giroux tells a similar story. After
paying tribute to Little Richard and Fats Domino for being hugely influential in his
education—before he ever went to school—Giroux writes that, once relocated from the
streets of Providence to the classroom for his Ieaming, he quickly discovered that “what
we learned had little to do with where we came from, who we were, or where we thought,
at least, we were going” (x). Now many years removed from that experience, he reflects
that his identity “has been largely fashioned outside of school. Films, books, journals,
videos, and music. . . did more to shape my politics and life than did my formal

education.” As a result of this realization, he explains:

I no longer believe that pedagogy is a discipline. On the contrary, I have
argued for the last few years that pedagogy is about the creation of a
public sphere, one that brings people together in a variety of sites to talk,
exchange information, listen, feel their desires, and expand their capacities
for joy, love, solidarity, and struggle. . . . [P]opular culture, precisely in its
diverse spaces and spheres, [is where] most of the education that matters
today is taking place on a global scale. Electronic media . . . have
drastically altered how identities are shaped, desires constructed, and
dreams realized. (x)

I cite Giroux so extensively here because I want to argue that a rock-centered
classroom presents a fitting site for the creation of the kind of public sphere he describes,
one engaged in the collaborative production of knowl edge, democratic values, and social

identities. Moreover, rock is a vastly suitable topic for bringing students together to

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exchange, shape, and sharpen the theories they already bring in its regard to the discourse
since students have biases, preferences, and conceptions about music’s origins, functions,
and genres that can let them explore stereotypical assumptions and prejudices with, if not
eagerness (I make no claims regarding the ease of rock’s presentation in the classroom)
then perhaps at least candor, transforming rock’s discourses into a serious subject for
critical analysis and the creation of new ideas regarding human agency, social dynamics,
and power politics. Students know this text very well; they have, afier all, been
surrounded by rock music from birth to graduation—if not by choice, then by force. As
Grossberg notes, rock has become omnipresent, forming the backdrop for advertisement,
TV and film, visits to dentists and doctors, and even trips to the mall (Gotta 9).
Therefore, “teaching rock ’n roll. . . differs fi'om most other subjects in that it involves
bringing into a school setting material with which the students often strongly identify and
upon which they have already placed strong interpretations” (Shumway 223). Because
they’re still largely unaware of the ideology underlying these interpretations, students are
apt to approach the act of re-interpretation with a level of interest that comes from
having a previously granite foundation suddenly begin turning to sand.

It’s also helpful to understand how and why students have aligned with rock long
before entering the post-secondary classroom. For Herbert Gans, all adolescents share a
“taste culture” within the larger popular culture, from which they create social contexts
for themselves (24-5). Many of them will form friendships based solely on shared taste
in music, and these friendships are strengthened as they then share in the escape which
the discourses can offer them. As a result, music can form a common background for the
peer group—resulting in an en masse resistance to anything against which the group’s

preferred musical taste stands, but also against other discursive genres in which the

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group’s politics are not articulated in the same way, or at all. Building on Gans’s
conception of taste cultures, a 1993 study by Ernest Hakanen and Alan Wells finds that
shared appreciation and an ability to communicate with others about musical discourses is
“crucial to an adolescent’s participation in the world of other youth,” and that a
“closeness” develops—from the perspective of the adolescent—between musicians and
their admirers due to the discourse’s omnipresence in the lives of admiring youth (57).
While a great deal of their study is focused on examining the percentage of listeners in
specific age groups who prefer only certain rock genres, the two researchers also
contribute the formulation of what they call “clusters” of taste cultures, defined by
musical genre, and the cluster labeled “Music Lovers” (not pegged to any single genre)
“rate[s] rock higher than any other group, enjoy[s] heavy metal, pop, and easy listening,
and even g[ives] a positive rating to classical, country, and jazz” (65). Tying in with
studies of group preferences and alliances, James Lull notes that for adolescents, audience
participation takes place at five separate but interconnected levels ( l 9), and these same
levels can apply to the shared “taste culture” of a given peer group. Participation in the
music begins at a physical level (e.g., slam-dancing or stage-diving in the mosh pit), then
moves on to an emotional level in which anger, sadness, or joy are universally-shared
responses to the music. From there, young listeners progress to a cognitive level where
they can identify with the themes and sentiments in the music’s narrative and place
themselves in it; and this in turn leads to an internalization of the lyrics at a personal
level. A songtext is no longer about a shared human condition, performed for a universal
human audience, but rather it is about the listener’s specific condition, and it is performed
for that listener alone. Because of this personal relationship, listening and buying moves

beyond mere consumption to situate consumers as what I’ll call consumer-theorists,

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actively engaged voices of consent and—even more often—of dissent when “their”
' performers step beyond the boundaries of consumer expectations and desires. From
here, with time, participation moves beyond the personal level to a social one, and at last,
the music offers some tangible insight for dealing with the world outside the peer group.
If a clearer understanding of the people who consume rock is possible,
approaches to examining the object of their consumption are perhaps more limited.
Charles Keil and Steven Feld have suggested, in their distinction between “uptown” and
“downtown” modes to criticism and analysis, that there are two ways to understand
music—a “high, scholarly, theorized” approach and a more “participatory, dance floor,
feelingful sonic, directly articulated, embodied, primal” approach (172). Since the latter,
“downtown” form would require a multimedia presentation of prohibitive cost and
extreme technical demand (not to mention a need for dance lessons), I can only go
“uptown” in form here, while in intent I am reminded by Robert Palmer that rock always
comes up to social and critical awareness fi'om neighborhood hangouts and clubs, never
down from the “rarefied air” of criticism and top-ten charts to lived practice (I 1).
Accordingly, my first specific methodology is borrowed primarily from cultural studies.
There’s really no such thing as a purely “cultural studies” approach in and of itself since
the field, as Grossberg et al. have explained in the overview to their Cultural Studies
collection, is best described as a bricolage, a wide-ranging hybrid and synthesis of
numerous disciplines without whose methodologies and theories cultural studies would
not exist as an autonomous field of scholarship. But this interdisciplinarity has lent to

cultural studies the enhanced ability to perform “readings” of a wide range of “texts”

 

a term whose definition, of course, has today been vastly expanded from its formerly

limited usage as a synonym for printed page(s)———based on the languages with which those

-22-

things offer up their narratives for analysis (Mukerji and Schudson 10-1 1). With the
redefinition of buildings, art, social practices and customs—and rock music—as texts,
contemporary cultural critics can employ an array of disciplinary tools and approaches,
and a text takes on added dimension in the depth and breadth of the critique being
performed in order to both demonstrate and interrogate how textuality and rhetoricity, no
longer confined to the narrow limitations of literature, are present wherever one
encounters culturally-constructed signs of meaning.

Within the signs of meaning constructed by rock culture, specifically, lies a
vigorous ideology working toward the attainment and preservation of power, and the
getting-at of this system requires some fairly extensive theoretical foundation. As
Foucault charges, a subject cannot reasonably expect to exist transcendent of its working
field, nor can it “run in empty sameness throughout the course of history” (“Truth” 59);
there must be an accounting of what has constituted the subject’s prescribed
“knowledges, discourses, and domains” if the subject’s history is to be open, and thus
dynamic, rather than closed and therefore fixed in stasis. Who, throughout its relatively
short history, have been the shapers of rock’s discoursesZ, and what did they hope to gain
for themselves and others? Who has benefited from the discourses’ applications,
continuation, longevity of practice and theory? Who has spoken from the pages of rock’s
texts during its history—and who has been rendered silent? What caused the silence?
Where are the ruptures in rock’s codification of its discourse? Answers to any of these
questions will not be possible without an examination of ideology and hegemony within
rock culture. A Gramscian conception of ideology as “organic” or contextually/
historically effective allows for a view of political spheres not as determined, but rather as

sites where “forces and relations, in the economy, in society, [and] in culture have to be

-23-

actively worked on " (Hall, Road 169; italics added). Gramsci also provides an
understanding that hegemony is, rather than a control by force as Althusserian models
present it, more realistically a control by consent, defining relations of force as
“moments” that developed through discrete times and stages, a process Gramsci terms as
“[having] as its actors individuals and their will and capability” (209)—an important turn
away from Althusserian notions of unwillful interpellation where the primary actor is,
rather than individuals, the ideology fashioning them to fit its particular construct(s).
Because a recognition of hegemony allows for the creation of “new ideological terrain”
and a reformation of consciousness (I92 ), it is capable at times of moving beyond
connotations of constraint and limitation to instead discover possibilities for promotion
and advancement. Gramsci’s definition of political-force relationships describes
hegemony moving outside its own limits to “become the interests of other subordinate
groups” under a mandate for “unison of aims” and “intellectual and moral unity” as a new
hegemonic entity is created (205) in connection with what Laclau and Moufi‘e term
“fissures that have to be filled up, contingencies that have to be overcome. . .[as] the
response to a crisis” (7). By this definition hegemony is not brute force; rather it seems
protective and at times, if not quite compassionate, then at least not merely repressive,
manipulative, and exploitive. For Stuart Hall, hegemony becomes transformed into “sets
of strategic alliances” that constitute, by their differential makeup, the bases for “new
cultural orders” (Road 170) that, as Tony Bennett explains, do not consist “simply of an
imposed mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideology, nor simply of
spontaneously oppositional cultures, but [are] rather. . . area[s] of negotiation between
the two within which. . . dominant, subordinate, and oppositional values and elements are

mixed in different permutations” (“Gramsci” xv-i). All of these conceptions of

-24-

hegemony, and of the ways in and by which it functions through ideology, must appear in
a thorough interrogation of rock’s discourses if teachers hoping to lead students to an
enhanced awareness of social and political negotiations of power are to understand that
rock means much more than simply a photocopied set of lyrics—especially those penned
by now-shadow figures like Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle, or even Bruce Springsteen3
—to supplement or replace more conventional course readings.

One important aspect of rock’s hegemonic structure is found in much of
contemporary, popular (non-academic) rock criticism, which, while it may at times be
rigorous and theoretically informed, still acts primarily as a capitalist tool for product
promotion by its reliance on the weekly Billboard sales charts, special issues listing the
“100 Greatest” songtexts, albums, concerts, groups, etc, and a consumption-focused
evaluation of the aesthetic merits or failings of new rock artists or works. In this way it
tends to follow after a Leavisistic tradition in which the humane arts are to be tightly
canonized under a rubric of “great tradition” works focused on a moral/aesthetic “balance”
in life in order to prevent the act of consumption—for my purposes, that of music rather
than literature—from becoming simply a leisure activity as consumption-for-pleasure is
taken up as a p0pular, and—for rock’s producers—profitable aspect of of mass culture.
But contemporary rock criticism does not functions to preserve the music’s purity or
enhance one’s life through an increased appreciation of its forms and fimctions; rather, it
constructs simple consumers as knowledgeable purists, connoisseurs, and most
importantly collectors so that they will perceive a need to possess rock’s Great Tradition
works, and a need to pay $85 to $250 (and above) for upper-level nosebleed seats when

one of rock’s Canonized Artists—the hoary, rock-till-they-drop Rolling Stones, the

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reunited Eagles, the reassembled and revitalized E Street Band with its boss, Bruce
Springsteen—comes trucking into town.

A similar perception that yet another “great tradition” was likewise being
manipulated alarmed Adomo and Horkheimer, who argued in their mid-19405 article
“The Culture Industry” that music and art were in grave danger of being transformed into
“mere” leisure activities by the captains of the relatively new entertainment industry
who, among other gross violations, ignored (skipped past or rewrote) complex musical
passages as musical genres became transformed, e.g. as jazz became popularized and
blended into swing, be-bop, and the blues. Coming as it does from these two founding
members of the Frankfurt School, this essay demands an especially careful reading as
Adomo and Horkheimer struggle, only somewhat successfully, against the formation of
a “high/low” dichotomy for art and strive instead to articulate the inherent loss being
imposed on consumers—not only in their lives as a whole, but also, more importantly,
in the way they viewed their world—by the kulturindustrr‘e. In this articulation, popular
presentations of music become exploitive and transitive rather than artistic (celebratory)
and fixed forms of the real thing, a perversion of desire fulfillment which, gradually, might
be capable of completely replacing the lived experience. Mass-produced and
commercialized art, for the consumer, becomes a kind of cmel voyeurism in which the
subject of desire can never become a known object; the tragedy for Adorno and
Horkheimer is that the desirer will, after enough exposure to these media forms, no longer
discern the difference. In music, if enough bars disappear from a given score in order to fit
an acceptable playing time, the music becomes increasingly more minimal, less complex
and challenging, and less fulfilling—for both musician and audience alike. While the two

authors stop short of arguing for a strict canonization of “great tradition” art, their

-25-

argument is no less aesthetically originated in its focus, and they mince no words in their
assessment of the entertainment-industry leaders whose violations of art earn them a
description as “virtually Nazis, replete with both enthusiasm and abuse” (42).

In citing this last, there is also a reminder that the style of much cultural studies
writing differs from the standard depersonalized and detached model of academic/
intellectual analysis by including the writers’ views, emotions, and personal narratives as
an integral part of the analysis itself, challenging the dearly-held (but crumbling)
prescription that intellectual/critical discourse must present itself as “scientific” in order
to establish and maintain academic and theoretical validity. Clearly, Adorno and
Horkheimer’s labeling of entertainment producers as “virtually Nazis” is not an objective
observation; nor can any study of a cultural discourse, such as mine of rock, be
completely free of ideology or preference. While I’ve done my best to avoid wandering
into any personal theories of aesthetics and leave such journeys to those much braver
critics (such as Adorno himself) who have tried nonetheless to theorize beauty and appeal
within art and sound, I’m sure to lapse nonetheless into “downtown” perceptions and the
occasional use of aesthetically-oriented terminology as my study unfolds. (It seems that
the labels of “power” and “glory,” appearing in one of the opening pages of this chapter,
are just such terms—no matter that I did attempt to qualify them immediately after their
appearance.)

None of this is intended to claim that cultural studies is in some way more
valuable tlmn the more established field of rhetoric, from which I take my second
approach for this study. Indeed, while I agree to an extent with Louis Althusser that the
ways individuals are interpellated by ideology—in this case, the individuals constituting

rock culture, the ideology of rock’s discourses—are at least in part the ways they are

-27-

constructed to fit given ideological standards, my critical definition of the hegemonic
entities surrounding the larger rock culture, entities which thus dictate to individuals what
is right, what is needed, what is to be desired, what is constructed ideologically as
“common sense,” is drawn most notably from the field of rhetoric in order to theorize,
beyond what is taking place in the given dynamic, a more precise understanding of how
that dynamic functions as discursive practice. At the same time, since cultural studies has
much in common with rhetoric in that there is a clear intersection between rhetoric and
ideology, the cultural dynamic of rock can begin to illustrate this intersection through an
interrogation of rock’s consistent striving to “rebel” and make its own space, apart from
the culture of its elders, and especially through an analysis of how rock’s perceived need
to be “authentic” is linked to a larger need to prove an actual existence—a need to, as
Grossberg argues, confirm the act of being alive and in control. Grossberg places the
history of this phenomenon in the “set of apocalyptic images and events”

forming the background for life in the 20th century (Gotta 203): events such as the
Holocaust, Oppenheimer’s gift of nuclear weapons, the Apollo 11 mission, Chemobyl’s
meltdown, and others worked to remove stability and permanence fi'om the former canon
of reliabilities. For youth (including aging baby-boomers), Grossberg writes, “the ground
on which they had to construct their own sanity and survival” began to threaten that same
sanity and survival, with the result being that “perhaps the only identity that could be
achieved was that of the ‘identity crisis’” (203). Thus musical acts who, mirroring their
youthful fans, constantly redefine or else reassert their “authenticities” do so from a
recognition that instability and impermanence are as inherent to rock as they are to the life
that the music both celebrates and condemns—a redefinition that by Derrida’s terms

would be “a series of substitutions of center for center” in the quest for some kind of

-23-

 

stable, if temporary, “presence” (249). The temporary nature of that new center is part
of the entanglement of rock’s rhetoric, since the moment a new construction is born
regarding what is accepted as “authentic,” it is also always already beginning its slide
toward losing that authenticity (Grossberg, Gotta 208). Example: Nirvana was a band
from the little town of Aberdeen, Washington. Its founder, Kurt Cobain, had a new
sound, the sound of anti-formula—of loud, screaming music that wasn’t exactly as hard as
heavy metal, wasn’t exactly as refined and polished as hard rock—a sound of no long and
self-serving guitar solosl—a sound so new and exciting that the national press quickly
proclaimed Nirvana as the Hot Band of the Age, its alleged hometown of Seattle as the
Hottest Music Scene Since Liverpool, its musical genre as “grunge,” and its 199] major-
label release Nervermind as the Must-Have CD of the Decade. Incessant interviews,
photo shoots, headlines, magazine covers, and gossip followed, and just three years and
one more album after Nirvana’s national debut, Cobain put a shotgun to his head after
writing a rambling treatise on alienation from his music and the loss of his initial vision.
The perpetual rhetoricity of rock—the omnipresent applications of rhetorical
strategies and practices underlying and framing the discourse——also serves, for teachers, as
an important connecting point between rhetoric and ideology if that point is viewed as the
connection between traditional approaches to textforms and newer modes of cultural
criticism. If rock is seen as a site of endless struggle between hegemony and resistance, as
the Cobain example suggests, then the link can be illustrated by likewise seeing how, as
Victor Villanueva explains, rhetoric is the vehicle for carrying ideology as well as for both
preserving and changing hegemonic structures (121 ); at the risk of oversimplifying,
ideology is rhetorical and rhetoric is ideological since, for Villanueva, hegemony relies on

effective language use—Le. on rhetoric—in order to continue receiving the consent of

-29-

those under its domain, while counter-hegemony relies on “active rhetorical practice,” in
the shape of effective communication and collaboration, to change the structure of
hegemony and eventually take its place (126). The overarching rhetoricity that is
everywhere in the discursive practices of rock stems from the intensely personal and
highly ideological experience that its artifacts—music, fashion, television shows, and so
on—ofl’er to the individuals inside its discourse community. The ideological struggles
taking place within that community, I argue, constitute what Kellner, in describing
ideology, defines as a system that “presents the specific interests of groups as universal,
as in everyone's interests” (1 12) thus “represent[ing] the world upside down, with culture
and the historically contingent appearing as nature and the eternal; with particular class
interests appearing as universal; with highly political images, myths, and stories
appearing as apolitical.” The discourses of rock, however, are sometimes capable of
seeing through such illusions of harmonious homogeneity and making any attempt to
create them their call to anus—if not always appropriately, then at least with fervor. As
Kellner describes it, our current mass-mediated culture offers an endless stream of
“representations that help constitute an individual's view of the world, sense of personal
identity and gender, playing out of style and lifestyle and socio-political thought and
action” (I 12), and these—identity, style, lifestyle, and protest—are the exact issues
around which rock often tends to polarize itself, and from which it launches its
counterhegemonic excursions into hegemony while unable to see that the imagined
rebellion against standard norms is, itself, a standard norm for the particular culture doing
the rebelling. For Kellner, rhetoric (as tool) is at one point in his argument an ingredient
of ideology since ideology is “as much a process of representation, figure, image, and

rhetoric as it is of discourse and ideas” (59-60; italics added), while in another, ideology

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is nearly synonymous with rhetoric (as system) in the articulation that “[i/deologv is thus
a rhetoric that attempts to seduce individuals into identifying with the dominant system
of values, beliefs and behavior” (112; italics added). In this way Kellner joins Villanueva
in making a case for the possibility of defining the intersection between the two, in
simplified form, as a case of their being not only highly complementary but also
inextricably bound to one another.

Rock’s discourses, although formed and practiced by individuals with their
collective ideologies, also form a “network of communication” (Crowley, Ancient 5) in the
rhetorical sense when those discourses illustrates a rhetorical system operating from a
sort of Aristotelian golden mean of shared values, structured on the employment of
commonplaces both rhetorical and hegemonic which the discourses can fashion into a
naturalized communal code to strengthen the shared ideology. In this network, empirical
evidence does not count so much as testimony, and the result becomes a giving way of
individual ideologies to the collective, socially-constructed master narrative of rock
culture. In Bakhtinian terms, whenever the language used to describe experience is
examined critically it presents a conversion from what he called the “I experience” to a
more collective “we-experience” as experience itself will “relinquish [its] ideological
clarity and structuredness and testify to the inability of the consciousness to strike social
roots” (“Marxism” 934 )-—the I-experience—and give way to “ideological differentiation,
the growth of consciousness...in direct proportion to the firmness and reliability of social
experience”—the we-experience. The discourses of rock entail, ironically, a collective
ideology of individualism, which, again through Bakhtin, can be seen as a “special
ideological form of the we-experience of the bourgeois class,” one that “derives from a

steadfast and confident social orientation” (935); given this, it becomes easier to see how,

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rhetorically, rock’s relentless focus on the authentic is an outcropping of the desire of its
individual members to remain “individual”——thus authentic—even while trapped within a
collective that remains to them, because of its own ideology, invisible. If the whole
concept of rock discourses as I am defining them here—as allegedly homogeneous entities
possessed of heterogeneous values, and employing a barrage of rhetorical appeals to the
commonplaces of their members in a dizzying quest for a cohesive hegemony of
conformed rebellion and authentic constructed identity—is articulated as any or all of its
primary labels—homogeneous, rebellious, authentic, and so on—then the culture
controlled by and constituting the discourses exists not so much as a tangible reality in its
own right, but primarily as an extension and manifestation of the discursive practices
which, by the very fact that they are constituted of an inability to examine their own
unrecognized and thus ineffable contradictions, renders them more “real” and “true” to the
practitioners.

Bakhtin, in terms of rhetoric, supplies the term “behavioral ideology” to describe a
dynamic in which the perception of any given phenomenon is “combine[d] with the
whole content of the consciousness of those who perceive it and derives its perceptive
values only in the context of that consciousness” (“Marxism” 937)—thus rock’s
blindness to the fact that, again in Bakhtinian terms, “‘creative individuality’ is nothing
but the expression of [the individual’s] basic, firmly grounded, and consistent line of
social orientation.” A songtext, artist, or live performance may be truly awesome in an
individual’s view, but if that judgment goes tmshared by the larger social group to which
the individual has subscribed—the “taste culture,” as Gans has labeled the alliances made

around given aesthetic/stylistic preferences—then the songtext/artist/performance’s doom

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to obscurity is due not so much to a lack of popularity as to a failure to exist
meaningfully and tangibly within the larger hegemonic entity controlling the discourse.
What may be most problematic, for classical-rhetoric purists, in my defining the
discourses of rock as rhetorical is the ideology of the classical-rhetoric discipline itself,
claiming as it often has to know what is “acceptable” and “suitable” to the extent that
those values may be noted, studied, taught, and promoted in what Edward Soja terms an
“unbudgeably hegemonic. . . historicism of theoretical consciousness” (136) where
rhetoric is rendered somehow timeless and is employed not to adjust to new forms of
discourse so much as to question them as suspect. As Soja argues, theory moving largely
tmchanged through time will tend to privilege time over space, with the result being that a
classically-oriented rhetorical analysis attempts to make new discourses take on a still—
classical rhetoricity to fill the available designated space. An alternate and more
productive methodology would create an amended, because fluid, theory to fit the new
arrangement of existing spatiality. While rock culture and rock discourses may appear
better suited to an interrogation of their ideologies than to a mapping of their rhetoricities,
such a mapping can nonetheless be performed and explained. Very simply, a band’s
external ethos, its internal character as translated and constructed by group-consensus
ideology of the audience, becomes suspect when it is perceived to have abandoned the
trope of “resistance” in rock’s rhetoric, and for groups playing harder-edged music this
trope is particularly disabling, especially as it is defined through the kind of dangerous-

creature metaphor supplied by British critics Mark Putterford and Xavier Russell:

Unperturbed by any need to conform, and oblivious of media courtship
or crossover recognition, [heavy metal] moves at its own pace, sometimes
hardly at all. It either retreats into its own shadowy circles, derided by the

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masses and misunderstood by most. or advances like a monster with meat
in its mouth, never worrying about popular taste, never wanting to be
flavor of the month. (5)

Of course this criticism too is highly problematic. Any binary approach like it
which presumes a naturalized homology requiring all aspects of a discourse—especially
its composer/performers—to reflect a teleological “radicalism” or “opposition” leaves
little space for the composer/performers to experiment, grow, change, or—worst of
all—“sell out” by compromising their desires in deference to the music industry’s
requests for a more marketable product Ideologically, this view seems to bear out
Althusser’s claim that ideology constructs the subject since, rhetorically, the ideology set
forth by Putterford and Russell removes musicians from any viable subject position or
autonomous agency, rendering them instead as the patient to be acted upon. But here
again is Soja’s argument against an artificial preference for time over space, coming into
play in the ideology of this particular rock rhetoric by the fact that no space can be made
for the artist as agent when the artist’s agency defies hegemonic desires, simply because
no space exists for that agency. There is only time, through which a given ideology has
proceeded unchanged and unchallenged, or at the very least unshaken by any artistic
desires to throw off the constraints created by the consensual norms of rock’s codifying
rhetoric. Such an ideology, that no space exists for change, ignores any possibility that
while the music industry certainly represents what Bakhtin called “unitary language”
(Imagination 270), a language of systematic “normality” serving to codify the available
discourse forms of its members, some musicians nonetheless have been able to throw off
the definitions placed upon them and to replace them with an active agency shaping a

more “literary language” of artistic freedom. Whether this ability accomplishes anything

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is unclear, however, since the typical response from rock culture will be an instant
reification of that freedom under the label of rebellion, or else a kind of magic act in which
the attainment of freedom goes uncommented upon as a “natural” growth— usually,
toward slow oblivion—and is thus rendered invisible, a not-happening event in a history
that never exists.

While it would be exceedingly difi‘icult for me to make a case for human agency
under the weight of Althusser’s model of ideology, wherein those who work to change
hegemony only serve by their actions to bring the outlines of its power into clearer view,
his conception of interpellation nonetheless applies in an important way to the rhetoric
employed in rock’s discourses since the ideology within that rhetoric functions exactly as
Althusser defines it to both “constitute concrete individuals” and ensure their compliance
as subjects unaware that they have been so constructed. This is an effective trick, as any
first-year student’s face will attest when, in the middle of a tirade concerning how, for
instance, Metallica “sold out” and “lost their individuality” by cutting their hair and
making MTV videos, it’s suggested to the angry student that long hair and anti-
commercialism may actually be part of the rhetoric (as tool) wielded by a majority of
allegedly “individual” artists. What you expected of the artist was not what the artist did,
the student hears—so how is it that he/she/ it “sold out,” exactly? The expression in
return is the face of clarity trapped in ideology: there’s something wrong with the
picture, but what it is cannot be articulated easily—or comfortably. It’s much easier,
inside such a trap, to simply proclaim in disgust, “They just did [sell out],” and have
done with it. I borrow here from James Clifford to argue that, in the discourses of rock in
which self-identity for the consumer is so closely entwined with artist-identity of the

producer, “an excessive . . . need to have [fixed possessions] is transformed into rule-

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governed, meaningful desire. Thus the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns
to select, order, classify in hierarchies” (53). Ideologically, the artist may have
transgressed most by failing to live up to the rhetorical delivery of his/her/its message;
the message, spatially, was expected to remain fixed in time but instead forged a new
space where time has been neither granted nor created. And since the particular ideology
of authenticity makes no allowances for such an event, the most “logical” result, for
rock’s consumer-theorists, is a reorganization of hierarchical structure so that the
transgressor falls out completely—and then ceases to exist meaningfully in the void of
not-space.

Since the trope of authenticity itself is well defined by Grossberg as an “ability to
articulate private but common desires, feelings and experiences [of its audience] in a
shared public language . . . which must somehow transcend that experience” (Gotta
207)—a clear echo of a Gramscian theory of hegemony—it can also blend its rhetorical
footing in ethos with a definition of what Crowley calls an “ideological positioning” or
“ideological standpoint” (Ancient 141) that will be open to any member of the rock
discourse community at any time. In addition, as Peter McLaren points out, all ideologies
are selective, and as a result they have both positive and negative fiinctions (“Resistance”
188): The positive function of authenticity-construction in rock ultimately helps the
definers to place themselves in the world, while the negative function ultimately validates
the music as worthy of belonging in the same world the deflners desire to live in. Thus
rhetoric (as discipline) can examine the dynamic of authenticity as it applies to the
interactions of message, messenger, and audience where perceptions of character and
motivation can determine the degree of “success” in the processes, and ideology can come

into focus through a schematic outlined by Hall (“Encoding”) in which paramount is the

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perception of a useful, meaningful identity between the “encoder-producer” (in rhetoric,
the messenger) and the “decoder-receiver” (in rhetoric, the audience) interacting through
discursive practice (in rhetoric, the message). Yet attempts to find correlation between
rhetoric and ideology are challenged by the fact that they are not the same thing in Hall’s
paradigm, if for no other reason than that the encoding-decoding process employs
semiotics in relation to the “technical infrastructure” of a known social topography while
ancient and even some Enlightenment rhetorics were concerned with tropes and what
must be seen as a clearly ideological system of appeals to morality and justice. These are
significant differences, but the two paradigms appear to coincide logically by merely
juxtaposing the terminology of each approach. When a sign—a linguistic symbol of an
arbitrarily agreed-upon idea—is encoded by the source of transmittal in Hall’s schematic,
it is somewhat analogous to a rhetor having employed a successful topic within a suitable
style and delivery; the difference may lie in ancient rhetoric’s fondness for predicting the
manner in which a topic will be received and acted upon by the audience. Yet in another
way there is no difference, for in the choice of signs to be encoded also lies the
employment of still more signs to fashion a “meaning structure” for the primary message
so that the receiver, in Hall’s paradigm, will know exactly how to decode what has been
delivered With rock, one can consider the PR campaigns surrounding new album releases,
upcoming concerts, television appearances, and so on—any of these has potential to be
lauded as “the event of the summer/year/ decade/century,” “the most important album
ever released,” a “killer” soundtrack that “no true fan can afford to be without,” etc., all of
which are designed by the source as signs-superior to place the primary sign-inferior
directly within a specific ideological context for the receiver. Where ideology differs

significantly from classical-rhetoric approaches in this model is that one is much less

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likely to encounter predictions and dictations for successful transmission since semiotics
must by nature allow for massive slippage when meanings cannot be fixed with any
certainty.

To return to that favored, and problematic, trope of “authenticity” in rock
rhetoric, Simon Frith takes the problem to another level by arguing that the figure doesn’t
necessarily indicate that a cultural entity is actually authentic in any tangible way, but
only that it represents something authentic (Pleasure 97)—what counts more than
meaning itself then is an ability to read the signs which point to meaning’s possibility.
Frith argues that the term “authentic” in rock discourses is never bound to mean a lived
experience, but only a convincing portrayal of such experience (98), yet Richard Weaver,
echoing Bakhtin’s dichotomy between the I- and we-experience, would likely forgive
rock’s consumer-theorists this apparent contradiction on the basis that, for Weaver, all
individuals are constantly turned toward what he called the “tyrannizing image” of culture
itself, a term that he hoped would be “excused its sinister connotations and understood as
meaning unifying and compelling” (20) since he intended by culture the denotation of “a
complex of values polarized by an image or idea.” By this Weaverian view, members of
rock culture would earn the label “pessimists,” defined by the rhetorician as individuals
for whom “novelty is not always originality nor a fresh departure toward a new horizon”
(5), but because they possess such an intensity of ideological feeling, they are perfectly
suited as “custodians” of the culture to which they so strongly adhere. It’s helpful here
to recall Terry Eagleton’s description of the 20th century’s movement away from
language-as-definition and instead toward an ability to “use [language] in particular ways”
(Benjamin 194). For Eagleton it is productive to consider the signs and signification in

language use since signs, as an element of discourse, are “inherently social and practical,”

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and a continued labeling of “false consciousness" for particular ideologies gets one
nowhere if the sheer longevity and wide range of many deeply-held doctrines is itself a
sign that those ideologies must successfully “encode, in however mystified a way,
genuine nwds and desires” (Ideology 12). A thorough interrogation of rock
“authenticity,” then, would ultimately surrender any charges of realness or falseness as
well as notions of an existing, fixed consciousness and endeavor instead to see how it is
that the discourse behind the ideology can so often remain unchanged and to take so many
adherents into its grasp.

Viewing rock through a methodological lens of cultural studies and rhetoric can
ultimately work to suggest a new praxis through an analysis and explanation of the ways
in which a wealth of subject matter exists in rock for application in contemporary
classrooms. Ethical, moral, and critical issues have always surrounded rock, and the value
of rock music as the central focus of any course based on critical reading, thinking, talking,
and writing is derived from the fact that rock is both a discourse and a general rubric under
which its various metadiscourses are shaped. Today’s rock is a network of music, video,
performance, celebrity, and political activism, giving the basic rhetorical interchange
between speaker and audience a host of added dimensions whereby the basic speech act
becomes embedded in, and also serves as a foundation for, a multiplying of itself into
numerous other acts. But how do teachers and students begin to understand such a
cultural practice as rock that presents itself as rebellious and resistant to codification,
yet at the same time remains highly territorial about what it considers an authentic
expression of that cultural practice? From the moment when the term “rock and roll” was
coined, rock’s practitioners have defined themselves as positioned outside the

mainstream, always rebelling against bland conformity and challenging dominant cultural

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discourses. On the other hand, in the last twenty years or so there have been numerous
examples of rock’s desire to legitimate and institutionalize itself, and many rock historians
and critics attempt to tell a coherent story of its music that allows for no contradictions
or subplots. Therefore an unpacking of the ideologies in rock’s discourses, for teachers in
rock-centered classrooms, is crucial in aiding student understanding of how our larger
culture works to reproduce dominant discourse even within a cultural practice, like rock,
that situates itself as outside hegemonic values, and to see how clearly the music
associated with a social conscience that spoke out against blind acquiescence to national
values, music that championed the misunderstood and oppressed underdog, can actually
be complicit in perpetuating the colonization, appropriation, and blatant marginalization
of the other. As the Canadian group Rush has put into songtext, “One likes to believe in
the freedom of music / But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion
of integrity.”

Having recently been subjected to a scathing critical reception for a proposed
composition textbook that would blend cultural studies with traditional rhetoric in
promoting the ancient art of imitatio, I’ve gone into this study of rock discourses fully
aware that some rhetoric purists will have nothing to do with any perceived “Marxist”
viewpoints or even cultural studies, since it employs so much of what they perceive to be
“Marxist” terminology. This is unfortunate, since rhetoric, having been through the
centuries intermittently altered, expanded, condensed, mislabeled, and even for a time
forgotten, remains at center a primary tool for the examination of discursive practices, and
the introduction of marxist theory and cultural studies to rhetoric’s growing canon, along
with their adoption by some of the primary established voices in the discipline—Berlin,

Villanueva, Crowley, Schilb, to name only a few—has provided a vitally important

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lens—ideology—for the ongoing critical interrogation and expanded application of just
about everything constituting what we call rhetoric. Newly revitalized by its gradual
embrace of cultural studies, rhetoric is an ideal lens for examining the systems and codes
of rock’s discourses, and those discourses have the potential to suggest an expanded form
of praxis by illustrating the promise of a contemporary conception of rhetoric for :
traditionalists who may remain focused on an “available means of persuasion” approach

in the classroom.

 

Since I am by primary definition a classroom practitioner, this study ultimately
warrants a discussion of classroom practice since teaching rock can often reflect the
subject matter as resistance takes place in not only the text but also the
pedagogy around it In the latter form, such resistance occurs because the teacher is also
by default a critic, presenting a “discourse distinctly other from the students’ discourse,
[which]wounds the students’ narcissism because it claims to be a superior discourse and
seeks therefore to deprive students of their previous claim on the music” (Shumway 229).
What happens then is that students resist teacherly insights, methods, and authority in a
single gesture of defiance, “because their identification with rock is threatened not only by
the teacher’s interpretations, but also by the character of the student-teacher relationship
itself.” Tapping into this resistance can create a new, less pejorative definition for what
Crowley calls “full frontal teaching” by changing its meaning away from a lecture-oriented
presentation style, to become instead a teacher’s willingness to present his or her age and
experience as an ancillary text to the primary one of rock itself, subjecting one’s own
generational difference to the same critical analysis which the music undergoes. From

what can be vastly diverse places in the musical-cultural margins, two generations have

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the potential to move equally toward a center which is always already undergoing
redefinition.

In teaching rock under the shadow of postrnodemity's multiplicities and
fragmentations, however, the teacher must walk a fine line between entering into
conversation with students about it (speaking with them) and simply telling them what
they need to add to their ”limited" knowing ( speaking for them). Teaching rock, within a
guiding framework of meta-awareness of one’s practice, can be transformed into
collaborative learning, and in such a classroom, teachers do not censor themselves into
silence by claiming representational illegitimacy, but rather rely on students to work with
them in taking the teacher—and the class itself—apart in order to rebuild academic com-
munities and literacies in better ways. Rock discourses, specifically, show particular
promise for the enhancement of this rebuilding process at the dawn of a new century, a
time when, as Bennett et al. have noted, “the influence of old discourses is present but

waning, and new ways of thinking about music as culture are slowly being forg ” (Rock

5). It’s my hope that the chapters ahead will make a contribution to that forging process.

£239)?

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__.
-._j- -_

 

KEEPIN’IT ‘REAL’:
The Controlling Metaphor of ‘Authenticity ’ in Rock Discourses

How can I convince her (Faker!) that I’m invented, too?
I am smitten; I’m the real thing (I’m the real thing)
We all invent ourselves, and—uh—you know me.

- R.E.M., “Cmsh with Eyeliner”

I don’t know why people pay such tribute to Madonna. She had a lot of great disco records, and certainly
sustained that for a long time. [But] she was a girl who wanted to be a star. . . . [S]he just wanted to be
up there. She chose the kids-from-Fame route. And it worked. But it was never rock ‘n roll.

- Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders (qtd. in Juno 199-200)

[We called our band] the Originals, but there was another group, up in the east end, called the Originals, so
we had to change our name to the New Originals. Then they changed their name to the Regulars, and we
thought, “Well, we could go back to the Originals—but what’s the point?

- Dialog in the rock documentary parody, Ihis Is Spinal Tap

Epigraphs can be wonderful things, but they can’t always fully explain the
intended role and function of their appearance on the page. The three above, for instance,
all point toward a similar story, but each one points to a slightly different aspect of that
story than do its two neighbors. Michael Stipe of REM, with his “Crush” lyrics,
indicates a self-awareness carried by current rock musicians in regards to the pursuit of an
authentic self and practice, interrupting his own such pursuit by first reminding himself
that he’s a “faker,” then with an argument that he’s “the real thing,” and finally becoming
terribly confused by the two warring conceptions. Chrissie Hynde, on the other hand,
sets out a rhetorical pattern of exclusively past-tense verb forms in order to construct
Madonna as a no-longer-relevant figure, using that pattern as a system of proofs for the
warrant that Madonna “was never rock ’n roll.” And finally, the parodic “metal band”

Spinal Tap, by poking fun at the whole notion of originality, provides verification of an

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awareness outside rock of the same complexities that Stipe’s lyrics testify exists within
rock as well. Yet the notion of the authentic—addressed, rebuked, and at times even
mocked—remains both compelling and problematic within rock’s discourses. And so, in
an attempt to explain how and why this is the case, I’ll start with a story:

Once upon a time, there was a music group that went by the name of Milli Vanilli.
Fronted by two very handsome young men, Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, this group
put out a few songtexts like “Blame It On the Rain” and “Girl You Know It’s True”—
exquisitely catchy tracks highlighting appealingly clear tenors—and of course the requisite
promotional MTV videotexts which revealed the singers’ fine Afro-European looks, long
braids, and smooth dance moves. And Milli Vanilli sold millions and millions of records
because of those songtexts and videotexts, and Rob and Fab (as the group’s fans knew
them) became huge celebrities, and they were very happy. So happy, in fact, that an evil
record producer, Frank F arian, who knew a terrible secret about Milli Vanilli, began to see
Rob and F ab’s happiness as outright hubris. He thought this because the young men
were enjoying a success that, to Mr. F arian’s mind, they really had no claim to.

And so one day Mr. F arian did a mean and awful thing: He went public with his
secret. Rob and Fab had never sung a note of those top-selling tracks, he said. In fact,
neither one of them could even sing worth a damn. It was all just a lip-sync performance,
moving to tape, even in their live “concerts.” And as for those long braids? Hair
extensions. Milli Vanilli, in truth, was merely a studio concept, an invented image—the
real singers weren’t as pretty as Rob and Fab, so those two young men had been hired as
faces for the vocals. But now they had taken their “own” stardom much too far. They
had literally started to become, not merely a part of the lie, but all of it, showing great

disrespect for their benefactor back in the studio. They were even demanding a chance to

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actually sing on “their” next album. And so the evil Mr. Farian—who was really just
being an honest man, not an evil one—had been forced to stop them.

Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan were very sad. Now they were derided and
mocked around the world The whole situation was, as the Germans like to say (for Milli
Vanilli had originated in that country), SChreCkIlCh. In the United States, Arsenio Hall
(whose own cult of late-night TV celebrity would soon come to an end) made Rob and
Fab the butt of his most cutting jokes. When the National Academy of Recording Arts
and Sciences, itself extremely embarrassed, made them return the Grammy Award they’d
received for Best New Artist, the humiliation was complete. Rob and Fab went into
seclusion and tried to become invisible. Then, after a long time away, they began to speak
quietly of a “comeback” album to prove their genuine vocal talents. They even made that
album, which no one bought. And in 1998, Rob Pilatus committed suicide in a German
hotel room. The news came in the form of little sidebar notes in newspapers and
magazines. And no one really cared

But nearly 20 years prior to the sordid “Milli Vanilli Affair” (Shuker 21), as at
least one rock lexicographer has come to call it, a man who owned a little hip-clothing
shop in England decided that he wanted to start a punk band. Not as one of its musicians
or songwriters, mind you, but just as its creator. And not that he’d had any previous
experience in creating punk bands, but just that he felt like doing it now. The clothier’s
name was Malcolm McLaren; the band he had in mind would call itself the Sex Pistols.
And this band, like Milli Vanilli, would be huge, selling hundreds and maybe even
thousands of records. Its lead “singer” (for singing was not exactly what he did), “Johnny
Rotten” (whose real name was just plain old John Lydon), would become a punk legend,
eventually finding himself implicitly connected, through a Neil Young lyric, to 905

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punk/grunge suicide Kurt Cobain. Its bass "player” (for playing was not exactly what
he did), “Sid Vicious” (whose real name was just plain old John Ritchie), would become
a legend in a different way afier he accidently murdered his girlfriend Nancy and then
overdosed on heroin three months later while awaiting trial. Greil Marcus would go on
to write a massive tome, published by Harvard University Press, claiming that the Sex
Pistols were influential to the point of becoming a whole epoch and culture in and of
themselves. And all of this even though the band’s flame, like Milli Vanilli’s, burned
for little more than one year, and even though, as Marcus admits: “Punk began as fake
culture, a product of McLaren’s fashion sense, his dreams of glory, his hunch that the
marketing of sadomasochistic fantasies might lead the way to the next big thing”
(Traces 69).

What’s the moral to these stories? There isn’t one, really; there are only
contradictions. To Arsenio Hall and all the rest of rock’s consumer-theorists around the
world, Milli Vanilli clearly was a fraud, a fake, a manufactured facade that quickly
crumbled; Milli Vanilli clearly was a sham, a joke, an embanassment. Now those Sex
Pistols, on the other hand: That McLaren chap was a pure genius, taking four raw kids
off the street, putting instruments and a microphone into their hands and telling them to
make some noise—this is the stuff that punk music was supposed to be all about, right?
No smooth edges anywhere, no hooks, no melodies, no commercial appeal, and certainly
no physical attractiveness (although guitarist Steve Jones did go on to become a fairly
handsome guy by the time he formed the Neurotic Outsiders, with other rock veterans
and survivors4, in 1996). The Sex Pistols, regardless of their carefirl construction by

McLaren, were never perceived as invented; instead, the perception was that each of its

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members invented himself especially Lydon and Ritchie—er, that is, Rotten and Vicious.
Like Milli Vanilli, they couldn’t sing or play worth a damn—but of course that was the
whole point.

While the late Lionel Trilling’s work has come under fire in recent years for his
tendency to essentialize both authenticity and “sincerity” as inherent aspects of human
nature (and indeed one is well served by a caveat to read his ideas “against the grain” of
postmodern awarenesses), much of his later writing is framed in such a way that the
esteemed critic’s overviews of philosophical thought through history themselves contain
at least some indications of his willingness to problematize some of these “essential”
human qualitities. And while a handful of rock performers—R.E.M., Talking Heads, and
David Bowie come to mind—are very much informed and influenced by postmodern
thought, the vast majority of rock’s discourses linger and thrive in modernity and
romanticism, so it is here that I find Trilling’s writings most productive for contributing
to a contextualization of authenticity in rock. In regards to the issue at hand, for instance,
I turn to his writing that “we are impelled to use some word which denotes the nature of
[sincere being] and which accounts for the high value we place upon it. The word we
employ for this purpose is ‘authenticity”’ (Sincerity 93)—and with this, in a discussion
of the Sex Pistols, a question forms: Were the band members sincere about being punk
rockers? The immediate answer seems to circle right back: How could they not have
been? They were putty in McLaren’s hands, babes in the rock woods, street kids
suddenly told they were punk-music “stars.” And most importantly, whether a total
fabrication or not, they sang their own songtexts, played their own instruments. We tend
to empathize with those qualities; although it was a British enterprise and thus an

immediately Other kind of experience, we in the US. nonetheless know how to value the

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work ethic surrounding the Sex Pistols’ artistic endeavor (made all the more valuable, in
the ideology of rock discourses, because it failed to become a successfully commercial—

i..e. wealth—generating—endeavor as well), and so we tend to polarize around a positive

 

form of what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” something less than
ideology or Weltanschauung, something more than mere impression: a tangible
manifestation of our “concern with meanings and values as they are actively lived and

9

felt” (132) and of our desire for “evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures’

 

that accompany widely shared “living processes” (133). Meanwhile, structures of feeling
for Milli Vanilli differ greatly due to a lingering and troubling sense that Pilatus, Morvan,
and F arian blatantly violated, in concrete form, the most significant of the meanings and
values which their fans and admirers brought to that band’s ultimately corrupt and
fraudulent enterprise. Work ethic? None. Moving lips and hips to a pre-recorded
vocal—a vocal performed by someone else (even though the specter of reified labor is
unlikely to raise many eyebrows in the States, the specter of plain old “laziness” will
function sufficiently)—is no ethic at all; nor is it any kind of real work in the sense of
sweat and energy and concentration, the kind of physical and mental labor shown in
Simon F rith’s description of a real singer:
[Otis] Redding’s approach to singing—making a vocal noise—opened up
the question of speech itself, celebrated its possibilities, fought against its
constraints. . . . [H]e applied Little Richard’s frenzied gabbling to Sam
Cooke’s precise tones of feeling and ended up with a sort of vocabulary of
desire, a dictionary of soul. Words for Redding weren’t simply semantic
devices, conventional signs of meaning. They were also always sounds,
carried their own aural implications of rhyme and rhythm. His style had

. . . repetition and experiment, the voice as the vehicle for the body, a
form of power: Bam-A-Lam! Bam-A-Loo! You can hear Redding making

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meaning, and it’s hard not to grimace and crunch the mouth muscles in
sympathy. He constantly stops to savor a vowel, to consider a
consonant. No syllable is safe. . . (“Redding” 138).

This description is grounded in aesthetic critique, but that critique is at the same
time squarely focused on notions of an authentic style, an authentic originality, and
especially an authentic labor. What is Redding doing in this passage, if not working his
voice off? And what are listeners doing, as they lock their jaws to prevent spontaneous
spasms ofgrimacing and crunching, if not working just as hard? Now we have a proud
point of contrast for those Milli Vanilli poseurs, those fashion models, those. . .not real
singers. It isn’t a matter of self-written songtexts, since Deena Weinstein’s articulation of
changing notions of authenticity regarding cover tunes—modem updates of older
songtexts or even reinterpretations of very current ones that have been penned and
performed by others—has shown how such work is “no longer relegated to the periphery
but share[s] the center with original work” since “[t]he raw material of rock is no longer
life, but culture” (145). Further, Weinstein argues, “If God is dead and all things are
allowed, the god that was knocked off by punk was the myth of the individual, along with
its master name, Authenticity. Musicians can now plunder the past with abandon.”
While there is a great deal of evidence to support this claim of individual worth gradually
giving over to an equally prized cultural tradition and history from which songtexts may
be “plundered” without penalty for the plunderer, I have to counter that evidence of punk
having “knocked off. . . the myth...of Authenticity” in rock’s discourses is much harder to
find. Even the slow re-positioning of cover material as itself “authentic” is very much a
work in progress inside many of those discourses, but in the case at hand, Milli Vanilli

had not covered; it had merelyfionted. And as for the millions of records bought by

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millions of its young fans (most often with millions of their parents’ dollars), well, if
Milli Vanilli had to return that Grammy, then how about refunding the cash, as well?
Owning one of these albums now was something akin to having bought a fake Rolex in a
back alley somewhere: Sure, it might keep time (literally, in each of its formerly
formidable hit singles), but what exactly did you have? Something pretty, but also
worthless, valuable only as a reminder of how easily you’d allowed yourself to be
swindled. “A person is he,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in 1651, addressing both legal
tribunals and the theater, “whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as
representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing, to whom they are
attributed, whether truly or by fiction” (480; italics removed). If Pilatus and Morvan had
merely “represented the words and actions” of other studio musicians, admittedly “by
fiction,” then why all of the accompanying shame and disgust? Simply because, as
Hobbes explained: “When they are considered as his own, then is he called a natural
person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another,
then is he a feigned or artificial person” (480). And in the discursive practices of rock,
especially, artifich people are not made welcome.

Yet the figures in rock discourses, time and again, demonstrate that artificiality
will be tolerated to an extent Vanilla Ice, with an invented ethos of fraudulent background
and stunningly co-opted riffs, enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame as a white rapper in the
early 19905, fending off attacks on his authenticity not by discussing his race but by
trying to demonstrate that whereas the famous Queen/David Bowie bass line from
“Under Pressure” informing his own “Ice Ice Baby” had seven beats—“Duh-duh—duh—
duhduh-duh-duh,” said Mr. Ice in an MTV interview—the version in his songtext had
eight—“Duh duh-duh-duh-duhduh-duh—duh,” he said, and with this explanation he

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disappeared into the mist of Where Are They Now? But then again, Vanilla Ice was a
white boy, so the boot he received might appear to “make sense,” at least until we look at
black rapper MC Hammer (later just Hammer, bigger than a mere Master of Ceremonies)
likewise copping a whole bass line from Rick James’s “Superfreak” to inform his own

“U Can’t Touch This,” following that initial offering with a boast of being “2 Legit 2
Quit”—and then promptly joining Vanilla Ice in early retirement Why? My 16 year-old
daughter, sitting around a summer campfire one night and recognizing the disposable
nature of pop icons, declares Hammer to have been “all dance and fashion, plus too much
overkill—he was the Spice Girls of his time.” Admiring this insight, I begin to see more
clearly how a deeper issue is an ongoing conflict between “real” rap and “fake,” of a
powerful rap culture forged of lived experience coming to bear against what it perceives to
be a transient group of pretenders who will corrupt and taint not just the music, but the
lived experience itself. (This issue is further taken up in the next chapter.)

Nor is this last exclusively a rap “.thang” In the area of folk music, Kit Rachlis
describes a 1960s-era drive for folk purity requiring a “blanket repudiation of pop,
everything from Jerry Lee Lewis to the Ronettes” and an insistence on “unadomed
performers” since “[e]lectric guitars and drums, perfectly calibrated hooks and neatly
hinged lyrics. . . [all] spoke of slick-talking salesmanship and money-grubbing ambition”
(173 ). And even in classical music, Robin Maconie has suggested that a similar conflict
over authenticity has arisen over the fact that contemporary symphony orchestras have
become “a hybrid” with “some instruments [that] are old, some relatively new. . .
instruments from the East and instruments from the West, some virtually unchanged from
ancient times and others embracing the most up-to-date technology. An orchestra today

is a compendium of civilizations” (57). As a result, Maconie writes, “Authenticity has

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begun the process of reintegrating early music with its time and place by readopting
period instruments, performance practices, and locations” (151). (Christopher
Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music, for instance, plays only on period instruments
in an attempt to re-locate the music within its original context. The debate over whether
one can hope to replicate the social and historical context behind those instruments and
that music, however, is something I leave to other studies.) But with classical music,
struggles over authenticity can generate at least one measurable result, as Maconie
describes how the sheer size of many modern orchestras creates a minuscule lapse in
sound wave reception for musicians on the far edges of the platform who “would have
great difficulty in keeping together if they were not kept in time by a conductor. The
consequence. . . of having to rely on the visual cues of the conductor and having to ignore
what they themselves hear, is inevitably a loss of sensitivity of response” (83)—

a corruption of what is, to Maconie, an important, because genuine, human musical
ability. As a result of the authenticity movement’s turn to a smallness of scale,
“employing fewer numbers and less strident timbres, and making use of more intimate
recording environments,” orchestra musicians in smaller symphonies “are beginning to
reap very real benefits in terms of balance and quickness of response” (83).

Such measurable results are much harder to spot in the ideological conflicts over
authenticity in rock, where the term awhentic functions as a rhetorical trope in the
sense that it works to substitute for an infinite number of often contradictory structures
of feeling which are at once aesthetic and ideological in their origin, and as a recurring
figure working to preserve the conflict and promote its arguments through an ever-
changing conception of its central meaning. Moreover, as indicated by the title of this

chapter, authenticity as it is applied in rock discourses becomes the controlling metaphor

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for the discourses. By this I mean that, whereas a poem like X. J. Kennedy’s “First
Confession,” for example, is controlled by imagery of religion in opposition to a skeptical
and slightly blasphemous humanism, and whereas Adrienne Rich’s “Living in Sin” is
controlled by images of housekeeping in opposition to a sick and dying relationship, a
controlling metaphor of authenticity presides over rock discourses to illustrate a central
connecting point between otherwise disparate ideas. By holding up the authentic in the
discourses, there is an accompanying and immediate dragging along of the inauthentic; in
reverse order, naming the inauthentic instantly holds up its opposite. The words of
Walter Benjamin in his essay on mass-reproduction fit here—“The presence of the
original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (4)——and what Benjamin called
copies, Baudrillard calls “equivalence” as simulacra replace original artifacts and “only
affiliation to the model makes sense” (101). The range of disparate ideas within these two
definitions appears to be limitless. In rock, authenticity continues to function in the way
that Trilling once described it, as “implicitly a polemical concept, fulfilling its nature by
dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion, aesthetic opinion in the first
instance, social and political opinion in the next” (Sincerity 94). An old Chuck Beny
songtext illustrates the above “first instance” when Berry sings that he has “no kick
against modern jazz / Unless they try to play it too darn fast / And change the beauty of
the melody / Until it sounds just like a symphony”—a point at which he is forced to “go
for that rock and roll music” instead—while Lucy O’Brien illustrates Trilling’s “social
and political” realm of the authentic in her description of Joan Baez: “Never considered
an ‘authentic’ folk artist—once described as an ‘outsider singing to outsiders’—she still

conveyed the integrity of rural songtext, from the Appalachian mountains to the Arizona

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badlands. . . . [Baez] was the million-selling singer of other people’s stories” (371 ).
While Baez’s politics found favor in the 1960s—perhaps most vividly recalled by her
appeal to the crowd at Woodstock5 to remember her husband, who had recently begun a
prison-house hunger strike to protest the Vietnam draft—they could not, O’Brien writes,
match the rage of 19705 punk which “dismissed ‘hippydom’ as a failed experiment” or
prevail against “the knowing iconists of the postmodern MTV 805 [who] derided notions
of acoustic ‘authenticity,’ leaving the traditional protest voice submerged” (372). Berry
watches the “modern jazz” of his lyric slipping into a form that seems and feels like
something other than jazz, while O’Brien describes what is ultimately a protest against
protest itself when its form—acoustic on the one hand, “outside” on the other—is
deemed inauthentic. “I’d like to get something together,” said J imi Hendrix, “like with
Handel, and Bach, and Muddy Waters, a flamenco type of thing. If I can get that
sound—if I could get that sound—I’d be happy (qtd. in Burks 22). But such happiness,
in today’s rock culture, would instantly earn him a one—way ticket out of credibility.
Then again, would it? We are speaking here about Jimi Hendrix. a “guitar g ”to both
fans and critics, and deities sometimes earn privileges that mere mortals may not attain. I
can only speculate here, since the “thing” that Hendrix mentioned never went beyond a
mention, but it seems likely that, in the eyes of contemporary consumer-theorists, the
perforrner’s pre-established ethos could allow him to maintain an authenticity that the
musical product, on the other hand, would not be allowed to share (see my discussion of
Metallica ahead for a more detailed analysis of this division between performer and

product).

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No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Strange Case of Pat Boone

The whole idea of being in a rock band, in the first place, was to say, ‘Hey, I’m an ugly duckling, firck
you.’ The point was to be non-competitive, to say, ‘I don’t have to prove anything. This is me. I
walked in here, off the street, and this is it. I’m not an actor. I’m in a rock band. I’m not going to

compromise myself to look or be something to make you accept me.
- Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders (qtd. in Juno 199).

I admired you. You, in your black leather jacket.
- Joe Rasnick (Michael J. Fox) to his rock-guitarist sister Patty (Joan Jett) in Light of Day

Now comes the plaintiff, Pat Boone, praying to the court that it would permit the
dissolution of his previous identity as a good Christian man in white shoes who had a
career in rock ’n roll during the 19505 and early 19605 by flashing his impossibly straight
and white teeth at audiences of clean-cut American teenagers who came to hear him
perform sanitized versions of songs by black, and thus commercially limited, artists. Mr.
Boone prays that the court would accept into evidence for this petition his 1997 CD, Pat
Boone in a Metal Mood, upon which he has performed swinging versions of songs by
groups such as Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, and AC/DC. He has stated,
inside the liner notes to this collection, that such songs and artists have worked as “a
revelation” to him, and he now prays that the court would grant him authenticity as a
Heavy Metal Musician. As the first set of evidence in support of his petition, Mr.

Boone submits the following specific items regarding his previous claims to authenticity:

1. He has informed the audience for this collection, by way of its liner notes, that
he is a “product of the whole rock revolution, musically, having come along. . . just when
rhythm and blues was becoming a new thing we were calling ‘rock ’n roll’ (italics added).
Further, Mr. Boone writes that “[s]ome of my early million sellers included Little.

Richard ’5 ‘Tutti Frutti’. . . Fats Domino ’s ‘Ain’t That A Shame,’ and other. . . simple,

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lyrically lightweight songs” (italics added). These songs, he claims, received “new life”
from his endeavors; thus is implied his altruistic nature as a cover artist.

2. He has informed the audience that one of his early methodologies for
determining the commercial appeal of his recordings was to “watch the girls” for signs of
“grooving, dancing a little, and really enjoying the feel of the thing.” Upon those
occasions when all such signs were present, Mr. Boone reports that he “knew we had
something.”

3. He has informed the audience that he once made a recording which he describes
as “a tribute to my buddy Elvis” (italics added); further, that he did rebel against the
desires of that “buddy”’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, by releasing said tribute
recording under a title which did not contain Mr. Presley’s name and thus would not
require the transfer of royalty funds to Mr. Presley’s accounts.

4. He has informed the audience that he is a “direct descendant of Daniel Boone,”
therefore generating a speculation that “it may be in my genes to like to go where no one

else has gone before, to explore new territory.”

With all of these proofs of a past authenticity does the plaintiff, Mr. Boone, pray
to the court for its permission to be re-authenticated now, as a performer of Heavy Metal.
As the second set of evidence in support of this petition, he offers the following proofs

of current authenticity:

1. He has adorned this music collection with photographs of himself bare-chested

save for a leather vest, seated upon a motorcycle, wearing an earring and much related

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jewelry such as a pair of bracelets and multiple rings upon his fingers, his eyes hidden by
sunglasses. These, he hopes, will function as signs of a sufficiently “metal” aura.

2. He has rendered the subtitle of his work, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” in an 18-
point, bold, Olde English-style font, thus establishing an appropriately “gothic”
appearance for these five words. (It is hoped that the court would overlook a failure to
also employ two umlauts—another visual trope favored by earlier metal bands such as

Metorhead and Motley Crfie—in the spelling of the plaintiff‘s name; thus, Boone.)

Mr. Boone assures the court that he will promote this new collection of “metal”
quite heavily, likewise assuring all of the television hosts he encounters during his initial
interviews that he holds a sincere admiration and respect for the music he is performing.
However, when early rumblings of protest and confusion are detected from his core
audience of good Christian folk, Mr. Boone prays that he might reserve the right to look
earnestly into the camera while informing Jay Leno that this new collection of music is
“a four-letter word: J-O-K-E.” Furthermore, when this explanation proves insufficient to
prevent the swift and punitive cancellation of Mr. Boone’s own television program on a
Christian cable network, Mr. Boone prays that he might reserve the right to call off the
whole venture and slip back into the shadows from which he has presently emerged.

Thur does the plaintiff pray to this court that it would grant him the dissolution of
a previous identity and the formation of a new one which he now seeks, and thus shall the

plaintiff ever pray.

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More Difficult Cases: In This Case, Yes—That 15, Unless. . . .

It’s real. Everything is so slick now. . . what I do is something else. Just let me play my autoharp, my
guitar or my banjo, and I’ll play for you what I feel. lt’s pure. It’s me.
- June Carter Cash on her 1999 album, Press ()n (qtd. in DeCurtis 33)

We’re not like Kiss. We break real guitars, not the fake stuff.
- Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick 6

Obviously, John Locke never wrote a word about rock discourses, but I’d like to
introduce him to the subject here. Identity, for Locke at the end of the 17th century,
came from the knowledge that if something exists at one time, we may compare that thing
with its existence at another time—thus forming notions of identity and diversity.
Beyond their clear application in the Boone case just concluded, Locke’s thoughts
likewise linger in less aberrant current arguments over rock authenticity: That was rock
then, so this is not rock now; that was rock once, but now is no more; this is rock now,
therefore all that follows will also be. Following the lyrics of Don McLean’s “American
Pie,” and like those lyrics unable to pinpoint a specific date or cause of expiration, a
number of critics and fans alike have named the period 1959 through l969—Buddy
Holly’s plane crash through the dismantling of Woodstock’s plywood stage—as “the day
the music died.” And this death certificate is underwritten by a totalizing ideology
through which current rock music, due only to its diversity from the “classic” rock of that
ten-year period, is somehow constructed as less than the sum of its preceding parts
Moreover, much of this difference itself is due to changes in the cultural backdrop——
politics, fashion, sexuality, and other elements of “subcultural style” defined by Dick
Hebdige—which lent themselves to lyrical content then but would be laughable now. The
music of the late 19505 and that of the 19605 admittedly played an integral role in that

backdrop, but since today’s version of background scenery is more crowded and noisy,

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lacking the same level of focused intensity of the earlier period (perhaps because of the
crowdedness itself, making focus difficult if not impossible), current rock often appears
to lack the power and stature that would give it the same relevance bestowed upon its
predecessors. The formula, for Locke, in determining difference from matter with an
established identity was fairly simple: “[T]hat which had one beginning is the same thing,
and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that is not the same, but
diverse” (654). Thus would be explained the necessity for constraining commonplaces
within the rhetorical and hegemonic systems in rock’s discourses, for topoi that would
help to make allegedly quantifiable measurements in the discourse’s omnipresent and
relentless search for the authentic—were it not for the fact that Locke also noted a
concomitant “difficulty about this relation” which stemmed from “the little care and
attention used in having precise notions of the things to which [the relationship] is
attributed” (654). And as a young and confused Shakespearean prince once said, there’s

the rub.

Difficult Case # I : In rock discourses, the inauthentic is that which is, by
Grossberg’s observation, “‘establishment culture,’ rock that is dominated by economic
interest, rock that has lost its political edge, bubblegum music, etc.” (Gotta 206-7).
Elsewhere, Grossberg asserts that the rhetoric of authenticity “is built upon a strategy of
differentiation; always distinguishing between the authentic and the co-opted,” an
opposition which “easily and often slides into a narrative war between authentic youth
cultures and corrupting commercial interests (“Anybody” 42). And this “war” is
complex to the point that its own rhetoric can collapse under the weight of the endless

qualifiers often required to hold itself up. For instance, since Ozzy Osbourne is still an

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influential force and a relevant figure in contemporary rock culture, when his music blasts
from TV sets to help sell Nissan’s latest sports car the discourse simply adj usts to
remove Ozzy from the picture, to place him safely “out of the loop” as neatly as George
Herbert Walker Bush during Iran-Contra. The syntax, just as Grossberg has indicated,
typically goes this way: Nissan is co-opting Ozzy is music. It does not go: 02:9» sold his
music to Nissan for its promotional use. And yet, there’s Bob Seger on the TV, too,
singing that Chevy trucks are “Like a Rock.” When the ad campaign begins, more than
one journalist asks Seger how he can allow this to happen when so many other musicians
have protested the increasing number of corporate “corruptions” of rock music. Seger
explains: I like Chevy trucks. And many of nry fans drive trucks.7 They ’11 understand.
But by this time, Seger is as relevant to the contemporary rock culture as, well, Milli
Vanilli. He has been gone too long, and most of his later work was starting to “go soft,”
anyway. As Dave Marsh has written:

Unlike average consumers, the most committed rock fans. . . feel
empowered by the very rhetoric of the music to make judgments——
sometimes punitive judgments—about their heroes. Furthermore, they not
only expect to be entertained but expect to have certain ‘needs’ met in the
process. Rock stars carry a heavier load of symbolism than any other
contemporary performers. (18).

So, unlike the protecting discursive shield that forms around Ozzy, the discourse here
makes no adjustments for Bob Seger. Its syntax holds firmly that Seger sold out to
General Motors, and worse, that he paved the way for even more corporate corruptions
of rock. Except that, well, his music wasn’t really what we’d call rock by today’s
standards, and except that the Nissan thing with Ozzy isn’t a corruption on equal footing

with the Chevy/Seger thing, simply because it’s Ozzy, and the 02 would never. . . .

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Ditficult Case # 2: In which a rock journalist struggles to pin down a precise
meaning for one particular genre of rock:

Let’s try to be specific about what metal means: aggression and guitars;
tattoos and thrash; endless songs in the key of E, with special tunings to
make them sound slate cold and disturbing; maybe a nod to the Nineties
with a smidgen of hip-hop or electronics (but wait—what do you call Rage
Against the Machine? what’s Rob Zombie?); mostly white, although there
are creditable bands [from non-white cultures and nations]; nothing to do
with the precious collegiate ‘indie’ aesthetic, though death/black/dark/doom
metal forms a distinct underground identity whose foremost practitioners
tour college towns. . . ah, forget it. (Ratliff 19).

I think this paragraph speaks for itself.

Di/ftcult Case # 3: Kendra Smith, bass player for a band called Dream Syndicate
and then another called Opal, quit each band just before it signed a corporate record
contract. An interview with her, appearing in an anthology titled Angry Women in Rock,
is primarily focused on organic gardening and country living, her current interests. She
has made two albums in twelve years, neither of them a commercial success. By all of
this, under the strict constraints within that part of rock rhetoric which holds that
financial success is immediately parallel with the inauthentic, Smith should have earned
the status of Authenticity Icon. But she has not; she is known only to the smallest of

rock-discourse communities.

Dtflicult Case it 4: It is 1988. Bill Gazzardi, aged 60, self-styled “godfather of
rock and roll,” is the owner of Gazzardi’s on the [Sunset] Strip, 3 California rock club.
He wears a suit and tie, a hat. And he has a weekly dance contest. Tonight he comes
before the crowd, before the contest, to make an announcement: “There’s been so much

fuckin’ bullshit about this contest being fixed that—I’m gonna make damn sure you all

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understand this—at the end of the contest, when they’ve announced the winners, the
judges’ sheets will be available at the front door for any motherfucker to inspect. And that
oughta take care of all the fuckin’ bullshit about this contest being fixed!” The crowd
cheers wildly; the old man has spoken their coarse, profanity-laden language of
disrespect and rebellion. He’s one of them.

The contest begins. One by one, women parade before the panel of j udges—a
panel made up of testosterone-fireled hard-rock hopefuls who will perform their music
later in the evening—to gyrate to a heavy metal soundtrack and receive a completely
impressionistic score. The judges seem to be enjoying their jobs more than the dancers.
Finally, one woman’s dance builds to the point where she strips down to a bikini made
only of white strings.

Bill Gazzardi steps forward to put an end to this meltdown in protocol. “Uh, I’m
gonna let that go, but the, uh, rules of my contest is [sic] that—that’s a little bit too
skimpy because—we’re looking for Gazzardi dancers, not kind of a [sic] little skimpy
risque stuff like that. There will be no bikinis or G-strings or stuff like that. They have
to wear foxy, rock and roll clothes.”

The audience considers this, then offers its collective reply: “BOO! ”

Gazzardi takes a step back from the microphone. “Boo? Boo? " There is a
momentary pause while the audience confirms its determination. “Okay, I’ll tell you
what—why don’t you guys run the contest?”

The audience instantly responds: “YEAH .’ "

“You mean you want a strip show?” asks Gazzardi.

Later, draped on each side by a young woman barely out of her teens, Gazzardi

beams at an interviewer and explains his longevity: “They say, ‘Bill, you’re not a 60

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year-old guy, you’re like three 20 year-old guys, all the energy you have. Rock and roll

forever!” (Decline).

Difficult Case # 5: The Verve, an English band, have a platinum album in 1998
due to a hit single titled “The Bittersweet Symphony,” a songtext most infectious due to
a soaring symphonic hook between its verses. Rolling Stones catalog administrator Allen
Klein identifies this hook as having been taken from the Andrew Loog Oldham
Orchestra's classical rendition of the Stones‘ 19605 hit "The Last Time," and he demands
100 percent of the songtext’s royalties. In the eventual settlement, Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards receive 70 percent as songwriters, plus full writing credits for the Verve
songtext’s music minus its lyrics and some main-verse passages (an arrangement that
results in some fairly complex liner parentheticals). Allen Klein, as the Stones’ catalog
manager, receives another 30 percent, leaving The Verve with exactly nothing. A year
later the band breaks up. In retrospect, the lyrics to its breakaway hit seem telling:
“’Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, this life. Try to make ends meet, you're a slave to
money, then you die.” One night about a year later, an English teacher working on a book
about rock discourses hears that same infectious hook, slightly slowed, playing on
National Public Radio, is confused because this is supposed to be NPR’s evening
broadcast of classical music—and discovers that the passage came from Antonin

Dvorak’s “Slavonic Dances.”

Aesthetic and ideological preference (in the first case), imprecise articulation (in
the second), concrete manifestations of incompatabilities between ideology and lived
practice (in the third), a failure to interpret successfully the cultural desires implicitly

connected to one’s discourse (in the fourth), and raw issues of ownership and originality

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(in the fifth) are but a few examples of the “difficulties” mentioned by Locke three
hundred years ago, difficulties that continue to pervade the ideological and rhetorical
systems at work within rock’s discourses and their incessant drive for authenticity now.
And the immense blind spots sometimes manifested in that drive can, at times, be
puzzling indeed. “I never identified with [Kiss and Alice Cooper]. . . because both of
those bands were always very specific that their show was an act,” says a certain Brian
Warner, better known by his stage name, Marilyn Manson. “I wanted to meet what was
on stage. I didn’t want to meet some old guy who plays golf” (qtd. in F ruchtman 21 ).
Pressed to speculate on any possible contradictions in who has just said what, Warner
explains that he is different from them in that he “can’t wake up and not be Marilyn
Manson. It’s not like I turn off Marilyn Manson and I’m an everyday guy who goes and
has another job and doesn’t think about any of this stuff. Marilyn Manson is the most
real thing that can come from me.” While Frith validates Warner/Manson’s insistence on
the “r ” when he writes that “young rock bands and musicians put the highest value on
originality and self-expression, on music as a means of defining one’s identity” (“Cultural”
174), Wamer/Manson concedes nothing to the possible existence of an act of his own, on
par with the same theatrics of Kiss and C00per that so alienated him in his youth, or to
the fact that, as Hobbes explained centuries ago, “persona in Latin signifies the disguise,
or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more
particularly that part of it which disguiseth the face, as a mask” (480). More recently,
Trilling wrote that “[t]he work of art is itself authentic by reason of its entire self-
definition: it is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being . . . . Similarly,
artists seek their personal authenticity in their entire autonomousness—their goal is to be

as self-defining as the art-object they create” (Sincerity 100). Thus, behind its gothic

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mask of death-pale makeup and black lipstick, a clouded contact lens covering one iris,
Wamer’s “Marilyn Manson” persona feels free—much like Pat Boone behind his
sunglasses and clip-on earring—to assert its own “real” identity by fast-forwarding right
past its creator, who is much less significant than the artistic manifestation he has
fashioned, reflecting what Jon Spayde, in arguing for a general return to substance over
form in everyday life, has after Baudrillard termed a “move from the fake that stands
starkly inadequate before the real, to the hyperfake (or, if you prefer, the hyperreal)——a
fake so big, and so imbued with [social] hubris. . . that it makes the merely real seem
puny” (49). This move leaves the rock journalist interviewing Wamer/Manson trying to
determine whether the act of disavowing an act is itself an act before ultimately
abandoning such a determination completely and simply moving on to describe the
persona’s continuing claims of authenticity:

Manson’s pursuit for originality was a priority since [his band’s] early
days, when throwing peanut butter sandwiches into the audiences and
caging and crucifying nude women was a cult favorite at concerts.

Manson address[ed] individuality in an unreleased [early songtext]: ‘You
want to look like me, you want to act like me, you’ve got no sense of your
own identity. . . imitation’s not a flattery, you’re a pitiful thief.’ The
[band] practiced what they preached. Manson designed and drew [his]
own playbills and flyers, etching them with amateurishly-drawn

Dr. Seuss [characters], skulls, ghosts, handguns, and hypodermic

needles. . . . [E]arly stage shows were also highlighted by other unusual
gags including a ‘blood-spattered’ Ronald McDonald doll, raw meat, and a
few shredded Bibles. (F ruchtrnan 21)

Unusual, indeed. Surely millions of goth-rockers were astounded by the use of
skull imagery to promote heavy metal. (Okay. the sandwich thing sounds fairly unique,
although I have no idea of what it might have been meant to represent. Maybe, since this

is the “Satanic” “Reverend” Marilyn Manson we’re dealing with, an imagined corruption

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of one of the church’s sacraments?) Still, what’s most visible in this description is a
struggle by Warner/Manson, through his journalistic mouthpiece, to “find what is
significant in [his] difference from others” (Taylor 36). Charles Taylor, in The Ethics of
A uthenticity, explains that such a discovery is crucial because the act of naming one’s
particular abilities and qualities places the individual “in the domain of recognizable self-
definitions” where “[w]e understand right away that [these] properties have human
significance.” The recognition comes largely from the fact that the abilities and qualities
having been specified have at the same time been recognized previously in others, thus
creating what Taylor terms an a priori “horizon of significance” (3 8) upon which “some
things are worthwhile and others less so, and still others not at all, quite anterior to
choice.” The rhetoric of authenticity, holding up its simultaneous images of the genuine
and the diverse, puts these horizons of significance into play, but Taylor warns that when
the rhetoric “implicitly denies” and thus attempts to “collapse” those horizons (37-8),
claims to authenticity should be identified as illegitimate since such claims abandon the
very context that will “save them from insignificance” (66). In contrast to earlier
performers like the Rolling Stones, whom F rith labels as “intellectuals” who “share an
acute, almost contemptuous grasp of their own paradoxes: British makers of American
music, white romancers of black culture, [privileged] triflers with working-class urgencies,
adult observers of youth, aesthetes of body music” (“Beggars” 30), Warner/Manson
attempts to conflate ego with alter-ego, private self with stage persona, performed life
with lived performance, thus engaging exactly in a mission to collapse horizons of
significance, denying the knowledge and lived experience of his audience and therefore
limiting the value of his enterprise to a small population of 15 year-olds who will

ultimately base their allegiance on a mere untested and unquestionable “fact” that

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Manson’s intricate juxtapositions of identity are so complex as to make him the real
thing. In such a case, however, WamerfManson is less the agent than the subject of this
confirmation, since the act of confirming renders the pronouncer, more so than the
pronounced, authentic. As Taylor notes, all claims to authenticity are “clearly self-
referential; this has to be my orientation” (82).

Moreover, the historical amnesia that results from a crowded, hyperpaced cultural
backdrop can prevent pronouncers of authenticity in Warner/Manson’s case to recognize
similarities between the monikers Marilyn Manson, chosen for its factors of both gender-
blurring and tribute to a notorious mass murderer, and Vincent Fumier’s stage name Alice
Cooper, chosen for its factors of both gender-blurring and a hoped-for invocation of an
aural kinship with the name Lizzie Borden, notorious practitioner of parenticidefi; nor can
those pronouncers detect Warner/Manson’s similarity to the conflation of David Bowie
with his stage persona, Ziggy Stardust, two decades earlier. Since “[a]uthenticity is itself
an idea of freedom . . . involv[ing] finding the design of one’s life for oneself, against the
demands of extemal conformity” (Taylor 68), such an amnesia can also be selectively,
purposefully induced in order to dismiss Bowie’s recognition of the constructed persona
which Warner/Manson hopes to dissolve through sheer denial of its existence. Bowie,
describing his adolescence, speaks of being “painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really
have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to
do them in disguise” (qtd. in Lenig 8). Picking up on this admission, a recent film about
the glam-mck era, Velvet Goldmine, presents its Bowie-esque character “Brian Slade”
(Jonathan Rhys Meyers), himself fashioned as a modem-day incarnation of Oscar Wilde,
announcing that “[r]ock and roll is a prostitute. It should be tarted up, performed. The

music is the mask.” Later, the same Bowie/Wilde character, holding a mask over his face,

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tells his audience that “[m]an is least himself when he speaks in his own person,” then
squints to read from a cue card: “Give him a mask and he’ll tell the truth.” When the
audience appears to have trouble comprehending this, the character suddenly drops his

9

mask to exclaim, “We’re going to rule the worldl’ —and follows this announcement with
bitter, self-derisive laughter, clearly crushed by the hollowness of the words which his
unmasked self has just uttered and the failure of his masked persona to connect in any
significant way with its audience. This was the dilemma of rock theater both during and
immediately after Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” incarnation, along with the wider gender-
merging, fonn-and—substance—equalizing movement of “glam rock” as practiced by T. Rex,
Roxy Music, and Bowie in England, with the New York Dolls as that genre’s foremost
practitioners in the States. The genre eventually collapsed under its own ideological
aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,” confusing (and in time boring) its audience by its inability
to demonstrate any relevant connection between cosmetics and rock, between lyrics like
Marc Bolan’s “I have never ever nailed a nose before / All schools are strange” and
everyday life where nails, noses, and schools had no immediate correlation, between the
music itself—its rhythms and volumes—and the glam movement’s preferred method for
its performance. Ultimately, as Stuart Lenig has explained, glam theater was rejected and
subsumed under rock’s own preference for “the arena concert format, large crowds, large
overhead, and large payoffs” since theatrical rock had shown itself to be both too
expensive and too far beyond the comprehension of its intended audience. And then came
the ultimate dismissal: “[C]ritically, performance was seen as a sham, a means of

covering up poor music” (12). With this decree of inauthenticity, the glam movement

imploded. Even James Westerberg, better known as Iggy Pop, striving through both

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physical self-mutilation and constant manifestations of utter contempt for his audience to
take his raw brand of rock beyond mere musical performance into the realm of spectacle,
found nothing authentic in glam. Through the venom-and—bile prose style of rock
journalist Nick Kent, we see an Iggy living in London at the time and wondering how it
was possible that

[a]ll this ‘cute’ shit—this glam-rock—was selling up a storm over in
limey-land and all it was was a bunch of wimp pop written by more
cynical hack [people] and sung by talentless dorks wearing too much
make-up who were too dumb and lame even to be mistaken for real
[homosexuals]. Over in America they were lapping up this homogenized
crap by the Eagles and all these other clowns singing about feeling like
Jesse James and James Dean and pretending they were modem-day
outlaws when, in reality, they were just another bunch of denim-draped
self-obsessed faux hayseed hippy morons. (250)

In short, we see an Iggy who sees himself surrounded by inauthentic pretenders,
but of all the bands coming out of the glam tradition, the New York Dolls (whose lead
singer, David Johansen, went on to become a lounge lizard incarnation named “Buster
Poindexter” whose “novelty” scored big with MTV) offered what was essentially a how-
to-read-this-stuff set of directions with its songtext, “Human Being”:

Well if you don’t like it, go ahead and find yourself a saint
Find yourself a boy who’s gonna be what I ain’t

And what you need is a plastic doll with a fresh coat of paint
Who’s gonna sit through the madness and always act so quaint.

The Dolls even anticipated the most intense objections that would be fired at glam,
suggesting that “[i]f it gets a bit obscene” (as it often, for mainstream rock fans, did seem
to get in a genre where women’s clothing was the male performers’ favored fashion, where

some of those musicians pretended to fellate one another on stage, and where others were

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widely rumored to have experimented sexually with one another in private life) and “[i]f
I’m acting like a queen,” then one needed to keep in mind only one thing: “Well,
babybabybaby, I’m a human being.” This was High Concept for mainstream
consumption by a drug-addled audience, ensuring its failure to communicate glam’s two
primary theses: First, that Wilde’s famous line in The Soul of Man Under Socialism—a
claim that “art should never try to be popular; the public should try to make itself
artistic”—was a mission to be carried out in tangible ways, and second, that even if the
audience should come to grasp the concept, authenticity could not be locked in by any
definitive means. Those who objected to David J ohansen were free to “find themselves a
saint” in the form of “a boy who’s gonna be what I ain’t”—and such a person, of course,
would be none other than David Johansen himself, unadomed of his glam-rocker persona.
But since, as Johansen saw it, the audience both expected and demanded from him much
more than that, what they got was “a plastic doll " (self-referentiality at play) with a
“fresh coat of [cosmetic] paint,” while the actor beneath the makeup could simply “sit
through the [glam] madness and always act so quaint.” And if the audience missed that
(which it did), if it interpreted the lyrics 'as more of the same rebellion-against-everything
sentiment (which it did) that had always informed so much of rock, then the Dolls came
through with one more opportunity to learn: “I’m [just] a human being [someone else],”
they pointed out over and over again in the chorus. And no one, to borrow from Neil

Diamond in “I Am, I Said,” heard at all. Not even the chairs.

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“The Worst Crime I Can Think Of”:
The Sad Case of Kurt Cobain and the “Death of Grunge”

My prince was satisfied with all of my works and I received applause. As the director of an orchestra, I
could make experiments, observe what elicited or weakened an impression, and thus correct, add, delete,
take risks. I was cut off from the world, no one in my vicinity could cause me to doubt myself or pester
me, and so I had to become original.

- Joseph Haydn, c. 1800 (qtd. in Bonds 56).

I am what I am, but I’m not what you think.
- Crack the Sky, “Lighten Up, McGraw”

When Simon F rith writes that rock owes its conception and birth to Elvis, its
maturity to the Beatles and Sgt. Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and its ultimate
demise to the disbanding of the Sex Pistols in 1976 (Pleasure l)——a lineage and lifespan
that are, for me, highly questionable (and debate over it would ensure bringing the outlines
of our individual musical taste and definition ideologies into clear view)—it’s important to
recognize that Frith isn’t performing a eulogy for the music itself. Rather, he is trying to
identify the end of an era. and the end of a vaguely-defined essence that would make true
rock distinguishable from false. But in justifying his post-mortem analysis, Frith as a
Marxist critic inadvertently creates an opposition in which either today’s commercialized
rock is a blatant imposter of its earlier form, or else its current tendency toward
commercialization “proves that it was actually no different from any other leisure
product all along.” This slip into such a binarism tends to lock out any possibility of
rock being both commercialized and still “true” to its origins—especially since the
either/or opposition is made from ideological constructs of a naturalized role and function
the discourse must play out, most notably a resistance if not outright immunity to
commercial exploitation and purpose that transcends the vision and desires of the music’s
consumer-theorists, and, by extension, “their” bands. It is curious, as well, that Frith

should pay tribute to Elvis Presley within the context of his argument since, as Jeny

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Hopkins has shown, Presley launched his extremely lucrative career by co-opting a range
of preexisting music and “melding the best of four musical categories: country ‘n
western (or hillbilly). . . ‘race music’ [of] the early 19505, gospel music, and pop (Dean
Martin was a personal favorite). The ‘new’ sound was called ‘rockabilly,’ and Elvis
began touring as ‘the Hillbilly Cat’” (131). Regardless of this, Frith presses ahead with
the view that rock is rock, commerce is commerce, and the two must somehow remain
mutually exclusive. That next week’s Aerosmith concert may be brought to us by Calvin
Klein and Reebok is a perversion, not a sign of economic reality. Sponsorship, through
the traditional lens of Marxist analysis, is synonymous with alienation, so the purity of
rock is forever gone. Under such constraints perhaps only Neil Young, the Woodstockian
grandfather of grunge rock who “ain’t singin’ for Miller, ain’t singin’ for Bud,” and his
grunge-rocker grandson Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, whose personal war with profiteering
Ticket Master has become the stuff of legend, could remain untainted since “[m]oney, in
short, is the principle of the inauthentic in human existence” for early articulators of
Marxist thought (Trilling, Sincerity 124). But rock’s current consumer-theorists have a
bit more tolerance for commerce than does Frith’s form of Marxism; as Dave Marsh
explains, the majority of rock fans do not “automatically reject crass commercialism—-
millions of Kiss and Bon Jovi fans prove otherwise”—but under the controlling metaphor
of authenticity they do at least expect and demand evidence of “a self-generated crass
commercialism” ( I 9; italics added). It may be odd, then, that the crassly anti-commerce
anthem, “This Note’s for You,” which helped to return Neil Young to prominence in the
current rock culture—largely through its accompanying videotext’s heavy rotation on
MTV before the corporations named in its lyrics demanded that the videotext be pulled

back out of that rotation—has been labeled by Young himself as “the most idiotic fucking

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song I’ve ever written. I still can’t believe that such a dumb little song could have helped
resuscitate my career the way it did” (qtd. in Kent 329). Young had spent the 19805
experimenting with early forms of techno-industrial noise, feedback-filled garage rock with
his untrained band, Crazy Horse, and other completely uncommercial ventures (including
a foray into country music with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings) that caused his
record label great angst before focusing his interest on the formation of an R&B band he
called The Blue Notes and, within that context, writing “This Note’s for You.” But the
success of this songtext’s social critique, and the fact that its album’s accompanying
promotional tour was proudly advertised as free of commercial endorsement or backing at
a time when so many other bands had agreed to drape corporate logos above their stages,
had less to do with Young’s major repositioning on the spectrum of relevance than did his
unfortunate association with the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 when the Nirvana guitarist
and songwriter cited a line from Young’s 1979 songtext with Crazy Horse, “My My,
Hey Hey,” in his suicide note.

Cobain shared Young’s distaste for rock commercialism, appearing on the cover of
Rolling Stone in a T-shirt reading “CORPORATE MAGAZINES STTLL SUCK,” but he
ultimately came to realize and understand the reality that to play in a band, to sell music,
was his profession—and therefore his sole source of income. Although often constructed
by the music press as a poetic soul tortured by his reification at the hands of a capitalist
rock industry, this journalistic form of valorization-through-martyrdom is built of the
same need for a rational explanation that follows any suicide. What’s more, such an
explanation goes against ample evidence that Cobain knew exactly what he was getting
into when he formed Nirvana and brought the band’s music to the attention of Seattle’s

independent source of punk/ grunge marketing, Sub Pop Records—a label described in

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1995 by its co-founder, Bruce Pavitt, as “essentially one big prank. We’ve always
pretended we were something we weren’t. Now that we’re huge and have a lot of money,
we’re trying to pretend that we’re small and indie9 and have street credIO” (Hype).

Indeed, an early draft of the band biography that Cobain wrote for Nirvana’s first Sub
Pop single reveals a young musician as knowing and self-aware as his promotors at that
label, but one who is both repelled by and attracted to the business side of music:

Nirvana sees the underground music SEEN as becoming stagnant and more
accessible towards commercialism and major-label interests. Does Nirvana
want to change this? No way! We want to cash in and suck butt up to the
bigwigs in hopes that we too can get high and fuck wax figure hot babes
who will be required to have a certified AIDS test two weeks prior to the
day of handing out backstage passes. Soon we will need chick spray
repellent. Soon we will be coming to your town and asking if we can stay
at your house and use your stove. Soon we will do encores of “Gloria”
and “Louie Louie” at benefit concerts with all our celebrity friends.
(Document displayed in Azerrad 108)

Moreover, Cobain’s first draft describes Nirvana—in contrast to the second-coming-of-
Christ adulation bestowed by the rock press alter the group’s first major-label release—as
a band that “sounds like Black Sabbath playing The Knack, Black Flag, Led Zeppelin, and
the Stooges, with a pinch of Bay City Rollers”; so much for any claims to originality.

But behind the clear sarcasm in these statements is also a sense of humor about the whole
impending journey toward rock stardom, the kind of yes-I-know-corruption-is-easy-but-
I’ll-be-okay self-awareness that Joe Walsh had put into songtext many years earlier: “ I
have a mansion, forget the price / Ain't never been there, they tell me it's nice/ I live in
hotels, tear out the walls / I have accountants who pay for it all . . . / It's tough to handle

this fortune and fame / Everybody's so different, I haven't changed.”

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But Cobain’s nod-and-wink writing took place in 1988, still three years away
from the media’s blitzkrieg assault on Seattle as the Hottest Music Scene On The Planet,
an assault that, as shown in the grunge documentary H ype.’, causes Eddie Vedder to
lament of the so-called Seattle Sound: “It’s so profitable—~—it’s so profitable-and they
[commercial interests] just keep taking, and taking, and taking”-——here he grits his
teeth—“they just don ’t know how to restrain themselves!” In this lament Vedder is
joined by Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, explaining that the music

was our thing, and then all of a sudden it belonged to people who we never
thought we were sharing our music with, like mainstream periodicals and
fashion magazines. And you start realizing there’s a whole lot of people
out there making money by selling the idea of a ‘Seattle Scene,’ or ‘grunge,’
or whatever. But that’s what makes pop culture so significant to all the
little consumers out there. They have no interest in history or

economics. . .they’re interested more in gossip, the nature of celebrity.
And that’s not at all encouraging, to find out that you participate in that
society, one way or another.

As Hype! shows rather painfully, Seattle’s bar- and club-based music scene
quickly became a surrealistic zoo after the early successes of Alice in Chains, Screaming
Trees, and especially Nirvana in 1991. When the pressure built to bursting, some
involved in the city’s besieged music business began to fightback; Megan Jasper, a
secretary contacted by The New York Times for an article which that esteemed newspaper
would go on to print on the front page of an inner section under the title “The Lexicon of
Grunge,” invented completely bogus terms and definitions for the inquiring reporter’s
eager and unknowing note-taking, a move she justifies by saying that “[i]f they’re lame
enough to try to scrutinize this totally stupid thing, then why not fuck with them?”
(Hype). The words grunge and Seattle were pasted into the headlines of virtually every

entertainment-oriented publication in the world, with joumalistically-concocted

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phenomena like the so-called “grunge look” flannel shirts, long johns, stocking caps, and
other everyday necessities for staying warm in the northwest comer of Washington
State—suddenly co-opted for display in Vanity Fair and for mall consumption by kids in
Phoenix and Houston where “cold” meant 70 degrees. And even the “real” grunge people,
the sons and daughters of loggers and construction workers whose everyday clothing had
suddenly become a must-have commodity, the band members whose best claim to
authenticity was that they wore the same clothes on stage that they wore at home,
believing with Scott Ian of Anthrax that “[b]ecause we have no image and because we go
onstage in our jeans and T-shirts, people relate to us better” (qtd. in Eddy 227), were to
at least one rock veteran only imitators themselves. As Kent writes:

[A] whole new generation had. . . started dressing exactly like Neil Young
in flannel shirts and rancid old jeans festooned with patches and playing
stoned, willfirlly eccentric electric rock ’n roll music. . . . They called their
stuff ‘grunge,’ but it sure sounded like Neil Young to Neil Young. He
caught some of these young cats on MTV. . . and he quietly marveled at
the unavoidable fact that, after thirty years as the most carelessly dressed
musician in rock ’n roll, his stumble-bum’s wardrobe suddenly made

him a major fashion symbol. . . . ‘I only hope they don’t take my old
flannel shirts after I die and stick ’em behind glass in some Hard Rock
Cafe,’ Young remarked. (334)

Working at the fore of this incredibly noisy, at times ridiculous, and often
frustrating cultural backdrop was Kurt Cobain, very much caught up in a still-compelling
Romantic ideology of the pure expression of uncorrupted truth, of an honest and sincere
self, untouched by the corrosive powers of establishment structures, and at the same time
very much a product of the liberal humanist tradition that compels individuals to not only
identify their uniquely authentic and original qualities but to nurture them as uniquely

their own qualities, self-made, self-chosen, self-driven. Surely many of his experiences

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toward the end of his life, in both his private and public lives, in both his emotional and
physical states of being, hurt badly enough to help drive him toward his irrational
decision to end that life and that pain, but Cobain also came out of a rock tradition in
which aspiring groups and individual musicians can literally see no alternative to a
successfirl rock-oriented life—by whatever measurement of success, from incredible
riches to simply a decent meal each evening. Dozens of such aspirants, asked by
Penelope Spheeris in her documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part I! what
they will do if they “don’t make it,” reply without exception: “But I will.” The question
is therefore moot—but it is also impossible to address since no space has ever been made
for it in the respondents’ ideologies. All reality has been fused around its opposite,
making the specter of failure something that cannot possibly exist. Pressed harder by
Spheeris to nonetheless consider alternatives, some of the interview subjects finally name
two: abject poverty, or death. “Yeah,” sings Michael Stipe in “Let Me In,” R.E.M.’s
tribute to Cobain, “all those stars drip down like butter, and promises are sweet. We hold
out our pans with our hands to catch them; we eat them up, drink them up, up—up—
up.” But that lofty place is the site where, in the oft-quoted words of Marx, “all that is
solid melts into air.” Saint-Preux, a novelistic character acting as literary representative
for his author, the founding Romantic philosopher Rousseau, describes the experience in
this way:

I’m beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life
plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my
eyes, I’m getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that
holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I
forget what I am and who I belong to. (Qtd. in Berman 18)

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Echoes of these words, and of the determining Romanticism still very much alive
and well within not only rock culture but its larger host cultures as well, nearly leap off
the pages of Cobain’s suicide note. Self-murder, as his farewell letter suggests, has
become for the musician the only move possible to reclaim his authenticity from the
unnamed but still-identifiable forces that have intoxicated him, dizzied him, and taken
charge of him; moreover, and most tragically, a shotgun to the head has become the only
way he can possibly atone for his self-perceived “crime” of alienation. Cobain’s note,
only lightly edited but italicized to highlight relevant passages, reads as follows:

Speaking from the tongue of an experienced simpleton who obviously
would rather be an emasculated, infantile camplainee, this note should be
pretty easy to understand. All the warnings from the Punk Rock 101
courses over the years, since my first introduction to the, shall we say,
ethics involved with independence and the embracement of your
community, have proven to be very true. I haven 't felt the excitement of
listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for
too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For
example when we're backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of
the crowd begins, it doesn't aflect me the way in which it did for Freddie
MercuryH who seemed to relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.
Which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is 1 can 't fool
[anyone]. . . . The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by
faking it and pretending as if I 'm having 100 % fun. Sometimes I feel as if
I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage. I've tried
everything within my power to appreciate it, and I do. God, believe me I
do, but it's not enough. I appreciate the fact that I and [Nirvana] have
affected and entertained a lot of people. I must be one of those narcissists
who only appreciate things when they're alone. I'm too sensitive. I need
to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm 1 once had as a child.
On our last three tours I've had a much better appreciation for all the
people I've known personally and as fans of our music, but I still can '1 get
over the frustration, the guilt and empathy I have for everyone. There's
good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much. So much that it
makes me feel too fucking sad. The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative,
Pisces-Jesus man. Why don 't [I ] just enjoy it? I don't know. I have a
goddess of a wife. . . and a daughter who reminds me too much of what I

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used to be. Full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because
everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the
point to where I can barely function. I can't stand the thought of Frances
becoming the miserable, self-destructive death rocker that I 've become.

I have it good—~very good—and I'm grateful, but since the age of seven
I've become hateful towards all humans in general. Only because it seems
so easy for people to get along, and to have empathy. Empathy! Only
because I love and feel for people too much I guess. Thank you all from
the pit of my burning nauseous stomachI 2 for your letters and concern
during the past years. I 'm too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don ’t
have the passion anymore so remember, it’s better to burn out tlum to fade
away. Peace, love, empathy.

- Kur‘l' Cobalt) (Azzerad 347-49)l3

One popular conception of artists that has remained with us since the Romantic
period, Trilling has written (and critiqued), shows “creative people as being, in the very
nature of their calling, alienated . . . or at least isolated beings” (“Talking” 143). Cobain,
although he clearly addresses a multiple audience here (his wife, the industry, his fans,
and less directly, his daughter) is a writer in isolation just as he has become a musician
feeling isolated from the world and work around him. Trilling’s account goes on to
describe artists who “must always aim at originality, even uniqueness; what they make
must be different from what is made by any other artist. That is one reason why they
conceive of their life histories as being a long experience of misunderstanding and

rejection.” These issues are addressed by Cobain only obliquely by way of the “warnings

 

from Punk Rock 101” a screw-everybody-else-and-rock-your-way aesthetic that he saw
as maintainable throughout his stage of unsigned-band “independence” (Azerrad, var.) but
which subsequently fell apart following the implicitly un“ethical . . . embracement” that
his independence received from a “community” of ambiguous origin, although one that

certainly included, if not fans directly, then at least the Sub Pop and Geffen labels along

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with the mainstream press. But what is perhaps the most jarring discovery to be made in
reading Trilling’s decades-old writings on authenticity comes when the noted critic details
the “violent meanings” in the ontology of the word, authentic: “A uthenteo: to have full
power over; also, to commit a murder. Authentes: not only a master and doer, but also a
perpetrator, a murderer, even a self-m urderer, a suicide” (Sincerity 131). In connection
with these ontological histories, Trilling writes in completely uncritical fashion:

[We forget] how much violence there [is] in art’s creative will, how
ruthless an act [is] required to assert autonomy in a culture schooled in
duty and in obedience to peremptory and absolute law, and how extreme
an exercise of personal will [is] needed to overcome the sentiment of non-
being. . . . Surely something not less than violent [is] needed to startle
[the] dull pain of the social world and make it move and live, to retrieve the
human spirit from its acquiescence in non-being. (131-2)

Of course, I am not suggesting that Cobain, like his grunge colleague Eddie Vedder, hoped
to “startle the dull pain” of the physical “social world” around him or to heed Vedder’s
warning that if Seattle’s music “doesn’t make some kind of change, some kind of
difference. . . if this group of musicians finally gets to the forefront, and nothing comes
of it, that would be [a] tragedy” (Hype). Rather, the dullness he experienced was located
within himself, in the spiritual social world, if you will, and because of its presence he
could no longer retrieve his formerly vital spirit from its now-lethal state of “non-being.”
But beyond the issues behind the immense sadness, more significant to the discussion
here is the manner in which Cobain’s farewell message is filled with claims regarding not
only his inauthenticity—-his loss of the determining qualities valued in rock discourses
-—but also his still-valid authenticity—his lingering ability to see those values as
important and to recognize their loss; at times these presentations of contrasting yet

complementary sentiments take place within the same statement, as I’ll indicate here with

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markers for claims of inauthenticity as (I), of authenticity as (A), and of both/and as (I/A),

followed by a bracketed explanation:

(I) I haven 't felt the excitement oflistening to as well as creating music along with
reading and writing for too many years now. (A) I feel guilty beyond words about these
things. (I/A) [Performing] doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury
[inauthentic because of the loss of perfonnance’s felt impact; authentic because of the
recognition of another perfonner’s correct response to performance]. (A) I can 't fool
[anyone]. . . . The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and
pretending as if I 'm having 100 % fun. (I) I must be one of those narcissists. (A) I ’m too
sensitive. (l/A) I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm I once had as
a child [inauthentic because of the need for “numbness” (most likely through a widely-
publicized heroin addiction and other substance abuse); authentic because of a still-clear
recollection of earlier “enthusiasm”]. (A) I 've [recently] had a much better appreciation
for... people, but I still can 't get over thefi'ustration, the guilt and empathy. I simply love
people too much. (I) The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces-Jesus man. Why
don't [I I just enjoy it? (I) [My] daughter. . . reminds me. . . of what I used to be. [I don’t
want her to become] the miserable, self-destructive death rocker that I 've become.

(A) I have it good—very good —and I 'm grateful. I love and feel for people too much I
guess. (I) I 'm too much of an erratic, moody baby! (I) I don 't have the passion
anymore. And as for the last line of the text, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,”
Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad suggests that making this lyrical nod to Neil Young’s
germinal prom-grunge songtext from 1979 was a “sarcastic way of showing that [Cobain]

knew exactly how his death would look” (354): like a flashy, stupid move by a gifted,

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stupid man who wanted to join Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison in live-fast-die-young rock
mythology. Neil Young’s songtext, which also dragged the Sex Pistols into the Seattle
tragedy with its line, “The king is gone, but he’s not forgotten; this is the story of
Johnny Rotten,” also told another story: “It’s out of the blue and into the black / They
give you this, but you pay for that / And once you’re gone, you can never come back.” It
was a cautionary tale that Cobain, the romantic, took to heart.

Nearly six years after his death, Cobain’s image continued to be appropriated by
commercial interests such as Rolling Stone, which in its May 13, 1999 issue offered the
late musician up to the reading public as that magazine’s “Artist of the Decade,” his
noisy, resistant virtues extolled by the venerable Greil Marcus who in the cover article
makes no mention of any of the numerous stresses and conflicts, both personal and
professional, that Cobain endured as he neared the end of his life, but who does concoct a
clever label for an ailment that Nirvana, as a whole, allegedly suffered—something Marcus
calls the “folk virus,” defined as “the suspicion that if what you do is accepted by a mass
audience, then it must be either devoid of content or a sellout, and you yourself the
enemy you mean to destroy” (“Cobain” 47). And the victim-blaming continues as
Marcus goes on to note that “the band made great drama even out of something as puerile
as this,” apparently operating under the assumption that no one will remember how
another primary actor in the same drama was, during its overheated coverage of the brief
grunge era, a magazine called Rolling Stone. But no matter, since the grunge/altemative
movement, like Kurt Cobain, is gone now, its own death announcement first printed in
the pages of The New York Times in December 1996. (Note to conspiracy theorists:
There is no evidence that the “Gray Lady” killed the genre and movement in retaliation

for that embarrassing “Lexicon Of Grunge” piece.) Thomas Frank, writing in The Nation,

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describes how a simultaneous attack from both the Times and Time magazine portrayed
grunge as suffering from “a full-blown authenticity crisis, [having] lost its ability to
conjure up that basic cultural commodity without which the lifestyle trade grinds to a
halt.” While the Times offered advice for remedying the situation, Time picked away at
the fact that grunge, like Seger and Ozzy, was being used to sell cars, and worse, that
newer bands were “devaluing” the genre and “robbing [it] of even the illusion of sincerity”
(Parales, qtd. in Frank). In response to this resurgence of mayhem surrounding the music
that had already lived through such stuff once before, Frank writes that the rebuke handed
to grunge! alternative by these two Establishment icons—themselves the kinds of entities
that the Seattle-bom discourse was “supposed to” itself rebuke—constituted “a cultural
contradiction of staggering arrogance, a bit of I ’ll-have-it-both-ways-at-once-thank-you
presumption that comes closer than anything. . .to defining the spirit of this corporate-
hegemonic age.” And with this we arrive at Eagleton, arguing in The Ideology of the

Aesthetic that

it is no longer possible to pretend, given the transition from market to
monopoly capitalism, that the old vigorously individualist ego, the self-
determining subject of classical liberal thought, is any longer an adequate
model for the subject’s new experience of itself under these altered social
conditions. The modern subject. . . is less the sharply individuated source
of its own actions than an obedient function of some deeper controlling
structure, which now appears more and more to be doing its thinking and
acting for it. (316)

Of Services, Talent, Payments, and Power

Flying in the face of Eagleton’s compelling argument, many of the primary
discourse producers within rock strive nonetheless, through their lyrical and perfonnative

ideologies, to situate themselves as counter to any such obedience, as opposed to the

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presumptions of corporate/monopolist hegemony, as struggling to stay clear ofdirect
involvement in neither commerce nor success. For consumers and critics observing the
verbal manifestations of this stance, the opposition often seems contradictory, even
ludicrous. Peter Wicke, in his Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics, and Sociology, provides
useful insight into understanding the oppositional stance and the struggles behind it by
citing the late Frank Zappa’s claim that rock “is original, composed by the pe0ple who
perform it, created by them—even if they have to fight the record companies to do it—so
that is really a creative action and not a commercial pile of shit thrown together by
business people” (qtd. in 93). For Wicke, Zappa’s statement created a “sharp dividing
line. . . between rock music, released from every suspicion of commercial motivation, and
the usual chart-style pop music,” but the nature of this division was such that rockers
subscribing to the ideology expressed by Zappa only “distanced themselves from their
real activity as musicians” (93). In a lengthy passage, Wicke explains and defines the
“real activity” being denied:

Rock musicians earn their living by selling a service, their ability to make
music. . . . [They] can only offer their abilities; the purchasing decision
rests with the music industry. This particular socio-economic process
leads musicians to develop a particular perspective from which they
consider themselves and the whole process of rock production and
distribution. . . . Although in an economic sense musicians are only service
operators for record companies, agents, and tour promoters, the particular
nature of the services they perform demands that this service should be
related to a quite different target group from the one which actually claims
the service and pays for it. In terms of earning a living, musical
performance is an economic relationship between musicians and the music
industry, but in terms of the real nature of music it is a relationship
between musicians and their audiences. Thus, what musicians sell to the
industry is not merely their musical abilities, but those abilities in relation
to the particular audiences for whom the music is intended. This allows
musicians to occupy a position in which they represent the audience to the

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industry, [and] this relationship reflects the musicians’ personal
conceptions, ideals, and values as those of their fans, indeed as those of
young people in general. . . . The key to the ideology of rock lies in these
thought patterns” (95).

What can be understood through Wicke’s careful articulation is that rockers and the
discourses they produce are not merely commodities to be traded for cash, as the most
cynical critiques of rock production and consumption would have it, but rather that they
represent the full rhetoricity of the discourses. The messenger, the message, and its
audience are so interconnected in Wicke’s definition that it causes what he appears to
view as an ultimate confusion by the messengers, but which in another view might
indicate a more overt and even critical awareness by those same individuals that the
overriding contexts of a songtext sent into commercial action are so intricately constructed
and entwined that commerce becomes the least of a songtext’s roles or functions. While
such an awareness is instantly downplayed due to the long history of resistance so often
appearing as a merely ornamental trope in rock’s rhetoric, the extreme emotions generated
by “mere” commodification-and—complicity models of interrogating the “non-artistic”
aspects of rock production are at times so intense that dismissal itself ought to be
questioned. For Edward Said, “musical performance. . . is the central and most socially
stressed musical experience in modern Western society, but it is both a private musical
experience for performer and listener, and a public experience too. The two experiences
are interdependent and overlap with each other” (12). The key to approaching the
discourse, then, becomes “understand[ing] the connection between the two” and
examining not only the connection, but also the ways by which it is interpreted. Said
suggests that the “more interesting” of possible interpretive models would help to

illuminate “the enabling conditions of performance and [how] their connection with the

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sociocultural sphere can be seen as a coherent part of the whole experience.” Thus, for
instance, hearing Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8 announcing, “I don’t ever want to let go of
my righteous indignation, because I feel like that is what fuels me” (qtd. in Juno 66) can
become less a case for exploring the musician’s entanglement in an ancient notion of anger
mysteriously but vitally feeding creativity, and instead an example of the perforrner’s
awareness that one’s active choices help to determine the limits of the role and reception
of agency in the rhetorical interchange between musician, performance, and audience. As
Robert Palmer has argued, the choices made in rock have been manifested by “different
attitudes toward the organization of sound and rhythm, different ideas concerning the
nature of the song.” Accordingly, the “distance” between current songforrns and their
“pre-rock norms cannot be explained by advances in musical instruments and recording
technology alone” because, for Palmer, “these sounds proceed from what amounts to a
different tradition. . . . Generation after generation, musicians have made artistic choices,
opting for the values of what we might call the rock and roll tradition over those of the
popular tradition that preceded it” (9).

Problems of authenticity may lie in the conception of this “rock tradition” which
Palmer names, since the tradition carries its own rules for the communication that will be
generated under the rock label and millions of consumer-theorists stand ready to judge a
performer’s message as art or fluff, rock or pop, worthy or worthless. The available
categories and classifications for responses in the consumer-theorist’s domain extend as
far as those individuals maintain their interest in the exchange; for performers, then,
resistance and its accompanying desire for authenticity may be seen as a result of the
vast number of impasses set before them after each choice is made. In Breedlove’s

perception, for instance, the source of intense counter-resistance to her own desires to

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align her openly lesbian, and thus instantly othered, band with fellow musicians and
political groups who support Tribe 8’s strongly feminist creeds and pedagogical aims is
the rock press:

[T]he structure that is trying to control us is going to constantly try and
drive schisms between us. In our case, they’re going to do their best
through media hype and commodification. The media have a lot of power
in representing who Tribe 8 is, and that’s why we’re paranoid. They can
manipulate us. Our efforts to ally ourselves with other groups are going to
be constantly fucked with by the mainstream media, who are going to try
to keep us separated” (qtd in Juno 67).

When Breedlove has before her ample evidence of her band’s being either ignored or else
fetishized as a mere curiosity, a critique of her statement along the lines of its “standard
rock rhetoric” becomes difficult. What appears to have happened, at least to an extent, is
that rock’s long history has worked against itself when the recurrence of such statements
has rendered each repetition gradually less compelling. And as a child of the cultural
revolution in the United States, rock in its middle age is held constantly in check by its
own childhood as the time when the majority of those statements were forged. Dylan
constructed the evil corporate “Masters of War” in a memorable songtext by that title,
and corporate/hegemonic/commercial involvement has been a moral and artistic affront
ever since. But what happens when a performer is genuinely outraged, frightened, or
disillusioned? If every utterance is only an ideological construct or a favored rhetorical
trope for these particular human beings in this particular industry, what are our own
critical motivations in shutting down their messages of disaffection by simply hauling out
the required responses, the tried-and-true forms of critique? “The ‘music industry’ is fat
and satisfied,” writes rock survivor Iggy Pop. “They can buy anything, and turn anyone

into a spiritual eunuch.” To which one is inclined to instantly answer, “Yeah, we’ve

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heard that one before. Aren’t you wealthy, famous, respected—set in life? Where’s my
basis for empatlrizing?” And this kind of uncritical response is itself perhaps even more
standard than the rock lament being addressed. What’s more, it is situated squarely,
simultaneously, on a pole of Puritanical and capitalist extremes through which the
messenger (a) has fallen prey to the wicked excess of wealth and (b) successfully attained
the enviable status of wealth. Surely there is a more productive way to frame a
considered response to the message and its contexts within the ongoing struggle by rock
messengers to preserve some semblance of agency in a discursive field so often situating
them as patients. For another rock survivor, Joan Jett, the struggle begins almost
immediately upon a group’s “arrival” on the rock scene:

A new band will come out, a song will get on the radio, the video will be
played, and all of a sudden—they’re the hot new band. Even though they
might want to go out and tour and become more well-known, they’re sort
of ripped from their community and their regular lives, shoved into this
limelight, just to wait for the next record of some other band to come out.
(Qtd in Juno 80)

Today cattle futures, tomorrow hog bellies; surely there is something like shock,
something like disappointment, something like bitterness after enough years have passed
and a discursive form once so magically powerful to a dreaming adolescent has become no
more than a product fighting for shelf space in the highly competitive music market. In
the rock film Velvet Goldmine. the Iggy Pop character, Curt Wild, sums up the experience
with a simple admission: “We wanted to change the world. All we changed was
ourselves.” Alice Cooper, early in his career, put into songtext the discursive
methodology required to cope with Wild’s realization: “I thought this was living, but
you can’t ever tell / I’m trying to get away from that success smell / I’m caught in a

dream——so what? I don’t know what I’m goin’ through / I’m right in between, so I’ll just

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play along with you.” But these paradigms for experiencing and narrating the process of
involvement with rock’s alienating tendencies, are themselves choices. A rhetoric of
reification, of naming the reifying processes which “divide” artists from their art, is part
of the the baggage of music’s role in human history as an art form different from all other
kinds of production-based enterprises, as a product above and beyond basic materiality,
as something uniquely, innately wonderful and mysterious. But as Williams has
explained, art is also one of the most extensively mediated forms of social expression (98).
In the end, then, every claim of authenticity, or its “inauthentic” counterpart, must be
filtered through an understanding of those mediation processes to see how rock practices
need not remain trapped within a fixed—and fixing—discourse of limiting terminology to
define the extent to which rock, and rockers, may operate. A turn to social and political
awareness can open many of the discursive spaces previously closed, and one such turn

becomes my focus in the next chapter.

flfls‘l

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CROSSROADS:

History at the Impending Merger Between Rock and Rap

Mister Charlie said, “Lookit here, boy”—the boy just kept on pointin’ back—

He said, “If you can’t talk about it, then just sing it.”

So the boy sang: ‘Oh. Mister Charlie. do you know your rollin’ mill is bumin’ down?’
- Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Mister Charlie” (version recorded 1969)

Listen for the lessons that I’m saying inside music / That the critics is blasting me for
They’ll never care, for the brothers and sisters / Now across the country has us up for the war
We got to demonstrate. come on now: Turn it up! Bring the noise!

- Public Enemy, “Bring the Noise,” 1987

Fuck these magazines leadin' hip-hop off course! Ya print about black mayors, black senators—
Why you ain't got no black editors? Every time I do a interview in Rolling Stone,
They sellin' me a writer that look like he's home alone. Ignorant to the culture and the microphone.
This has got to stop. . . . You don‘t understand why you're publicly banned
Until you recognize the writing skills of a black man—black editor. All of us ain't thuggin’,
Gossipin’ over who's homosexual—some of us are black intellectuals up in Harlem world.
You can't get with me, so now, in midtown, you wanna stop and talk with me? Bitch-ass journalist.
Is this your fake hip-hop publication? You can burn in this.

- KRS-One, “Bulworth (They Talk About It While We Live It),” 1999

A lyrical progression takes place in the three samples above: From a veiled early-
blues allegory about a stuttering black child who, unable to speak in a way that will be
understood and validated as important, puts into songtext his warning to the ubiquitous
“Mister Charlie”—code for the white boss man—that his entire wealth- and power-
generating system is about to go up in flames, to a typical 19805 rap blend of self-
referential (and empowering) lyrics with still-tenuous references to a vaguely-defined war,
demonstration, and “noise,” and finally to a not-at-all ambiguous rant against the
mainstream periodicals (among which, in the unabridged lyric, are Spin, Details, and the
rap-oriented The Source in addition to Rolling Stone) that have, for KRS-One,

misrepresented rap music and hip-hop culture. On their faces, these lyrical changes

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reflect a growth in their respective writers’ confidence to challenge hegemonic systems
and structures, but more than just this, they also reflect the increasing power that black
musicians have forged with their songtexts over a very short span of years at the end of
the 20th century. In the 19605, audiences of both Afiican and European descent tuned in
to early forms of sociopolitical criticism from Motown acts like The Temptations,
Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, but when the “Motown Sound” gave way to disco in
the 705 and the punk movement arrived as a backlash against both disco and art rock, the
previous decade’s tentative form of racial “harmony” in the form of shared musical
appreciation gave way to a gradual division. And as the gold-chain-and-white-powder era
of disco danced its way to a close at the end of the 19705, a new discursive practice was
taking shape in the inner city: A musical form of record-“scratching,” beat-keeping, and
fast talking known in the ’hoods of New York as “hip-hop” was being solidified into
what would become the single most influential musical genre of the 19905. Fine
distinctions are made (and enforced) by the music’s fans between hip-hop to mean the
culture behind the beats and rap to mean the creation and delivery of vocal stylings—but
very often both the genre and the culture. it created are referred to by all but the most
strident terminology purist and genre divisionist simultaneously and interchangeably as
both hip-hop and rap. To call it a musical “genre” is grossly inaccurate; the music has
branched into a wide array of discursive styles, philosophies, and purposes that
constitute the leading edges of contemporary popular musical discourses just as the
songtexts of white groups from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Led Zeppelin once did in
the Sixties. My focus in this chapter is an examination of both the discursive forms of

rap itself and the current moves being made by white musicians to re-enact the 19SOs-era

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appropriation of African American musical discourse by fusing rap with white hard rock
and heavy metal.

F rith has noted that “Each moment in rock history fused moral and aesthetic
judgements: rock ’n roll, rhythm and blues, and punk were all, in their turn, experienced
as more truthful than the pop forms they disrupted” (A rt 266), and this has been the case
with rap. Militant rappers from the gangsta/thuggin’ or just “conscious”/message schools
deliver rhymes of revolution, crisis, aggression, and violence that—Tipper Gore’s PMRC
to the contrary——-defy easy moralistic response simply because the “obscenity” of the
songtexts ofien lies not in their profanity or thematic revulsion, but rather in the tragedy
expressed within contexts of a differing form of catastrophe. These contexts spring from
the defacto chained-below-decks-and-kept-hidden enslavement created by a
misrepresented or unrepresented black culture in white America, from the dire nature of
inner city life and its maddening stasis, from the endless struggles of a black existence
within a white hegemony that, in ways ranging from the mildly ideological to the severely
penological, strives daily to keep the “savages” in their “rightful place.” With all of this,
it might seem more than a little curious that the discursive forms of rap have, like the
Motown songtexts of the 19605, once again crossed racial lines and become appealing to
both white and black audiences who share a deep admiration and respect for the
discourse. As Judith Hanna has written:

Rap is surely not at odds with the experience of many people, particularly
in the inner cities. Others, including youth of the upper classes, often
admire its attack on the establishment and identify with its rebellious
qualities opposing mainstream life. . . . [Y]outh identify with performers
as outrageous and provocative, as they fantasize themselves to be. (190)

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Because of this appeal, rap has itself been sampled/interpo(pel)lated by musicians
better known for their more traditional approaches to rock songtexts. Early on, hard-
edged groups such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, and Anthrax took a shine to
the form for its “outrageous and provocative” braggadocio, and the results were songtexts
such as Anthrax’s “I’m the Man,” in which the band proudly told listeners that, “[l]ike
Ernest and Julio, before its time / Seven years later [this song’s] holding up fine. . . / We
stretched our boundaries, we opened the door / That no one [had] attempted before.”
Now, just a few years later, groups including Kom, Limp Bizkit, Blink 182, Barenaked
Ladies, and Rage Against the Machine have forged from both metal and hip-hop a sound
that—although Rolling Stone has begun to call it “Metal Rap,” Newsweek has labeled it
“Rock ‘n’ Rap,” The Source has noted it as “Hip Rock,” and my local record boutique
places it in a special bin under the category of “Extreme”—-is in practice referred to as
none of these. No labels come into play at all; instead, the sound has simply become
synonymous with its performing group—if I tell you I listen to Korn, Bizkit, and/or
Rage, then you instantly know what kind of sound I’m into. To address phenomena like
this one, Gene Bluestein has, in his study of folklore, borrowed the term “syncretism”
from linguistics—“the fusion into one of two or more originally different inflectional
forms” (5)——altering it slightly to mean “a development in which strong elements in two
or more cultures combine to create a new and different product in which none is
overwhelmed” (2). And it might seem in at least one way fitting that rap and metal have
begun to bond in this fashion, since both forms have (as my local music peddler’s
categorization suggests) taken more traditional conceptions and definitions of music to an

’

in rap’s case, lyrics have clear precedence over individual notes, although a

 

“extreme’

strong and sometimes nearly overpowering bass or keyboard riff keeps circling around in

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the background; in the case of metal, lyrics can at times be completely obscured by the
riffs and chords at the foreground, rendering vox parallel with instrumentum. To merge
the forms, then, lyric and accompaniment come together to share a common foreground in
a loud postmodern pastiche.

But metallized forms of rap remain by nature hybrids: The origin of hip-hop is
centered around the same kind of youthful rebellion against standard musicianship that
the punk movement championed around the same time. While punk was pushing the
three-chord Chuck Berry riff to its variational limit, hip-hop deejays listened for a great
note or series of notes (the “breaks” in a song’s arrangement), sampled the sound through
a combination of turntables and mixing boards, and blended it with others to form a usable
backbeat for the general entertainment of a neighborhood audience and the growing
reputation of the mixer. The backbeat in turn could be sped up, slowed down, or
staccatoed by the deejay’s “scratching” the record on the turntable. This whole process,
again, mirrored Dada in its non-musicality—or better, its non-musical “purity” by
conventional musicological standards—and for the kids looking for a new musical form, it
was perfect. What better form of rebellion against bloated dinosaur bands like Yes,
Queen, and even the Rolling Stones than music that required no musicians—by
conventional/traditional definitions—to play it? “Rap embodies and reproduces perfect
postmodern themes,” writes James Lull, since its

Lyrics are sounds. Segues match grooves and beats, not words. . . .
Melodies disappear. Deejays make music [as opposed to simply playing
it]. Popular music today may be the perfect soundtrack for life at the end
of the twentieth century—a choreography of musical and cultural
impermanence that matches the quickening pace and uncertainty of the
times. (1 l)

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These ideas of impennanence and uncertainty take audible shape in songtexts such as
Naughty by Nature’s “OPP.” and its sampling of a long, intact passage from the Jackson
Five’s much earlier “ABC,” including a young Michael Jackson singing “Come on baby,
come on, let me show you what it’s all about”—thus placing little Mikey, pre-sparkle
glove, pre-cosmetic surgery, wholesome child star of the 19605, into a story about the
unethical theft of “other people’s pussy” (the “CPR” of the songtext’s title) in the
19905. About this technological ability to rewrite history by simply cutting and pasting
electronically, Walter Benjamin has written that “technical reproduction can put the copy
of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself” (4), and
like the newly-located Michael Jackson, the 19605 ensemble Sly and the Family Stone are
transported, although to a differing end, by Arrested Development’s total remixing of that
group’s bass-heavy, shouted-vocal party anthem of the Woodstock era, “Everyday
People,” into a light, reggae-flavored 19905 songtext titled “People Everyday.” In this
case, the remix and consequent relocation was a matter of gradually making the earlier
version fade and then disappear as even listeners who clearly recalled the older work
gradually lost the memory under the power and contemporary appeal of the new one.

For Grossberg, the complex nature of musical life within postmodernity is such
that “the relationship between musicians, music, fans, and history is constructed around
an increasingly common celebration and production of energy in the midst of a global
‘blackout”’ (“Search” 175). Although both the celebratory and the energizing may have
been musical constants throughout history, Grossberg’s conception of a current
“blackout” is echoed by Erica Hunter, one of my former first-year writing students who

later went on to become a collaborator in an early publication venture:

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Students bom after 1972 have not had any social events of huge impor-
tance to identify with—no racial integration struggles, no Vietnam war (the
quick and easily-forgotten Desert Storm barely counts as a “war”), no
presidential assassinations. . . . [Finding out] about another generation’s
conflicts and conquests may give us something to think about, but not to
identify with and savor. Contemporary works, more relevant to our lives,
our world, and our conflicts, provide us with the opportunity to identify
ourselves and our places in the narratives. (J uchartz and Hunter 77)

By this young consumer/producer’s argument, an old songtext like, say, the Ronettes’
“Soldier Baby of Mine” may still be enjoyed by contemporary youth for its value as an
amusing antiquity, but it won’t be “identified with and savored” simply because so many
present-day listeners see the predominantly casualty-free wars fought by the present-day
version of smart-bomb soldiers—ventures like the afiemoon invasion of Grenada,
Operation Just Cause in Panama (named, by my students who served in it, as “Operation
Just Because”), Desert Storm and its sequel, Desert Fox, and the prolonged multinational
fly-overs in Kosovo—as the “quick and easily forgotten” kinds of engagements Hunter
mentions. Most problematic in this particular argument is its preclusion of the
possibility that the songtext can work against the historical amnesia and generational
displacement that together block all memory of the catchy Ronettes number having been
written and performed at a time when US. “soldier babies” were “only” “advising” Ngo
Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese troops in methods for their self-defense—“advice” that
would go on to claim nearly 60,000 American lives and more than half a million more for
the NVA.”

The songtexts of rap, in contrast, enjoy a more enhanced continuity of cultural
relevance, since the spoken and rhymed word, like the written text, shapes a narrative
whose form is substantially different from that of the sung lyric, not as easily dated as

sung textforms since the vocal stylings share a consistency of style (even within differing

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rap genres) and the backing tracks, borrowed (as they often are) from all periods and all
genres, defy easy identification with a specific era. This allows rap a significant increase
in longevity of relevance that other genres in rock’s discourses cannot share, in turn
allowing rappers a longer span of influence in narrating often cutting observations about
the society and cultures around them. As Lull notes, the US. “has had a rich history of
music as an agent of organized resistance to many forms of oppression” (5-6)——examples
here would include “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Roll, Jordon, Roll” informed by
slavery, “Bread and Roses” (1912) and “Joe Hill” (1936) by labor abuse, “How Can a
Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” (1929) and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

( 1932) by poverty, and any of a hundred Vietnam-era protest songs by war. Although
nearly all of these issues have been gradually dimmed by the unfocused “blackout”
Grossberg mentions, the dimming in this case is the result of a long series of what I’ll call
“not-changes” (credit to Faulkner and his way of dealing with opposites) in which, for
example, starving people are still not fed, inner-city education is still not improving,
entry-level blue collar wages are still not going up, and politicians remain unconcerned by
the everyday struggles of their constituents. While more recent songtexts like James
Taylor’s “Millworker” and Springsteen’s “Youngstown” have updated the issue of labor
abuse to address its current form as laborer anonymity and thus commodity as disposable
debits to be dropped from the accounting ledger when profits slump, the issue still
lingers; ditto for the poverty addressed by Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,”
Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ in the City,” and more recently, Live’s “Waitress.” (I do not
include here the Elvis Presley/Mac Davis bathos-from—essentializing/racist-tripe vehicle,
“In the Ghetto,” for what are now obvious reasons.) And one other thing has not

changed: Children still become adolescents, and adolescents still rebel against the status

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quo. Since the status quo does nothing, it leaves itself wide open to the strong
probability that youth will do something in protest—like reject the traditional rock genres
their parents enjoyed and embrace a newer, louder, more objectionable form instead—

a move that Grossberg suggests fits right into “the heart of rock and roll, and the soul of
youth” (“Search” 175).

KRS-One, previously known in connection with Boogie Down Productions,
speculates that, as a result of exposure to rap, “kids are becoming more socially and
politically aware, I think. . . . Of course, music is not supposed to play that role” (qtd. in
Denski 39). But he makes this latter statement with great irony. The role music plays in
a young audience should be clearly understood by anyone able to recall his/her own youth
and replay the musical soundtrack that accompanied the progression of those years.
Chances are, there’s a songtext to frame a first kiss, another to surround first love, a
number of them to contextualize the teen ritual of driver’s training (on those horrible,
crackling AM stations that the instructors preferred, or the cars exclusively provided)—
along with the songtexts one turned to, during adolescence, for guidance and identification
in the narrative. Regardless of KRS-One’s tongue-in-cheek claim to the contrary, rap
does play a significant role in the process of “coming up” into socio-political awareness,
primarily because it really has no other choice. The Billboard Top 100 sales chart1 5 for
September 1989 showed rap releases making up 17 percent of the entries, with metal and
what could be called “standar ” rock making up 35. (The remaining percentages went to
country, light pop, Christian, film/stage soundtrack, and other musical genres.) By
September 1994, the figures had changed only slightly for rap, with 18 percent of sales,
but for metal and standard rock more significantly, down to 29 percent The charts at the

end of 1999 indicated 36 percent for rap, only 20 percent for metal and standard rock.

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But since the top-100 charts tend to reflect sales of current releases within the first 50
listings and of older, more archival works below that line, a reconfiguration of these
percentages to indicate the popular/commercial reception of new work moving quickly in

each of these years appears as follows:

M RAP SALES METAL / TAND K ALE
l989 7% 19%
1994 24% 20%
1999 40% 14%

To state the obvious: With the passing of the short-lived grunge era and its brief infusion
of energy for both rock and metal in the early decade, traditional-form rock songtexts are
no longer at the helm of the discourse. Seventy percent of rap’s consumers are white, and
in recognition of this fact, there seems to be a choice of responses: Dismiss rap as an
iceberg named Other and cling to rock as it goes the way of the Titanic in 1912; embrace
rap and leap away from rock so as not to get sucked into the whirlpool of its sinking; or
get busy with some engineering feats that can keep each of these floating behemoths on an
even keel. Not an equal course, mind you; such a project would be in no way intended
to gloss over the fact that rock has already slipped dangerously low into the waves, and
that it is slipping further with the passage of time. Rather, although standard rock and its
harder-edged siblings are unlikely to sink completely into the fathomless and
unrecoverable depths anytime soon, it is just as unlikely that the presence of rock—as we
know it now and remember it from before— will ever return to the same prominence it
once enjoyed. Therefore, perhaps the time has come to recognize hip-hop as rock, and to

acknowledge this previously-othered and highly racialized discourse genre as such. As

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Billy Joel has suggested in songtext: “Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the new sound,
honey—but it’s still rock and roll to me.”

No. Stop; rewind. This is exactly the kind of white-supremacist thinking and
hegemony-maintaining rhetoric that surrounded the mystification of black “jump blues”
into white “rock ’n roll” in the 19505. Moreover, this would be a move intended solely to
flatten out the many real differences between hip-hop and standard rock, and a way to
subsume rap’s hard-won cultural and commercial prominence under the banner of an
older, more established, and thus more respected discursive practice. And yet, in another
perspective, an argument holding that “rap is rock” could be constructed as a move
intended to include rap in the conversation as the more established practice loses
increasingly larger amounts of cultural capital each year, ultimately resulting in a situation
whereby, in the place of the noisy and always myriad signifying activities taking place in
what we now know and remember as rock, there would be, not rap to fill the empty
space, but only a huge and awkward silence resulting from a continued rhetoric of
Otherness. Like this: There used to be rock. Now there '5. . .not. To prevent such a
silence, this alternative viewpoint would claim, the rhetoric must shift to one of inclusion.
Therefore, since either line of argument has the potential quickly to become nettlesome, I
will try to offer a bit of rap history in order to suggest that, regardless of the final
determining outcome in ideological and future-historical perspective, in some ways rap
appears to have always-already followed side by side with several of the same
foundational practices and ideologies underlying rock’s discourses.

First, the charts. In trying to determine the precise causes for rap’s rise to record-
selling leadership, a number of critic/historians have credited MTV and two specific

programming decisions made by that network early in the hip-hop revolution: first, to

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put the video for Run-DMC’s rap version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” into heavy
rotation during the mid-19805, and second, to design a half—hour show titled (with

'9,

economy of creativity) “Yo! MTV Raps in which the network could showcase the
latest hip-hop stylings by the most recent challenger to Run-DMC’s heavyweight crown.
Every Saturday morning (the original, pre-expansion—and in retrospect, utterly
tokenistic—“Yol” time slot) some new group or, less frequently, solo performer would
climb into the ring and get knocked back out of it. And then Public Enemy arrived.
Although PE had been making records before Spike Lee included its late-805 songtext,
“Fight the Power,” in the soundtrack to his film Do the Right T hing, rappers Chuck D and
Flavor F lav assaulted a mass public consciousness for the first time during the movie’s
opening sequence. As the titles rolled and a then-unknown Rosie Perez performed a

street dance both provocative and threatening, Chuck D slapped at least two whole

generations of Americans across the face with the lyrics:

Elvis was a hero to most,

But he never meant shit to me, you see.

Straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain—
Motherfuck him and John Wayne.

These lyrics, wrote Elizabeth Wurtzel in The New Yorker, functioned to let Public Enemy
“dismiss two white pop icons as if they were just a couple of flies that needed to be
swatted”(113). And American youth loved it. To counter Mom’s collection of Elvis
LPs and Dad’s library of John Wayne videos, they made PE’s next two releases—F ear of
a Black Planet and The Empire Strikes Black-«gold records. In response, Chuck D
uttered the now-famous pronouncement that rap had become “black America’s CNN”

(echoed a decade later by Ras Kass’s less polite definition of rap as “the Ni gga News”)

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and white kids were free to watch it, too. The message was in the music, and vice-versa.
Public Enemy and its fellow rappers were “bringing the noise” to all of America’s young
people, moving a prominent aspect of African American culture right next door to
wholesome white Suburbanville, and with the advent of gangsta rap from NWA’s Ice
Cube and Dr. Dre, participation in the rituals and codes of the ’hood was as easy as
strapping on the headphones. Rap’s construction of its listeners, as those listeners saw
it, was one of street-smart and self-sustaining latchkey kids against whom all odds were
stacked and for whom establishment symbols—especially police officers, politicians, and
educators—held nothing but contempt.

And its own self-image was all rough edges. Where black Motown musicians in the
19605 had been required by label head Berry Gordy to go to charm school in order to
become “more palatable to white America” (Leland, “Race” 49) in their presentation of
what Reebee Garofalo calls “the perfect metaphor for the integrationist phase of the early
civil rights movement: upbeat, gospel-tinged black pop, produced with a white audience
in mind. . . threatening to no one in tone or content, and. . . irresistibly danceable” (241;
italics added), rappers who’d never seen integration become manifest in any real way
simply showed up on MTV with gang attire and assault rifles, wearing dark glasses and
scowling the most menacing impending-murder expressions they could muster. All of the
nation’s Ideological State Apparatuses identified by Althusser—especially those of
family, church, school, and media—were scared witless by the posturing, and so it was
only a matter of very short time before teens of all races not only flocked to watch it but
also to adopt its signifying styles (in Hebdige’s terms) for themselves in order to
experience what Wurtzel described as “the great high on rebellion which has been mostly

sanitized out of music since the sixties (112). For Michael Eric Dyson, the “white panic”

-1oz-

arising from young white America’s huge migration to rap was nothing new since the
same response has taken place each time black musicians have attracted white listeners
over the decades. The difference this time, in Dyson’s view, was that the clear sexual
attraction rappers held out to white girls—young women who then both stated and
demonstrated their desires to act upon the attraction—created a perfect situation for
white hegemony to respond to what it immediately perceived as a crisis. Thus, a
narrative was crafted by which both rap and its generative culture could be constructed as
inferior, flawed, undesirable. Dyson writes: “It wasn’t until rap made a huge impact on
white kids that the music was so roundly attacked. As long as the ‘bad’ effects of rap
were restricted to black kids, its menace went undetected, unprotested, or was flat-out
ignored” (116). Indeed, while many of the nation’s ISAs tried simply to make like Burt
the Turtle in those old Defense Department propaganda films for schoolkids (in the
event of nuclear attack, simply “duck and cover”) in response to this panic, their more
Repressive State Apparatus cousins in law enforcement began to suit up for action; after
all, rap was a discursive form forged by groups named Public Enemy and, even more
threatening, Niggas With Attitude, whose first big contribution to the discourse was a
happy little ditty titled “Fuck Tha Police.” Rapper Ice-T’s own border-crossing foray
into heavy metal, with a band he named Body Count. was a self-titled release with cover
art portraying a hulking, scowling black man wielding both gun and chain, with the words
COP KILLER—also the title of one of the disc’s songtexts—carved into his chest. The
controversy over “Cop Killer” has been well documented in a thousand different places:
In brief, police departments across the country, at both state and local levels, banded
together to protest, picket, and threaten a boycott against Time-Wamer, Ice-T’s label, due
to lyrics like “[m]y adrenaline’s pumpin’, I got my stereo bumpin’, I’m ’bout to kill me

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somethin’—-a pig stopped me for nuthin Eventually, law enforcement was joined in its
complaint by both Congress and the White House, with the result being—in contrast to
the mere FBI monitoring of Public Enemy and NWA—that Ice-T’s Body Count was
silenced by both the removal of its offensive songtext from all new pressings of the
offending album and by the further dissolution of its record contract. (This was, of
course, a “mutual agreement,” in the finely-crafted legalistic phrasing required of both
Time-Wamer and Ice-T at their respective press conferences.) Wurtzel used The New
Yorker to remind everyone that Body Count was a metal band, not a rap group,
and that the use of the tag phrases “rap” and “rapper” by both the media and police
agencies was a rhetorical device functioning to create “a racially divisive slant [that]
helped inflame the terms of the argument even further” (1 10), and Dyson has written
more recently that “the rhetorical marks and devices of blues culture, including
vulgar language, double entendres, boasting, and liberal doses of homespun machismo”
forge a close link between the blues and gangsta rap ( 121), Ice-T’s pre-metal rap genre.
But it was Barbara Ehrenreich, in no less than Time magazine (this issue might well have
been titled “Yes, We Caved, But We’re Still ‘Down With’ Rock”) who stepped forward
most convincingly in Ice-T’s defense:
The ‘danger’ implicit in all the uproar is of empty-headed, suggestible
black kids, crouching by their boom boxes, waiting for the word. But what
Ice-T’s fans know and his detractors obviously don’t is that ‘Cop Killer’
is just one more entry in pop music’s long history of macho hyperbole
and violent boast. Flip to the classic-rock station, and you might catch the
Rolling Stones announcing ‘the time is right for violent revo-loo-shun! ’
from their 1968 hit ‘Street Fighting Man.’ And where were the defenders

of our law-enforcement officers when a[nother] white British group, the
Clash, taunted its fans with the lyrics: ‘When they kick open your front

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door / How you gonna come / With your hands on your head/ Or on the
trigger of your gun? (89)

Ice-T himself tried to offer yet another analogy in which rap was like country
music, explaining the “parallels” in country musicians “sing[ing] to their own
neighborhood . . wear[ing] jeans and hats to the Grammys. . . sing[ing] in their own
language, to their own people” (qtd. in Guccione 93). What’s more, the embattled rapper
and metal vocalist pointed out, his protesters needed only to “look at Johnny Cash,
[who] makes a record and says, ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’. . . . It’s
very aggressive, and a lot of times violent, but it’s from a country-westem perspective.”
The problem, of course, is that responses to T’s observation are formed of a massive
dominant-ideology rebuttal which trarnples the observation into oblivion. Even country’s
strongest detractors are often willing to conceive of its discourse as just a big ol’ harmless
cliche, and this picture of innocence combines with a further, even more entrenched
argument holding that the Stones and the Clash, as representatives of an earlier and
therefore better rock era, were diflerent from all these scary rappers in the same way that
Johnny and country are. What’s more, Johnny Cash has long been known to Americans
as a good guy, a folk icon, even though he’s always dressed in black, even though he once
played the part of Satan in an MTV video. (But way back before MTV ever came along,
he also had a wholesome little “variety show” on the TV, back when the TV still had
programs like that, and he sang along with his wife, and in the comedy bits he was all
funny and sweet and such.) For their part, the Stones had made it perfectly clear, through
one of their 1970s album titles and its corresponding songtext, that what they did was
“only rock and roll,” and furthermore, that they liked it that way. And the Clash—this is

a no-brainer—were just basically British punks. Their beef was with the English

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“Bobbies” and Scotland Yard, not the LAPD and the FBI. And the biggest no-brainer of

all, of course, is that all of these guys were white.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Part 2: (Steal That Funky Music, White Boy)

[White rap] is not a racial issue. To be real with you. white MCs usually aren’t good—it’s as simple
as that. It’s like if you saw a black person in a hockey rink: It’s gonna get some attention, but he’d
only be there if he was good.

- Dr. Dre (qtd. in Diehl 32).

When I moved in[to rap in the late 805], there wasn’t any of this black and white. Then around 1992,
after Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark screwed the whole thing up. there was this distinction—that white
rappers were stealing rap just like white rockers had stolen rock ’n roll.

- Kid Rock (qtd. in McCollom. “Divide” 3E).

[R]ock ‘n’ rap offers anxious white males a chance to act out their top-dog fantasies without having to
take full responsibility for them
- N’Gai Croal (61).

From Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone, no black artist’s album has ever been chosen as the best
of the year.
- Armond White ( 17)

In the spring of 1998, I stuffed a couple of suitcases full with books, dragged
those leaden bags to the airport, and flew off to Rhode Island to spend two weeks with a
good friend in Providence who’d agreed to open her house to me while I plied the books
in preparation for a comprehensive exam in pedagogical methods and issues. My friend, a
former post-secondary English teacher herself, had been forced into premature retirement
from that profession due to an insidious eye condition that was steadily destroying her
sight, yet the caustic wit and clarity of expression that I’d always admired in her had, if
anything, become more formidable than they’d ever been. Because of this, I made it a
point to give my own eyes a rest each evening by simply sitting with her at the kitchen
table or out on the porch and enjoying what would inevitably become the challenge of

conversation—and it was in such a context that one night I happened to bring up rap as

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the focus for one of my upcoming dissertation chapters. The diatribe that ensued quickly
became such that I asked if I could write down every word of it, and after obtaining
permission (along with self-mocking laughter and disclaimers that whatever she thought
was unimportant), I broke out pen and legal pad and began to transcribe the following

“interview,” although it was really just a talk between old friends.

Q: Define rap for me.

A: Monotonous, relentless bass that lacks any kind of subtlety. It’s like having
sex with someone who never varies the rhythm—after a while you just go numb.

Q: Okay. but still—~what 's wrong with it?

A: What’s wrong with it! Here, I’ll tell you: Rap is used as a weapon by teenage
drivers who play it so loudly that your house windows rattle when they go by. Or your
car windows rattle if you’re stuck next to them at a light.

Q: Why do you think kids play it loud?

A: They like it partly because they know that other people don 7 like it loud.

Q: So is it rebellious, then?

A: I don’t mind rebellion, but I hate being assaulted.

Q: Isn ’t rock —especially heavy metal ~—als0 pretty loud?

A: Metal assaults the senses, and it does so creatively. Metalheads don’t inflict
their music on others like rappers do—and the music has all kinds of changes in rhythm.
In rap, so-called ‘music’ serves as background for doggerel—not any astute social
commentary as critics claim. It’s just a general bragging game. There are some exceptions,
but mostly it’s boring. The only real music is the stuff they sample!

Q: Some critics say it 's an art form.

A: Maybe it is. Collage is an art form, but you need to have something uniquely
your own, too. '

Q: Explain?

A: Well, I guess there is something unique about rap: the ability to aggravate the
hell out of me, to turn me into a closed-minded old fart, the thing I told my parents I

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would never be. Look, if you bring me some rap and say it’s good, I’ll listen to it with an
open mind because you’ve recommended it, but I know I’ll be struggling constantly to
overcome my revulsion.

Q: Always?

A: The rhymes, the rhythm, the lyrics—there’s just nothing there that pleases
me. Maybe I’m missing some appreciation for black culture, but how? I grew up on
black music and I loved it. People told me that I ‘danced like a nigger’-——and at the time,
that was understood as a high compliment. I find black urban conditions horrifying, and
maybe that’s why rap is bad art as I see it.

Q: How so?

A: There’s a lack of fresh insight; it doesn’t open the senses in a new way. I’m
not saying that art needs to be subtle—look at [Robert] Mapplethorpe, who shocks me
into an awareness that I don’t know how to deal with.

Q: If Mapplethorpe were to have used only two models, always in the same poses,
then would his photos have been like rap, as you see it?

A: Exactly. But Mapplethorpe engaged audience emotions in startling ways
instead. Or look at [Andres] Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ,’ which is absolutely tragic. The
image conveys what happened: the wonderful, positive message that Christ brought to
the world was just pissed on by the church. Rap, on the other hand, is facile; it’s a pat
answer.

Q: To what?

A: Well, ‘fuck you’ has always been a pat answer, and there’s nothing that angers
me more than being told “fuck you” for five minutes straight, even if it’s done creatively.

Q: But rap often is doing it creatively, since it is based in part on ‘the dozens ' and
‘toasts ’ in A frican-A merican oral tradition —

A: But they’re the same dozens, over and over!

Q: Is there any inherent racism in your view of rap?

A: Of course there is. How can there not be? Any white person who says that
she bears no racism is deluded. I’m very empathetic, but I’m also totally removed from

black experience. Still, it would be even more racist to pretend I like or respect rap music.

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Q: You said you grew up on. and liked. black music ,_
A: Yes, but in that sense it’s less a matter of racism and more one of simple taste.
I don’t want a purple car. I don’t like liver. My mother made me eat liver once, and I

puked instantly. Rap is like liver.

As I look back on this conversation now, I see several things not apparent to me
at the time I engaged in it: first, my friend’s many turns to Romantic notions of
authenticity and Enlightenment conceptions of originality by way of the “creative”
sensory assault by metal musicians, her claim about the “only real music” in rap coming
from the works which rappers sample/ interpolate, her argument that even a collage artist
must make a “unique” contribution, and so on; second, my own counterclaim that rap’s
authenticity may be found in its employment of recurring figures in African-American
oral tradition; third, the fact that every analogy drawn between rap and something
else—metal, black music of the 19605, the art of Mapplethorpe and Serrano, and finally a
forced meal of cow’s liver—is one that ultimately functions to construct rap as an
inadequate failure. And in response, I find my own ideologies stirring into action: How
could another English teacher not recognize in rap even such basic worth as found in
Dyson’s reminder that rappers are, in many ways, skilled wordsmiths able to

use a variety of rhyme schemes, from couplets in tetrameter to iambic
pentarneter. . .[r]hyme schemes [that] can employ masculine and feminine
rhymes, assonantal and consonantal rhymes, or even internal rhymes...
enjambment, prosody, and sophisticated syncopations to tie their collage
of rhymes into a pleasing sonic ensemble? (121)

If not any of these, then what about rap’s basic ability to influence confident writing. as
found in Jon Spayde’s testimony that, as a former creative writing teacher, he has often

“been thrilled when students turn their fascination with the cadences of rap—delivered to

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them in all its layered, sampled, synthesized richness. . . into an awareness of their own
power as poets” (54)? Instead of any such recognitions of value and worth in rap, even at
such practical levels, there are only the standard complaints—rap is too loud, too
repetitive, too (falsely) confrontational—and each of these complaints is “supported” by
either “fact” or anecdote. But this is in no way a moral or intellectual failing on the part
of the speaker. Rather, as explained by Maconie in his study of classical music, such
complaints are a common practice with a common function:

People who dislike a certain musical idiom will claim that it isn’t music,
even though they know very well that it falls within the customary
definition of a musical composition and actually gives pleasure to other
listeners. We are not dealing here with a definition of music, but rather
with a definition of individual response, a deliberate distancing of personal
taste from the imagined preferences of others. (14)

As a result, I see in the speaker not a “closed-minded old fart,” as she herself claims to be,
but rather someone attempting to reconcile her own awarenesses and memories with a
fixed individual response that is completely shut to any desire, whether weak or strong,
to change it. Since Adomo has likewise pointed out that simplistic notions of mere
“taste” are irrelevant by the fact that the aesthetic preferences implied by “taste” are
more accurately described as a moral judgments which function to close the issue entirely
when “no more choices are made, the question is no longer put, and no one demands the
subjective justification of the conventions” (“Character” 270), what is ultimately revealed
by this struggle is the compelling nature of Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling,”
falling short of strict ideology but at the same time standing beyond mere personal
opinion. “The perception of music,” Maconie writes, “has as much to do with attitudes

and conditions of hearing as with the nature of sounds themselves” (15). And it is this

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issue of attitudes and conditions—of contextsw- which leads me to my next point of

discussion.

White Mythology, Black Containment

Ike Turner, who with his former wife Tina has contributed a number of songtexts
with a high level of appeal for earlier white fans of rock, is one who has heard all of the
stories regarding the “invention” of rock, and he says in response to them that “when
somebody puts a name on something, that [doesn’t] make it the beginning of it. Fats
Waller, Cab Callowaym-if you just take the color off of it, man, these guys rocked and
rolled way back then. So how could the first rock and roll be when they decided to name
it rock and roll?” (qtd. in Palmer 7, italics added). The answer to Tumer’s question forms
what Foucault calls, at one point, “the episteme,” that is, “[t]he total set of relations that
unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures,
sciences, and possibly formalized systems,” and thus the episteme for the “invention” of
“rock ’n roll” is a collective of cultural codes which governed popular music’s “language,
its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, and the hierarchy of its
practices” (“Intellectuals” 191). Later, Foucault changes “episteme” to “discursive
formation,” an entity less concretely defined not as any specific ideas or practices being
codified, but more the kind of character that a code assumes because of the rules that
govern it. These rules are not likely to be consciously made and often can’t be articulated;
even so, the end result as Foucault sees it is that “the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed according to a certain number of

procedures” (Archaeology 216). A5 a result, in contrast to the dissent and doubt in Ike

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Turner’s questioning, the preferred white narrative of rock’s origin is sanitized, fixed, and
at times even utopian. In that narrative, the primary figure is, of course, the so-called
“king,” Elvis Presley, the long-deified alchemist who, as described by Henry Pleasant in
The Great American Popular Singers, “introduced young white America to the music that
had been fermenting in the black subculture since Louis Armstrong’s prime” and
“stimulated in an enormous young white public an appetite and a readiness for the real
thing” (qtd. in Hopkins 131). But since black music by black musicians—the implied
“real thing” in this passage—was (as Dyson has already said here, too dangerous for the
allowance of mass consumption by white mainstream teenagers)—I mean, that is, rather
not widely available because it had not been widely advertised or broadcast—white
consumers (for it was too early for the formation of what I’ve been calling consumer-
theorists to have taken place yet) had to stick with white musicians for the filling of their
appetites and the consummation of their readiness. In this, Presley was more than happy
to oblige; since his first band “ranged far back into the hills” and “kept the radio tuned to
the latest Memphis blues,” he was able ( with the help of producer Sam Phillips and
backing musicians) to preside at what Marcus calls “the giant wedding ceremony” which
“marr/ied] white culture to black, and invented rock and roll” (“Treasure” 285; italics
added). ‘80 magnificent was this “wedding ceremony” that, for Marcus, “[i]t was as if all
the contradictions of American music had been resolved in a dream.” Early rock ’n roll,
which Marcus elsewhere acknowledges as “black music altered in one way or another by
white culture,” was only “something like a secret” when black musicians still owned it,
although “[b]y about 1955 it had achieved the status of a rumor” (“Introduction” ixx).
Clearly such a slow growth would be detrimental to such a vital and energizing form of

discourse, and so the descent of Elvis from his heavenly throne was not only beneficial,

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but necessary for “tum[ing] rock and roll into a deeply shared culture, the password of
millions, a means to identity and delight” (ixx). Yet even such an exalted being as Presley
couldn’t carry such a complex undertaking all by himself, so he cried out to his makers,
Lo, it is not good that 1 should be alone: you must make a helperfor me, and so, in
Marcus’s narrative, “the advent of the Beatles intensified th[e] process.” (Let us also not
forget Pat Boone’s generous bestowing of “new life” to tired black songtexts here.) And
while all of this happy helping and marrying and sharing may have taken place in a
society described by Bluestein as a site where “African Americans and whites live on
separate and unequal scales—in education, employment, housing, and all the other indices
of well-being, including life expectancy” (2), this does not prevent the author from
pointing out, more optimistically, that “in connection with music and dance, the United
States is clearly the most integrated society in the world.”

Now, none of this is to suggest that Elvis Presley actually had no real hand in
helping to shape what we now know as rock. Nor is it even to suggest that I, personally,
don’t own any of his music. (I do: two “best-of” CD5.) What I do mean to suggest is
that white people can no longer hope to rely on an exclusively white coming-of-age
narrative for rock in which racial difference—make that the sheer existence of racial
difference—is mystified so tidily by simply confining it to quick, vague mentions and in
this way rendering it unimportant and unproblematic. Moreover, Robert Palmer’s Unruly
History of Rock effectively cancels even Bluestein’s optimism by noting that the early
genre classification of rhythm and blues was a code established by a writer for Billboard
magazine and intended to signify “any sort of music that was made by and for black
Americans,” while rock and roll (an early blues-songtext code for sex, as is well known

by now) was intended by white deejay Alan Freed to signify “music that was black

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(‘R&B’) in style but not necessarily made by black artists or aimed primarily at black
audiences.” To his credit, Freed aired black—performed original versions of songtexts
rather than white covers, but even 50, Palmer notes, “somehow the term ‘rock and roll’
came to designate guitar-based music with a ‘black’ beat, primarily played by and for
whites” (8) and in short time the tenn’s meaning became so Caucacentric that labels like
soul and funk came around to keep black music/ians entirely separated fiom it. So
pervasive has the rhetoric of segregation become that, for many rappers and consumer-
theorists alike, the current labels of rap and hip-hop have thus far carried very few
connections with rock 'n roll discourse at all—a situation which Palmer argues is
preferable for those (including many rappers themselves) who maintain the separation
(8). While Bluestein’s observation about integration may still have validity in the sense
that there is and has been a great willingness by whites to come out and play with black-
written and black-performed music—even when the play required them to reject “their
own people” as represented by such anomalies as the Average White Band out of
Scotland and KC and the Sunshine Band here in the States during decades past—there has
been no such willingness to let the music remain black-owned, nor any indication that
whites have ever been willing to give back to black musicians the same amounts and forms
of capital that early black music made possible for white musicians. A particularly
painful and clear example of this one-way relationship took place on NBC’s Saturday
Night Live in the fall of 1998, when Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs appeared with Led
Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to perform the metal/rap songtext “Come With Me”——a
Puff Daddy lyric over a 20 year-old Zeppelin riff accompanied by a full and formally-

attired orchestra. When the performance ended, “Puffy” bowed deeply to Page, once and

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then again, before laying himself nearly prostrate at the legendary guitarist’s feet. Page, in
turn, smiled and nodded to the rapper before finally returning a little half-bow at the
waist.

Decades ago, Chuck Berry sang this chorus: “Just let me hear some of that rock
and roll music / Any old way you choose it / It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it / Any
old time you use it.” But in practice, those last two lines were changed by whites to read
this way: “It’s got a black beat—we can use it / Any old way we choose it.” Charles
Keil, for instance, in Urban Blues, provides a concise history of Willie Dixon’s songtext,
“Little Red Rooster,” which upon being recorded by Howlin’ Wolf in the mid-19505 sold
roughly 20,000 copies; a later update by Sam Cooke, whose rendition is described by
Keil as “somewhat more relaxed and respectable...with an organ accompaniment and
slightly altered lyrics,” sold roughly 60,000 more than that. But when the Dixon work
went on to catch the attention of the Rolling Stones in the mid-605, whose version
“adhered closely to the original, replete with bottle-neck guitar techniques,” the white
cover moved over half a million copies worldwide (48). Because the term, cover, always
offers a pair of practical denotations by which (1) a musician who covers the material of
others can do so out of tribute and deep respect for those others, and (2) a cover can
function literally, as a concrete entity which completely hides the context beneath it, the
“Little Red Rooster” catapulted into popularity as a hit record (at a time when half a
million was still considered a massive number) became known, not as a Willie Dixon or
Howlin’ Wolf or even Sam Cooke tune, nor even as an example of the blues, but as a rock
'n roll songtext by—and from—the Stones in an early and doubled form of what has
become known as a “crossover”: The Stones crossed over to the blues for “their”

material, which in turn crossed over to the rock ’n roll charts. And even the charts that

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record the numbers resulting from such excursions are not problem-free in respect to race

issues, since Garofalo has explained that

pop charts are constructed on the basis of reports from mainstream radio
and retail outlets; the rhythm and blues charts [are based on information]
from outlets based in the black community. For a rhythm and blues
release to become a pop hit, it must ‘cross over’ from the R&B charts to
the p0p charts, which is to say, it must first sell well in the black com-
munity. A recording is listed on the pop charts only after it is distributed
and sold in mainstream outlets. (237)

As a result of this two-tiered system, for any major black artists to become major by
mainstream definition in the first place requires them to “cross over” first, while Garofalo
notes that no major white music groups or solo artists are ever required to follow suit
simply because they are already located on the primary pop chart as their starting
point—and in this way, black artists are “held to a higher standard of performance than
white [ones]” (238). The issue is further taken up by Nelson George, who in The Death
of Rhythm and Blues demonstrates that, for many black musicians, “one of the
consequences of crossover was that if you altered your style but failed to broaden your
audience. . . you ran the risk of alienating your core audience and never getting it back”
(183). The number of flaming hoops and spiked pitfalls involved in crossover for black
artists—endless tests of stamina, will, and the financial means to persevere which simply
don’t exist in the same ways for whites—are practices that can be seen as nothing less
than racist, but when combined with the fact that even the attainment of “major” status
for black artists will not be enough to warrant an equal placement with their white
contemporaries, the issue goes beyond racism into the realm of a more overt apartheid.
As Marsh notes, “[Tjhe music that the industry most loathes and fears—rap—remains

its commercial powerhouse” (20), and so one way to keep that powerhouse in line, as

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with Body Count/Ice-T’s controversial songtext, is simply to attempt to maintain rap as
the same kind of “secret” that Marcus suggests was the status of early, black-performed,
electrified, walking-bassline discourse.

The secret is kept first by radio, where Garofalo notes that “African-American
performers do not gain any reciprocal access to rock [stations]” (243) in exchange for
black-oriented “Urban Contemporary” radio formats having been opened to the so-called
“blue-eyed soul” of performers such as George Michael, Hall and Oates, Michael Bolton,
and Eric Clapton. (Wait, surely this charge can’t hold. Let’s see: there’s Jimi Hendrix on
the rock stations, that’s one, and Living Colour, that’s. . .it. One dead, the other defunct.)
White-owned rock stations more than happy to play the “extreme” songtexts of Korn,
Bizkit, Faith No More, et al. will never be caught spinning equally “extreme” songtexts
by black musicians RZA, Ice Cube, DMX, or even the metal of Ice-T’s incarnation with
Body Count. It will play Anthrax, but not Anthrax with Public Enemy; Aerosmith, but
not Aerosmith with Run-DMC; it will play white rapper Everlast singing/rapping
(mostly rapping) a profanity-bleeped version of “What It’s Like” from his solo release
Whitey Ford Sings the Blues. but not Everlast with his Irish-American “hardcore” (but
often profanity-free) rap ensemble House of Pain. Relevant here is an open letter to
owners and programmers of black radio written in 1986 by Jack Gibson, who in 1949 had
become the first black deejay to broadcast his voice from America’s first black-owned
radio station:

. . .[B]lack radio [has taken] an ass-kickin’ and when you boil it down, the
reason is [that] so many of you are tryin’ to go ofay or pop on us, figurin’
the more pop or ofay records you play daily will cause your ofay or pop
listeners to increase. . . . Black radio, who has sold you that bill of goods?
‘If you play pop music, white folks will flock to your station’. . . . Why
would ofay listeners come over to black radio to hear [the] few pop

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records you play, when they got their own pop stations that can and

do play more of their kinda music that you’ll ever be able to [even] if

you stayed on the air 28 hours a day! You can’t be white, so come on

home. . . . (Qtd. in George 184)”
And where white rock radio is the first site of rap’s containment, the second is that of
print publications of the kind named by KRS—One in the third epigraph to this chapter. It
is these information outlets, as shown by both Will Straw and Armond White, which
control—through editorial selection and preference, in turn filtering down to become an
unofficial official style guide for journalists in their employ—what will be interesting,
valuable, notable, and newsworthy for their readers. Observations made by both Straw
and White show that the recurring names deemed as matches to these criteria belong
exclusively to white performers; for Straw, these are individuals (Springsteen, Emmylou
Harris, Tom Waits, Lou Reed) who have been moved into “archival” status by the
magazines, while White sees a strong tendency for white musicians in general to receive a
level of “steady praise” which is not bestowed upon black ones, as well as a dichotomy
of labels in which “intelligence” is the preferred attribute for whites and “sexuality” the
one most common for blacks (Straw 375; White 17). As further evidence here, Marsh
points out that “[Irish rockers] U2 got headlines for selling about 350,000 copies of [their
ultimately poorly received and quickly dismissed album] Pop during its first week in the
racks. [But the rap ensemble] Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu- Tang Forever sold almost twice that

many in its first week” (20 )—an accomplishment that went unreported and so passed

unnoticed. By all but the Wu-Tang’s hordes of admiring consumers, that is.

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Black Faith, White Negotiation

Ultimately, the impending merger of rap with rock all comes down to color lines
demarcating territories drawn on sand. By the rhetoric of multiculturalism and
progressivity, this should not be the case anymore, but the memory of the first hostile
takeover (or, to adjust Marcus’s metaphor, the first shotgun wedding) of black musical
discourse by White Entertainment, Inc. remains clearly recalled. Those who ignore
history are bound to repeat its mistakes, one saying goes, while another holds that history
is a philosophy fashioned from prior examples. Each maxim offers an equal number of
problems and possibilities in the challenges facing the merger between standard/traditional
rock and its new primary form of discourse. For the many black rap artists and their
white consumer-descendants who appear ready—regardless of history—to engage in the
merger, the current historic moment requires a long and critical look back to the last one.
Since “[o]ppressed groups have always studied the oppressor in order to survive”
(Whatley 120), events of the last 50 years offer a record in which whites turned to black
music once before but in that turning, made the discourse their own; in which blacks were
then (and are still) required to transform themselves and their cultural re/presentations in
order to be noticed by a white rock entertainment bloc that has indicated in multiple ways
how it has/had no more need for them; and in which, with the passage of years, that
bloc’s continued attempts to keep itself separate from black discourses and black
discursive practices resulted in a significant number of black street entertainers finally
recognizing—and naming—the futile ritual of pushme-pullya for what it was. “It might
feel good, it might sound a little somethin’, but damn the game if it ain’t sayin’ nuthin’!”

said Chuck D in the 1998 resurgence of Public Enemy (once again by way of a Spike Lee

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“joint”). That naming process, in turn, provided a hard blow to the soft midsection of a
discourse that many bored consumer-theorists of white standard rock were yearning for
ever since “their” entertainment bloc had turned its back and walked away from black
performers and songtexts. And thus arrived the current historic moment in which rappers
and rockers, their discursive forms already beginning to blend into a full merger but with
no language available by which to clearly identify that process, stand at a line on one side
of which lies the repetition of past mistakes and on the other of which lies the formation
of a new philosophy by prior examples, and prepare—with great caution and a great deal
of faith—to act. But how?

For Dyson, rap has never been “an exclusively black affair” by the fact that
“African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, Latinos, and progressive whites all shared in the
Bronx parties where hip-hop was spawned in the States.” And beyond just this, even
“[o]ld-school [hip-hop] legends like DJ Grandmaster Flash experimented with a wide
range of music, from Frank Sinatra to [705 Irish rockers] Thin Lizzy” ( 124). Thus begins
a possibility for a partial erasure of color lines which is outlined further by Chuck D’s
shift from color to abilities: “It’s twenty years since rap began. It’s really irrelevant
what a person looks like and where they’re from. The music has spread . . . to the point
that it’s overstood. Saying, ‘just because I’m black, I’m more hip-hop than you’—-that’s
got nothing to do with skills” (qtd. in Diehl 32). Reflecting a recent turn to/desire for
peace by hardcore gangsta rappers whose own lives have been shaken by the murders of
their colleagues Tupak Shakur and Biggie Smalls/the Notorious BIG. at the end of the
905, former NW A member and founding gangsta Dr. Dre has softened his discourse
markedly, saying that “[r]apping about one brother killing another brother is just not

where I’m coming from these days. And [think with the recent deaths no one should. . . .

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Hip-hop has to continue to evolve if it wants to survive. and part of that evolving is
getting back to the positive” (qtd in Samuels and Leland 64-5). But that “positive” goal is
offset by the standard boasting element in hip-hop, a lingering trope by which one is
compelled to call out and trash at least something in order to place oneself in a position
higher than what has been knocked down. Thus, in his songtext titled “Cowboy,” white
rap/rock practitioner Kid Rock describes himself by ciu'ng NWA’s 1988 album title,
Straight Outta Compton, and saying “I ain’t straight outta Compton, I’m straight out the
trailer,” a move intended—along with the CD’s inside-cover photograph showing Kid
walking toward the trailer park which buyers are to believe is his home—to lower himself
to an “authentic” status as white trash1 7, but the nature of the boasting game is such that
white fans could easily take his words (and their photographic “evidence”) to mean that
Compton’s rappers—its black rappers—are inferior to “trailer”——i.e. white—ones,
keeping the conflicts of color alive and unwell. Likewise, when Detroit-based white
rapper and shining hip-hop star of the moment, Eminem, reinforces the note of “positive”
change outlined by his mentor, Dr. Dre, by suggesting that racial harmony lies beyond the
stage as much as on it—“[I]f there’s one music that could break down racist barriers, it’s
hip-hop. When I do shows, I look out into the crowd and see black, white, Chinese,
Korean. I see all these nationalities there for one thing”—he also offsets the observation
instantly by following it with a boast (not to mention a lexical degradation to excrement
status of the same unity he has just promoted): “You don’t see that shit at a country
show, you don’t see that shit at a rock show. It’s hip-hop that’s doing it” (qtd. in Diehl
35). Since it was this kind of I-rule-you-suck boasting that caused the deaths of Tupak
and Biggie, if any real move toward peace is to come of the impending rock/rap merger,

then this trope would first require serious revision if not outright abandonment.

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Another area that must be examined is the power still held by notions of a black
essence, a particular form of rap authenticity that evades the sometimes ridiculous
“crises” generated by searches for the real in standard-rock discourses due to black
essence’s own grounding in lived practice and recallable history. Houston Baker, for
example, engages in such an examination by way of responding to those who break
blackness down into even more discrete categories, and he writes that such a practice
cannot hold. Calling such division of the whole into its parts a form of “intersectional
thinking” and “confus[ing] binarism,” Baker argues that these divisions

rel[y] heavily upon essentialist assumptions difficult to credit in [an] age
where any of us might encounter. . . a black, Vietnamese-American,
potential MBA, Ivy-League, basketball-playing woman who is fully at
ease with the transnational, material, and indisputably hybrid space in
which she dwells. (Studies 71)

For individuals to deconstruct themselves into specifically-named and separable parts of
identity, Baker suggests, can do little good as they face such “contemporary multi-
plicities.” other than to make “a case of special pleading” (71). In this he’s joined by
Barbara Epstein’s argument that “[a] politics based on identity encounters not only the
problem of the fragility of particular categories of identity, but the fact that everyone
occupies various categories at once. One may be female but white, or black but male;
virtually everyone is vulnerable to some charge of privilege” (34). That Epstein appears
to go on the assumption that all white females and all black males share two universal
stations in the power hierarchy—a kind of self-evident truth that is surely not held by
every individual represented in her example—is exactly why those white performers who
want continued access now to the privilege of rapping and otherwise engaging in a highly

racialized discourse will need to operate within a state of heightened awareness of

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themselves as symbols of the specific genders, races, and social classes they carry if a
repetition of history is to be avoided. While whites in rap may not necessarily be viewed
by the audience as “a repetition of power relations,” as Lott writes in his study of
blackface minstrelsy (8), they will nonetheless represent “a signifier for” those relations
and their historical position(s) within them, necessitating a careful negotiation of the
subject positions being at once presented and perceived

Here I should note that very similar challenges of representation exist in academic
circles, where Sherley Williams argued nearly thirty years ago that white critics had only a
“minuscule” and “negligible” place in the black-literature genre since “with only the rarest
exception, white critics have proved time and again that their perceptions are neither deep
enough nor precise enough to give us the insights we need into our literature and our
experience” (234). And nearly twenty years after Williams’ attack on white critics, with
black literature having made huge gains in canonical representation and literary
importance, African-American scholars were still being warned to expect “even the most
apparently self-conscious and self-referential white investigation [to] conclude with the
advocacy of older, Caucacentric orders” (Awkward 601-2). Moreover, Michael
Awkward writes, if both race and gender were accepted as being social constructs,

then whiteness as a dominant position in the Western racial hierarchy is
potentially as formidable an obstacle to interpretive competence vis-a-vis
black (con)texts as maleness is to persuasive feminist exegesis. . . . [R]acial
privilege may create interpretive obstacles or, more importantly, points of
resistance that [affect], in racially motivated ways—perhaps even in
hegemony-maintaining ways—the effects of an exploration of blackness.
In other words, white reading can mean the adoption of a posture anti-
thetical to Afro—American interests. (5 82-83)

There is a direct correlation between literature and songtext here. Since all rap

artists are also writers—not only in the literal lyric-creation sense but also in the sense

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that they constantly inscribe their discourses and perforrnative practices with the word-
processors that are their bodies—any attempt by white rappers to feign racelessness
only reinforces “the norm of whiteness as an ethnic category that secures its dominance
by appearing to be invisible” (Giroux, “Redefining” 225). And this position of
“racelessness” is exactly what Eminem attempts to create by saying, “I don’t put myself
in the white-rapper category. Anybody who puts me in that category—fuck ’em! Every
white rapper that’s come out, people have tried play on it like a gimmick. I’m like, ‘Yo,
when you put me out, put me out as a rapper, strictly based on the talent’” (qtd. in Diehl
34). No amount of profanity, parallel-drawing, or boastful pride in this statement can be
enough to disguise the fact that the rapper never directly addresses the issue of his
whiteness. Since the position of Euro-American rappers like Eminem who are engaged in
a predominantly Afro-American discursive practice is a precarious one in light of past
history, both black rappers and black consumer-theorists of rap must remain highly
skeptical about white involvement with hip-hop, and simply dodging the question will
not help matters. But Come] West, in writing on the issue of race and its conflicts,
concerns himself less with racial authenticity than with moral integrity. Calling for a more
“prophetic viewpoint base[d on] mature black self-love and self-respect,” West explains
that a moral approach to race is one that “assume[s] neither a black essence that all black
people share, nor one black perspective to which all black people should adhere,” but
instead tries to promote “the variety of perspectives held by black people and [the
selection of views] based on black dignity and decency that eschew putting any group of
people or culture on a pedestal or in the gutter” (28). This is not to say that West avoids
the issue of racial authenticity completely; rather, his response to the issue offers an

expanded view when he asks:

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Who is really black? First, blackness has no meaning outside a system of
race-conscious people and practices. . . . [Alny claim to black authenticity
—beyond that of being a potential object of racist abuse and an heir to a
grand tradition of black struggle—is contingent on one’s political definition
of black interest and one’s ethical understanding of how this interest
relates to individuals and communities in and outside black America. In
short, blackness is a political and ethical construct. (25-6; italics added)

The possibilities opened up for white rappers by West’s “prophetic viewpoint”
are generous indeed; moreover, they provide a model for what could be if the principles
involved in the current rock/rap merger take the time to think, to plan, and to act with
the same level of integrity for which West advocates. On the other hand, if white
rappers simply try to appropriate the experiences and practices of black culture once
more as their own—under the same rhetoric of “skills” and “abilities” which some of
their black predecessors/current colleagues are likewise employing—while simultaneously
inserting their obviously and unavoidably white bodies as symbols of the experience
being represented, they will ignore all of the clear disconnects between their own names
as “authors” of the discourse and the material they are naming (Foucault, Counter-
Memory 122). Thus they will ultimately engage in a process that Peter McLaren calls
“enfleshment,” denying all of the conflicting elements that stand between one’s
words—and the body generating them—and the more tangible signs pointing to the
concrete/observable authorship of the position being taken (“Schooling” 154-5). By its
nature, McLaren points out, enfleshment is typically built of failings and mistakes when
individuals “unproblematically identify with the symbols. . . or subject positions. . .
which [they have] appropriated” (155), and it has been these kinds of mistakes and
failings that have already consumed the brief careers of white rappers such as Vanilla Ice

and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, and which have hovered constantly over the

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heads of the Beastie Boys since their inception in the mid-19805. But since the Beasties,
like the now-defunct rap group 3rd Bass, are white Jewish rappers who have openly
acknowledged their conflicted location and all of the social symbolism behind it, while at
the same time making clear the intentions and desires behind the songtexts they Present
and the social contexts from which they draw those presentations—and especially since,
unlike Eminem, they have directly addressed the very real potential for failure in all of
these endeavors—they have actually served to invite criticism and suspicion from rap’s
consumer-theorists. This in turn has formed a basis for dialogue between the band
members, their consumer-theorists, and media critics, transforming the assembled group
into consumers and co-producers of the discourse in their own right. As McLaren notes,
none of us can “put on new bodies before we desocialize our old ones. . . we cannot act in
and on the world as others if we want to see from [our own] positions critically”
(“Schooling” 152), and this is the challenge for white rappers at this historic moment
when an opportunity exists to revise completely the numerous conflicts extant in, and
harms inflicted by, the first “marriage” between black musical discourse and white
performers in the forced “wedding” of the 19505. As one fan of white rap says now, “If
white kids use hip-hop as a way to defy their racial destiny, that’s a good thing” (Croal
62)—and it might be a good thing indeed, were it not for the fact that the same speaker,
moments later, adds this: “You can love what black people represent without loving
black people.” Although journalist N’Gai Croal immediately comments on this last by
writing that “curiosity doesn’t necessarily translate into cultural understanding,” what
goes overlooked is the fact that the fan has perfectly described the exact dynamic present

during the 19505 white takeover of black music.

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Clifford Geertz, for one, has recognized that "an ethnographer’s data are nothing
more (or less) than an interpretation of other people’s constructions of what they and
their compatriots are up to” (9). Given this, white rappers would, ideally, be able to
make explicit their awareness that when they interpret an Other’s discursive practice they
are, in fact, constructing or fashioning an interpretation based on their own histories as
admirers and lifelong consumer-theorist-practitioners of the discourse. But as I have
mentioned earlier here, they would also have to forego the currently “mandatory” claims
(boasts) that their interpretations are both definitive (“the real thing”) and incontestable
(“the only thing”), since Geertz has also argued that any outsider interpretations are
second and third order; only “natives” can make a first order interpretation of their own
culture (15). These exact observations appear in the 1986 white-boys-can-play-the—
blues-too film Crossroads, in which during an early scene a professor of classical music at
J ulliard, informed by his white student Eugene Martone (Ralph Macchio) that he wants
to be known as “Lightnin’ Boy,” abandon classical guitar, and pursue the blues instead ,
tells the misguided and clearly confused student that “[e]xcellence in ‘primitive music’ is
cultural—you have to be born to it” (quotations added). And when Lightnin’ Boy later
meets one of his blues-harmonica playing heroes, Willie Brown (Joe Seneca), he is met
with scorn: “Long Island blues man!” the old man shouts at him. “Soul from the golden
ghetto!” And what is most relevant in these scenes is the same notion of a pure essence
with which I began this whole discussion many pages ago. As Baker has shown so well
in his book Blues, Ideology, and A fro-A merican Literature, this essence is forged as much
through lived practice and still-memorable historical events as it is through the ideologies
sprung from those two things. The phrase “behind the mule,” for instance, which Baker

refers to in several places and which appears either intact or in varying form throughout

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Alan Lomax’s acclaimed blues history The Land Where the Blues Began, denotes many
things at once: that one has actually been there and done that kind of living necessary to
have been truly immersed in the discourse now being practiced; that the content of one’s
songtext must likewise be a true manifestation of that real immersion; that the audience
must be able to detect—to feel in its soul—the immersion shining forth through that
content. And from here it becomes even more complex. The larger point, however, is
that behind the mule is also, as shown in the works of both Baker and Lomax, a widely
shared trope of authenticity among blues practitioners and within their discourse. Baker,
for example, cites bluesman Booker White as employing the phrase in his statement that
“[t]he foundation of the blues is walking behind the mule way back in slavery time” (qtd.
in Blues 188). And here on my desk is a brief biography of blues legend Sam “Lightnin’”
Hopkins in which appears an even fuller narrative account, using the same phrase,
provided by this blues player as well:

The reason we had the blues was because we had something to have the
blues for. . . . We wash our face and eat our breakfast, we grabbed a mule,
man, and put a bridle on him. We go to the field and we plow that row.
Well, what can you have but the blues? All you can do is sing down that
row behind the mule. But here’s what you would think. You will be
hoping that some day you will not have to be walkin’ behind a plow.
That’s when you really got the blues. Well, I was plowing [with] a mule
one morning and I knowed I had the blues. I tied the mule to the post
and walked on across the field. . . . (Orig. qtd. in Charters 183)

If it is possible for so many blues practitioners to have been behind the mule
simply because, as Baker writes, being behind the mule has been a real lived experience for
thousands of American black slaves (Blues 188), and if many of the tropes and figures of
the blues have, as Dyson shows, been carried directly over to the discourse of hip-hop,

then it may be possible to argue that the protests, cautions, concerns, and general

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hesitance of many black rappers and their supporters who do not subscribe to a rhetoric
of skills and do not condone an unregulated “crossover” into their discourse by all of the
“ofays” lining up at the door is, by at least one important criterion, understandable and
perhaps even admirable. And the criterion would be that no Anglo/Euro individual has
ever been behind the mule in the same way that the vast majority of rap’s immediate
foreparents have. Nor, for that matter, has that mule ever really been put out to pasture,
since it continues to be a burden to current black musicians in the fields of white radio and
journalism. So in just this one sense, being behind the mule moves beyond a claim to
authenticity based on shallow individualism, becoming instead a collective social identity
which transcends simple meaning as the essential experience of misery, becoming instead
the phenomenal accomplishment ofperseverance in misery ’5 presence. This kind of
accomplishment, to coincide with a satisfaction at having re-made from the rubble of the
blues a new and powerful form of black discourse after having witnessed the old one being
wrested away and made into the image of its captor, is not something you feel like sharing
freely with anyone who wants a piece of it, especially when that anyone has proven, over
and over again, in a number of damaging ways, to be unworthy of trust. As Benjamin has
written:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from
its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the
history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on
the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when
substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized
when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. (5)

Because the “object,” in the context at hand, is at once discourse, culture, agency,
and an opportunity to rupture longstanding codes of hegemonic practice, Benjamin’s

words are no small matter. As the doors of rap discourses are—by some individuals

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pulling from within and many more of them pushing from without—gradually opened to
an increasing number of skilled white communicators this time around, history is
something for everyone involved to keep in mind. While many of hip-hop’s discourses
are grounded within the same “traditional” (and tiring) pronouncements of the real versus
the fake which crop up so often in rock discourses, those pronouncements have also led
to a growing sociopolitical awareness of the music’s active roles, origins, and possible
destinies in larger cultures. Thus history is carried at the fore, and by a turn fi'om a
limiting discourse of authenticity to larger examinations of the social interaction which
shapes and changes discursive practices through social spheres of influence, a space
begins to open for a dialectic between music producers and their consumers. This space,
and the dialectical practices that can take place within it, is my point of development for

the following chapter.

$232)?

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THE POLITICS OF POWER:

Case Studies on Metallica and Rage Against the Machine

If now we pry a little closer into the poet’s business. we shall see that the realizement of his Aim consists
solely in the making possible an exhibition of. . . an Expression which shall in so far claim his active aid.
- Richard Wagner, 1851

Just victims of the in-house drive-by—they say jump, you say ‘How high?’
- Rage Against the Machine, “Bullet in the Head”

Heavy metal is, like all culture, a site of struggle over definitions, dreams, behaviors, and resources.
- Robert Walser, Running with the Devil (3)

Mama, they try and break me.
- Metallica, “Hero of the Day”

Decades ago when I. A. Richards reconceived the role which rhetoric played in the
social arena, his reconception gave rise to two arguments. The first, that “[r]hetoric
should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3), was accompanied by a
second urging that rhetorical theory turn away from “macroscopic,” generalized
conceptions of “the sources of the whole action of words” toward more “microscopic”
approaches that “look into the structure of the meanings with which discourse is
composed” (9; italics added). In keeping with this turn toward the group and away from
the individual, Douglas Ehninger writes more recently that “[i]f the classical rhetoric may
be characterized as “grammatical” and the ‘new’ rhetoric of the 18th century as
‘psychological,’ the rhetoric of our [current] period may best be described as ‘social’ or
‘sociological”’ (333). Similarly, Lynn Worsham has argued that “[r]hetoric thus far in its

history has been a rhetoric of the product, of style, and of consumption” but has

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neglected to set up “a new discursive economy based on a rhetoric of production.” Such a
task, Worsham writes, would require “formulating a new rhetoric [through] a reworking of
the idea of form and order” ( 149), and the end result of such a reworking would be
“[n]either a reified rhetoric (an institutional and repressive rhetoric) nor a purely aesthetic
rhetoric of the figure, [but] a rhetoric of production whose principal arts. . . would link a
new aesthetic practice to political and ethical rhetoric and produce a reconstructed social
order” (149). Richard Ohmann, in describing a major shift between classical and
contemporary conceptions of rhetoric, has similarly argued that “[t]raditional rhetoric
tends to conceive the task of eloquence in terms of overcoming resistance to a course of
action, an idea, a judgment. There is an intimate link between rhetoric and action, rhetoric
and decision. . . . Modern rhetoric. . . shifts the emphasis toward cooperation, mutuality,
social harmony” (65-6). This “intimate link between rhetoric and action” which Ohmann
describes had been developed at length, decades earlier, by Kenneth Burke. By way of a
sweepingly interdisciplinary methodology, Burke contributed the vitally important
theory of agency—the means and abilities for accomplishing an act—to a growing
awareness of social and political interchanges of power.

A gap exists between a rhetoric (in the sense of a historical system of knowledge)
and those who have practiced, shaped, and interrogated the system unless there is also
a thorough explanation of that system’s foundational discursive formations, spheres of
influence, and guiding epistomologies in order to render its history open, and thus
dynamic, rather than closed and fixed. In other words, gaining a clear view of the power
relations at play in a discourse and its practices first requires asking some crucial
preliminary questions about the nature, tradition, and possible rupturing of that rhetoric’s

system(s) for codification. As Berlin has written, “[a] rhetoric can never be innocent, can

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never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always
already serving certain ideological claims” (477); in this light, the issue of rock-discourse
acts and utterances presented, repeated, and possibly subscribed to becomes more
compelling when the reception of those acts and utterances can determine whether one is
a passive and captive patient of the rhetoric, or an active agent. Each of these
participatory acts, Clark warns, also requires a full awareness that “[r]hetorical
statements are assertions of ideology because their claims to consensus present particular
preferences as if they were absolute principles. Our rhetoric does that because we each
perceive our particular preferences as inherently correct” (Dialogue 53)——a possible
explanation for the dynamics at work behind choices made by rock-discourse participants
who view the myriad issues within the discourse in a singular and simplified way. A
multiple viewpoint of the world can only come about when those participants understand
how, as Crowley has noted, a system of rhetoric is “tied to, and is complicit with, the
social practices and relations that produce it” (“Straight” 10).

And so I have turned in this chapter to heavy metal, a particular strand of rock
discourse that from its aggressively entrenched beginnings in the far margins of popular
music went on to become what Will Straw, in a 1990 update of his study of the genre two
decades earlier, has redefined as “one of the coolest, most critically respectable and most
diverse of musical forms” (381 ). Once loosely defined and haphazardly classified as any
songtext with loud, distorted guitarwork at its fore, today’s metal strives for a no-
pretense stance to distance itself from showy “corporate” acts along the lines of
Scorpions, Def Leppard, and Judas Priest, to disavow the tired pseudo-Satanic theatrics
of Black Sabbath, Danzi g, and Iron Maiden, and to expand into newer discursive

subgenres of thrash, doom, and grindcore. Leather, spiked gloves, and crucifixes (inverted

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or upright) just don’t get it anymore; blue jeans and T-shirts—“the Metallica look”
defined by Chuck Eddy as a style which “reinforces the populist myth that hard rockers
aren’t jetsetters or design-school theorists, just grimy-haired streetkids in ripped pants”
(207 )——will do just fine when sound and lyric are what really matter in an updated genre
practiced by “kids who grew up with hard-core punk and early thrash” who strive to
“combine the velocity and aggression of hardcore with the more flamboyant fretboard
virtuosity traditional to metal” (Palmer 286). Moreover, today’s metal has had the
accumulated weight of three decades worth of stereotyping to overcome, the kind of
misunderstood and inaccurate notions about it shown by Andrew Ross in the
introduction to his otherwise excellent Routledge anthology Microphone F tends: Youth
Music and Youth Culture: “[Metal’s] gothic variants remain the home of choice for the
death trip and the suicide tendency” (7-8). Never mind that other discursive genres, most
notably gangsta rap and country, are chock full of those same themes—or that when
metal addresses these themes, it" reveals a strong connection to the blues, a particular form
of discourse which set out not to surrender to despair, but to overcome it through
naming and articulating its pain (Bayles 189). In short, current metal is undergoing a
metamorphosis of both sound and image, freeing itself of its former affect-driven
goofiness and moving into increasingly more voluminous and abrasive forms. Part of this
change is due to the ascendance of the still-unnamed metal/rap merger, a dynamic still
very much in progress but having introduced a specific style of discourse championed and
in large part forged by the politically-motivated group Rage Against the Machine. And
the other part of metal’s significant change stems from the presence, over two decades, of
the San F rancisco-based group Metallica as the genre’s premier shaping force.

Before launching into these bands’ histories and their struggles for power within

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the headbanger genre, however, I’d like to first “map the conditions of existence” for
heavy metal itself by making an argument for “how its genesis was made historically
possible” (Redhead 20), and in doing so to push the origins of this particularly raw form
of rock discourse further back than the era of Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Bill Haley—or,
less often, Chuck Berry—so frequently named as the Official Start Date for rock in
general. While Robert Walser has written that “[a] heavy metal geneology ought to trace
the music back to African-American blues, but this is seldom done” (8), an even fuller
understanding of metal’s connection to the blues can come from starting even before the
appearance of blues discourses in music history. Although the title of Martha Bayles’
polemic, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music,
gives clear warning of the jeremiad between its covers, it is Bayles who nonetheless
situates contemporary rock’s origins in “the entire history of Afro-American music,” to
include such early black discursive forms as plantation work songtexts and spirituals18
(135). These sounds of slavery gave birth over time to the blues, whose performers in the
19205 took part in the Great Migration from the rural South to cities in the northern
United States, most notably Chicago, where Bayles notes the songtexts also underwent a
significant transformation in moving from acoustic guitar to electric when Muddy Waters
and Howlin’ Wolf used amplifiers for the first time to combat the noise of nightclub
crowds (190). From there, one need only pick up a guitar, plug it in and turn the volume
“up to eleven,” as the guys in Spinal Tap say, and then quadruple the tempo of any
three-chord blues tune in order to experience the same process through which the
discourse of John Lee Hooker became that of metal’s Motorhead, not by appropriation

but through slow transformation. Appropriation itself, Nelson George suggests, is not

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possible in this case since blacks had willingly “disposed of” the blues (108) long before
Lemmy Kilmister and his Motorhead bandmates arrived on the scene:

The black audience's consumerism and restlessness burns out and
abandons musical styles, whereas white Americans, in the European
tradition of supporting forms and style for the sake of tradition, seem to
hold styles dear long after they have ceased to evolve. . . . Blacks create
and then move on. Whites document and then recycle. (109)

George’s observation is more than a little problematic in its vast generalization if
not outright essentializing of African-American musical habits, not to mention its flying in
the face of the intense recycling and outright reclamation of older “traditional” musical
discourse which not only took place in early blues but also occurs in hip-hop sampling
and interpolation.24 But in another way it succeeds in making a larger point that the habit
of canon-formation, expansion, preservation, and codification—a systematic approach to
musical discourse—might distinguish white attitudes and practices, while remembering
and re-honoring prior discourses and forms—a celebratory approach—may be the
distinguishing points of contrast for black practice just as white habits of religious
worship tend toward a silent deferral to ministerial authority and a focus on ritual while
African-American worship habits tend to be more fully participatory and focused on the
liturgical. In any case, what’s most significant here is that by “recycling” the blues, heavy
metal got tagged with the same label—“devil music”—athat its source genre once wore.

The myth of blues practitioner Robert Johnson having sold his soul in exchange for
artistic and commercial success is part of American folklore now, but the connection
between blues and Satan comes from another such lore. As Jon Michael Spencer relates
in his history Blues and Evil, both whites and their black slaves in the old South named,

on a purely arbitrary basis, certain instruments as belonging to the devil since he himself

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allegedly played them (26). For the Europeans, these were wind instruments; for the
Africans, stringed— especially the guitar, or “box”-—and the result was that blues singers
and guitarists were “shunned by the church faithful” (27).19 So labeled, blues guitarists
incorporated their devil associations into their songs—a tradition carried forward by a
number of metal bands both current and defunct—but practitioners of the blues also sang
of other themes which metal has preserved: migration and restlessness, prejudice and
racism, magic and occult (called “hoodoo” by the blues), alcohol and chemical use/abuse,
crime and poverty, prisons, wars, sickness, death, religion, and hell (Oliver; qtd. in
Bayles 190). For early white metal musicians such as Led Zeppelin, the attraction held
by the blues was the same as that offered to whites by black jazz musicians decades
earlier: “[N]ot just new sounds and rhythms, but new relationships, those of the hitherto
inaccessible culture. . .[the music] seemed to offer an alternative set of values” (Small
330). In this attraction, it’s also possible to view the blues as a desirable discourse seen
by white metalheads as a way to “disrupt the prevailing array of [other] discourses
through which subject identities are formed . . . so as to produce new articulations that
will produce new subjects and new forms of political alliance” (Bennett; “Texts” 5)
through alternative conceptions and formations of identity. Sensing, then as now, that
standard rock had begun to sound like what Adorno had called popular music in the
l9405—“Aunt Jemima’s ready-mix for pancakes extended to the field of music”
(“Critique” 21 l)—for what were protest songs and psychedelic “feed your head”
anthems, if not recipes for rebellion?——early metal practitioners made their own discourse
faster, louder, angrier, and less palatable to mainstream commercialism. When the MC5
began its most famous songtext with the now-legendary call, “Kick out the jams,

motherfuckersl”, it could not have been from a wish for widespread airplay, no matter

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how “underground” 605 FM radio may have been. Metal came into being as anti-listener,
anti-industry, and anti-songtext—even if mainstream rock radio did find a way to
broadcast the MC5 through an overdubbed call to “brothers and sisters” rather than the

initially-named audience.

Reading Metallica: A Pedagogy of A geney

There’s very few outside factors involved. It’s not your typical “Give the people what they want” or
“Yeah, we’re here to play rock and roll for you and party all day,” or any of that. This is firckin’ our shit,
and we wanna do what’s right for us, what we feel good about. If you like it, you’re invited along. If you
don’t, well, there’s the door.

- Lars Ulrich of Metallica

And my ties are severed clean; the less I have, the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign: rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond—call me what you will.
- Metallica, “Wherever I May Roam”

They dedicate their lives to running all of his
He tries to please them all, this bitter man he is
Throughout his life the same: He’s battled constantly
This fight he cannot win...

- Metallica, “The Unforgiven”

At first glance, it would seem ridiculously easy to track Metallica’s rapid
ascension from resistance to hegemony, from counterculture to mainstream power
structure. But such a study, Steve Redhead warns, is of the far too typical kind of
“cynical” critique that focuses on the “exploitive, shallow, and thoroughly commodified
culture underlying [popular music]” (13) and ignores the inherent richness of the
discourse as a “site of intersecting cultural struggles” where, as Grossberg notes, current
rockers “constant[ly] reassert that we/they are getting screwed . . . and keep trying to
name the power, to identify those who are doing the screwing, so to speak” ( “Anybody”
57). More importantly, “cynical” critiques focused on commercial complicity and

corporate commodification of rock’s discourses overlook, or perhaps only cast into too

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deep a shadow, the important power struggles a band can find itself engaged in over the
direction of its discourse, the perception of its image, the manifestations of its desires,
and the transformations of its varying textual and cultural forms. In short, critiques
focused solely on a triad of production, consumption, and the reifying processes between
them tend to short-change or eliminate altogether issues of agency. Therefore as a
longtime consumer-theorist of metal myself, 1 too will embody its own position of
resistance by likewise shrugging off the easiest, most “obvious,” i.e. critically favored,
possible readings of the discourse form. To get there, I’ll offer a pair of readings-—
Metallica the Unapologetically Complicit, and Metallica the Defiantly Resistant—
drawing in part from Chris Crocker’s Metallica: The Frayed Ends of Metal and Mark
Putterford and Xavier Russell’s Metallica: A Visual Documentary as sources to
supplement my own knowledge of the band and its history.20 Crocker, an American,
tends to offer a largely uncritical and at times even fawning account of the band’s rise to
popularity, while British writers Putterford and Russell take a clearly cynical position
that at times will have many readers wondering how A Visual Documentary can claim to
be “THE book for Metallifans,” as advertised on its front cover.

By all accounts, Metallica’s formation as a band is credited to drummer Lars
Ulrich, a Danish junior-ranked tennis player who developed a rabid affinity for a type of
hard-edged discourse that was called, by music critics in the late 1970's and early 805, the
“New Wave of British Heavy Metal.” Abandoning his tennis racquet for a drum set
following his parents’ move to Los Angeles and the States, Ulrich worked as a newspaper
carrier, taught himself drurnbeats by following along with NWOBHM records, and
advertised his desire to join with other musicians in performing cover versions of the

songtexts he loved. James Hetfield, a fellow teenaged admirer of the New-Wave genre

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who worked in a print shop and had picked up the guitar after many years of despised
piano lessons, responded to Ulrich’s ad; the first and most significant realization the two
fledgling musicians had, upon jamming together, was that Hetfield had no singing ability
and Ulrich’s drumming skills were even worse. Hetfield, in fact, gave up all h0pe for the
partnership after Ulrich’s cymbals flew off their stand whenever he hit them. Pressed
nonetheless by Ulrich to stay with the project, Hetfield recruited two other musicians to
round out the lineup, and Ulrich appropriated the new band’s name, Metallica, from a list
of fan-magazine titles submitted to him by some writer friends for his recommendation.
Liking this name best, he simply deleted it from the list and suggested the friends go with
Metal Mania for their publication. Untrained and raw, but now newly named, the four
teens cut a demo of an original songtext titled “Hit the Lights” for a compilation album to
be released by a local independent record label. The album’s cover, upon release,
misspelled the band’s name as “Mettallica” and further misspelled the last names of each
of Ulrich’s and Hetfield’s bandmates. Moreover, the lyrics to “Hit the Lights” were
standard jock-rock machismo that began with a tribute to an influential work in the metal
canon, MOtOrhead’s live album No Sleep Til Hammersmith:

No life till leather/ We are gonna kick some ass tonight

We got the metal madness / When our fans start screaming

It’s right, well all right/ When we start to rock

We never want to stop again. . . .

You know our fans are insane / We are gonna blow this place away
With volume higher/ Than anything today, the only way. . . .

In a purely aesthetic and lyric-based analysis, any originality in this “original”
composition would have to be limited to the vivid imaginations which Hetfield and Ulrich
showed in dreaming up a history of “screaming fans” and any sort of “place” to “blow

away,” since performance of their music had thus far been limited to the living room of

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James’s parents’ house. But the music behind the words followed a tempo faster and
louder than anything previously recorded by an American metal band. The record was a
local success, and the group—praised by area fans and critics alike for this new form of
“thrash” discourse—found steady work. Soon after, they replaced their bassist with the
more accomplished Cliff Burton, who taught them music theory and introduced them to
classical works, especially Bach, and their lead guitarist with Kirk Hammett, who’d
studied under rock-guitar maestro Joe Satriani and introduced Hetfield, Ulrich, and Burton
to a style of soloing that moved away from “American” blues-based fretwork and
incorporated “European”-flavored minor notes/chord progressions instead.21 Signing
with yet another independent label, Megaforce, headed by record-store owners Jon and
Marcia Zazula, Metallica cut its first full-length album, which the band members wanted
to title Metal Up Your Ass. Corporate distributors, however, who would be stocking the
album in record-store bins, objected to the title and refused permission for the band to use
it; in response, bassist Burton uttered, in reference to the executives behind the refusal,
“Just kill ’em all, man”—and Kill 'Em All became the substitute title.

In approaches to metal discourses that require all aspects of the discourse—
especially its practitioners—to reflect a naturalized essence of “radicalism” or
“opposition,” there is little tolerance for a band credited with the founding of thrash metal
to embrace classical compositions, learn music theory, receive training from a master
musician, and compromise its own desires in deference to industrial power. So, in this
Metallica-the-Unapologetically-Complicit reading, the band is already seriously losing its
resistant footing—and its story has only begun. Having developed a following by playing
faster and louder than its rivals, Metallica traveled to Denmark to record its second album,

Ride the Lightning. The title of this work, prison slang for execution by electric chair,

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reflected a new politicized content to the band’s songs which, Crocker notes, can be
directly attributed to the success of the first album since the proceeds from its sales
allowed the band members to buy their first television set and use CNN as a supplier for
topical, news-based themes (64). But along with this thematic change, Metallica also
went “experimental” on the new album, slowing its tempo and introducing acoustic guitar
to the lead-in for its anti-suicide song, “Fade to Black.” The group’s consumer-theorists,
sensing an impending crossover to mainstream metal, voiced collective displeasure; Ulrich
responded by saying he’d already become

fed up with the mentality shown by so many thrash[ers]; all they want to
do is play faster and faster. What does that prove? Anyone can concen-
trate on speed for its own sake, but this doesn’t allow any room for
subtlety, dexterity, or growth. Metallica is always seeking to improve,
which is why we’re getting attention now. (Qtd in Putterford & Russell
45)

Already constructed by many former admirers as a sellout, his agency as a
resistant force called into serious question, Ulrich’s next move only served to support
their continued condemnation. He persuaded his three bandmates to abandon the Zazulas
and their Megaforce label for a much more lucrative deal with Elektra Records. Moreover,
he also pushed them to sign with Q-Prime Management, a firm very much in the music
mainstream. Q-Prime, in turn, got the band a slot on a major European tour—during
which bassist Burton was killed when the group’s tour bus overturned on an icy highway.
Between Metallica’s next two albums—Master of Puppets. with Burton on bass guitar,
and its successor And Justice for All, with replacement Jason Newsted in the lineup—the
group nudged further into conformity by allowing truncated “radio edit” versions of two
of its songtexts to be released as singles, and by abandoning its pledge to forswear

videotext as a promotional tool. The vow was initially broken by the release of the

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$19. 98 Home Vid: Cliff ‘Em All, in which the band attempted to qualify and validate its
decision first with the price-locking title preventing Elektra Entertainment from profiting
excessively at the hands of Metallica fans, and second by a hand-scrawled, error-plagued
explanation on the videotext’s back cover:

Well, we finally went and did what we always talked about not doing,
releasing a vid! Before you throw up in disgust let us tell you the idea
behind this. First of all, this is n0t your typical shit home vidio [sic]
(its-worse)done with hi gh-tech camera production and sound, its [sic]

a compilation of bootleg footage shot by sneaky Metallifux, stuff shot
for TV that was never used, but we’ve held on to, home footage, personal
fotos [sic] & us drunk. But most important, its [sic] really a look back at
the 31/2 years that Cliff [Burton] was with us and includes his best bass
solos and the home footage & pix that, we feel, best capture his unique
personality and style.

The disclaimer presented an argument supported by evidence difficult for judgmental
consumer-theorists to refute: this videotext release was made possible through bootleg
(i.e. fan-generated, not band-commissioned) footage, unused (i.e. not commercially
valuable) television clips, and especially an ethos-establishing intent of paying tribute to a
musician whose skills had been admired, and whose death had been mourned, by a great
number of fans. But all of these rhetorical contortions went to waste in 1988 when the
band, at the behest of Elektra, did go onto commission a “high-tech camera production”
MTV promotional videotext for its songtext “One,” from Justice; when “One” went on
to be nominated for that most mainstream and socially-sanctioning of musical awards, a
Grammy; and especially when, although it did not win in its category, the band
performed live for the tuxedo-and-ball gown set at the ceremony. With Ulrich watching
and directing the band’s finances, Metallica entered the 19905 with a lucrative recording

contract, high-powered management representation, two videotexts in the stores,

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numerous royalties pouring in from clothing and memorabilia sales, and a touring
entourage of eighteen trucks and sixty full-time employees who followed the musicians to
five-star hotels as they traveled the US. and Europe. After its initial loss at the 1989
Grammys, the band collected two awards from that same institution before going on to
record a sixth album, this one eponymous. Metallica, in sharp contrast to all of the
releases before it, contained very short, formulaic songtexts perfect for radio play, five of
which were accompanied by MTV videotexts, and one of which was a tender love ballad.
The album’s producer, Bob Rock, was a technician best known for making slick, radio-
friendly music sanitized of all rough edges, and who persuaded James Hetfield to take
voice lessons in order to sound less raw. Metallica arrived in stores boasting the number-
one spot on the Billboard sales charts; its 1993 follow-up, Live Shit: Binge and Purge,
was a combination disc/video/book package bearing a retail price of ninety dollars. In
just ten years, Metallica had gone from “cult to culture” (Crocker 4), losing all of its
credibility as a force of resistance to both commercialization and commodification and
being thoroughly consumed by the rock-culture hegemony it had held in contempt early
on. Once content to shun mainstream practitioners of what Eddy calls “nerf-metal”
(302)—soft melodies framed by loud volume, as performed by such groups as Starship
and Joumey—-to the point where the members of Metallica flatly refused to record music
at studios where these groups had worked before them—they eventually shared a stage
with no less than Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minelli at the 1992 AIDS benefit tribute to
Queen’s Freddie Mercury. The band, in Putterford and Russell’s British-based critical
view, “had clearly been transformed into the kind of hi ghly-polished corporate money
machine they once existed to rebel against. They were just another fat turkey on the

production line, bearing no resemblance to their former selves” (78).

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Dealing out the agony within / Charging hard and no one’s gonna give in

Living on your knees: Conformity / Or dying on your feet for honesty...

Following our instinct: Not a trend / Go against the grain until the end.
- Metallica, “Damage Inc.”

Never cared for what they say / Never cared for games they play
Never cared for what they do / Never cared for what they know—And I know.
- Metallica, “Nothing Else Matters”

As the first reading, of Metallica the Unapologetically Complicit, comes to a
close, the critics have no lack of evidence in making their assessment of the band’s
position. Yet one also has to wonder whether the “fat turkey on the production line”
decree works to deny options for seeing Metallica fully, as a site of discursive practice
grounded in conflict. What’s more, such a quick verdict of corporate complicity may also
ignore any possibility that, while the music industry of late corporate capitalism surely
represents what Bakhtin called “unitary language” (Imagination 270), a language of
systematic “normality” that serves to codify the available discourse forms of its members
and dispense controlled measures of cultural capital to those same members, Metallica
might still be seen as having brought forth a more “literary language” of agency that
created an empowering position of control over its discourse and forced the validation of
that agented discourse by the very groups—Elektra, MTV, the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences (the Grammy people), radio programmers, fellow metal
bands, and especially Metallica’s own consumer-theorists—who wished it so hard away.
If alternative readings do exist, then the Metallica lyrics used as section epigraphs thus
far, easily constructed as standard fare in metal discourse and as a necessary reflection of
teen angst and rage as recalled (but not lived) by four musicians now well into their
thirties in order to attract the attention—and the dollars—of metal-discourse consumers,

might also show how, even while dancing (or moshing) inside the capitalist market

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economy that would embrace, sanitize, and thus commodify the group’s discourse and
agency, the primary focus of Metallica’s struggle as reflected in the admittedly
Romanticized lyrics cited here has been to ensure that the dance will always move the
band a few more steps away from the defining and identity-fixing clutches of mainstream
rock culture. Already enmeshed in an artificial and wholly reified construct of metal as a
leatherbound, slobbering beast whose purpose is to threaten everyone over eighteen and
validate everyone under, Metallica’s own fall into such an image and tradition occurred in
its very early years when the still-teenaged band members conformed to every outside—
authored expectation and definition of what a metal band was and should do. “Hit the
Lights” was, as I’ve already said, typical metal-discourse blather in its lyrical content, and
the band performed its early Kill ‘Em All songtexts in standard metal garb—leather—
under a huge barbed-hook logo (see figures 1 and 2 ahead) while encouraging its audiences
to chant Obscenities between songs ($19. 98 Home Vid). While the musical style may
have been in some ways innovative, everything about its delivery was basic rehash.

But after the band’s early posturing allowed it to come into its own as a discursive
force, Hetfield and the others likewise came into an awareness of agency by focusing on
their own private desires as writers of the discourse and ignoring the common desires of
the audience as readers, with the result becoming an ongoing project to subvert every
favored trope subscribed to as a permanent truth and unquestioned requirement by both
music industry executives and metal’s consumer-theorists. On the group’s second album,
Hetfield abandoned his affected screech, the standard sound of metal vocalists, dropping
his voice to a deeper, more normal register. The songtext “Fade to Black” introduced
acoustic guitar to a thrash tune, arguing that headbanger music did not, in fact, preclude

an appreciation for the softer sounds of earlier times and genres; indeed, that it could

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be made of those sounds. And the overall tempo of this album, in response to the
awestruck appreciation by consumer-theorists for the blitzkrieg pace in the first one,

was slower. Signing with Elektra and abandoning its independent-label affiliation
unquestionably nudged Metallica several steps toward the mainstream, but in response to
its courtship by the suit-and-tie corporate set, the band did several things to confirm its
agency. First, it refused to restrict the length of its songtexts on its initial major-label
offering, Master of Puppets, to anything near the three-minute limit imposed by
commercial radio, in effect rendering the album unpromotable through airplay. To make
promotion even more of a challenge, in a fairly brilliant reading of the silently-subtextual
ideology behind the warning labels being advocated at the time by Tipper Gore’s PMRC,
the group designed a stop-sign shaped sticker for the cover of Puppets which read: “The
only track you probably won’t want to play is ‘Damage Inc.’ due to multiple uses of the
infamous ‘F’ word. Otherwise, there aren’t any ‘shits,’ ‘fucks,’ ‘pisses,’ ‘cunts,’
‘motherfuckers,’ or ‘cocksuckers’ anywhere on this record.” (The “warning” was simply
covered by oversized price stickers at all but the most extreme record shops.) The band
then followed Puppets not with another major studio release, as Elektra had hoped, but
with a brief collection of NWOBHM cover tunes partially recorded in Lars Ulrich’s garage.
To prevent Elektra from gouging buyers, the group titled this new work The $5. 98 EP, a
move later echoed in the title of its first videotext release. After releasing its fifth album,
And Justice for A ll, Metallica received critical praise and attention for the politically-aware
content of the new songs and the literary quality of the anti-war songtext “One,” inspired
by Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun. As before, the band immediately

overturned these new and unwelcome subject positions of activism and intellectualism by

making clear that what it knew of world politics was only as much as it could gather from

-r47-

CNN in brief sound bites while traveling from one concert to the next, and that its reading
of Trumbo’s novel had been, if anything, a quick scan—a fact made clear when Ulrich, in
a televised interview, referred to the main character in the novel as “Johnny.”22 And
when it gave in to Elektra’s push to make an MTV video for the radio—edited (shortened)
version of “One,” the hand first set out a lengthy list of rules that culminated in its having
absolute final-approval authority for the clip. Embarrassed by the standard metal-
videotext format, in which groups either lip-synced or played out melodramatic scripts in
high camp, Metallica insisted that its first MTV-promo venture would consist mostly of
outtakes from the 1971 film version of Trumbo’s novel intermixed with brief black-and-
white flames of the musicians performing their songtext in an empty warehouse. No
script, no skulls, no nearly-naked women stalked by demons; the videotext did its job for
Elektra and no more.

Metallica entered the 19905 with Hetfield steadily confronted by evidence of an
ever-increasing modeling of his discourse by other hardcore thrashers. His singing
style, which had effectively killed the falsetto screech that had once dominated metal
vocals, was now also the sound of Pantera, White Zombie, Helmet, Slayer, et al.——
everyone growled. His songs had stretched into six, eight, eleven minutes of complex
chord changes and multiple bridges; this was now standard metal tunesmithery. His
lyrics had become politically and socially thematic; this too was commonplace. Having
cleared out a comfortable space for Metallica inside the headbanger forest, Hetfield was
now surrounded by upstart sapling clones that seemed to close off his band’s main
avenues of growth. In response, Metallica threw off every reifying definition it had
accumulated: It hired a “mainstream” producer for its new album, whittled its songtexts

down to three or four minutes and an equal number of chord changes, replaced CNN

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themes with topics from Hetfield’s now-adult perspective on his childhood life, called in
an orchestra to supply string accompaniment for the love ballad “Nothing Else Matters,”
and commissioned videotexts for almost half of the new songtexts. The new album,
Metallica. came out with a nearly all-black cover, the band’s logo barely visible, the faces
of its members appearing as gray silhouettes. Continuing in its drive to function as a
force of resistance against outside objectification and to preserve its agency as a leading
entity in metal’s discursive practices, the group subverted everything, including
itself—and in doing so, it presented to the market the first number-one selling heavy
metal album in the history of music sales charts.

Here, for critics searching for evidence of the vast power of the “culture industry”
which the Frankfurt School described, is the most satisfying ending for the story,
whereby that industry has forced resistance into a comer where the last available act of
defiance is required to take the form of total capitulation, instantly rendering moves of
resistance and struggles for agency invisible as political acts. For Metallica, separation
fi'om metal’s commercial (and commercializing) aspects is made all the more difficult since
the band’s two-decade effect on the market is formidable. Independent record labels, like
the one that gave Metallica its start, went on to become a thriving part of the altemative-
music scene. The headbanger press, which in 1982 had only one publication outlet,
Britain’s Kerrang, (Putterford & Russell 73) now has over forty titles between the US.
and Britain alone; this does not account for Japanese and European publications of which
there are dozens more. And where metal was once considered off-limits by radio
programmers, it is now common practice for many mainstream-rock stations to set aside
whole time blocks for nothing but metal songtexts. Metal “pretenders,” especially those

in the short-lived “hair band” genre covered by Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of

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Western Civilization, Part II and made of acts like Poison, Ratt, Faster Pussycat, and Skid
Row in the 19805, were dismissed by consumer-theorists nearly as quickly as they
appeared; other acts like Metley Cute and Guns N’ Roses quickly dropped the makeup-
and-mousse routine in order to stay alive in the metal arena. And through Metallica’s
appearances at such televised events as the Grammy Awards and the Freddie Mercury
tribute, the band succeeded in forcing metal into the living rooms of millions of viewers
who discovered there was much more method than madness involved in the music. As
Will Straw has observed, metal at the start of the 19905 had become respected as a valid
and important form of musical expression. Indeed, Metallica can be seen as having
become a form of culture industry itself by wielding influence of a magnitude that more
established business entities could never have hoped to possess, much less exert.

And yet; and yet. Perhaps Metallica, in its two-decade struggle to resist total
capitulation to the desires and definitions of both the capitalist music market and the
consumer-theorists who feed that system, can be seen as having built both a career and a
reputation from—to paraphrase Laclau and Mouffe—the creation of fissures for a fan-
based hegemony to fill in order to maintain a permanent state of crisis. By this alternative
reading, it might be possible to argue that in order to keep its discourse vital, the band
imposes upon itself a requirement for constant transformation in order to challenge, and
ultimately to corrupt, the codes by which “heavy metal” is fixed as a discursive form and
by which metal’s practitioners are likewise fixed merely as patients, rather than agents, of
the discourse. As Eagleton has written, “[t]he most efficient oppressors are the ones who
persuade their underlings to love, desire, and identify with their power; and any practice
of political emancipation thus involves that most difficult of all forms of liberation,

freeing ourselves from ourselves” (Ideology xiv). This becomes the basis, in an alternative

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reading, for casting Metallica as the agent of not so much its own liberation from the
freezing power of those outside its own realm of discourse production, but more of the
liberation of the very consumer-theorists whose intense love, desire, and identification of
and with the band leave them most in need of a new form of identity, made possible
through “their” band’s own position of emancipation from the cumbersome weight of a
fixed and immobile identity and role in discursive production. For Michel de Certeau, any
form of production that is by nature “rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular
and clamorous” is placed into immediate conflict with its audience, defined as “an entirely
different kind of production, called ‘consumption’ and characterized by its ruses, its
fragmentation. . . its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity” (31).
The perplexing nature of this conflict, as it is experienced by individuals involved in the
initial production, lies primarily in the tendency of consumer-based “production” to
“show itself not in its own products...but in an art of using those imposed on it” (31).

De Certeau’s many arguments to suggest that “consumption” by those at the “margins”
has in fact become an inextricable part of production—not in a repositioned center, but by
a reconceived notion of the marginal—lead to an ability to view Metallica’s songtext,
“The Struggle Within,” as neither a rhetoric of teen angst nor a Romantic ideology, but
rather as a first-hand narrative of the power struggle between the primary and secondary
producers of a discourse:

Reaching out—for something you’ve got to feel

While clutching at what you thought was real. . . .

Closing in—the pressure upon you is unreal

What the hell—What is it you think you’re gonna find?
Hypocrite—Boredom sets into the boring mind

Home is not a home, it becomes a hell / Turning into your prison cell
Advantages are taken, not handed out / While you struggle. . . .

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The most significant aspect of these lyrics is the complex way they can illuminate
dc Certeau’s argument by functioning as valid perspectives for each of the discourse
“producers” involved in the struggle. For the band-producer, the “you” in lines one, two,
four, and five becomes the consumer-theorist, clearly recognized as a co-producer by the
“unreal pressure” exerted on the band in line three and turning the band’s discursive
“home” into a “prison cell” where “advantages are taken, not handed out” in lines six and
seven. Yet at the same time, the force of the consumer-theorist, having asked a variation
of a foundational question in philosophy—“If a musical text falls into the rack of a record
store, but no one is there to buy it, does it make a sound?”—establishes the means to see
itself as the entity being “pressured” by the band-producer’s constant tums, itself as
posing, in response, a question for the band—“What is it you think you’re gonna
find?”—and itself as accusing the band-producer of hypocrisy for failing to deliver what
its overseer, the consumer-producer, has demanded and expected. A charge of hypocrisy
could not be possible without the presence of the controlling metaphor of authenticity,
and as Taylor has written, “the ethic of authenticity [reveals a] site of an ineradicable
tension [which] comes from the sense of an ideal that is not being fully met in reality.
And this tension can turn into a struggle, where people try to articulate the shortfall of
practice, and criticize it” (76-7). Returning to Eagleton, then, the “other side” of the
liberation narrative cited earlier must also be examined, since any form of oppression
which “fails to yield its victims sufficient gratification over an extended period of time”
will face the surety of eventual rebellion (Ideology xiv). Metallica bassist Jason Newsted
has articulated the conflict between his band and its fans in this way:

A lot of groups still play real fast and they do it well. And that’s okay,
we’ve already done that. We helped to invent that. . . but we have more to

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offer than that as well. We’re more than just metal, okay? Fans just want
us to be in this little thing right here. and we're not happy with that. . . . If
you want just the fast stuff, [support] Napalm Death and Rage Against
the Machine. . . go to their shows, buy their T-shirts, but don’t disrespect
the guys who helped invent the fast stuff that these [bands] learned from.
All we’re doing is doing what we feel. . .[b]ut it 's better when fans say we
can 7 [change], because then we want to do it that much more. (Qtd. in
Miller 14; italics added).

As Eagleton has written, rebellion itself is “rational . . . when the miseries clearly
outweigh the gratifications, and when it seems likely that there is more to be gained than
to be lost by such action” (Ideology xiv). Thus a look at the Metallica lyrics from the
songtext “Wherever I May Roam” can work in tandem with Newsted’s articulation to
reveal something more than a Romantic yearning for a knowable self: “And my ties are
severed clean; the less I have, the more I gain. Off the beaten path I reign: rover,
wanderer, nomad, vagabond—call me what you will.” In a more expansive view, the
lyrics may also present the heart of a dialectic taking place between the primary and
secondary producers of everything that has come to be known as Metallica. With the
multi-platinum success of their most experimental and confrontational album to date, the
band faced a formidable challenge in overturning the immediate and vehement charges of
“selling out” which accompanied the commercial and critical success of the “black album”
as a collection of discourse, but made all the more subject to hostile reception by core
consumer-producers who did not condone the flurry of videotexts and radio singles to
which the band had always stood in opposition. Ultimately, the band’s reply to these

charges and suspicions took five years to formulate, and it came by way of utterly

suspending every practice and style that could be defined and defended as heavy metal.

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Figure 1: Metallica (from left)—
Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich, and Newsted as they appeared until 1995.

Metallica Digest Volume 6 (1996): Issue 017
Subject: Re: release date for Load

First of all, this digest is getting pretty shitty lately. . . . For the people that don't like the band,
why are you even on this listsen/l GROW UP PEOPLE. Moderator, can't you do something. . .???

i can do something. but i shouldn't have to do something. . . . most opinions about bands &
musicians are no different than religious zeal. i am not running a religious zealot digest. i had hoped you
folks were far enough past puberty to carry on rational conversation. perhaps i've been wrong. . . .

When an announcement came in 1996 that Metallica had been added to the list of
performing bands for the summer’s Lollapalooza tour, Eddy writes that “accusations of
integrity-loss [on the part of the event] started flying. . .[and] the only conceivable
explanations were fishing-for-headlines, conspiracy theory, or short-terrn memory loss”
(67). And the reason these charges were leveled at concert organizers was that Metallica,
in 1996, had become a bitter enemy to not only metal and hard rock discourses, but to the
whole ethos of the rock carnival which Lollapalooza represented. Lars Ulrich, a year
earlier, had previewed the change to come as only a stylistic turn musically, saying that
his band, in the studio recording its first album of new material in five years, was heading
into what he called

a dirtier, looser thing, not so tied into the idea of. . .‘the mighty guitar riff.’
It’s so corny to say ‘bluesier.’ I like the word greasy. When I listen to

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[our earlier albums], I still hear a tension, a staccato thing that we’ve
always been a slave to. We’ve done that. It doesn’t have a lot of soul in
it. The human spark gets put to the wayside. (Qtd. in Fricke 98).

What Ulrich did not disclose, however, was the delivery by which this stylistic turn
would be presented to the band’s vast audience; that is, the image of Metallica’s new
“human spark” which itself would turn as well, but in a way far more radical than the
mere sound of the band’s discourse. The 1996 album, Load, stood the band’s definition
by core consumer-producers completely on its head. The CD bore a cover photo by
Andres Serrano in which a mixture of blood and semen were pressed between panes of
glass, and the band’s barbed-hook logo had been replaced by a softer, rounded, and rather
undistinguished set of capital letters. In addition, the numerous photos inside the CD
booklet presented the band members, in Eddy’s critical description, “male-bonding
shirtlessly and flaunting Freddie Mercury coiffures and glam makeup, a notably gutsy

[move] for San Francisco guys who’d never exactly specialized in songs about sex with

women” (50). Kirk Hammett’s appearance was the most severely altered: In contrast to

WWI ! l

 

Figure 2: The old “barbed” logo (left); the new “plain” logo (right).

the mere short, college-athlete haircuts of his three bandmates, Hammett had shom his
formerly waist-length curls to a tight Afi'o style which lifted his forehead by several
inches, while also piercing his lower lip with a silver spike, having his stomach and left
side tattooed, and hiding his eyes behind gobs of black mascara. The Internet immediately

began to burn with howls of confusion and alarm on the part of the band’s core consumer-

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producers: Had Metallica been a gay band all along? Were rumors true of an affair
between Hammett and Ulrich (who appeared, in a few liner photos, in a white fur coat
and makeup to rival the lead guitarist’s)? Could anyone verify that the semen and blood
in that disgusting cover photo had come from Hammett himself? And even if not, what the

hell was going on here? As bassist Newsted has explained in retrospect:

People saw these photographs and they freaked, and I freaked too, as a
fan of Metallica. Because it didn’t look like my Metallica, the Metallica I
know and what was a part of me. . . . I argued from day one that I did not
want to do those photos, that I did not want semen on the cover; that
doesn’t represent Metallica. We’re not homosexuals, that’s not something
I’m into. I don’t think we should put on eye makeup. That’s not me; I
don’t agree with it. . . . [But] I had to go with [the photos] because we
agreed—those guys talked me into it. . . . What threw me the most [about
the Load controversy] was that whole haircut thing. It was probably too
much at once. (Qtd. in Miller 13, 16.)

The lack of agency in Newsted’s solitary vote against the image changes is a holdover
from his replacement-guy status after the death of Cliff Burton in early 1987, and it
confirms Metallica’s tight direction by Hetfield and Ulrich. For Newsted, Ulrich’s
consistent inclination toward full rock-star imagery is something that particularly
rankles—“Lars is really into making the scene and being seen. That’s what makes him
go. . . . Lars and I are getting to be more and more like polar opposites as we go on” (qtd.
in Hedegaard 1 19)—but the image of Metallica which formed the overriding context of
Load’s vehemently negative reception was not the only sign of the two band leaders’
awareness of the power held by signs of success and, more importantly, its acceptance.
The album’s back cover (see figure 3) consisted of what might well have been a giant
middle finger raised by the group to its core group of definers: a photo of all four band

members seated at a vast wooden table, dressed in gaudy shirts and black sportcoats,

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wearing sunglasses, with Hetfield and Hammett smoking cigars, Hammett and Ulrich
drinking white wine from delicate Stemware. (Newsted is noticeably removed from the

pose and has no props.)

  

      

/. ., .

Figure 3: (From left) Hatfield, Ulrich, Hammett,
and Newsted as they appeared on Load in 1996.

   

This photo, combined with Serrano’s artwork on the front cover, was a sign guaranteed to
trigger protest and dismay from every consumer-producer who joined in Newsted’s own
lament that this was “not my Metallica,” the confrontational, resistant, and yet still
known entity producing metal/thrash discourse for over a decade. But to coincide with all
of the semiotics of image, Hetfield also indicated quite clearly, on the songtext “Hero of
the Day,” an awareness of the turmoil his band would create with the most code-
disruptive offering in its history:

Someone there is sighing—

Keepers of the flames, do you feel your names?
Can you hear your babies crying?

Excuse me while I tend to how I feel

As things return to me that still seem real.

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In a continued reading focused on articulations of agency and power of self-definition, the
last lines here are intriguing in that Hetfield seems to suggest that the former Metallica is
no longer a reality at all, while this new incarnation as a short-haired, slowed-down,
metal-tinged (but no longer metal) rock band is real—yet the only way to establish this
point is to disguise the new “reality” under a barrage of images conveying phoniness and
pomposity. As the verse continues, Hetfield addresses the five-year-old charges of
“sellout” status for his band and places the responsibility for Metallica’s new turn
squarely in the hands of consumer-producers themselves: “Now deservingly, this easy
chair,” he sings, “but the rocking stopped by wheels of despair.” As in the Metallica
album’s lyrics, Hetfield once more provides terminology that functions equally for both
band-producer and consumer-coproducer: The “rocking” (a pun) has been stopped, on
the part of the band, in response to the “despair” created by its outside definers, while for
those same definers the rocking will be stopped, on their own part, in response to the
despair created for them by the band’s refusal to be known in any fixed way. And so
Hetfield completes the verse: “Don't want your aid, but this fist I've made for years can‘t
hold or feel. No, I‘m not all me, so please excuse me while I tend to how I feel.” As the
songtext ends, the vocalist repeats the words, “Mama, they try and break me, Mama,
they try and break me,” each repetition gaining in volume until the words become an
extended howl.

For John Fiske, the “tactical maneuvers” of De Certeau’s consumption-based
coproducers of popular discourse constitute an act of “constructing our space within and
against their place, of speaking our meanings with their language” (36)—with us being the
secondary, consumption-based producer and they being the primary, production-based

competition for ownership of our products (which, remember, have been co-produced;

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there is no their sound without our ears——and our wallets). On Load. Metallica’s most
significant step in the political struggle for discourse ownership was not the act of
changing its physical image through bodily appearance, cover art, or logo redesign, nor to
convert its former “thrash” metal into radio-friendly hard rock, but to combine these two
smaller steps in a way that would effectively remove their language from usability by us
through the act of rendering that language so complex as to become unintelligible. But
toward what end this often bitter and always complicated struggle for ownership? If the
goal is something as simple as forcing consumer-coproducers not to remain solely in that
role, but to strive for the creation of their own discourses and avoid the shallow,
ultimately unfulfilling appearance of discursive co-production shared with a more
privileged and better-connected primary producer—if the message could be boiled down
to something as simple as “get a life, don’t just attach to someone else’s”-—would the
struggle best be read as merely a frivolous enterprise? Perhaps an exercise in sado-
masochism? Or as a dialectical opposition that might be seen as mutually liberating?
Metallica’s two follow-up releases after Load may hold clues. If the band were a
novel, then Load would be its pivotal, climactic scene, but beyond that scene could lie a
narrative of gradual understanding and acceptance on the part of both the musicians and
their consumer-theorists old and new, and an enhanced view of the power politics that
can at once generate and stem from an ongoing dialogue, one in which harsh confrontation
is sometimes necessary for the most constricting edges of a fixing ideology to crumble and
allow for a more unencumbered agency within the bounds of mutually-constitutive
conceptions and appreciations of power. Metallica’s 1997 album, Re-Loaa’, offered a
number of tracks that had been kept off the ’96 release due to space considerations; the

first songtext to gather major attention, “The Memory Remains,” told a tale of a fading

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Hollywood actress recalling her former days of glory and adoration. What generated the
attention for this songtext was not its thematic content but the guest appearance of
Marianne F aithfull, playing the role of the “fading prima donna” in Hetfield’s lyric by
singing a wordless chant of “la la la” during the chorus and fadeout, finally convincing a
significant number of former Metallica admirers to accept the possibility that change,
through experimentation, might not be such a terrible thing. The band, in turn,
acknowledged that too much change at once might not be such a good thing, as shown by
only a limited number of MTV videotexts being commissioned and a return to black-and-
white footage, this time of stock-car racing, as the visual context for the back-to-thrash
songtext, “Fuel.” Internet discussions praised and condemned both band and album as
always, but did not howl in anguish as they had after Load’ 5 release. Some kind of
mutual understanding, based on a recognition and respect for difference and movement in
the place of bitter alienations from sameness and stasis, was taking effect, as reflected in
the words of music critic Ben Ratliff:

Up until the turn of the 19905, Metallica stood at the terminus of every-
thing heavy metal was about, including its side streams of punk and thrash.
Since then, James Hetfield and company have become firll-fledged rock
stars with a fat, comfortable, limousine sound. They lost some orthodoxy,
gained a lot more fans, and did it all with consummate grace. (24)

Well, maybe. To end their second decade of involvement in rock discourses, the same
Hetfield and company released a double-disk compilation of raw and underproduced
cover tunes, under the title Garage Inc. (a play on the 1987 Metallica songtext “Damage
Inc.” but also an appropriate blending of the two colliding spheres in which the band
members have tried to operate). as a way to pay tribute to all of the groups of the 19705

and 805 whose influence helped to shape Metallica’s own discourse. And although

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controversy continued to surround the band for its inclusion of Bob Seger’s 19705 ballad
“T urn the Page” in the tribute, the outrage was softened 3 bit by the reappearance of
Metallic’s old barbed-hook logo on the new CD’s cover. The group’s final release of the
20th century, S&M, was a live recording of its April 1999 collaboration with the San
Francisco Symphony—an event which, combined with the recent appearance of a
Metallica-on-four—cellos European chamber ensemble calling itself Apocalyptica—has
caused numerous orchestra patrons to howl in protest. After sixteen years of struggle,
the band’s highly conflicted position of power appears to have been temporarily settled
with an agency still contested at times by consumption-based coproducers, but one
mediated by a group of secondary-level “laborers” whose own role and function may be
more clearly defined through the ongoing struggles of its primary opposition.

Reading Rage: A Pedagogy of Confrontation

All of the people we meet in the course of daily life, no matter how unlettered they may be, are groping
with sentwces toward a sense of thdr lives and their position in them; and they have what almost always
goes with an impulse to ideology, a good deal of animus and anger.

- Lionel Trilling (Imagination 275)

See right through the red, white, and blue disguise—
W'rth lecture, I puncture the structure oflies.
- Rage Against the Machine, “Take the Power Back”
Young performers like Rage Against the Machine create their own forms of resistance. That they have
found listeners who respond and that they have inspired others to emulate them suggests that the celebrity

system obscuring so much of contemporary reality can be undermined. Corporate rock has already proven

that it cannot learn.
- Dave Marsh (21)

Within the discipline of rhetoric and composition, a number of recent theorists
have begun to turn their attention toward the political aspects involved in the inclusion
and exclusion of voices within academic conversations. Lester Faigley, for instance,

looks out at academic discussions of literacy and finds that while they “often follow in

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the tradition of John Dewey, whereby one of the main goals of teaching literacy is to
create more politically active citizens,” this is not the case for discussions centered on
educators working outside the United States. F aigley notes that although “the radical
pedagogy of. . . Paulo F reire is frequently cited, efforts similar to Freire’s in the US. to
teach literacy so that people might challenge existing social and political orders have not
been widely praised or support ” (69). Dewey’s “politically active” citizens are, for
James Berlin, “critically literate” citizens, and both of these versions derive from
Isocrates’s “great” citizen who would “love wisdom” in order to become a productive and
admirable “statesman.” While the United States, by sheer size alone, cannot realistically
produce “statesmen” at the rate which Isocrates envisioned in classical times of relatively
tiny city-states, it can—and for Dewey and Berlin, should—produce citizens who
become actively involved with the political system. As Gregory Clark notes, schools
teach writing so people can “participate in self-goveming communities” (Dialogue xvii).
What one hears in F aigley’s words, however, is that this involvement has clear limits
within American culture, which values and condones existing hegemonic structures in such
a way that a truly radical involvement is deemed dangerous.

Such an involvement is exactly the message presented by the always politically-
charged and thus extremely “radical” group, Rage Against the Machine. Free speech and
critical awareness for all are the central focus in Rage Against the Machine’s discourse,
and political education and activism are the band’s primary purposes in songtexts such as
“No Shelter” and its condemnation of “American eyes, American eyes, see[ing] the world
through American eyes. Bury the past, rob us blind—and leave nothing behind.” The
inside cover photo for Rage’s second release, Evil Empire, features a wide assortment of

books laid out in a random pattern, among which are Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Walter

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Adamson’s Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of A ntonio Gramsci's Political & Cultural
Theory, Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory,
and Sonia Kruks, et al. ’5 Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, along
with copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Marx-Engels Reader. In another
medium, the videotext for the group’s early songtext “Freedom” alerted the MTV nation
to the plight of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, while a series of benefit concerts
to fund a new trial for African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, awaiting execution
in Pennsylvania for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer, has produced
outraged protests from police organizations and conservative media commentators
nationwide. Elsewhere, as activists at the 1993 Lollapalooza concert in Philadelphia, the
band took to the stage naked, each of the four members having taped his mouth and
painted his chest with a letter from the acronym PMRC (the same “warning sticker”
group mocked by Metallica) and stood in silent protest for 14 minutes. And on a 1996
episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live hosted by billionaire presidential candidate Steve
Forbes, the group draped its amplifiers with upside-down American flags as a way to
signal, according to guitarist Tom Morello, the group’s “contention that American
democracy is inverted when what passes for democracy is an electoral choice between
two representatives of the privileged class” (qtd. in Moore). Seconds before taking the
stage to perform "Bulls on Parade," the band members watched incredulously as NBC
Stagehands came in to pull the flags down, and with the protest censored, they refused to
perform. As Morello saw it, the sharpest irony was that “SNI. is supposedly this
cutting-edge show, but they proved they're bootlickers to their corporate masters when

it comes down to it” (qtd. in Moore).

For mainstream music critic Dave Marsh, what is most appealing about Rage’s

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overtly political practice is the band’s simultaneous resurrection of activism as a
component that might once again become part of rock’s central discourse. Following
Steve Redhead’s earlier appeal to avoid “cynical” readings of rock politics, Marsh writes
that

today’s rock, with its roots in and continuing links to society’s most
dispossessed, somehow effectively does promote resistance, even critical
thinking. . . . Rather than lapsing into cynicism, newer rock performers
already show signs of recognizing these links. Rage Against the Machine
. . .used [its] stadium shows [as opening act for U2] to talk about, among
other things, the injustice of Mumia Abu—Jamal being on death row. And
[the band] made this work because its members don’t talk about such
issues coldly but with real rage. They project a sense of conviction that
speaking out will make a difference” (20).

When Marsh catches himself in the aesthetic judgment of “real rage” and corrects it to a
less value-laden “sense of conviction,” I have to admit that, as an education worker, it was
this same ethos of a “genuine” passion on Rage’s part which immediately drew me to the
group and its songtextual messages. As a mediator and traffic controller for daily
choruses and collisions of student voices engaged in the production of knowledge both for
and about school, I was particularly intrigued by the critical illumination that Rage
provides on its eponymous first album in a songtext titled “Take the Power Back”:

In the right light, study becomes insight, but the system that dissed us
teaches us to read and write. . . . The present curriculums, I put my fist
in ’em—Eurocentric, every last one of ’em. . . . The teacher stands at the
head of the class, but the lesson plan he can’t recall. The students’ eyes
don’t perceive the lies bouncing off every fuckin’ wall. His composure is
well-kept; I guess he fears playing the fool. The complacent students sit
and listen to the bullshit that he learned in school. . . .

These lyrics reflect both the “institutional violence necessary to ensure that 30 or 40

million children sit mutely at their desks so books can instruct them,” as Kurt Spellmeyer

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has defined it, and the “ideological violence” that connects language to so many historical
acts of carnage where “the speech of the few has drowned out the bitter silence of the
many” (10). But this is not enough to impress critics who immediately see only a
rhetoric of rage—to mean an ineffective system of solely ornamental appeals and
figures—rather than a situational ethos of conviction or outrage on the perforrner’s part.
For Eddy, this band is no more than part of what he calls a “rage genre,” a particular kind
of performer and discourse that simply “turn[s] rage into an easily digestible schtick, an
impotence that might jar grandma or grandpa, but big deal” (167). To defend such a
dismissal, Eddy falls into a common critical rhetoric in which the primary failings of the
new discourse form are made mystifyingly clear by comparing them with the failings of
older forms. Thus Eddy writes that “music that’s all fucked up and [endlessly shouting]
‘fuck you’ tends to be even more useless than tripe that admits to nothing but peace,
love, and understanding” (167), and since the shouted epithet seems to be the critic’s sole
conception of protest and activism, he later turns to a zippy ad hominem attack upon
those of differing (or, as he sees it, no) aesthetic sensibilities in order to veil the limited
view:

[M]ost metal and rap acts seem to think protest can compensate for some
lack. so they wind up stiffening their beat and uglifying their voices to
make room for it. When ‘reality’ is the entire package, it’s bound to fall
flat—Rage Against the Machine play clumsy, sexless, pogo-funk crud...
[but] needless to say, they’re lauded by tastemakers who can’t tell good
intentions from good music. (177).

Of course, neither Rage nor its politics are quite so easily defined—or dismissed.
With “Take the Power Back” in particular, there is a rhetoric at work, but not in a

pejorative sense of the term. Rather, the band’s argument regarding the oppressive

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nature of the educational system takes on a stance which is both confrontational and
unforgiving. Although there are still general implications left to be deciphered by the
audience, these tend to follow a single vision: If the current system is rotten, then a new
one will be better. Likewise, Rage creates no space for debate on the issue, and discussion
would be pointless since the audience will only encounter more “one sided stories. . .
from the system that cares about only one culture” in creating—and maintaining—the
ideological state apparatus of American schools. In creating this stance, the band
employs a rhetoric that “is intrinsically normative; it utilizes observational research, not
simply in order to describe what is, but as a basis for claims about what should have been
or ought to be” (Simons 52 )——and so, because the central issue in Rage’s songtext regards
the extensive harms inflicted by a Eurocentric curriculum which disregards the
contributions made by other, non-Westem cultures through history, and by teachers who
fall into the damaging habit of teaching the same materials in the same ways every
semester regardless of the interest level students may show for those materials and
methods, the audience is literally trapped into agreement with the messenger. For who
would stand up to counter that Eurocentrism and professional sloth are fine practices, to
be preserved? The only way left to engage in dissent with Rage’s argument in “Take the
Power Back” is to examine its logic, and to isolate the substantial assumptions made by
vocalist Zach De La Rocha in his lyrics. To begin such a process, the audience must first
ask if all teachers, in all classes being offered, at every school in every year of one’s
education, have been guilty of the evil practices described in the songtext; by these
questions a counter-argument may form in which Rage is charged with faulty assumption,
implication, and generalization, without exception or qualifier, resulting in no more than

purely negative destructiveness and hatred of the same kind it attempts to oppose. But

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the same line of questioning is ultimately connected to the implicit preservation of the
corrupt system being defined by Rage, so that any rhetorician attempting to engage in

a little dialectic with the polemic only becomes more complicit in the power structure
being confronted. In this way, the key issue for the band becomes the compelling nature
of logos, the function of the message to form a tight noose around its possible counter-
arguments.

Yet in another way, the key issue becomes ethos. If the message, in unaltered
lyrical form, were delivered by Sheryl Crow, the Rolling Stones, Alanis Morissette, or
even Metallica, while it might represent what Wicke has called an “accelerated expansion
of aesthetic codes” as cover tunes and crossovers increasingly take place in rock’s
discourses (155), it would more problematically become one more case of what Iain
Chambers has seen as “musical and cultural styles ripped out of their contexts, stripped
of their initial referents and circulated in such a manner that they represent nothing other
than their own transitory presence” (qtd. in Wicke 155). Unlike Metallica, whose four
members strive to preserve their own power in opposition to fan desires, Rage struggles
to raise its audience’s collective consciousness to oppose power in a number of political
spheres not related to rock in any direct way. Rock for Choice (abortion rights), Refuse
and Resist (freedom of information) and the dire circumstances of Peltier and Abu—Jamal
are just a few of the causes for which the band has advocated in print, electronic, and
songtext textforms, and for Marsh, Rage becomes a master of a liberatory “aesthetic
coup” in its connection of “agitprop” in the form of these causes to “the kind of dense
metallic noise that lefties have always frowned upon,” resulting in a “raised profile...
among rock fans” for those causes and individuals (21 ). Once again, however, the band’s

rhetoric of rage seems to me more carefully constructed than to generate merely a “raised

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profile” for political miscellany. What appears in Rage’s discursive system is partly
illustrated, for instance, by Wayne Brockriede’s move to join discursive practice and
presence into a single issue when he examines the notions of power and “distance” at
work in rhetoric:

Knowing how much power of what kind each rhetorical participant has
may be less immediately relevant than knowing the relationship among

the power statuses of the people involved. That is, power is relative
rather than absolute. . . . Two questions especially are important in an
analysis of the power structure: How disparate are the power positions of
the various participants of an act, and does the act function to increase,
maintain, or decrease the disparity? How rigid or flexible is the structure,
and does the rhetorical act function to increase, maintain, or decrease the
stability? (315)

Brockrr'ede’s assertion that power is ‘relative’ rather than ‘absolute’ is further
developed by Foucault, who argues that power is not a structure or collection, but rather
a practice of establishing and organizing relationships; likewise the case with knowledge
and discourse. In the case of persuasive discourse, Gregory Clark notes that “[b]y
presenting our beliefs to others as if they had already judged and accepted them, we not
only assume their assent, we demand it” (Dialogue 51), and this is the case with the
rhetoric of rage practiced by Rage Against the Machine in songtexts such as “No Shelter,”
in which both capitalist industries and advertisers are condemned for having the power to

. . .[get] you thinkin’ that what you need is what they sellin’
Make you think that buyin’ is rebellin’

From the theaters to malls on every shore:

The thin line between entertainment and war.

As with “Take the Power Back,” this songtext presents a strategic problem within the
band’s argument, since there is no role for consumers in this particular rhetoric other than

to be duped and manipulated—false consciousness prevails untroubled by Gramsci’s

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notion of the consensual nature of hegemony and hegemonic practices. The band
members are young Marxists for whom subscription to a theory of control generates a
more effective rhetoric than one of consent-perhaps especially so since Rage is
positioned squarely in the midst of a capitalist entertainment enterprise—when the
driving purpose behind the rhetoric is a pedagogy of liberation from control in order to
generate a gradually-increased awareness of consumeri stic bestowals of consent The
challenge, then, in looking at the power relationship within Rage’s communique’s to its
audience is to attempt the “reworking of the idea of form and order” set out by Worsham
at the beginning of this chapter, by identifying the successful functions of the band’s
political employment of a rhetoric of rage while resisting impulses immediately to negate
those successes by focusing on traditional conceptions of logic and pre-emptive
arrangement. The message of the “Shelter” songtext in particular contains strong echoes
of Umberto Eco’s warning that democracy cannot thrive when images work only to
induce paralysis rather than to trigger critical interrogation, but a key difference is that, in
contrast to Eco’s more detailed deve10pment in conveying that message, the form of
Rage’s discourse must by necessity substitute rhyme and highly compressed cultural
references:

Memories erased and promise scarred—trade history for a VCR.
Cinema, simulated life, ill drama—forthright culture, Americana. . . .

Fix the need to burn up the taste; buy the products or get laid to waste.
Coca-Cola goes back in the veins of Saigon, and Rambo too—

We got a dope paradise. . . .
Just stare! Just stare! Just stare! Just stare!

This songtext appears on the soundtrack to the summer 1998 cinematic update of
Godzilla, and Rage pulls off the neat trick of burying a reference—and a scathing

critique—of that very film in plain sight in the line, “Godzilla, pure motherfuckin’ filler.

-‘|69-

Gets your mind off the real killer.” Here one has to wonder whether the soundtrack
arrangers simply missed the line due to De La Rocha’s quick vocal delivery of the words,
or whether having a “radical” band on the soundtrack ultimately took precedence over the
possibility that listeners would catch the commentary. In either case, the band’s political
stance has long been established in such a way that there would have been no grounds for
objection to the line’s inclusion on the songtext. Rage’s politics are not part of its
practice-they are its practice as the band uses its concert venues as sites for distribution
of free information about its various causes, its lyrics as a site for social criticism, its web
site as host for links to numerous electronic forms of related materials and further readings
as well as a continuing opportunity for direct dialog between guitarist Tom Morello and
those who subscribe to his band’s activism. For critics such as Greil Marcus, that
activism has all but disappeared from rock’s discourses:

[Rock music’s desire to change the world] begins with the demand to live
not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something
actually depended on one’s actions—and that demand opens onto a free
street. Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex
and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to
experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological
constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or
done away with altogether. (Traces 5-6; italics added)

The “brief possibility” lamented here was, for Marcus, the punk movement of the late
705, itself an outgrowth of the violence that had taken place at the 1969 Rolling Stones
concert at Altamont in which Hell’s Angels bodyguards killed a drug-addled spectator
while Mick Jagger lamely inquired “Who’s fighting, and why?” from the stage (see
Gimme Shelter video) but did not stop the performance. In the years after Altamont,
Marcus writes, the violence of that concert “took many forms,” in punk venues
especially becoming “stylized into slam dancing and pit diving” and eventually helping to

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“shape a glossary in which the passive neologisms of 19705 human-potential and self-
improvement therapies (‘Thank you for sharing your anger with me’) were translated
back into active English (‘Fuck off and die’)” ( 89). Marcus’s lament over the loss of such
confrontational and socially-transforming discourse is taken up elsewhere when he writes
of rock that its exact onset of ineffectiveness occurred when “the music and the audience
lost their center in the late 19605” and was due to the sad facts that “the Beatles
disbanded and Bob Dylan eased up” (Stranded xx). As a result, “[r]ock and roll, as
culture, lost much of its shape. The mass movements of the sixties, which for many
brought a sense of common endeavor and shared fate to almost every aspect of life,
fi'agmented. . . (This view is shared by Bennett et al. in their collection Rock and
Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, for whom rock in the 19605 and 70s “was
good because it was authentic to subcultural and countercultural values. . . in opposition
to the dynamics of capitalism, and their expression through the actions of the music
industry was to be welcomed. Rock was political.” But when they look at rock in the
805, “the question. . . was that of what the music was being authentic to. . . and where”
[3].) Marcus, ignoring alternative paradigms such as Frith’s argument that the 605-era
Stones practiced “rebellion [as] a grand gesture, an aesthetic style without a social core”
(“Beggars” 37), instead connects his perception of “loss” to a change in audience
dynamics: “[T]hough one may have found identity as a member of an audience, one also
found it by staking a place in that audience, defining one’s self against it.” But current
rock, he writes, has supplied no singularly central or major act like the Beatles or Dylan,

and so while “[p]eople have staked out their territory in rock and roll. . .they don’t feel

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much like members of anything big enough to take over the world, which. . . is what rock
and roll is supposed to do” (Stranded xx).

Surely there are more than a few layers of ideology behind Marcus’s history, here
as in the other places where I’ve cited him, but that same history is subscribed to by
numerous current performers as well as their fans. Indeed, I would argue that this exact
sort of “loss” nostalgia fuels much of Rage Against the Machine’s rhetorical practice of
political activism. What prevents me fiom leading from this argument to making a cynical
rage-as-commercial appeal critique, however, is that the band has thus far stood utterly
alone in its stance. The Beastie Boys’ activism for a free Tibet has earned that group a
label of new-age dabblers; Sinéad O’Connor’s early-905 feud with the Vatican and its
decrees against birth control—a quarrel enacted by her shredding a portrait of the Pope on
Saturday Night Live—resulted in an immediate condemnation by SNL (again) and
O’Connor’s gradual disappearance from every sphere of musical discourse. Yet Rage,
boycotted by the Fraternal Order of Police for its defense of Abu—Jamal (just as Ice-T
endured a law enforcement boycott over “Cop Killer”), censored and scorned by a
national television network (just as O’Connor suffered the same after defacing the Pope’s
image), and like any other group suspected of wearing its politics on its sleeve only to
generate interest and thereby income, carries on unimitated and without strong alliances
with other politically-aware musicians. And the key words here are that—unlike the case
with Ice-T or O’Connor—the band has, in fact, carried on without altering or aborting its

politics.

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Figure 4: Rage Against the Machine.
(From left) Tom Morello, Zach De La Rocha, Brad Wilk, Tim Cummerford

One particularly revealing text in the Rage canon is the band’s 1997 release of a
CD-single covering Bruce Springsteen’s acoustic songtext, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
The cover to Springsteen’s album by the same name shows a man (presumably
Steinbeck’s character himself) with his back turned, blood staining his middle torso, his
face in partial profile marked by weariness and grief. In contrast, the cover art for Rage’s
remake depicts a decidedly sinister-looking paramilitary cop on horseback (the steed is
likewise clearly evil) beating a group of lowly commoners into submission; in the
background shadows lurk a hundred more cops waiting to join in the melee as a solitary
black woman stands with her fists in the air, refusing and resisting the beating. Beyond
the cover illustrations, there is a marked difference between the two songtext versions
musically as well. Springsteen’s vocal rendition, performed to acoustic guitar without
additional accompaniment, is mellow and melancholy, while De La Rocha’s is furious and
bitter. Springsteen, in both vocal style and album art, suggests a self-alienation due to a
failure of the American Dream, the pain and isolation of a lonely individual who is the
subject of oppression, while Rage presents the exact opposite with the agent of
oppression—the State—foregrounded and the collective group bitter and enraged by the

bogus tauntings of a non-existent American Dream kept, by force, forever out of reach.

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Springsteen quietly hints at class difference; Rage screams about class warfare.
Springsteen’s text presents the Ideological State Apparatus as the backgrounded agent,
with Tom Joad taking his alienation from hegemony’s bait all inward (which is the ISA’s
function) and simply lamenting in the lyrics that he will never reach the ideal because
times are hard but no one specifically is to blame for that. Rage, on the other hand, sets
out the Repressive State Apparatus (the military, the police, ideology through force) as
the active, clearly foregrounded agent of oppression, hatred, fear, loss, and social
imbalance. And by all of this the band illustrates in an extreme fashion the much less
radical role of musical discourse defined by Edward Said:

[M]usic plays a role in civil society that is neither natural nor substitutive.
Music is of course itself even if its way of inhabiting the social landscape
varies so much as to affect compositional and formal styles with a force as
yet largely uninventoried in cultural studies. . . . [T]he transgressive
element in music is its nomadic ability to attach itself to, and become a
part of, social formations, to vary its articulations and rhetoric depending
on the occasion as well as the audience, plus the power and gender
situations in which it takes place. (70)

The extreme nature of Rage’s radical stance lies in the fact that variation of style
and delivery—for that matter, a varied conception of audience and purpose—is not part
of the band’s rhetorical skills, and any examination of the group’s rhetoric thus requires
both patience and paradigm adjustment in order to look beyond such an apparent “flaw”
when dealing with a rhetoric of rage. Central to any such examination is an understanding
of rage as the most intense degree of alienation, a state of consciousness so utterly
frustrated and angered that it cannot, will not, be tempered by artful means. For Rage
Against the Machine, the “transgression” addressed by Said is not so much a practice on
the band ’s part as it is a practice taking place outside the band’s sphere of influence, and

these transgressions require correction by any discursive means necessary. And while

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gender is not a factor for this group, “power situations” form the foundation for its entire
existence as an agent of change at a time when, as Grossberg writes, “rock seems to have
lost any power to resist, let alone threaten or change the existing relations of power. It
seems rather obvious that rock, in the United States at least, has been ‘colonized’ by the
economic interests of capitalism, patriarchal and racist relations” (“Conservatism” 195).
Further, for Grossberg,

[i]t is becoming difficult to see where and how rock is, or could be,
articulated to progressive political commitments. The once generally
shared assumption that the two intersected at [a] point that placed rock on
the margins, in alliance, however tenuous, with various populist political
struggles, seems to have disappeared.

While he is surely aware of the multitude of activist projects underwritten by rockers in
past years—the Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof organizing Live Aid for starving
Ethiopians, Steven Van Zant’s organization of the United Artists Against Apartheid to
produce the awareness- and fund-raising single “Sun City,” John Mellencamp’s
continuing role in Farm Aid, Queen’s Brian May spearheading the Freddie Mercury
benefit for AIDS-research funding, the Very Special Christmas albums benefiting Special
Olympics, and the nonprofit compilations recently released by assorted rock figures to
benefit Bosnian and Kosovar refugees—Grossberg correctly does not name these as
“political commitments” because they are all temporary rather than full-time engagements.
While Farm Aid may be the most consistent of the political causes listed, even it is only
an annual concert, with the management and distribution of informational materials left to
non-rock personnel, and the musicians performing at these concerts do not dedicate their

work or themselves to the family-farm crisis after the stage is dismantled.

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Such a part-time commitment to activism, as Grossberg notes, does not lend rock
much weight to call itself a force for anything, and for Palmer, who like so many other
critics mourns the loss of rock’s former unified social message that allegedly posed a
threat in the 19505 and 19605 by being “dangerous to racists, demagogues, and the self-
appointed moral guardians of the status quo,” there is not much left to admire. Writing
that he would “like to think rock and roll is still a danger,” Palmer argues that “after 40-
odd years of commodification, the increasing concentration of the music business in the
hands of a few giant corporations, and the video revolution’s reduction of so much of
rock to the electronic equivalent of wallpaper, I can’t seriously imagine the music I love
being really dangerous to anyone” (11). But for Theodore Roszak, revisiting in 1995 his
27 year-old The Making of a Counter Culture, the fault is not entirely placed on rock so
much as it is shared with other agents of the 19605’ social upheaval:

From the outset, the counter culture, so distrustful of authority and
suspicious of leadership, suffered for its lack of long-term organization. . . .
A movement that cannot find ways to revive and use the institutions it
inherits. . . cannot expect to provide leadership. But the counter culture
made a worse mistake. It grossly underestimated the stability and
resourcefulness of the corporate establishment, the ultimate locus of
power in industrial society. . . . [T ]he corporate system outlasted its
opposition and struck back with astonishing effectiveness. (xxix)

Thus the very things named by Palmer—corporate mergers to increase administrative
power, mandates for endless promotional videotexts to “reduce” rock to imagery over
content—along with rock’s aural “wallpaper” status when its songtexts become
backdrops for the marketing of endless non-rock consumer goods, become for Roszak the

weapons deployed in a corporate backlash against rock’s own anti-corporate stance

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during the height of a “unified” countercultural activity. The counter-strike named by
Roszak is described more fully by Peter Wicke, who notes that when musicians went on
to form a view of their songtexts “as a medium for political conflict with the authority
structures of state-monopoly capitalism,” the industry responded by simply releasing
performers from their contracts under the directive that politics was not poetry, and
poetry was the “best possible plane” of expression, as the president of Elektra Records
put it in 1969 (93). In all of these views rock becomes a sort of noble guerilla freedom
fighter losing its life in the honorable pursuit of an admirable cause, but providing an
alternative paradigm to all of the nostalgia-fueled rhetoric of this soldier’s loss is journalist
Brian McCollom’s reminder that

Woodstock ’69, portrayed as the climax of a communal revolution, was
actually a triumph of individualism. Conservatives in 1969 failed to see
that—distracted, understandably by the long hair and dope. Sentimental
liberals in 1999 still fail to see that, distracted by warm, fuzzy nostalgia
and forgetting that the Who’s Pete Townsend literally booted activist
Abbie Hoffman off the Woodstock stage. Sure, hippies were intent on
rejecting the provincialism of traditional America. But in their own
deliberate freakiness, they embraced freedom and liberty like Granny at the
4th of July parade. The revolution, it turned out, was won not by the
collective elite but by good old-fashioned individualists—who happened to
be naked and on the lookout for brown acid. (“Nation” 4G)

The same charges of embracement of American values and a practice of
individualism granted through those values could be leveled at Rage Against the Machine,
since at a very basic level the band’s rhetoric and pedagogy could not be practiced in their
current forms in any other kind of social venue—as Bennett et al. have shown in Rock

and Popular Music, the United States is unique in that its government does not have a

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direct hand in rock’s production, in contrast to the cases in Canada, Britain, Australia, and
the former German DDR. But the complex issues inherent in practicing a rhetoric of rage
against not only capitalism and consumerism, but also against an uncritical form of
individualism (termed a film- and television-perpetuated “bullet in the head” by the band
on its first album) when that concept becomes both symptom and cause of the larger
problems, form the core of the group’s pedagogy of liberation from ideology’s unabated
influence. Those who see public intellectuals such as F reire, Giroux, and Dewey as
uncompromised advocates for the public’s empowerment must not allow a cynical
critique of rock’s political activists—groups who stand against morally and ethically
bankrupt systems from a position fully within those same systems—to create a failure to
see the same type of advocacy being generated by a ferociously militant group of metal
rappers. For Neil Nehring, whose Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism borrows
its subtitle, “Anger is an Energy,” from Rage’s whispered “anger is a gift” on the Peltier-
awareness track “Freedom,” and whose book may be the worst example of kill-’em-all-
and-tenure-me vitriole I have ever read, “resentment” is a laudable trait for angry rockers.
Unfortunately, any inclination by readers to agree is systematically undermined as
Nehring dedicates his work to what appears to be a personal war against postmodernism
in general and Frederic Jameson in particular, everywhere presenting a sad kind of macho
scholarship in which others are cited solely for the purpose of pointing out their gross
misreadings, flawed understandings, and failures to comprehend issues and ideas which
Nehring alone can grasp. Yet there is a brief moment of lucidity and calm when the author

pauses to note that

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[c]ontemporary culture may actually work in large part the way
postmodern theorists believe it does: to encourage a taste for strong
emotions unburdened by reflection or commitment. But this is just
another variation in the long history of efforts by mainstream culture to
convince people that anger and resentment are inappropriate—or in this
case, frivolous. . . . The condemnation of resentment is continually
necessary because the anger of disenfranchised groups, including
disaffected youths, always presents a threat to the status quo. (104)

While this is the only place where I can cast my lot with the writer, I have no misgivings

99 6‘

in doing so, and for several reasons. First, the “part-time activist causes”I mentioned
earlier here—the “Sun City” single (we made the song, now let the money it generates
take care of apartheid), the Farm Aid concerts (we did the show, now let the T-shirts we
sold there raise awareness the rest of the year), the Mercury tribute (let’s save lives by
having Elizabeth Taylor relate to young rock fans), and so on—are exactly the kind of
“strong but unburdened emotions” named by the author. Second, when critics such as
Eddy describe Rage as practicing merely an “easily digestible” but ultimately “impotent”
“schtick,” they are complicit with all of the hegemonic entities striving to render rage as a
“frivolous” ornamentation empty of substance in order to cancel out any real power the
rage might carry, and they do so by employing the communication model described by
Hall in which encoding a message with pre-deterrnining signs helps to ensure that
decoding will take place in a manner acceptable to the encoder. And finally, I would find
it extremely troubling to negate the danger of Rage Against the Machine’s rhetorical
practices and discursive systems when those represent the clearest and most consistent

voice of active rock dissent in a democracy which claims not only to condone, but also to

value, dissenting views—even when that same democratic system deploys a host of

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ideological and rhetorical devices which instantly spring into action to contain the
alternate discourse by reshaping it as a powerless sham.

Metal may be cool, as Straw has labeled it, but more than that, it is complex And
the complexity makes it possible to gain further insight from the genre about the nature of
human struggles for power and resistance. Any transformation of an initial weak
discourse of authenticity and inauthenticity into a meta-discourse of agency and purpose,
control and consent, moves rock into territories where its conflicts begin to take on a
clearer relevance to everyday life. If this were not the case, then—to borrow a line from

Stuart Hall—I wouldn’t give a damn about it at all.

§§2$2

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MAKING GENIIS SENSE:
Telling Stories at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Clean; the cleanest I‘ve been. An end to the tears, and the in-between years, and the troubles I've seen—

now that I'm clean.
- Depeche Mode

They called it Paradise; I don't know why. You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.
- The Eagles, ”Last Resort"

[I]t had escaped even his reckoning, that from all the quantum tendencies of Opera a caricature might be
cobbled up, which should be greeted not only by the Public. but also by the wiseacres of Art, as a new
and substantial shape of Opera; for in the flower of his prime he never could have dreamt that it would
some day occur to the Bankers, for whom he had always made their music, to make it for themselves.

- Richard Wagner, 185123

I love rock and roll—so put another dime in the jukebox, baby.
- Joan Jett

Rock is not a pretty thing. In the studio, endlessly re-recorded and re-mixed
tracks might provide the illusion of immaculate, perfectly-balanced songtexts springing
fully-formed, on the first take, from their composers’ heads (actually, that should be
throats, hands, and feet), but in live performance, the story changes. Unaided by mixing
boards and computer software, rock is a site where people sweat; guitar strings pop and
drumsticks break; sound systems short out and go mute; amplifiers overheat and burst
into flames; flashpots misfire and immolate musicians. A live recording of the Stooges'
final concert, Metallic K. 0., contains the clear sounds of Iggy Pop and his bandmates
dodging—and being pelted by—ice, then eggs, and finally glass during one of I ggy's
notorious let's-stand-here—and-play-nothing-while-I-insult-the-audience extended pauses.

Woodstock 1969: bad acid and fields of mud; Woodstock 1999: rapes, riots, arson, and

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fields of sewage from overflowing Porta-Johns. Yet for all of this, there have been
numerous examples in the last decades of the 20th century of rock’s desire to scrub itself
clean by legitimating and institutionalizing its discourses. Heavy metal has finally been
recognized by no less than the Grammy Awards; rock’s history has been told by a multi-
part documentary aired by that pinnacle of good taste and high culture, Public Television;
and every year seems to introduce another new award-giving mechanism designed to give
the music ever more cultural weight and legitimacy. The rock image once conveyed by
photographs of destroyed instruments, smashed arena chairs, or simply a line of sweat-
drenched guitarists waving in gratitude from the front of a stage after a third encore is now
just as likely to be a tuxedo-clad Eric Clapton with his arms full of gold-plated award
statuettes.

But Grammies, PBS documentaries, and other self-congratulatory gestures all pale
beside the establishment of a Rock Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983 and the grand
opening of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in downtown Cleveland, in 1995.
Nothing else functions to discipline a narrative as well as a museum (or, as David Bowie
quickly defined the Rock Hall upon its opening, a “mausoleum”) since the process of
deciding who and what should be—deserves to be—included in the telling of rock’s
official narrative can’t help but to create boundaries and fix meaning(s). Perhaps the most
interesting thing taking place at Cleveland's riverfront, however, is that even as the Hall of
Fame and Museum (HF M) clearly disciplines the narrative of rock, it also shouts at the
same time that it’s not possible to essentialize rock music. By presenting rock in highly
contradictory ways—positioning it as both inside and outside the dominant culture, and
seeming to want it, and have it, both ways simultaneously—the l-[FM illustrates all the

more clearly that the discourses of rock have become one with the discourses of rock’s

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surrounding social and political practices, even when those practices have themselves
been opposed to rock's preferred way of being. In other words, while the HF M may
have been intended as a shrine to the energy and danger and just plain enjoyment that is
“supposed to be” both the means and ends of rock, the shrine ultimately functions
primarily as a mirror to the social and political spheres of influence from which each of
the practitioners of its cherished discursive traditions have come, and by focusing
squarely on those traditions and all that is right with them, the final product becomes a
symbol of all that is wrong with the very support system—the same system that rock has
constructed as the source of endless attempts to constrain it—that has made, is making,
and will likely continue to make rock's viability as a discursive practice something that is
allowed to remain influential in its own right.

A critical analysis of any material manifestation of culture, such as the rock HF M,
is therefore important for keeping oppositional discourse vital in a hegemonic system
which appropriates and incorporates resistance into dominant discourse, and a rhetorical
analysis of the Rock Hall, through a cultural studies lens, is equally crucial for rupturing
the codification and commodification of resistance and rendering the codes less powerful,
thus preserving a possibility for resistance to work against—even though caught within——
hegemonic desires. As a primary text, rock’s HF M reads like most totalizing narratives,
attempting to construct a coherent story of its music that allows for no contradictions or
even subplots. Therefore an unpacking of the ideologies of the place can lead toward a
better understanding of how a culture works to reproduce dominant discourse even within
an allegedly subculturally- or cowrterculturally-derived discursive practice, like rock, that
situates itself (and is at the same time situated by the primary culture) as outside

hegemonic values, and to see how clearly the discourse associated with a social

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conscience, with speaking out against blind acquiescence to national values, with valuing
and championing the misunderstood and oppressed in society, has actually been complicit
in perpetuating the practices of colonization, appropriation, and blatant marginalization
of others. Cleveland’s monument to rock is a rich cultural text indeed, reflecting and
perpetuating the values that dominate primary sociopolitical discourse by presenting its
visitors with a celebration of individualism, the promotion of capitalism, and the
construction of a narrative that works to flatten difference and reproduce the notion that
we are all, in fact, the same.

In most ways, moves to universalize the values of rock are parallel with colonial
desire to subsume the interests of marginalized groups under a rubric of assimiliation or
“good citizenship.” When rock claims to reflect the experiences of all of “its” people——
regardless of their subject positions—the discourse immediately flattens out and negates
all difference in the interest of gaining cultural capital. Here it becomes especially
important to examine the roles played by race, class, and gender in the construction of a
grand narrative claiming to represent universal truths and attempting to tell a coherent,
linear story stemming from a specific point of origin—and to let that examination function
to reveal the problematic ways in which “[t]he making of meaning in museum
classification and display is mystified as adequate representation” when “[t]he time and
order of the collection erase the concrete social labor of its making” (Clifford 54). While
the rock HFM is careful to always establish tight links between contemporary
practitioners and previous discursive genres, its insistence on clear boundaries between
not only the genres themselves but also the temporal spaces they have inhabited prohibits
an ability to see (or hear) clearly the presence of those who came before in that which is

taking place now.

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Since rock itself is both an array of discourses and a general rubric through which
its various metadiscourses are shaped, its very nature as an aesthetic art, as Shumway
suggests, ought to prevent the formation of any “definitive” labels, theories, or critical
approaches. However, Wicke argues that the act of making aesthetic valuations for rock,
by comparing it with dissimilar musical forms, is an inaccurate methodology since the
values bring forward other models of understanding music forms that are “completely
alien to [rock’s] cultural origins” (2). But in the drive to make rock’s respectability equal
to its cultural capital, it has been rock’s central figures—musicians, rock journalists, and
industry executives—who have created a jumble of conflicting notions about rock by
themselves applying “socially established views of [other] music” (3) to what is clearly a
still-ongoing synthesis of many and diverse musical forms and concepts. Rock defies
traditional aesthetic criteria while at the same time creating its own aestheticism, and this
conflict in turn produces an intensely ideological discourse used both in its own self-
analyses and in its employment as the topic of analysis by the consumer-theorists,
critics, and other musicians who dwell and practice their particular discursive forms
within its own community. As both Grossberg and Shumway have argued separately,
everyone wants to claim ownership of rdck, and as a result the music itself—the sound-
and-lyn'c manifestation of the discomse—is less a thing than it is a site of struggle for
control and possession.

That site came into material form with the idea to capture and contain rock—to
authenticate its authenticity, if you will—in a $92 million Hall of Fame and Museum, to
be built in Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie. New York, Boston, and Los Angeles all
vied for the honor of playing host to the facility, but after a competitive courtship,

Cleveland (in part due to a successful campaign built around its native son, deejay Alan

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Freed) emerged as the site of choice and construction finally got underway in 1993.
Sponsored by the Hall of Fame Foundation, launched by Atlantic Records chairman
Ahmet Ertegun, the building was designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and largely
financed by state and city bonds. After delays in construction and some requisite
scrapping over artistic differences which resulted in the resignation of the HFM’s first

curator, the building opened on Labor Day weekend 1995 with what Rolling Stone called a

9

 

“historic concert” put on by “Rock’s Dream Team’ i.e. by some of the biggest names in
rock, both legendary and new kids on the block: the Allman Brothers and Snoop Dogg;
Jerry Lee Lewis and Natalie Merchant; Martha and the Vandellas and Bruce Springsteen;
Al Green and Alice in Chains (Gardner 22). Such an impressive and carefully chosen
opening-day lineup worked to suggest that the ideology of the HF M would, like rock
itself, be inclusive and cross lines of generation, race, sex, class, and musical subgenre.
What’s more, by its own rhetoric and situational ethos, the promise of a place dedicated
to rock would seem to possess an unlimited potential for excitement and rawness, for its
ability to present the allegedly “wild” and “undiscipline ” heart of youth and its urges for
rebellion to the pilgrims who would make their journeys to the site—but contradictions
between expectation and articulation were already underway with the birth of the idea.
When the HF M finally opened its doors a decade after its initial conception, rock’s
designated Museum was a place in which the official narrative of the discourse’s present,
past, and future could be told definitively and precisely before taking visitors to the
center of a known, unmoving rock universe—the Hall of Fame—where figures fiom
rock’s history would be enshrined in respectability and validity for all time.

The Rock Hall, at first glance, is a grand gesture by which rebellion and

respectability can be rendered mutually inclusive. Through its tributes to rock’s long,

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noble fight against censorship, its roles in political protests and activism, its free
“underground” press of the 19605, and many other such displays, the HF M finds clear
delight in remembering and celebrating the rebellious, anti-social aspects of rock, but these
strike a dissonant chord against the ethereal, refined aura of the building itself. Even this
fairly minor observation, however, is highly ideological—as one of rock’s consumer-
theorists, I approached the place with very definite ideas about what a museum dedicated
to "my" music should look like. It should be loud, chaotic, rebellious—and so the
reverential air of the HFM as a whole feels, for many of the visitors whose comments of
surprise drift along the walkway, more than a little suspect when they first approach the
building and gaze upon an exterior that suggests very little about the nature of the
collection it holds. A stunning, angular, gleaming steel-and-glass building which instantly
calls to mind an Egyptian pyramid, the Hall imposes a commanding presence on the Lake
Erie waterfront; indeed, the first official program guide notes that the HF M Foundation
wanted “to make the Hall of Fame a dignified and serious home commemorating the
people who created this music” (2). Inside, that air of dignity is extended by the vast
spaces of the main floor entrance, where a Il4-foot glass “tent” seems to hang from the
tower to the ground level, creating a lobby 200 feet long and prompting one critic to
compare the HF M’s initial sensory impression to the “worshipful modernism of [TV
evangelist Robert Schuler’s] Crystal Cathedral” (Willman 104).

Upon its Opening, the HFM presented its visitors with clashing semiotics from
the moment they entered the main lobby. There a vast expanse of gleaming emptiness
engulfed them and, rather than overwhelm them with a sensorgasma of rock sounds and
images, offered only a small sampling. From the ceiling hung some glitter-painted cars,

replicas of stage props used by Irish rockers U2 on one of their tours, and up on the third

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floor loomed the huge inflatable figure of The Teacher from Pink Floyd’s touring
presentation of The Wall. From speakers of remarkably poor sound quality came the
sounds of an endless-loop soundtrack: early blues, Motown, Springsteen, Stones. What
visitors got was not an immersion in rebellious rock noise and disorder, but a sanitized
sampling of its memorabilia within a highly systematic space that, in Foucauldian terms,
“guarantee[s] the obedience of individuals, [and] a better economy of time and gesture”
(Discipline I48; italics added). Moreover, since the HF M is itself a hegemonic
“instrument” charged with both representing and mastering the multiple discourses it
seeks to distill into homogeneity, it is faced with what Foucault has seen as the “question
of imposing upon [those discourses] an order.” Visitors themselves constitute an
important part of the multivocality of rock storytelling, so the lobby is rendered sterile to
avoid a full immersion in rock semiotics that would prevent them from noting the far more
important cultural signs of efficient order and correct procedure: Information Desk;
Check Cameras Here; No Photos Allowed. They pick up a map brochure and glance at
its cover: Welcome to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. NOW GET LOST. It
is rabid punk anti-social snarling wrapped in commercial high-gloss tricolor. Tickets
Downstairs. An escalator takes visitors in comfort to another expanse of antiseptic quiet,
where most prominently displayed is a colorful montage of logos for the building’s
corporate sponsors: Radio Shack, AT&T, Levi’s, Thrifty Car Rental, Pepsi-Cola,
Continental Airlines, Ameritech, the Ohio Lottery. There is a coat room with smiling,
uniformed attendants; next to it looms a giant ATM shaped like a jukebox that lets
visitors “play” their Visa, Society Bank, Cirrus, or MasterCard. A few feet away is the
ticket counter, where they part ways with their money, then trade the tickets for a wrist

band only a few yards further down, outside the Ahmet Ertegun Exhibition Hall. The

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wrist band will become useful if they need to exit the Hall at any time to use the lobby’s
restroom facilities, where a wholesome shoulders-up photograph of a decidedly angelic,
clean-shaven and blue-eyed Kurt Cobain once hung nicely framed outside the women’s
restroom but two full-body shots—a nude Courtney Love (Cobain’s widow) and a

likewise nude Janis Joplin—hung outside the men’s.24

 

    

1 . .4 rd" ' ”Ii ‘ 1 ‘ é ' i it}: ‘4 13:“?
Figure 5: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Visitors enter the Museum through a plain hallway clearly intended as a tribute to
what are identified as rock's “early influences.” Here, early performers such as the Ink
Spots, Dinah Washington, Willie Dixon, Leadbelly, Professor Longhair, and Big Mama
Thornton (without whose successful interpretation of a Lieber and Stoller songtext,
“Hound Dog,” the career of a certain Memphis guitar picker might have taken a markedly
different course) are consigned to the plain frames of black and white photographs that
hang from an equally plain gypsrun wall. Not all of these “early influences” are musicians
of color; Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie join Howlin’ Wolf and Louis Armstrong as
equally important, though equally marginalized, figures. All of the musicians represent a

diversity of musical backgrounds, grounded as they are in country, folk, blues, and jazz;

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what they share is an equal appropriation by rock to fit them into its all-encompassing
narrative. Consignment to the gray-steel outer limit of rock’s infinite Territory seems
due primarily to race, but also to the degree of commercial success the artists once
enjoyed by rock standards, the longevity of their careers by rock standards, and in some
cases the brevity of the perforrner’s life—again by rock standards. Thus a hard-living,
hard-drinking martyr such as Hank Williams, wasted if simply left to “hillbilly” music,
cuts a much finer rock figure next to Cobain, Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, et al.—but only
so long as that “next to” is merely figurative and rhetorical and not literal and spacial.
These photos appear on the left wall, painted white, while the right, painted
black, is empty—as the narrative of rock’s genesis begins, the “right” side of the story
has not yet been filled in; it is void and without form. And in this austere entranceway,
the working-class and often racialized status of rock’s early “influences” is only
reinforced by the material utilitarianism of the physical space itself: flat paint for the
walls, battleship gray paint over diamond-plate steel flooring, unadomed overhead lighting
to illuminate the photos. Official HF M text confirms the symbolism of austerity in
words such as appear next to the photograph of Guthrie, “the original source of a now-
familiar image: that of the working-class singer/songwriter rambling across the continent
with a guitar on his back.” Represented in this walkway is not rock itself—as culture,
practice, or discursive artifact—but only the hard work and musical innovation that has
taken place before rock’s arrival. Nor is the walkway intended as a space to be dwelled
in; rather, it is one to be gotten through, letting visitors make a quick token nod to the
multiple “pioneers,” “founders,” and “fathers” of rock before they come to the much
more important space where rock’s history becomes more interesting, compelling—and

told in full color and sound.

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Exiting the initial hallway, visitors turn a comer to be confronted by confrontation
in the form of an entire wall of TV screens, their volumes set high, playing an endless
loop of news and archive videos focusing on historical attempts to censor and/or silence
rock’s discourses. Images flash by: angry citizens throw records into bonfires; preachers
shout anti-rock vitriole from sidewalks and pulpits; George Herbert Walker Bush rattles
a presidential saber over Ice T’s cop-killing lyrics. Rock’s core history is being told in
these images, set within a context of opposition to the society surrounding it and
threatening to control rock in response to rock’s threat to society. It is more than a little
surprising, then, to proceed to another video display titled “Rock Around the Clock,”
where an almost exactly opposite story is told: Here, twin banks of floor-to-ceiling
video screens display how the multivalent discourses of rock and society, the dialectic
between rock and its cultural home, have—in contrast to rock’s stance of oppositionality
to anything society may offer—also allowed the society to shape the same music which
would claim to be free of any such influences. Cleverly, though, the story here resists
totalizing by presenting a nicely postmodern series of rapid-fire sounds and images——
there’s General Westrnoreland addressing the nation during the Vietnam era, assuring a
victory; there’s Jimi Hendrix during the same time, mauling the national anthem on his
electric guitar, making the strings sound like bombs—war, anti-hippie; Woodstock, anti-
war—who made whom?—that defy the construction of a single line of correspondence
between the musical discourse and any specific, individual cultural events and practices.
Instead, created here is a chaotic multiplicity for possibilities of influence, and a perpetual
dialectic between rock and society. By one implication the video displays work as an
admission that without the existence of mainstream opposition, rock's counterculture

would have nothing to counter, and thus no influence at all—a separate discourse of

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rebellion, after all, can only function after another, more established discursive system
first provides the necessary subject matter. Yet the simultaneous implication, much
louder and more preferred, presents a stronger and even Marxian rhetoric wherein rock is
the clearly dominant base, and mainstream culture, finding itself helplessly molded and
steered by rock’s powerful, inescapable influence, is the superstructure. By this rhetoric,
then, Hendrix’s performance was not a response to Westrnoreland’s address or his control
of the Vietnam conflict; rather, the general’s address was a response to Hendrix ’s control
of the anti-Vietnam counterconflict—which of course could not be counter at all, since the
conflict being opposed would exist only as a manifestation of, rather than a contextual
issue for, Hendrix’s discursive act.

From this intriguing display, visitors are released to the main floor displays, where
the color and sound barrage continues and so too does the HFM’s contradictory narrative.
In the center of the hall are numerous freestanding displays with mannequins representing
well-known artists in their signature costumes: Madonna, appearing in both white bridal
lace and black dominatrix leather, represents the severe limits of possibility placed upon
female rockers, presented first as virgin, then as whore; Diana Ross and the Supremes
represent not so much female rockers as‘black ones, and appear in full Motown regalia;
Alice Cooper, with his S/M costume, death’s-head makeup, and working guillotine from a
1973 tour, represents heavy metal; and Michael Jackson, spinning on a rotating platform
beneath a mirrored disco ball in his trademark single sparkle—glove and sequined black
jacket, represents rock’s Showmanship. These and other major full-body representations
strongly suggest that the chosen artists have earned their status more by the degree of
glitz and spectacle in their stage presentations than by their actual centrality to the grand

narrative of rock. Evidence of this appears in the form of the three members of Texas

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blues-rockers ZZ Top, for instance, clad in neon green-and-pink outfits and bearing fuzz-
covered white guitars, enjoying a major display in the center of the room, while the
Beatles were originally relegated to a side wall with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.27
And when an exception to this rule appears through the Allman Brothers Band receiving a
major display like ZZ Top’s, that display consists only of the band’s instruments—the
musicians themselves, who wore only plain work shirts and denim jeans, are not
represented at all.

Similarly, other displays present only a band’s or solo artists’s costumes without
any mannequin representations for the individuals who wore them. A major display
dedicated to blues and R&B artists, where a sequined evening gown worn by Etta James
is deprived of a form to fill it, accompanies another display, for rap, featuring a huge black
leather jacket worn by one of rap’s Fat Boys, but the jacket hangs free of bodily shape.
Likewise the Temptations, known for flashy choreographed live shows and matching
sequined tuxedoes, have the clothing—but not themselves—consigned to a side display
case. While any curator can argue that the content of museum displays is predicated on
the artifacts s/he could gather, these choices and their presentations are clearly ideological
when exhibits without bodily representation are primarily those of black performers,
when centralized artist exhibits feature only those primarily white performers who
achieved phenomenal commercial success, and when all of these exhibitions further
conflate stage presence with discursive influence. And that conflation itself is rife with a
primary, and troubling, contradiction: The Rolling Stones, one of the most commercially
successful bands of all time, rates an entire floor section devoted to the group's various
stage incamations—but if this is the way stories are told, why has Michael Jackson not

rated such a prominent display as well? And Madonna? Both of these individuals have

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certainly experienced (and presented) a vast number of changing forms during their long
careers, but what may be more significant in keeping them at lesser status than the Rolling
Stones is the fact that neither of them is, in the words of a forgotten Foreigner songtext, a
requisite “dirty white boy.” Then again, the reason for their sub-Stone status also appears
to go beyond the mere failings of, respectively, incorrect race and gender. Because of
rock's long-established custom of identifying and naming separate musical genres as part
of its desire for tidy housekeeping and the preservation of that all-important trope of
rock authenticity, Jackson and Madonna are not really rock by the same stylistic
definition, nor do they share the same cultural ethos of the Stones, whose legendary (and
inaccurate) history holds that they came from dirty industrial towns, taught themselves to
play instruments in order to escape that blight, made their names by whipping an
assortment of black-composed blues songtexts into white-snarled rock shape which
nonetheless managed to both preserve and honor its original roots, moved on to become
"street-fighting men" whose call for “violent revolution” arrived at just the right time, and
in all these ways conquered the rock world. By the magisterial power of this kind of
history-cum-rhetoric of its own accord, how can Madonna and Michael Jackson hope to
compare? The former, in her prime, represented dance-oriented top-forty pop discourse
by and for young, white, college-educated, affluent women, later turned to slower, more
introspective “power-pop” ballads, then switched to electronica to mark her 40th
birthday, while the latter provided a hybrid of early Motown soul and later R&B
smoothness with an occasional metal guitar solo, courtesy of Eddie Van Halen or Slash
from Guns N’ Roses, thrown into the mix. In these ways Madonna and Michael Jackson
defy easy genre-tagging and thus resist rock by slipping out of its codifying grasp.

Following my argument to its logical end, then, these two performers are included at the

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HF M not because they rock by rock's self-definition, but rather because they fit rock’s
more important practice of marketing its tropes of rebellion and resistance—the desirable
qualities most relevantly manifested by Jackson and Madonna—-—as commodities worth a
great deal of capital, both cultural and economic. To at once refuse and lust after
commerce, to praise and dismiss resistance simultaneously, are in themselves huge
rhetorical contradictions, but contradictions befitting the dizzying ideology of the HFM‘s
narrative which promotes rebellion against social norms while allowing only those
practitioners of its discourse who have achieved exceptional commercial success to
represent physically the story of social rebellion. As a result, resistance in the end
becomes utterly normalized since economic success in American culture, as well as its
normalizing ideology, is the strongest indication of an unfettered desire for, adherence to,
and allegiance with the controlling hegemonic values of capitalism.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the costume displays—when those
costumes are given form—is the use of mannequins. An identical mannequin body type,
bearing one of only three different facial expressions, is used throughout the displays,
regardless of the gender, race or body size of the artist being represented. Thus the
towering, dark bass player for Kiss, Gene Simmons, appears in the same form as petite,
pale Madonna. Likewise, black faces bear white facial features; the only nod to racial
difference appears in skin tone and—only sometimes—hair type. The official HFM
souvenir book notes that costume curator Stephen Sprouse intentionally set out to
develop mannequins that “don’t look like fashion mannequins; they’re more like rock-
star poses—you know, holding guitars and lunging forward. . . [t]hese mannequins were

created just for this museum, just for rock and roll” (14). Aesthetically, the net effect of

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Sprouse's intent is an overwhelming oddity bordering on the surreal, but a more important
rhetorical effect is that while the outrageous costumes of rock—the exterior masks—
might proclaim an invented ethos of unique individualism, their bodies immediately work
to negate any individual, interior difference. As a result, the homogeneity of the HF M’s
mannequins ultimately suggests nothing more than a pair of equally trivializing story
threads: first, that the discourse of a musician (product) and its historical context
(process) matters far less than what s/he has contributed to the grand narrative of rock,
and second, that these are performers who, rather than having shaped or even influenced
the sounds of and by the times, have merely pushed the limits of social dress codes.

As a whole, the physical presence of a rock artist at the HF M is accomplished by
disciplining his or her representational body and thereby rendering it docile and open, in
Foucault’s observation, to subjection, use, transformation, and improvement (Discipline
136) in a quest to make the real authentic. While a mannequin body is of course literally
docile, its use at the HF M renders it even more so through the additional use of an
identical form for every musician. This generic shape in turn aids the primary project of
disciplining the narrative of rock music, but in the attempt to make sense of the differing
subject positions of the artists being represented, only their outer costumes are there to
suggest the possibility of individual agency. Moreover, the trope of synecdoche appears
everywhere through the musuem: T-Bone Walker, J imi Hendrix, and countless others are
embodied by their guitars; the Everly Brothers by their tap shoes; Jim Morrison by his
elementary school report card; John Lennon by his trademark wire-rim glasses. The
narrative unfolds through fragments of artifacts which function at once to celebrate the

achievement of greatness by a limited number of artists, while at the same time suggesting

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that these artists are interchangeable chapters who serve primarily to protect the overall
integrity of rock's Story through concrete, verifiable indications of a present and vital self
which has—beyond mere legend—a real historical context filling real, tangible space.
This history is further molded into linear, disciplined form in a prominent section
of the Hall entitled “ Rock Scenes.” Here the display cases are devoted to individual
major cities because, as the HF M book explains, “[r]ock and roll is city music” (24).
While a possibility existed here to fashion displays that would reflect the diversity and
continuing influences characterizing rock’s discourses, each showcase is instead
partitioned into discrete spatial and temporal units that place strict boundaries on each
city’s period of influential prominence. Memphis string-pickin’ music was at its height
from 1948-58; New Orleans mambo from l950-63; San Francisco psychedelia from
1965-69; Detroit Motown from 1962-71; London and New York punk from 1975-80;
Seattle grunge from 1985-95; and New York again enjoyed prominence with rap from
1979-91. (Apparently, when rappers began to arise from Los Angeles to coincide with
their New York colleagues, rap left no forwarding address for the HF M curators.) While
there is clearly some overlap in periods, the overall visual and sensory effect of this
display is that rock unfolded in extremely tidy cause-and-effect fashion. As Foucault has
noted, “[p]ower is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its
use” (Discipline I60), and this is the dynamic at work in the “Rock Scenes” exhibit. The
textual accompaniments to each display case, reproduced in the HFM book, continue the
practices begun elsewhere in the Museum: Musical genres are personified (“The blues
traveled up the Mississippi River until they reached Chicago”), “great” artists are deified

(“If James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, then George Clinton is the Grandmaster of

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Funk”), less commercially successful artists are marginalized (black rhythm and blues
artists appear on the wall across from the Major Cities—literally separated from the more
central narrative taking place on the other side of the aisle), and more than anything else,
time and space are partitioned with meticulous care. Foucault argues that the act of
partitioning involves designating a specific place for each individual in disciplinary
institutions, its purpose being to “analyze confused, massive or transient pluratives. . . its
aim to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals. . . .
It [is] a procedure... aimed at knowing, mastering and using” (Discipline 143). The HF M
partitions music by city and era in order to efficiently organize the analytical space of
rock and to place each practitioner/genre into a specific designated space, thus neatly
avoiding a messy plurality of voices. Furthermore, the resulting linearity of this official
narrative works to eliminate confusion by serializing historical events, articulating each
historical moment as if it had a specific origin and ending point within a fixed period of
time. Each of these devices serves to fulfill the desire of the curators, if not the public

at large, to tell a coherent linear narrative with maximum efficiency and minimum
contradiction. And indeed, it almost works: Only one factor creates a spillover,
undisciplined effect in this section of the HF M, and that effect takes place only because
the display case for each city’s musical narrative also features a television monitor
playing video highlights of the music and times being depicted in the display. The sounds
blaring out of these monitors follow visitors so insistently that it becomes impossible to
avoid hearing Detroit’s Four Tops singing their unmistakeable Motown harmonies at the
same time that San Francisco’s Grace Slick simultaneously pours her powerful vocals into

the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane anthem, “White Rabbit.” Rap blends with grunge,

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which itself blends with punk, and each of these in turn melds with Motown and
rockabilly. While it’s difficult to concentrate on any single thing amid this sensory
onslaught, the auditory collage does have the compelling effect of forging mental
connections between musical genres that, visually and narratively, are kept in isolation
from one another.

At the same time that this imbrication of styles and eras takes place, however,
partitioning remains effective in another area. For while a great number of black artists are
represented in this main narrative, there is a clear problematic at work in the display when
one realizes that although black artists are part of the story, their musical difference in it
is completely smoothed over. The official history told here works to mystify all
differential genres and discourses—blues, gospel, soul and rap among them—into parts of
rock. a process that instantly works to undercut competition and opposition. Co-opting
these and other musical discourses by flattering them, naming them as germinal influences
and thereby incorporating them into a master narrative over which they have no control
and into whose construction they have had no voice, the HFM also transmutes any valid
differences in the respective musical styles and thereby denies the existence of jazz, blues,
gospel, et al. as discursive forms possessing their own voices and agencies. Other than
the audio overlap within the hallway, there is no allowance for a dialectic of influences
here; rather, one form of music simply replaces another in a never-ending cycle of rock
progress. The move to subsume other styles of music into the hegemony of rock is
blatant; it is a perfect method for neutralizing the cachet of rap, especially, as a viable

competitor for rock’s accumulated capital. If hip-hop culture and its songtexts are reified

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as merely a logical discursive outgrowth of rock, they pose no potent threat to rock’s
dominance within music culture; instead, rock is allowed to congratulate its magnificent
and very cool self for giving rise to yet another rebellious and extreme form of music——
and for being at once that fonn’s cause and its center. This marginalization through forced
centering of hip-hop further serves to legitimate rock as a very serious and complex art
form, one with a rich, full, and suitably sophisticated——but in no ways complicated—
history. In turn, by constructing such a fine and noble history for rock, the HFM lends
that much more authority and cultural weight to any discursive form whose story it
controls, thus instantly diminishing the number and volume of protests which those
affected forms might have at being so controlled. Beginning in November 1999 and
running through most of 2000, a three-floor tribute entitled Roots, Rhymes, and Rage
bestows HF M credibility and support to rap’s history and artifacts, naming hip-hop as
“the biggest pop music innovation since rock and roll in the 19505” (“Roots”; italics
added). To coincide with this, a September 1999 conference titled Hip-Hop: A Cultural
Expression, featuring keynoters KRS-One and Chuck D and panelists whose names
comprise the entire history of early hip-hop discourses, was a presentation of the Black
Studies program at Cleveland State University—under the auspices of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum. I would be a h0peless cynic indeed to name either of these
events as examples to support the argument I have laid out, since the HFM clearly
enables and promotes both hip-hop culture and Cleveland State by lending its own
cultural reputation and heft to the projects. To borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke, the

rhetorical system at work here is literally rotten with perfection.

-ZOO-

. . . The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin?

- T. S. Eliot

Within the Rock Hall, visitors are presented with a history of radio, another of
television, and a highly prominent one of early rock magazines such as Creem, Circus,
and especially Rolling Stone—whose founding publisher, Jann Wenner, is also a founding
member of the Foundation along with Ertegun. Each of these rock publications has its
history told in a visual display, but Rolling Stone more than any other here presents itself
as an “underground” venture first and still. Utterly disregarding its gradual evolution into
a mainstream corporate glossy whose table of contents appears only after numerous
pages of advertisements for Ford, Hilfiger, IBM, et al., the magazine’s wall caption
proudly announces Wenner’s status as a high school dropout while the display case itself
holds letters from 19603 mass-murderer Charles Manson (demanding an editorial
correction) and notoriously eccentric staff writer Hunter S. Thompson (demanding drugs
so he can complete an article). The exhibit presents a basic chronology starting in the 605,
when RS was a pulp street-comer rag, to the present day, but the timeline is jarringly
interrupted by an obviously centralized late-19803 cover photo of Janet Jackson, topless
and with her hands barely covering her breasts. Look, says the display, at the dirty rock
star (this time a black woman rather than a white boy) who has rebelliously taken ofl her
clothes in defiance of a mainstream desire for morality and modesty, while a more careful
rhetorical analysis says instead, Look at how the exotic Other 's female form has been
fetishized yet again for delighted use by a predominantly white male readership in a

predominantly white commercial venue '5 drive to sell more copies. Unaware of its

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function as one more indicator of rock's clearly primary economic interests and its
ongoing entanglement in sexist practices, the centerpiece unknowingly shouts that this is
what rock journalism, ultimately, is all about.

The HFM next takes visitors exiting the rock journalism display up another
escalator to the dining floor, where grossly overpriced potato chips, sandwiches, and
Cokes can be consumed at the spot where opening-year diners could once peruse a
section of Pink Floyd’s massive stage prop from the band’s The Wall tour which loomed
over the main lobby below, bassist Roger Waters’ anti-stardom polemic neatly
“scrawled” across the bricks:

In the old days, pre-Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd played to
audiences which by virtue of their size allowed an intimacy of connection
that was magical. However, success overtook us and by 1977 we were
playing in football stadiums. The magic crushed beneath the weight of
numbers, we were becoming addicted to the trappings of popularity.

1 found myself increasingly alienated in that atmosphere of avarice and
ego. . . . I was faced with a choice. To deny my addiction and embrace
that “comfortably numb” but “magicless” existence or accept the burden of
insight, take the road less traveled and embark on the often painful journey
to discover who I was and where I fit. The Wall was the picture I drew
for myself to help me make that choice.

Having just been presented with this intriguing tale of an autonomous and aggressive
“success” that by its own power can pursue and viciously attack those gentle artistes
wanting nothing to do with it, this narrative describing a vehement opposition to rock
stardom—i.e., opposition to the exact thing that this building is dedicated to glorifiling—
visitors would, in the years before a substantial interior redesign took place, quite
ironically begin their ascent to the center of rock-star hegemony. No longer could they
ride an escalator; the only way up was by climbing a winding, carpeted staircase, with

the light gradually dimming as the steps ascended. And then, suddenly, there it was: The

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Hall of Fame. There was no light in this place, save for the faint glow of immortalized
signatures that appeared to be etched into glass on all four walls. Small LCD computer
screens appeared next to most of the names, showing random digitized images of the
person or group so immortalized. Overwhelmed by the sanctity of the place, visitors
would instantly lower their voices to whispers, as if in a library—or a place of worship.
Small purple lights set into the walls led the eye up, up, up into the heavens of an infinite
dark space overhead.

But this, as my re-visit to the HFM in the summer of 1999 revealed, is no longer
the case. In the view of former Sex Pistols vocalist John "Johnny Rotten” Lydon in 1995,
the original space “should [have] be[en] titled the Hall of Shame,” since it represented
what was, for him, the tragic specter of “institutionalized rock” (qtd. in Willman 104).
The opinion was shared by no less than Business Week, which chided that “the last thing
the hall should be is a shrine to rock—an oxymoron. . . . [The hall should] be gaudy, even
loud. Rock ’n’ roll should never forget” (Wolff 26). Like the lobby of the building several
floors below, the original Hall was sterile, muted, and antiseptic, and afler a steady stream
of feedback to this effect the HFM in April 1998 relocated the Hall of Fame component
of the Museum—the etched signatures and LCD screens, along with new film, animation,
and video segments to coincide with new still photography and personal artifacts of
inductees—to a separate circular wing attached to the main building near the dining area.
The opening of this wing, called The New Hall of Fame Presented by AT&T, surely
helped to appease some of the original Hall’s critics (not only rock practitioners and
business journalists, but an infinite number of visitors to the site as well) by delivering

what the building’s Internet site now proudly describes as “a dynamic, interactive

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experience” where the new sound and “hyperactive” film/video components have helped
to make a “dramatic” and “aggressive” surrounding for the Immortalized Names and those
who come to view their signatures on the wall (“New”). Clearly, the HFM’s directors
have responded in quick time to calls for aesthetic corrections in order to make rock seem
more, well, rocklike in its final resting place (corrections which, I must admit, do feel
much better than the original version), but by moving the Hall into an atmosphere of
bright movement and noise, they also took away the original space’s contemplative nature
which offered visitors a chance to wonder why there is, for instance, no place in the HF M
narrative for alternative viewpoints to counter the site’s clearly phallocentric focus
beginning with the opening-year nude photos outside the restrooms. There have, afler all,
been many more women in rock than just the likes of Tina Turner, Madonna, and Diana
Ross—women who, pardon yet another lapse into aesthetic judgment, have rocked much
harder and more loudly—and as Sherman Lee has explained in a lengthy article titled
“(The Guitarists Formerly Known as Chicks),” the histories some of those women could
bring to the HFM would coincide quite well with rock’s overall ideology of rebellion and
originality:

Women guitarists are no longer content to be ghettoized into ‘acceptable’
musical categories such as folk and country, and now can be heard playing
everything from heavy metal to jazz, and especially alternative rock. They
are a fresh voice on the pop music scene, and are inventing new modes of
expression for the guitar that could only be the result of their unique
perspective. . . . [T]oday’s women guitarists had little in the way of
female role models, so their outlook on the guitar has been influenced by
both sexes, something that just can’t be said for most male guitarists.
Women were never allowed to play by the rules, so they are often better at
breaking them. (28)

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In a first-person account, guitarist Susan Stenger supports the statement about differing
experience and fewer models, but she also moves musicianship away from a simple
definition as technique and toward a larger definition as discourse in explaining that
“[b]ecause a lot of women haven’t grown up with guitars and amps, in a way it is a
blessing because they can kind of reinvent how to play. They don’t have to rely on a
vocabulary that’s handed down. They can invent their own language” (qtd. in Lee 57).
And in regards to the site where such a differently-originated discourse is practiced,
women such as former Catholic Girls member Lucy O’Brien can also offer more visceral
accounts of rock life to counter the HF M ’s largely sanitized narrative. As O’Brien writes
in recalling her band’s beginning:
No one told us that promoters would rip us off blind, that boy bands
would try to fuck us under the guise of chivalrous respect, that skinheads
would come to our gigs, shout abuse at us, overturn the tables, throw
bricks through the windows and beat us up; no one told us that we would
pay for our own studio time and be included on a compilation album, yet
wouldn’t see a penny of the profit; no one told us that if we’d hung on to
the nugget we had—ourselves, our youth, our sex, our music, our

untutored, naive difference—we’d have one of the hottest properties in the
business. (xii)

What the Hall of Fame component of the HFM is about, of course, is not the
recognition of any “untutored difference” but instead a thoroughly disciplined
homogeneity, a distillation of rock’s past into rock’s present and, unquestionably, its
future. What takes place in this centerpiece of the building is therefore a simultaneous
creation of the Hall as the centerpiece of rock itself. It is at once Alpha and Omega, both
origin and destination for all of those inductees gazed upon with favor by the nominating

committee. By borrowing here from Katherine Bergeron in her study of musicology with

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Philip Bohlman, I will argue that what happens in the Hall of Fame transcends the mere
disciplining of rock which occurs elsewhere in the Museum; in the Hall, selected portions
of rock history and the individuals working within it are “scaled” and “tuned” until they
form a canon—“a physical model that both embodies a standard of measure and makes
possible its reproduction. The canon is. . . an ideal of order made physical, visible” (2).
Moreover, the musical canon is built of scales which are in turn reduced to ratios, the
latter of which function as controlling metaphors for the entire HF M enterprise:

Tuned on a single string (a miniature universe), each ratio yields a precise
section, a measurement that marks or rules the space, producing the
divisions that are the canon’s values. The operation thus reveals the
essential link between canon and discipline: the tuned scale, or canon,

is. . . a collection of discrete values produced out of a system that orders,
segments, divides. (Bergeron and Bohlman 2)

The net result of this metarationalizing process is the defining of rock’s past as being
identical to its present—the past comes forward through, in Jameson’s terms,
contemporary images of what it represents. But not too far forward, one assumes, if the
historian brings to the endeavor enough idealism and ideology about the work at hand. In
the words of the HFM’s chief curator (and former Rolling Stone editor), James Henke,
“Early on, nobody probably thought that rock & roll would [still] be around [at the end
of the century], but now we risk losing a lot of that history completely if something isn’t
built to keep it” (qtd. in F oege 23). In that “kept” model of history, rock can thrive and
survive through a clean and seemingly logical narrative, one that strives to present itself as
being free of contradictions or self-reflection. Accordingly, this $92 million tribute to
rock, the music of resistance, makes no acknowledgement to movements that have

resisted rock itself. Punk, which began as a movement of opposition to the rock

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establishment, wanting nothing to do with its history or its trappings, is named by the
HF M25 as rock’s grammarian, bringing the older music form “back in line” when, during
the art-rock and disco era, it “strayed too far” from its rebellious origins. Likewise Bruce
Springsteen, whose E Street Band came onto the musical scene around the same time as
punk and countered art rock’s pomposity with danceable, celebratory (or cautionary)
barroom stomps, is thanked for having given rock a “fresh infusion of vitality” when the
old dog got winded. And heavy metal, banished to a life in the far margins of rock culture
since its inception, is simply allowed to remain there; the closest things to an
acknowledgement of metal’s existence at the HF M are a plaque beneath Alice Cooper’s
“heavy metal S/M costume” from the early 19705 and a brief flash of a Metallica video
clip in the “Video Killed the Radio Star” display. Metal’s progression into genres of its
own—thrash, doom, grindcore, and others—is a story left untold and thus constructed as
inconsequential.

One likely explanation for this clear dismissal of a genre offering bands with names
like My Dying Bride, Napalm Death, and Cannibal Corpse is that the HF M is, first and
foremost, not a rock enterprise but a civic and commercial one. Built not so much to
represent rock as to revitalize Cleveland’s flagging riverfront district, the building at One
Key Plaza (an address named afier the HF M’s first corporate sponsor, KeyCorp) exists
primarily and without apology to promote capitalism and make a profit. As yet another
Rolling Stone staffer, Jon Parales, defines it, rock “is proud to be a commodity, one that
brings in billions of dollars, with artistic success frequently measured in sales figures” (I ),
and visitors get this message most clearly upon exiting the top floor/final exhibit26 of the

building, when their only avenue of descent is a series of escalators that dumps them

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directly into the center of the gift shOp. There is no other way out; visitors leave the
same way they came in, surrounded by evidence that the music whose narrative would
like consumer-theorists to read it as political, subversive, dangerous, and artistic— is, at
absolute bottom, a business venture. The gift shop, a mecca of HFM memorabilia,
presumably sells every record by every artist represented in the building, along with T-
shirts, books, coffee cups, coasters, and trinkets of all sorts—most prominently
displayed of which are little plastic snow globes with miniature facsimiles of the HFM
building itself inside them. This may be the final irony: that an art form with resistance
to conformity and an endless struggle against cultural entropy as its rallying cry uses the
quintessential tchotchke to commemorate one’s visit to a place where a tour T-shirt and a
mild case of tinnitus would, by the building’s own account. make a far more fitting
memory.

In the end, though, this reading of the rock HF M is not primarily a critique of
commercialism or even capitalism. As Bennett et al. ’s Rock and Popular Music makes
clear, the bonds between rock and commerce are too inextricable, the specific points of
suture too inseparable, the evidence of mutuality too overwhelming, for critiques based
solely on perceptions (not theories) of economic “corruptions” of rock’s purity as a
discursive form and practice, and of commercially-induced “alienations” from its primary
applications and intents, to continue to carry serious weight. And just as rock as a set of
discursive practices—even in the neighborhood basements and garages where they most
often originate—can never be completely free of commercial/economic influence, rock as
an array of discourses cannot ever be completely free of ideology or contradiction.

Resistance to these realities would, in itself, only constitute an ideologically-motivated

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pursuit of futility. By remaining mired in the mere reading of a discourse and the
mapping of its rhetorical systems, acts, and deployments, nothing really happens beyond
the formation of more “uptown” theory without any useful “downtown” praxis. Parales,
writing in 1985, proudly notes that

[r]ock accepts everything its detractors say, only to laugh it off. Sure, its
basics are stolen, and its ideas are often cliches. Yes, it tends to aim for the
lowest common denominator and appeal to base, primal impulses... It is a
happy bastard style, claiming a pedigree from jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley,
country, classical music, movies, television, sex, art, literature, electronics,
and out-and-out noise. It is rooted in real emotion; it is also rooted in
racism, cynicism. and greed. (1; italics added)

A continuation of rock theory without lived praxis—a conscious, ever-alert awareness of
not only which practices one is engaged in but also why one is engaged in them, and to
what ends—only allows rock and its historians like Parales and the HFM to continue to
“accept” the theory and simply “laugh it off’ in response. That, after all, is the correct
rock attitude, the required and expected stance. As Raymond Williams has written,
“[n]ew social relations and the kinds of activity that are possible through them may be
imagined, but cannot be achieved unless the determining limits of a particular mode of
production are surpassed in practice, by actual social change” (86). The road toward
achieving a “new social relation” between rock’s dominant ideologies and those
individuals who live by and uncritically perpetuate them can only be built through an
active praxis in the form of creating a social sphere which encourages and invites those
same individuals to study, discuss, write about, and then change their customary modes
of conception, promotion, and consumption of rock’s rhetorical systems and ideological

subscriptions. To simply identify the problems is not enough. To act on them by

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working against their continuation is the only way to cut rock off from the loathesome
“roots” Parales lists—along with the others he does not—and in so doing, begin to cause
those roots to wither while the discourses continue to thrive in new and better ways.

And a prime site for this kind of active intervention is the college classroom.

$32)?

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SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK:

Radicalism, Resistance, and Reading in the Classroom Arena

They say I won’t learn, they say they can’t teach me. How can I learn when they just don’t reach me?
- Coolio, “Gangsta’s Paradise"

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out. My word’s but a whisper; your deafness. a shout.
- Jethro Tull, “Thick as a Brick”

When we were young and went to school
There were certain teachers who would hurt the children in any way they could
By pouring their derision upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness, however carefully hidden by the kids.
- Pink Floyd, “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”

Well we can’t salute ya—can’t find a flag. If that don’t suit ya, that’s a drag.
- Alice Cooper, “School’s Out”

For Edward Said in his book Musical Elaborations, a particular feature “about
cultural canons and their consequences in general (or specifically musicological) analyses
of music is that they tend to set limits and priorities too rigidly and too hierarchically,”
and through this habit “the canon’s eminence is associated with a sort of. . . inevitability,
its laboriously constructed social authority either discounted or forgotten altogether” (60).
This, at one time in my life, was exactly the case for me. Rock’s discourses, through all
of their various rhetoricities and ideologies, presented to me and my peers their canonical
songtexts, performers, and acceptable/required forms as something that came wholly
formed and ready for our admiration and subscription, but never our questioning analyses.
This wasn’t a case of our not wanting to interrogate rock so much as it was one of rock’s
not needing our interrogation. Yet it is precisely this analytical lack which, Said writes,

creates “an unappealingly barren setting presided over by approved masterpieces and

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venerated authorities.” Rather than remain focused solely or primarily on textual
utterances in rock, their author/ practitioners, and their forrns—on the contents of the
discourse and its practices—teachers of rock can choose instead to follow Said’s
suggestion to look into the contexts that produce “masters” but ignore all others who are
deemed lesser, and to examine the particular histories that allow “mastery” to happen in
the first place. In my own field of composition, as if the making of meaning from student
papers was not a difficult and sometimes fi'ustrating endeavor for many teachers already,
Deborah Brandt adds an examination of context to the task by arguing that “[n]o matter
what the topic, texts are primarily about the writing and reading of them. What they
refer to is not an explicit message but the implicit process by which intersubjective
understanding is getting accomplished” (4), and to this George Steiner steps in from the
field of linguistics to add that the “silences that punctuate discourse. . . are not empty.
They have the echo of things unspoken. . . .” (15). Examinations of the contextual to
coincide with a close look at the discursive become vitally important with a discursive
practice such as rock, in which a 45-year history in some ways has provided no more
than a loud and noisome soundtrack to accompany—indeed, at times to provoke—an
ongoing legacy of harmful practices which the larger society has been struggling to change,
'if not end.

But two things immediately present a problem in this last statement. First, since
the statement is itself situated within a chapter whose title and opening epigraphs clearly
invoke (to borrow from Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford) an immediate audience of teachers
as the primary readers, that same audience will likewise see itself as being directly

addressed by it. Second, the very epi graphs serving to create the invocation are

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connected, in thematic fashion, directly to the troubling fact that teachers do not occupy
the same precise spaces within rock discourses that their students do. While teachers of
rock at one point in their lives have been consumer-theorists in the same ways that their
students are now, once the switch is made from consumer-theorist to theorist-consumer,
many key similarities end. Differences in education levels, socioeconomic status, and
especially age combine to create a power discrepancy that irrunediately springs forward to
erect a wall of resistance between the performer and the audience in a rock “concert
venue” shaped like a classroom, and this resistance becomes especially problematic if the
teacher/perfonner is one who fits Grossberg’s observation that “those who hold on to
rock rarely renounce their youth” (Gotta 182). If rock becomes merely a facade to mask a
teacher’s fading youth, then that educator will, as Grossberg writes,

transform the struggle over who ‘owns’ rock into a struggle over who
‘owns’ youth. . . . I have often heard teachers complain that their students
are not young, that they can’t be [young] because they are so straight and
boring. Implicitly, the teachers are congratulating themselves for their
continued loyalty to their own youthfulness. (182-3)

Therefore, in my statement naming the thorough interrogation of rock contexts as well as
contents as a moral and ethical imperative, I do not exclusively address teachers at all.
Rather, I include them as an equal part of the audience—by which I mean students——
whose place in the culture renders them, more so than the teacher, most effective in
enacting necessary changes in the discourse and its practices being examined. And since
“[t]he idea of music as a rhetorical art rests on the metaphor of music as a language”
(Bonds 61), it is that language which functions as the cornerstone for a dialectical
pedagogy aimed at identifying the many “policies of truth,” to paraphrase a Depeche

Mode songtext, that exist in rock’s discourses and its history. As Mark Bonds has

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explained in Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor ofthe Oration, while
many attempts were made during the eighteenth century to forge solid connections
between a musical composer’s processes in drafting an orchestral piece and a writer/
speaker’s processes for drafting an oration—to include parallels within a similar “three-
stage process: invention (or pre-writing), elaboration (ordering, varying, articulating), and
elocution (putting it all together in final form)” (80}—the movement toward theories of
musical languageas equal to written and spoken language eventually faded due to an
inability to separate such theories from their primarily aesthetic grounding point, as
shown in Lorenz Mizler’s claim that “[m]usic is an oration in notes and seeks to move
listeners just as an orator does” (qtd. in Bonds 89; italics added). Yet remnants of the
movement continue to thrive in classical music today, where Bonds notes that theoretical
attention has been focused instead on connections between music and story, especially
between the parts of an orchestral piece and the plot in written stories and novels. While
the success of such endeavors remains to be seen, they nonetheless offer a valuable
connecting point between the auditory nature of rock discourses and at least one way to
frame both the verbal and non-verbal messages and the movements and infl uences—the
contexts—of those messages through rock’s history. Charles Keil and Steven Feld join in
the call for contextual analyses beyond solely textual ones, writing that “whatever a
historical change in language, music, dance, or culture is about, we can study it best, at its
very point of creation, if we attend closely to the discrepancies that enhance participation
and the contexts that generate these discrepancies” (107), but the primary point of
resistance, for teachers and students alike, comes in the authors’ statement following

immediately after this: “We really have to get down to the recording studio or dance floor

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to groove a while and to ask people about what has been happening.” In one way,
implied here is the suggestion that only “hands-on” practitioners—better yet,
producers—of music or the celebratory dance that accompanies it are equipped with all of
the necessary experiences and knowledges from which incisive theoretical articulations of
a discursive practice’s history can be formed. But in another way, Keil and Feld offer
what may be the most practical observation for teachers to note: You gotta get
“downtown” to where the action is if you wanna be able to “talk true” about the action
itself. This, unfortunately, is much easier said than done. As Michael Bérube' writes in a
discussion of the pitfalls of teaching popular textforms, “whereas the subject is often
quite worthy of serious study, it’s getting harder for an aging body to keep up with it
every year and. . . Well, let me put it this way: I simply have no idea what Dawson 's
Creek is supposed to be about, all right?” (B5). Obviously, there are an infinite number
of practical reasons in any teacher’s life that will impede an ability truly to go
“downtown” in the same way that students can and do, but knowledge sufficient to talk
with those students about where they go can still be gathered by relatively minor lifestyle
alterations less imposing than weekly rock-concert attendance or fortnightly dance jams at
the local hip-hop club before crossing the street to the metal bar for a couple of Buds and
a case of temporary hearing loss. A copy of The Source and another of RollingStone to
coincide with Lingua F ranca and Z is a start, with those two music magazines offset in
turn by even more “downtown”-focused publications like Vibe and Circus. NPR can
share equal time with not one but several local rock- and rap-format radio stations during
drive (and perhaps even office) time; A&E’s Biography and Ted Koppel’s Nightline can

cede screen time to top-request music-video countdowns on MTV and BET. And—this

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may be the hardest part—dollars can part ways with paychecks as the music library of
the teacher’s youth expands to include the music of the student’s.

A minor adj ustrnent, indeed. Taken as a whole, these things more likely indicate a
major change to many teacherly private-life practices and even preferences, but they are
necessary for avoiding what Be'rubé has very recently called the “Elvis Costello Problem,”
defined as “the difficulty of communicating to students by means of the touchstones of
popular culture” when students either don’t remember those touchstones or never knew
about them at all (BS). Costello, a British musician labeled as an early “punk” in the late
19705 with his breakthrough songtext “Watching the Detectives,” went on to perform less
spare, more standard-rock pieces such as “What’s So Funny (About Peace, Love, and
Understanding)” before fading away during the 19805 and reappearing in the 905 to record
an album of duets with Burt Bacharach. Be'rubé’s point in invoking Costello, as it relates
to my focus here, is that the rock figures who have loomed large in a teacher’s earlier life
will often have zero significance for students. The breakneck pace of an average rock
figure’s rise to cultural celebrity and prominence and the typical slide into obscurity
which often follows this rise makes “keeping up” a daunting enough prospect, and as any
of Dennis Miller’s televised “rant” performances will attest, the same is true about any
type of referent in popular discourse. Miller, best known for both a cutting wit and an
endless capacity for dropping pop-cult references drawn from anywhere between
centuries past to just this afternoon, is typically met with puzzled silence during the
majority of his “standup” banter. “My wife and I just had a son, and we named him
Holden,” Miller tells the audience, and then comes the punch line: “After the famous

literary character in that great work from the 19505—William Holden in Route 66.” A

handful of people in the audience laugh; hundreds of others wonder what he’s talking

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about. Miller moves on to the next reference, the next joke. And while teachers who
encounter the “Elvis Costello Problem” when their rock references fail to connect with
students can certainly follow Miller’s lead by simply moving on to another example and
hoping it fares better, an ongoing pattern of more misses than hits ultimately results in
what can only be seen as a failed pedagogy. For this reason alone, whatever lifestyle
alterations can be made to become “well read” not only in the discourse of the academy
but also in the discourses of the academy’s students will be well rewarded. Contexts
cannot be viewed or examined completely if knowledge itself is incomplete, and since so
much of that knowledge can be transmitted by students, rather than to them, this becomes

my focus in the next section.

Join Together with the Band:
Radical Pedagogy and the Rock Teacher’s Speaking Position

As Henry Giroux has argued, pedagogy should be “a configuration of textual,
verbal, and visual practices that seek to engage the processes through which people
understand themselves and the ways in which they engage others and their environment"
(Border 3), and both songtexts and videotexts are surely within the scope of the “verbal
and visual practices” he mentions. But a relatively diflicult shift, away from claiming a
superior ability to interpret them and toward recognizing instead the various distances
that teachers may have from the students' own relationship with them, is important if
both students and teachers are to believe that the point in studying these textual form is
to locate the many possible meanings contained there and to gain some understanding of

not only the texts, but also each other. I have often heard students say that they enjoy

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working in peer-critique groups, for instance, because those groups offer an opportunity
to “know where people are coming from” with their ideas and writing strategies. The
colloquial phrase, I know where you ’re coming from. is shorthand to indicate one’s
knowledge of the history of another; to understand the other’s origins and experiences,
and thus the reasons for the other’s attitudes and beliefs. To know where others come
from is to have a full, rich context for the thoughts and desires conveyed when we share
with one another what novelist Tom Spanbauer calls “our human-being stories.” A
concrete example of this knowledge exchange in practice appears in Herbert Kohl's I

Won 't Learn From Y ou. in which Kohl recounts an African student named Akrnir who sat
in on his course in psychology where the other students had been asked to perform a
psychoanalytical reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Akmir, after reading the
book, angrily accused (twenty years before Chinua Achebe would publish an identical
charge) both Conrad and the story of overt racism. Kohl writes:

I learnedfiom Akmir's analyses how I too fell into sloppy, racist
linguistic habits, and I came to take his criticisms seriously. I tried to read
texts from his point of view and pick out the phrases and thoughts that he
might find offensive. In some cases, it made reading familiar material very
uncomfortable. . . on rereading [Conrad's story] with Akmir’s sensitivities
in mind, the explicit and offensive racism at the heart of the story

appalled me. . . . [T]hough the quality of the writing wasn't diminished by
my new reading, the story became repugnant to me. . . . And I understood
that I shouldn 't teach Heart of Darkness unless I was ready to deal
explicitly with the text's racism and condemn Conrad. (18-19; italics
added)

In Kohl's account, what constitutes a radical departure from his former pedagogy is the
fact that Akmir, the student, has played the most significant teaching role, and that the

' bulk of learning took place on the teacher's part. As a result of Akmir's complete re-

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Visioning of what had been, for the teacher, a favored author and text, and a reconceptual-
ization of Heart of Darkness as no longer a showcase of belles lettres but as a site for the
continued reinforcement of a racist construction of Africans, the teacher finds the work
first uncomfortable, then appalling, and finally, repugnant. In this way, the education
that has taken place is truly the result of a liberatory practice for both of the principals
involved.

For Giroux, pedagogy is “a form of cultural production. . . implicated in the
construction and organization of knowledge, desires, values, and social practices” (Border
3), and Kohl’s story reveals how the teacher and the student have, together, created
Giroux's version of a “democratic public philosophy” through a mutual respect for “the
notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of life.” But such
a dynamic can only take place in a radicalized site where two crucial ingredients are
present: first, the teacher's desire to listen and learn from students, and second, the
student's clear understanding that the teacher has this desire and may therefore safely be
challenged and questioned within the classroom arena. As Andrew Wi get writes, “To be
is to be heard, to speak into the silence of ignorance or oblivion, or to anticipate, even
interrupt the utterance of falseth with a statement of personal truth that substitutes an
act of self-naming for an act of other-labeling” (qtd. in Yancey xviii). And in order to be
heard, “[i]n some classes, students’ immediate needs may be to find the voice to counter
[the teacher's] agen ” (Brunner 151 ), to which bell hooks adds that “‘coming to voice’ is
not just the act of telling one’s experience. It is using that telling strategically—to come
to voice so that you can also speak freely about other subjects. What many professors
are fiightened of is precisely that” (Transgress 148). Teachers in a rock-centered

classroom cannot share in that fear if they want to generate a truly mutual understanding

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of a fully-contextualized discourse and its practices since teachers have their knowledges
of songtexts from a particular point in history, students have theirs of another, more
current point—and all of the less precisely-known and understood spaces between these
two perspectives form an opportunity to reinforce and promote a kind of collaborative
critical inquiry which is “always interpretive, critical, and partial,” with the result being
“the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position”
(Haraway, “Knowledges” 589).

The word, radical, has a number of different connotations. For students and even
younger children, it means excellent, awesome, great; one can even hear it, at times, being
pronounced as “radi-cool.” For others, it indicates a threat, a danger; there are terrorists,
for instance, who will blow up buildings, but there are terrorist radicals who will blow
up entire cities and nations. And for still others, radical indicates an opposition to
traditional, as in liberal versus conservative, as in a position on the left and a
counterposition on the right. But for teachers, to be truly “radical” by the word's
primary denotative value is to practice the root of pedagogical practice, which is to
provide an opportunity for leaming—and for the critique and questioning of leaming—by
any and all means possible. As evidenced by both Giroux's and bell hooks's nearly
complete turn in recent publications toward cultural analyses of popular music in addition
to filmtexts and television shows, each of these mediums has become a major sphere of
influence for radical teachers in the late 20th century. Students consume them not only as
cultural artifacts, but also, as I have described earlier, as indispensable aids in forging their
identities in the world. Every campus has at least a handful of Goth figures walking about
in Marilyn Manson death's-head makeup and head-to-toe black garb; even more

conspicuous are the thousands of cotton billboards in the form of T—shirts announcing

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Godsmack, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, and dozens of other bands or solo artists as the
wearer's cultural/political affinity. With the classroom, by this phenomenon of artifactual
omnipresence, always already made into a consumer mall for popular culture, teachers
can—with all of the caution and care required when moving into the territory of material
manifestations of a lived practice not entirely parallel to their own——introduce students to
the joys and terrors of critically interrogating these primary and defining texts. But as
Grossberg has only implied in his observation of “straight” students who earn the disdain
of self-described “hip” teachers, the surprise and dismay in many teachers’ negative
experiences with rock songtexts in the classroom arena comes from the intense resistance
which students will often show in response to the textform—and especially to any
interrogations of the material. “When you analyze, you paralyze,” is a favored defense/
attack I have heard uttered by many students who would prefer that their entertainment
be left unexamined; after all, the protest continues, “it's just a song.” But as Rage Against
the Machine has pointed out in its own songtext “No Shelter Here,” popular culture
presents to its consumers a “thin line between entertainment and war”—a phrase which
alone can ftmction as the rationale required to justify the pedagogical value of the medium
as a classroom textfonn, since rarely does any songtext prove to be “just” a simple thing.
For example, rapper Ton Loc scored a major hit in the late 19805 with a songtext
titled “Wild Thing.” The lyrics were fairly basic, and the chorus, “She like to do the wild
thing,” spoken over a monster guitar riff sampled from Van Halen, was standard male-
rapper reification of women’s sexuality. But this songtext goes far beyond such an easy
analysis since it was also a favorite of the so-called “gang of marauding black youths”
who viciously attacked the anonymous Central Park Jogger in 1989. As recounted by

Houston Baker, when asked by the police what their motives had been, the youths

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replied in black “shtreet” vernacular that they, too, liked to do the “wild thing”—which to
unuained white-detective ears was heard as “wilding.” The press took up this term
during the ensuing “moral panic” that Baker describes (Studies, var. ), with both Time and
Newsweek announcing on their covers the new and frightening “gang ritual” of wilding to a
terrified and outraged nation. But no one—not the press, not the police, and not the
offending youths themselves—knew what the word meant, exactly. Still, as Baker notes,
the term somehow fit, since white America perceives its black youth as “wild” and the
Central Park Jogger, an innocent, young, white career woman, was the hegemonic norm
under attack by these savage “marauders.” Just as would happen in the Columbine High
School tragedy ten years later when the press could find no clear rationale for the slayings
and so turned its attention to hardcore industrial rock and violent video games, the press
in 1989 could neither determine a clear motive for the Central Park Jogger’s attack nor
contrive a way to make the puzzling term, wilding, carry the story any longer, so it
turned its gaze to rap songtexts as the cause for the attack. For Baker, this shift revealed
even more cluelessness on the part of the national media since rap, as he defines it, is at
heart a form of poe“try. . .[a] disruptive performance,” and important as an “audible or
sounding space of opposition” which Homi Bhabha calls “articulation of the melancholia
of the people's wounding by and before the emergence of the state line” (qtd. in Baker,
Studies 97). In other words, just as Ice-T, Michael Eric Dyson, and so many others have
tried to point out, rap does not in itself create violence; it names and reflects it. By all of
this, then, it would be exceedingly difficult for any student to maintain the argument that
Ton Loc’s rap is “just a song.”

Since Loc’s songtext, at age eleven, suffers from an “Elvis Costello Problem” in its

own right, the introduction of its history in the classroom is an even more delicate matter

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as teachers must walk a fine line between using the songtext as the basis for an extended
conversation set within a context of larger rap history and white receptions of the
discursive genre—speaking with students—and simply presenting the songtext as an
artifact they “need” to add to their knowledge of that history, and further, how to know
it—i.e. speaking for them. Elisabeth Chiseri-Strater points out that education ideally
takes place in a context where “students themselves have helped to construct the reading
of [a text]; they have received their understanding not from or through teachers but with
them and the peers that support the dialogue” (73 ). For instance, the use of Metallica's
songtext “One” and its accompanying long-fomr videotext—each of them based in tum on
Dalton Trumbo’s censored antiwar classic Johnny Got His Gun—can function as aids in
both extending and complementing students’ understanding of warfare, resistance, and the
sometimes moral obscenity of military paradoxes (the song/story's narrator, horribly
maimed, would like to die, but the military doctors reply that “[killing soldiers is] against
regulations”). That is, they can function as aids until a student along the far wall, who
proudly served in the UN operations over Kosovo, raises a hand and offers a viewpoint
to counter the teacherly reading of these texts, and is then joined by another who shares a
story of a family member who has likewise found military service a noble profession and
has often articulated, in convincing fashion, the moral necessity for armed conflict. It is at
this point that dialectic, and thus a collaborative and socially-fonned kind of reading—not
of Metallica or even Trumbo, but of the historical, political, and psychological contexts
surrounding the human capacity to wage war against itself—begins for all.

In Outlaw Culture. bell hooks demonstrates the need for alternative conceptions of
literacy and reading as she explains the growing trend toward what she calls “eating the

Other” in filmtexts such as The Crying Game and The Bodyguard, in which “white males

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have not interrogated their location or standpoint” since “white supremacy allows those
who exercise white privilege not to acknowledge the power of race, to behave as though
race does not matter, even as they help put in place and maintain spheres of power where
racial hierarchies are fixed and absolute” (55-6). To many consumers of these filmtexts,
and to the principal actors (Stephen Rea and Kevin Costner, respectively), they appear as
“just stories” in which race is not a factor even though, as hooks notes, each film sports a
racial Other as the female lead to give the films their “radical edge” (56). (In the case of
The Crying Game, the Other is also a transvestite, making her/him a sexual as well as
racial Other which audiences nonetheless strive to “eat” uncritically and unreflectively.)
The taking place of this “eating” of “just stories” is a pedagogical opportunity for
students to receive from teachers the “critical professional readings [that] can provide a
lens” for their own critical interrogations and ideological unpackings (Brunner 71), and Sut
Jhally of the Media Education Foundation, in his extremely damning videotext
DreamWorlds 11, offers students a step-by-step methodology for reading MTV music-
videotexts in such a critical way. After offering a long stream of similar clips in which the
form's favored tropes (young, nubile women ready and willing to have sex any time,
anywhere, in any way) become painfully clear, Jhally interposes excerpts from the late
Sam Kinison's video for the songtext "Wild Thing” (a remake of the ancient 605 classic by
the Troggs; no connection to T6n Loc's rap) with a horrifying scene from the filmtext The
Accused in which Jodie Foster’s character is gang-raped in a bar full of drunken men.

Thus viewers see members of Aerosmith, Ratt, and Guns 'n Roses, among other rock
groups and solo performers, standing around a wrestling arena and cheering wildly as
Kinison and a nearly-naked Jessica Hahn roll around in center ring—and likewise cheering

as Jodie F oster‘s barmaid character is raped again and again. The response of many of my

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own students to Jhally's videotext has been consistently twofold: initial silence when it
ends, followed by a report, after a few days or a few weeks, that they are no longer able
to view MTV’s music-videotexts in the same way they once did—which is to say,
uncritically. They have become empowered with a new kind of “social literacy” by
having been trained in the interrogation of the visual stimuli they have for so long been
asked (by MTV, which attempted in court to prevent Jhally from releasing the

Dream Worlds video) to “eat” as “just a thing” to sell more musical product. But a
colleague of mine tells a much more troubling story arising from his use of the same
videotext: several women in one of his graduate seminars stood and left the room to
protest what they perceived as the teacher condoning the sexual violence being portrayed
on screen. To say that these women missed the point is not the approach required, and
so the teacher correctly avoided it. Rather, he asked the women when they returned the
next week to explain how Jhally might have made his point about videotextual misogyny
without committing the same serious affront to members of his audience.

And this is where an emphasis on praxis, to go beyond simple practice, comes
into play. Any teaching professional, in a variety of disciplines, can easily find dozens of
compelling reasons to validate the use of Jhally’s videotext as a pedagogical tool:

Students might be asked to write a response to it, to create their own counter-narrative to
it in similar videotext form, to emulate it by performing a critique of another cultural
practice, and so forth. That is what justifies the videotext’s inclusion in the course and its
appearance in the classroom, and thus it answers questions of practice. But questions of
praxis go on to ask why the justified material is being used—and to what intended ends,
whether stated or not. Has the teacher taken into consideration any unintended harm that

might befall the student(s) as a result of the material’s presentation in class? If all goes

-ZZS-

well, is the pedagogical bottom line that the students “need” to subscribe to Jhally’s, and
the teacher’s, view of rock videotexts? Is it to work against the steady consumption of
these texts as merely a pleasurable leisure activity, which the teacher finds aesthetically
offensive and trivial? Is it to inform students, in a very subtle fashion, that their
relationship with videotexts has been not only wrong, but harmful—and that they are
therefore complicit in the same crimes against women which Jhally has explicated? Or is
it simply to share with students the kind of critical professional reading and lens that
Diane Brunner defines, a tool that will allow them to see for themselves all of the possible
contexts surrounding both the production and consumption of videotexts—the good, the
bad, and the unspeakably ugly—as and when they choose to employ it? As Shumway
has cautioned, the goal behind teaching any text from popular culture should never be to
change students’ responses to the material, but rather to help them learn to support their
own critical interpretations, and this kind of self-actuation of power and ability can
manifest itself in all kinds of surprising ways. A student once wrote to me at the end of a
semester in rock-centered writing: “I have never had a teacher before who dressed the
same and listened to the same music as his students. It was good to have a teacher close
to our level.” But, as I have already argued and will continue to argue in this section, close
to is not the same as at. and what I find most satisfying in the student’s comment is the
wonderfully ambiguous way in which the words, close to, can indicate an attempt to come
up to the students’ level just as easily as they can an attempt to come down. Another
student in that same course wrote: “You were the sheriff in our rock community. You
were part of what was going on, but we were ever conscious of your authority. Well,
every community has its authorities, and you just happened to get paid for it.” In other

words, the student’s perception was that every member of the class had shared power

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equally, and the teacher’s had carried no more capital than hers or her classmates’ other
than to generate an incidental bit of extra cash. And while the rock-attitude stance of
rebellion in the last line (well. . . you just happened) is noteworthy, it pales beside an end-
of-semester evaluation submitted by another student in the same course a year later: “We
all had the same choices as you, and the same resources. You could guide us, but you
could never force us. We weren’t here to please you: you were here to keep up with us.
Hmm. I wonder, who was really in power here?” Here the teacher stands, by the rhetoric
of the whole message, within the group as an equal, but by the rhetoric of the message’s
smaller parts—its constant oppositional structures of we versus you and you in contrast
to us—at the same time stands outside the group as a lesser equal since any authority is
met with a fierce resistance that immediately works to cancel it out in a reading of the
course which falls, ideologically, firmly in line with the course’s content and verifies
Shumway’s observation that “[s]tudents will tend to resist all imposition by the teacher
upon that part of their world they have not previously ceded to the school” (229). The
readings and perceptions generated by this student resistance can help to bring to light all
of the ethical issues which confront pedagogical praxis, and in turn they can assist
teachers in identifying potentially harmful ideological agendas that may underlie their
presentations and applications of rock in the classroom arena.

To return once again to the immediate issue of videotexts employed within praxis,
while Jhally’s indictment of many videotexts presenting misogynistic narratives is harsh
and uncomfortable indeed, Be'rube' sees a much more positive role for the many other
video-format rock artifacts that do not share in misogyny. For him, the popularity of
music videotexts contributes a vital aid in the battle against the historical and cultural

“amnesia” which I’ve referred to in preceding pages, since video “mak[es], for example,

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the l977 divas of disco available to a whole new generation of dancing fools” (B5). More
importantly, Bérubé writes,

popular culture has actually begun to link generations more broadly than
‘high’ culture ever could. Thanks to contemporary culture’s ravenous
appetite for recycling, fans of music video not only can keep up with
[current music and performers] but also get acquainted with 19905’
versions of 19705’ reggae and 19405’ swing. The same economic forces
that drive popular culture’s high rate of turnover also drive popular
culture’s high rate of revival.

With videotexts—of any kind, whether viciously malignant or relatively benign—thus
seen as archival material to contribute to a fuller historical context for rock’s discourse
through the decades, it seems to me that there is reason for great optimism since such a
deep well of resources—and student awareness of it—forces teachers to listen, to think,
and to speak all the more carefully while positioning themselves to participate in one of
the primary discursive practices with which their students are engaged. And while even
very practical uses of these still-“nontraditional” textforms can, where necessary, easily
be used for testing and certainly for any required writing as a display of the student's
understanding of a vast range of subjects in which rock has served as a significant context
for social and historical proceedings, Jay Mechling warns that “[too] often, instructors
avoid risk-taking behavior, more often censoring themselves than facing the imagined
consequences of experimenting and failing” ( l 60).

Such avoidance is not without basis, since reading a songtext or videotext from an
instructional or “scholarly” perspective and then lecturing the results of that reading to
students who have dozens of valid reasons and ways to make the teacher’s perspective
appear at once desperate, groundless, and comical, is “risky” practice indeed. (I think

here of a colleague who, in the late 19805, tried to persuade her students that Walt

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Whitman was “America’s original rap artist” because he “invented new words and

’9,

bragged of having a ‘barbaric yawp. The teacher was a kind and gentle human being.
And there were many overhead slides, made over the course of many months, to support
her argument. But the lecture still bombed.) Because even an introduction of the most
meticulously researched and cross-referenced contemporary-musical topic still has no
guarantee of success, consolation may be found in recognizing that when teachers do fail
in risk—taking classroom practices, great opportunities exist for “teachable moments”
when students are invited to become full partners in an analysis of that failure. Such an
invitation can lead, in a best-case scenario, to the collaborative making of new kinds of
critical theory and a realization which proponents of radicalism like Giroux believe should

live squarely in the center of education’s heart:

[I]f teachers are to move beyond the role of being agents of cultural
reproduction to that of being agents of cultural mobilization, they will have
to critically engage the nature of their own self-formation and participation
in the dominant society, including their role as intellectuals and mediators
of the dominant culture. (Opposition 68)

But from a student perspective, an invitation to join the teacher in identifying
her/his role in mediating rock culture from the standpoint of academic culture runs
severely contrary to the student’s basic academic-survival skills. When teachers step into
any classroom, they’re automatically cloaked in a mantle of authority (conferred by
students as much as themselves) and looked upon as both eminently superior interpreters
of course materials and authoritative judges of student displays of comprehension and
mastery of those materials. In teaching rock, this tacit assumption can be a damaging tool
in the hands of instructors who “know better” than their students what the students’

relationship with rock’s discursive practices “,’means’ since this knowledge has the effect

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of silencing individual voices and shutting off the dialogue so indispensable in any

liberatory and transformational pedagogy.28

Teacher: What’s wrong with Led Zeppelin, a group of British white

men, becoming millionaires and rock icons by recycling the blues

songtexts of black musicians?

Student: Nothing. After I heard Zeppelin, I went and bought every blues
album I could find by the songwriters listed on the Zep albums. Most of
the originals are a lot better than Zeppelin’s versions; that’s all I listen to
now. But, umm, not everything Led Zeppelin did was blues covers. They
wrote a lot of their own stuff, too.

Teacher: Nothing? Really? All of those blues artists have been dead for
years, and many of them died broke. They won’t see a nickel of the
profits from your purchases. They won’t know you bought their music.
So Led Zeppelin still gets all the credit for ‘updating’ the blues. And,
ummm, I’m well aware that the band wrote its own material, too. (Smiles)
I used to be a huge Zeppelin fan myself. But that’s not really the point
I’m trying to make here.

Student: I see what you’re saying. Will this be on the test?

This exchange is not fictional. The teacher was me, early in my career, seeing myself as
Sir English Knight, Slayer of Weak Student Ideas. And I am heartily sorry for my words,
and I sincerely repent of them. As Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters has put into
songtext, “we don’t need no thought control” of this type, nor does any good come from
its manifestation of “dark sarcasm in the classroom” which only results, as Waters sees it,
in a massive wall of resistance—and protection—against education in general and teachers
in particular. No one benefits, and so it becomes necessary to create a space in which no

one is silenced and all voices are respected. A unilateral prohibition on the practice of

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speaking about students’ relationships with rock discourses at all would have the
destructive effect of silencing the entire classroom, since teachers restricted to speaking
only from and about their own experiences with the discourse would operate under clear
and huge limits on what they may say—limits that in turn would severely constrain and
warp what they could teach—but even a deferral to student experience as the final test of
authority can effectively shut off student voices as well. In privileging lived experience
and “downtown” forms of rock knowledge, teachers would grant authority to a number of
metalheads, Goths, and gangsta-thumpers who traditionally have let their stereos do the
talking while they themselves remain silent and removed observers and critics, but the
problem of establishing experience as the principle foundation for any pedagogy—
perhaps especially in my own field of composition, where "writing one's life" is often
encouraged as the first-year student’s initial step into the gradual movement from
personal to "transactional" writing—is that postmodern theory has shown how the
meaning of any specific experience is rarely if ever as stable or universal as it appears.
Privileging lived experience as the last word on a valid rock perspective can, as easily and
effectively as a position of teacher-superior, also shut down the dialogue that is the core
requirement for a full classroom collaboration, since it leads to a practice of only the most
knowledgeable voices being heard while others, less so, are necessarily silenced by their
lack of experience.

Ultimately, teachers engaged with rock discourses in the classroom arena become
at once historians and historical artifacts, storytellers and stories. Before students can
put aside their prejudices and agree to work with these teachers in filling their respective
knowledge gaps, the teachers must admit their own musical biases and preferences,

deconstruct their personal readings of rock-cultural events in history, and invite students

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to offer their own counter-readings in a dialectical quest for shared understanding. Since
the “rebellion” of a radical teacher’s own rock-oriented self-identity may, as Grossberg
has indicated, generate a perception of “conformity” in the students’, then the nature of
the terms themselves, their definitions and their cultural weights, can become a way to
find common ground amid a sea of difference. Building on Geertz’s notion of shared
experience as “local knowledge,” Ann Hill Duin and Craig Hansen define such center-
remaking as an “active collaborat[ion] with others to build culture out of agreements that
are as complex as codified law and as simple as common sense” (91). This, I’ll point out,
is in many ways a useful definition for rock itself, and the still “experimental” and
definitely risky setting of a rock-centered classroom provides a context for teachers to
subvert their multiple strata of social and instructional authority when all within the

community share a primary goal of collaborative learning.

Join Together with the Band, Part II:
The Rock-Classroom Arena and Conceptions of “Discourse Community”

For Chiseri-Strater, the term community, used in an academic sense, functions to
indicate any site where efforts are made to initiate students into its institutions,
disciplines, and classroom materials. At the same time, however, from the students’
perspective, the literacy norms within most fields—the reading, writing, talking and
thinking patterns of the given discipline—most often remain powerfully invisible, not
offering ready access for them to earn full and competent membership in the discourse
community contextualizing and controlling the initiations (144). And perhaps the most
obvious connection to be made between the conflicts present in a rock-centered course, as

I have been describing it here, and the term community lies in the more specific term

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discourse community. Traditional definitions of discourse communities most often
contain huge assumptions regarding ultimate ownership of not only the community itself,
but also (or especially) the discourse being used and taught. Typically, the teacher owns
it all and the student humbly seeks both entrance to the community and permission to
use its discourse in a way deemed effective by the teacher. In the end, the student
receives a grade and goes away—presumably to join yet another discourse community
somewhere else, owned by someone else: another teacher, a review board, an
employment supervisor. Meanwhile, back in the discourse community from which the
student has now been jettisoned, the teacher prepares for a fresh group of supplicants.
Joining this fairly disheartening view is Chiseri-Strater’s argument that

[t]here is. . . a paradox in positing college classrooms as a spiral or nest of
neatly linked ‘discourse communities’ when the student’s perspective is
weighed. Conununity should imply a place where the norms of

behaviors and rituals and routines of [its discourse] are implicit to all its
members, not just to those in control. Unless the concept of community is
consciously built into a course, the idea of discourse community refers
mainly to professional scholars’ circles. . . . (143; italics added)

Fortunately, definitions of academic community are, at a great number of post-secondary
campuses, currently undergoing healthy revision to focus more directly on collaboration,
cooperation, and a socially-constructed form of knowledge that includes the why of a
discipline’s discourse as well as the how. Higher-leaming institutions may still be
labeled as “communities of scholars,” comprising a variety of smaller discourse
communities within the larger academic host site, but the central trope of community

is gradually coming around to mean its denotative value: a group of diverse individuals
living, working, and speaking together toward a shared set of goals and rewards. In this

view, a community’s discourse “is a changing practice that [its members] have the chance

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of influencing even as it influences them” (Bizzell, “F oundationalism” 45 )-—which is
exactly the primary, most crucial aspect of a praxis dedicated to transforming both the
perceptive and consumptive habits which an uncritical reception of the most harmful
aspects of rock’s discourses and their practices will otherwise promote. Further, Bizzell
suggests that when a community’s discourse is viewed through a rhetorical lens, it
becomes a form of

[k]nowledge [that] ensues when rhetoric is successful, when rhetoricians
and audiences reach agreement. . . . [R]hetoricians cannot share a
community’s knowledge while remaining unchanged. [Their] own world
views will be influenced to the extent that they assimilate the community’s
knowledge to their own discourse. (Bizzell, “Literacy” 149)

To apply such a rhetorical lens to the rock classroom arena as community, however, two
key terms need to be explicated: Who is the rhetorician, and who is the audience? If the
former is the teacher only, then the problematic/traditional definition of discourse
community remains stuck in the authority to know belonging to the one (rhetorician) and
permission to learn being in turn granted to the many (audience). Therefore, in a revised
conception of both community and discourse community—which I’ll mark hereafter as
discourse/community—the students and the teacher fit both of the roles. Authority to
know becomes authority to teach, and no permission to learn is required of anyone when
all have joined together in what Brunner calls “the struggle to make sense” (227). When
teachers present their material from a position of authority, she argues, and especially
when they present the same material from the same textforms in the same way, year after
year, there is precious little motivation for students to believe that they have any
capacity to teach the teacher. On the other hand, Brunner writes, “when students see me

struggle to make sense. it [suggests] to them that it’s okay not to know every reading of a

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text prior to teaching it, that student voices offer valid perspectives and readings, and that
within the multiplicity of perspectives, we may carve meanings that make some sense to
all of us” (227—8). Such a model of cooperative learning breeds “positive interdependence
—a recognition by group members that they are linked together in a way that none can be
successful unless all are” (Johnson 123). In this light, just as attendance and participation
in a rock-arena performance will not take place without prior socially-provided
knowledge of the perforrner’s discourse and at least a leaning toward the values of the
surrounding throng inside the arena, group equilibrium in a rock-centered classroom
cannot exist without interactive and intersocial learning on the part of every individual;
they are mutually dependent. I do not want to suggest, however, that community is
synonymous with utopia—especially in a rock-centered space where the nature of the
discourse itself so often appears to “require” contestation and resistance.

Indeed, for every problematic arising from theories of community, there can be
just as many conflicts that may arise during (and even because of) the practices
surrounding it. Gregory Clark, in his article “Rescuing the Discourse of Community,”
begins with the point that the same assumptions inherent in a rhetoric of community
which appears to promote and reflect democracy can and do also subvert it, revealing how
a rhetoric of inclusion can actually work to create a defacto practice of exclusion when an
assumed “equality” exists among individuals possessed of unequal abilities (61 ). In
relation to Clark’s observation, bell hooks has elsewhere shown how an attempt to work
within a rhetoric of communal equality while also maintaining an awareness of its
shortfalls can lead to an overly cautious, excessively uncertain, and ultimately awkward

stance, as illustrated in her comment that when she enters the classroom,

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the weight is on me to establish that our purpose is to be. . . a community
of learners together. It positions me as a learner. But I’m also not
suggesting that I don’t have more power. And I’m not trying to say that I
don’t have more power. And I’m not trying to say that we’re all equal
here. I’m trying to say that we are all equal here to the extent that we are
equally committed to creating a learning context. (Transgress 153)

Clark, in performing the “rescue” of his title by outlining an “ethical discourse of
community,” further argues that such an ethic would have the primary function of
“constitut[ing] and maintain[ing] a democratic collectivity. . . [by] direct[ing] people to
value their dijferences because that is what enables their cooperation as equals" (62;
italics added). Drawing on the work of ethicist Nel Noddings, Clark cites the argument
that no communities are ever forged from a collective pursuit of common goals and desires
(qtd. in 65); rather, they are made of people who are individually “moving toward
something, trying to excel, intending to win”—and in this way community serves only as
“an extention of the self.” Yet after presenting such damning testimony, Clark’s ultimate
point falls in line with the other conceptions of community called upon here, with the
difference lying primarily in his focus on difference. In an ethical discourse, he concludes,

the progress of expertise in a community [would be] secondary to a. . .
practice of confronting differences so that its participants can come to
understand how the beliefs and purposes of others can call their own into
question. . . . [P]eople cooperate on the ground of an agreement to meet
their differences openly, and that requires them each to rethink contin-
ually their own intentions and actions in terms of those of differing
others. This is the only agreement that supports a democratic discourse
of community. (“Rescuing” 73)

At first glance, Clark’s line of argument may appear to present a binaristic
dilemma in the form of a forced choice between either an assumption-laden community of
commonality or an ethical community of difference. Yet when I apply it to a rock-

centered classroom arena, I see a site where students engage both in a common quest to

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make meaning from the chaotic discourses of rock, and in which their progress in this
quest is aided significantly by the recognition and articulation of the vastly differing
views—that is, different from the teacher’s as well as from each others’—they hold.
Most importantly, they are equals precisely because of their inequality; not all students
know much about folk or acid/psychedelic forms of rock discourses, for instance, and
some may know nothing at all about metal or rap-influenced songtexts. But some do, and
the knowledge becomes an opportunity for them to teach what they know to their
classmates, for the known to receive a gloss by those who, seeing it for the first time, see
it differently, for the knowledge of the few to become the socially-constructed knowledge
of all—and for the previously-unquestioned consumption and continuation of rock’s
discursive practices to be gradually, steadily transformed in a new, critically-engaged
manner. That is democracy, and it is equality, and it is community.

The value of Clark’s call for an ethical discourse lies in his implicit warning that
the guiding assumptions behind community formation must be themselves relentlessly
questioned. A community founded solely on the assumption that “we are all here to learn
the same thing,” and no more than that, is in grave jeopardy of choosing for its primary
discursive mode the same kind of hegemonically-imposed “cultural literacy” that got
Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch into so much trouble (Peck et al. 203). While “cultural
literacy” does fit under the larger rubric of community in its desire to form a common set
of valued knowledge(s), in the case of Bloom and Hirsch the result is an imposition of no
less than the same white/westem/patriarchal canon of historical information and tradition
which many educators would like to see considered in more careful, less oppressive ways.

Translated to the discourse/community of the rock classroom arena, this kind of

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demanded literacy would become the imposition of the rock canon itself—an officially-
sanctioned body of knowledge and an officially-licensed way of knowing it, both of which
have already been modeled and demonstrated by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum—and the most likely agent for such a canonical formation would be the teacher.
Under this model, the majority of the discourse/community’s citizens—the students—
will become, as at the HFM itself, passive viewers and temporary visitors, excluded from
any active role in the production of either exhibit or narrative—i.e. of the controlling
signifiers for rock’s consumption, i.e. of primary knowledge. And this is Clark’s point.
In the place of cultural literacy, then, teachers in rock-centered classroom arenas will do
better to seek a model of what Peck et al. have defined as a community literacy, “a search
for alternative discourse” (205) which “brings into conversation multiple and often
unheard perspectives” but then also goes further by

seek[ing] to restructure the conversation itself into a collaboration in

which individuals share expertise and experience through the act of plan-
ning and writing about problems they jointly define. The goal is not to
resolve the myriad of differences that arise in a mixed, working group,

but to treat diversity as a resource for solving specific problems. . . . (205)

Yet it’s not enough to merely acknowledge difference, these authors argue; one must also
go on to “actively explore the logic of how you and I are using our literate practices to
make meaning” (206; italics added). In a rock-centered classroom arena, this exploration
can shift to examine the logic of rock ’s employment of its own particular “literate
practices” in all of the ways that have historically forged its popularly-conceptualized
“meaning.” Moreover, since they represent a vastly diverse range of and advocacy for
rock genres and periods, students who are thus labeled and identified by their musical

affinities have an opportunity to both explain and question these ideological and even

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theoretical groundings when they find their discourses diverging wildly from those of
others. And from this experience, ideally, they have an increased potential to learn that
the same critical introspection may be applied when they move out of the

discourse/community into the countless others awaiting them.

Ain ’t Nuthin ’ but a G(iroux)-Thang, Baby: Rock, Radicalism, and the Corrupting

Irgfluenca of Corporate Education

I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that teachers of rock’s discourses, who
already face a multitude of critical issues in shaping their pedagogies and praxes, will find
themselves, in one way or another, additionally enmeshed in slightly-amended versions of
two of the most weighty and influential ideologies found within and around rock’s
discourses themselves: first, that the mere act of teaching rock is a rebellion against
traditions that are, to the bulk of society, far more valuable and respected; and second,
that this rebellion must be waged within a site that, although it was once pure and noble,
is seen by many fellow radicals as gradually becoming corrupted by the insidious
influence and increasing control of corporate/commercial interests. In one way, this
enmeshment can be (and is) constructed by the right as evidence that former rockers who
are now teachers have only brought their radical/leftist (to mean bad) histories along with
them to a place that should not have to suffer such indignities. But in another way, it can
be—well, kinda cool. Kind of like the best qualities of rock itself.

Let me explain.

The traditional binge-and-purge model of education—or what Sharon Crowley has
called “firll frontal teaching,” a sad form of pedagogy under which lecture of some kind

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takes place at one end of the room and passive note-taking takes place at the other for
later regurgitation during exams—remains tightly locked in as part of both the institutional
paradigm and, in my own field, the rhetoric of current-traditional practice with its
grammar- and theme-bound prescriptiveness. As a result, when many students have a
chance to speak at all, they encounter the first shocking glimpse of what a radical
pedagogy might entail. At the height of rock’s civil-protest era years ago, James Moffett
contributed to the English field his book Drama: What Is Happening, in which he set out
to “exploit for pedagogical purposes some similarities between theatrical and everyday
drama" in order to "make art and actuality illuminate each other” (rep. in Teaching 61). A
large part of this work, following the lengthy explication of Moffett's theories, included
the description of specific teaching methods for incorporating theater imo numerous
classroom situations, and among these methods was Moffett's idea to encourage students
to take part in theatrical improvisation——indeed, to take total charge in designing its
methods, purposes, and applications. This was a radical practice, and theater, as
described by Augusto Boa], is a site that in many ways runs parallel with education:

Theater was the people singing freely in the open air; the performance
was created by and for them, and could be called dithyrambic song. A
celebration in which all could participate freely. Then came the aristocracy
and established divisions: some persons will go to the stage and only they
can act; the rest remain seated, receptive, passive—these will be the. . .

‘people’. . . . (ix)
I'd like to paraphrase that citation liberally now to make my point. So altered, it reads:
School is the students speaking freely in an open learning climate; the curriculum, by their
full participation in it, is created by and for them, and can be called liberatory. A practice

in which all may participate freely. Then come the dominant groups with their rhetorics

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and traditions of order and efficiency and their established vision of what education should
entail: teachers will go to the front of the room and only they can teach; the rest remain
seated, receptive, passive—these will be the. . . "learners. ” As Mike Rose writes in Lives
on the Boundary, “American meritocracy is validated and sustained by the deep-rooted
belief in equal opportunity” ( 128), but the schools see themselves primarily as sites for
the judging of students (and the appeasement of a buying public which continues to
validate that perceived primary function by its constant calls for “tougher standards” and E
a “return to basics”). Students conform to the school’s judgment because they are ‘

powerless to do otherwise. So pathetic and shoddy can the typical undergraduate i

 

experience be that many students are almost embarrassingly flattered when they
encounter a teacher who knows them by name.

For all of these students, a positive experience in a radicalized rock-centered
classroom can help them to gain an understanding of Giroux's concept of a “border
pedagogy” seeking to promote “a democratic public philosophy that respects the notion
of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of life” (“Redefining” 51).
These democratic principles in turn help to ground a classroom praxis that encourages the
students to engage a number of reading, writing, and speaking positions within and against
rock discourses to create precisely such a respect for difference out of discursive practices
that so often attempts to foster, or at times even force, homogeneity. To nurture this
respect and understanding from a position within rock’s discursive attempts at solidarity
and ideological unity—and in opposition to larger hegemonic institutional desires-—
requires what Brunner has called “a patience with uncertainty” (20) and the creation of
what Carolyn Ericksen Hill describes as “permeable boundaries” (29) in the formation of

new discourses, authorities, and forms of practice not only within some of the discourses

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around rock consumption/coproduction, and not only within the classroom where those
discourses are interrogated, but within the school as an institution both representing and
answering to even more powerful hegemonic systems. As a result, radical teachers visibly
engaged with rock discourses as a pedagogical focus must be willing to see themselves
identified in the words of Audre Lorde, writing in Sister Outsider that “survival. . . is
learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common
cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek

a world in which we can all flourish” (l 12). Like white rappers operating in a
predominantly black medium, adherents to radical pedagogy and active praxis in general
(not necessarily those engaged with rock) will also ideally see themselves as subjects
constructed of the individual histories, races, genders, and social classes—along with
participation or non-participation in harmful traditions—they bring to bear on classroom
discourse (McLaren, “Schooling” 156). At the same time, they will strive to keep from
shutting down “those voices which were and are marginalized and disempowered by
already dominant discourses” (Porter 778). For teachers of rock, specifically, inviting
students to work with the teacher in building a collaborative power base in the collective
fight against the worst of rock’s qualities is far different from continuing in the music
culture’s own tradition of simply valorizing the discursive form and its practices.

But such an invitation is not, in and of itself, necessarily radical. Moreover, if
teachers make apologies for their authority in an attempt to prevent the re-marginalizing
that Carolyn Porter mentions, they are likely to put students into a defensive stance since
the teacher also then violates a whole litany of student expectations, not the least of
which is the firmly-entrenched myth of teacherly omnipotence which I addressed in the

previous section. And so, a fine line is drawn—“the swamp,” as Peter Elbow has come

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to recognize part of his theory on writerly voice—between productive and unproductive
ways of doing radical practice. But as I see it, with a full recognition that I may be in
danger of oversimplifying, the overarching “rule” for radicalism in pedagogy could simply
be this: Whenever possible, let the students do it. Or, rephrased in John Lennon’s
songtextual terms: “Power to the people; right on.”

The problem with this form of pedagogy, of course, is that it is the least efiicient
of all classroom models. When students run the program, schedules fall apart and lesson
plans go to rot. The teacher plans to show part two of the filmtext; the students have
lingering observations to share about part one. Chapter 14 might never be discussed
before the midterm exam, which, having been written two years ago, is heavily based on
Chapter 14. You get the picture. The ideology of the whole field of composition, for
instance, has a long history of taking not just Taylorism’s focus on efficiency but also
F ordism’s contribution of linearity as its models, with writing centers turned into long
assembly lines of writers presenting their products to the inspectors/tutors at the head
tables, and classrooms filled with worker/writers churning out a maximum amount of
words in a set time. As Miriam Brody notes, composition textbooks have historically
"taught writing as craft and enjoined students to adopt the virtues of the new heroic
entrepreneur—patience, diligence, hard work, courage, and. . . originality, expending
words like currency to create meanings as products in a process that used the factory as
its model” (132). Under the weight of such models and the expectations that coincide
with their efficient, unquestioned maintenance, any form of radical pedagogy will meet
with resistance, and radicalism centered upon rock’s discourses is, therefore, immediately
placed in double jeopardy. Lester Faigley’s account of the massive community backlash

against a “Writing About Difference” course proposed by the English department at the

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University of Texas at Austin in 1990 notes that “if the media represents teachers of
writing doing anything other than teaching students the proper use of semicolons, then
many people will believe that something is amiss.” This, with a great deal of dignified
understatement, Faigley calls a “limited view of what the teaching of writing should
involve” ( 78).

The conflicts inherent in teaching rock in any discipline are firmly tied to the fact
that the pedagogical site itself often presents a “dual curriculum” dichotomy in which the
“overt” purpose of schooling, as Giroux has seen it, is the appeasement of industry and
its job markets in order to attract its continued funding and interest, while the “hidden and
informal” agenda of colleges and universities is their fimction as “political institutions,
inextricably linked to issues of power and control in the dominant society” (Opposition
45-6). Bringing the latter agenda out of its “hidden and informal” status entails moving it
into the light of primary focus under a rubric of sweeping, radical change as advocated by
Foucault’s recommendation that since “power and knowledge directly imply one another
. . . these relations [should be] analyzed on the basis of. . .the subject who knows [and]
the objects to be known” (Discipline 27-8)—in other words, a change to include not only
the knower, but the contexts for knowing, as topics for study. This kind of critical
interrogation presents teachers with a “postmodern emphasis on refusing forms of
knowledge. . . wrapped in the legitimating claims of universal knowledge. . . and [an]
opposition to analyses that treat culture as an artifact rather than a social and historical
construction" (Freire and Giroux xii). Such an emphasis, in turn, “provide[s] the
pedagogical grounds for radicalizing the emancipatory possibilities of teaching and
learning.” Teachers who use rock as a pedagogical tool in reaching these goals, however,

are sure to hear from at least the more vocal of the “new McCarthyists” who, as Giroux

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explains and F aigley illustrates, stand ever poised to wield “the intolerance mustered by
those who in the centers of power can no longer legitimate their ideologies and practices
so easily” (Border 4)—in this case, the ideology of the textbook as the most valid form of
primary course material and the practice of canonizing some textforms at the price of
ostracizing others. And the individuals reinforcing such continuances of tradition can
often speak fi'om surprising places, as my car radio indicated one morning during the
winter of 1999:

Caller. I took a course in the history of rock ’n roll last winter, and——
Howard Stern: You took a what?

Caller: Yeah, really. And it was pretty interesting. But the reason I
called was to tell you that the band you were talking about—

Stern: Get outta here. The history of rock ’n roll? You gotta be kidding.
What were your exams like? Just sitting around and listening to a bunch of
old records, I’ll bet. . . .

And so an increasing number of schools who have no respect for the likes of Howard
Stern, but who do have a great respect for the long-held ideology which he represents in
this exchange—schools hoping to indicate clearly their recognition that teachers are
indeed servants to the public—have begun to practice and foster a rhetoric of “customer
service” by which students will be recognized as that most important of all American
icons: The Buyer.

Giroux's is among the strongest voices calling out a warning over the insidious
effects of this kind of corporate influence on education, writing that, in response to it,
“schools of education have become disappointingly reactionary. They tend more and
more to hire people in the business manager mode and there are very few critical voices

to be heard” (Border 16). This wony is shared even by a few business managers

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themselves, such as Apple Computer's interim CEO, Steven Jobs, who cautions that
education has become too willing to emphasize “mechanistic and quantitative activities
over humanistic, qualitative ones” (in the case of composition, this is shown by the
number of writing centers moving toward a “curriculum” of computer monitors and CD-
ROM tutorials offering grammar exercises as part of the drive to improve efficiency and
reduce overhead in teacher/tutor salaries). Jobs further explains that he has been required
to actively struggle against the textbook industry's desire to move “everything in
computer-aided instruction toward the automation of the ‘drill and skill’ mechanistic side,
which is wrong” (qtd. in LeBlanc 3 I ). As Neil Young has warned in songtext, “they give
you this—but you pay for that [gift],” and the growing popularity of such instructional
software also helps to bear out the complaint by Chiseri-Strater‘s budding-marxist
student, Nick, who critiques education as “just another capitalist consumption market.
We’re always asked to produce something that’s a thing of value. There are never enough
students producing something for themselves” (170).

And this is where the business model of education reveals the most serious rift
between its philosophical goals and their practical applications in the corporatized hybrid
of what I'll call the schoolmarket. As Giroux notes, radical teachers have little political
influence for calling into question the co-opting of the public’s educational needs by
conservative administrators, and the current, steady transmogrification of higher education
into this hybrid schoolmarket is one example of such a co-opting. As a result, teaching
rock’s own ideologies and histories of resistance becomes something akin to a surrealist
activity when at the same time the teacher is shoving CDs and DVDs into computer
drives that project images upon the wall through digital-projector hookups, and in this
way is answering to the technology industry with its ideologically-packed rhetoric of the

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“promise” and “wonder” of multimedia. The strangeness increases as the teacher stops
constantly to find thematic connections between the musical discourse and more
“important,” more “valid,” more “real world” (of course, there is a huge irony in this last)
subjects and disciplines which constitute the students’ academic majors. By these steps
teachers answer to government’s mandate for school-to-work programs and its creation of
Workforce Transition Boards to oversee the distribution of educational funding, as well as
to the public’s demands for accountability, measurable assessment, and a "marketable
degree" as the end product of the educational process. Such rifts between the content of a
rock-centered course and the omnipresent public conceptions of it are no more than
reflections of the larger rifts taking shape as higher education makes what is undoubtedly
a heartfelt attempt to forge a rhetoric of “education for all who may profit,” as W. K.
Kellogg put it. But in doing so, at the same time higher education must contort itself into
an increasingly corporate form in order to accomodate every potential learner in every
potentially untapped market by offering every potentially usable form of knowledge
transmission— Internet, remote Distance InterActive Learning (DIAL) classroom sites,
telecourse/videocourse, open entry/open exit enrollment, and hypercompact “weekend
university” scheduling, to name but a few—in the most blatant kind of “banking” (Freire)
or “warehouse” (Giroux) models of education where credits are exchanged for dollars.

As a result, accounts such as Karen Hodges' describe “instruction/training” taking place
for the “student/customer” (175) at institutions offering “money back guarantees” (178)
for their “products.” At the schoolmarket of the near future, Hodges writes, “upper
management will not tolerate high attrition—it will be the teacher’s fault” (I 79), and

“if. . . skills slip by graduation, the teacher and the department will be responsible.”

Further, as an addition to all of the forms of knowledge transmission which I named

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above, Hodges predicts that "teachers will teach midnights, at factories, like the workers
they teach,” and that other classes “will be located at the chamber of commerce” (180-81)
where local business leaders can send their employees for continued training in job skills,
although most likely only on an as-needed basis. To which I say fine; great; many of
my best teaching memories come from working with blue-collar students with whom,
because I have shared the same social background, I could easily relate. And to be able

to work with them where they work would make for even more such enjoyable and
productive experiences and memories. Nor do I mind the Chamber of Commerce scenario
too much, either, since equally fine people are sure to make up the student population——
and besides, class size is likely to be reasonable for a change, making plenty of
one-on-one interaction more possible. And so I am left with only one objection, in the
form of a question: Does anyone really think that rock would be tolerated, by program
administrators, as a topic for scholarly engagement in either of these contexts? I mean,
really?

It is in response to all of the kinds of moves that I have just described, in addition
to others like the indoctrination of elementary students into the “work world” cultures of
corporations such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola who sponsor early curricula in
marketing and economics, that Giroux has replied, on the pages of newstand-accessible
Z Magazine, in the strongest of terms:

Couched in the language of business competition and individual success,
the current educational reform movement orchestrated by corporate capital
in its now near-global expansion must be recognized as a full-fledged attack
on both public education and democracy. . . . Educators at the public
school levels are under massive assault in this country. Not only are they
increasingly losing their autonomy for imaginative teaching, they also
increasingly bear the burden. . . of overcrowded classes, limited resources,
and hostile legislators. Progressives need to join with community people,

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social movements, and teachers in both public and higher education around
a common platform that resists corporate power, the marketing of schools,
the deskilling of teachers, and the reduction of learning to the dictates of
selfishness and capital accumulation. (“Business” 17)

A focus on rock discourses in the classroom, of course, is a pedagogical endeavor that is
beginning to fit, slowly but increasingly, into Giroux’s term, “imaginative teaching.” The
problem is that, as a traditional supplement to more conventional analytical foci, rock
cannot be transformed easily into an independent subject for classroom scholarship in its
own right, and although rock has entered into mainstream academic conversations through
a significant number of recent scholarly studies, those critiques—including my own—are
largely theoretical in nature, not practical; they are uptown, not downtown; they are
symbols of an unfortunate but very real dichotomy through which the validation of rock
taking place at the highest academic levels is not necessarily also taking place down in the
trenches, in the many classrooms filled by first- and second-year students whose parents
and future employers would like to take the teacher’s word for it that rock will help the
student to think critically, write engagingly, and live responsibly, but since both time and
money are of the essence here, what the hell, let’s just skip it, okay? While any legitimate
conception and definition of radical pedagogy, for Giroux, is one that will concern itself
with an acknowledgement of these kinds of “spaces, tensions, and possibilities for
struggle within the day-to-day workings of schools” (Opposition 121), at the same time
he sees a dire need for “new modes of critical interrogation” along with “alternative
strategies and modes of practice” which can only be carried out through the practical
application of radicalism in teaching. This, essentially, leaves teachers of rock-centered
curricula completely stuck. Accordingly, a truly radical pedagogy cannot be allowed to

become synonymous with mere opposition for opposition's sake, since this kind of

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resistance, as Althusser has demonstrated, only generates an increased awareness

and verification of the presence of that which is being resisted. Indeed, in proposing a
new “rhetorical authority” based on Erasmus's concept of Folly, Patricia Bizzell warns
that “[i]t’s as if the existence of authority automatically invokes rebellion against it, and
therefore, the society that wishes to remain stable hastens to fill the role of rebel with
someone who is, by definition, incapable of really rebelling— the fool” (34). Radical
teachers—especially those engaged in the teaching of something as dubious and even
amusing (as the Stern example indicates) as rock’s discourses—must beware of falling into
this ineffectual role in the service of their classroom praxis and their political ideals. What
Bizzell suggests instead is a taking on of the fool’s persona—hence, the “rhetorical
authority” of her proposed term—in an endeavor to forge an “ethical authority. . . that
does not repeat the oppressive foundational tactics of the ideologies that [current]
skepticism has helped to call into question” (29). As Carolyn Ericksen Hill writes in a
description of her former loathing for business and technical writing,

I am turning to look the old enemy in the eye, entering his camp, listening
and answering, and finding common ground between us so that the margins
between us change as they could never do if I stayed on my side of the line
throwing stones. When I do not model digging in my heels against the
other's position, he tends not to dig in his heels against mine. (27)

Taking on a persona of Folly, within a radical, rock-centered praxis, is much more likely
to generate the kind of mutual understanding that Hill describes here than would a
continued stance of heated and often destructive total political opposition by two
completely different sets of ideologies who refuse to hear the other. The key question
forming the practice of any radical pedagogy, Giroux has argued, lies in examining the

distinction made by John Dewey between education as a function of society and society as

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a function ofeducation. Do teachers have simply a job in education, with a primary
obligation to follow the directives of a public which pays their salaries as classroom
laborers? Or do they have a duty and a right to devote those labors primarily to a full and
active participation in socially-transfonnative practice? The challenge for teachers of a
rock-centered curriculum is to find, within the persona suggested here, an answer that fits
between these two poles by crafting a pedagogy and a contextual praxis for it which
ensures that every critical interrogation of rock’s discourses will both outline possibilities
for social change and answer the public’s concerns over radicalism and rock in the
classroom in a responsible and ultimately respectable manner. Convincing a skeptic like
Stern (and more importantly, the audience prepared to follow his mocking lead), for
instance, would require laughing right along with the joke being made at the teacher’s own
expense—yet that laughter would serve not as a confirmation of rock’s non-validity but
rather as only the recognition of the perception of such a status, thus leaving the
perception completely open to a gradual refutation. By refuting the criticism gradually,
rather than in cluster-bomb fashion, the message of a rock curriculum’s validity is
articulated and broadcast that much more thoroughly—not on the teacher 's terms, but on
the critic 's. This is not the normal way of doing things in rock, which prefers to get all up
in people’s faces. But as Hill has described, it is an effective way. It gets the message
out in a manner that subverts and negates the intentions of the critic—and isn’t that one

of the favorite activites of rock itself?

Finale: New Adventura' in Hi-Fi
In the end, there are—as I promised in the introduction to this study—far more

possibilities (and problems) for teaching rock than there are any prescriptions for it, just

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as there is no single method for interrogating rock. For every pronouncement of
authenticity as a mere trope in a larger rock-discourse rhetoric, there is another reading by
which a desire for the authentic reflects a desperate plea for “something to grab for,” as a
songtext by former Cars vocalist Ric Ocasek has put it, from a position trapped within
the fraudulent. For every warning of white rock hegemony’s continuing colonialist moves
to conquer territory founded and forged by black musicians, there is an alternate view by
which two cultures long divided are at last moving toward a common ground in an effort
to create a still-undefined “third space” that is neither white nor black, neither rock nor
hip-hop, neither oppressive nor oppressed. For every band struggling to demonstrate——
whether through a continually-shifting discursive style or a continually expanding
political orientation—that reification at the hands of its consumer-theorists does not have
to result in either abandonment or obscurity, there are numerous compelling arguments to
be made which cast the same band as hOpeless adherents to the most proven of sales
gimmicks: free publicity through controversy. And on it goes in this same fashion for
every specific topic I have addressed in all of the preceding pages here, so I think I will
end with a very immodest proposal indeed.

At the end of the sixth decade of the 20th century, James Moffet concluded his
book Teaching the Universe of Discourse with a proposal that “educators work toward a
future reorganization of the total curriculum that would eliminate conventional subject
divisions” (212-13). Since that time there have been moves toward interdisciplinarity, but
these have been made in ways that preserve in practice the separation of the disciplines
being integrated in presentation. Likewise, there have been moves toward the formation
of integrative-curricula “learning communities,” especially (but not exclusively) at the

two-year college level, but these too have been made by bringing representatives of

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separate disciplines together to lend their separate perspectives to a single set of
classroom materials, a single course focus. Nonetheless, in each of these attempts to
answer Moffet’s call, distinctions between disciplines have eased in ways that their
divisions have not. Historians find much in common with sociologists, who have much to
share with linguists, who themselves have techniques to compare with psychologists. . .
and so, after observing and commenting upon these overlaps, the various practitioners
return to their separate offices in separate departments in separate buildings.

What does any of this have to do with rock? Simply this: While the use of rock
songtexts as an ancillary literature to supplement more traditional classroom textforms in
any given academic discipline and course through the past decades has been nothing new,
what would be new is a conception and use of the songtexts and the larger discursive
systems which they represent as a form of traditional literature of and by themselves——

9’ 6‘

and in a way that transcends the constricting labels of “rock history, rock rhetoric,”

3, ‘6

“rock genres, rock journalism,” and endless other this-is-it-and-that’s-how-we’ll-
understand-it institutional/departmental/pedagogical definitions. Frank Lentricchia,
addressing in Criticism and Social Change Kenneth Burke’s “conditions” of rhetoric, has
written that “[w]hat characteristically invites rhetoric’s activity is a social situation
somewhere between pure identification [with the subject matter] and absolute separation
[from it]” ( 162-3). In these words, I find a way to finally articulate what I have been
arguing for less specifically all along: a complete immersion, through critical analysis, into
all of rock, under any disciplinary rubric, in order to understand better its appeal and our
identifications with it, while at the same time enabling a separation from all that—because

we are able to understand its discursive practices more clearly—we no longer wish to be

identified with. Through this partial and informed separation, we have an enhanced

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potential to model for others how identification itself is never really required to be pure,
and how we can still continue to dance to the best of rock’s celebratory and even
confrontational human practices without continuing to be complicit in the worst of what

rock reflects about humanity.

fls‘ls‘ts‘l

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Notes

Chapter 2

1 The suburban scene should not be conflated here with punk’s presence in Detroit
proper, although even in that much larger city—made up of Southem-import steel and
auto workers, European-ethnic enclaves, and a primarily African-American population—
British-produced punk, or even its American derivatives from groups like the Ramones,
couldn’t exactly catch on in a big way. As for radio, Detroit’s rock stations did finally air
a few songtexts by the Clash, but only the most infectious-hook, dance-oriented ones.
The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Fear, Misfits, Dead Kennedys, et al. never got air time,
although I think I might remember a Ramones tune spun by a young Howard Stern during
his brief tenure at WWWW before that fine station switched to a country-music format.
(The format change plunged Detroit-area rockers into a prolonged period of mourning and
promptly motivated Stern himself to leave for New York and his own eventual cult of
celebrity.)

2 Or, better yet, strands of rock’s discourses. While certain musical styles properly
may be called discursive genres of rock, the varying arguments, conflicts, and rhetorical
strategies taking place within a given discursive genre (and the discourses taking place
within and around the genre)——the specific threads of meaning-forrnation—are the topics
that I examine in this study. While I refer often to “rock discourses” in general, I am at
other times more specifically engaged in the analysis of a particular strand of discursive
practices within rock culture.

3 As I explain in the concluding chapter within a discussion of the “Elvis Costello
Problem” defined by Michael Be'rubé.

Chapter 3

4 Duff McKagan of Guns ‘N Roses, Matt Sorurn of The Cult, John Taylor of
Duran Duran.

5 The first event in 1969, not the 1994 or 1999 versions by the same name.
6 Newsweek, April 28, I997: 25.

7 While still popular, Seger also insisted that his record label continue to market a
certain number of 8-track tapes of his music since he’d observed that many of his fans
drove vehicles equipped with those antiquated sound systems, even though the 8-track
format had long fallen into disuse by music (and auto) manufacturers.

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8 As Vince Farmer—aka. Alice Cooper—explained in the early days of his band’s
fame, the name had “a Baby Jane, Lizzie Borden, sweet-and-innocent-with-a-hatchet-
behind-the-back kind of rhthm to it. . . . With a name like Alice Cooper, we could really
make [people] suffer” (Morgan 15).

9 Independently owned and operated; not part of a corporate enterprise.

'0 Credibility; credentials.

l | Lead singer of Queen.

12 Cobain suffered from a lingering stomach ailment causing him great physical pain.
13 The handwritten document is also widely displayed on the Internet.

Chapter 4

14 War casualty figures taken from Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. New
York: Viking, 1983.

15 All sales figures from the Billboard Internet site, available at http:/lbillboardcom/
charts/bb.200.asp.

‘6 Quote is edited for typographical uniformity. The ORIGINAL appears in a
SPURIOUS mixture of CAPITALIZED words AND lower-case ONES (as shown here),
which, to my mind, interferes with easy comprehension of the important message which
Gibson sends to his audience.

'7 Croal, much more briefly, outlines this argument as well.

Chapter 5

18 Examples of the latter appear in the chapter on hip-hop; as an example of the
former, see for instance Leadbelly’s 19305 blues “You Don’t Know My Mind” using as
its chonrs lyrics from the secular field-hand work tune “Me and My Captain.” The
worksong, which describes the “mask” of Afiican-American double consciousness as
described in poetic form by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and in narrative form by W.E.B. Du
Bois, is simply updated in such a way that the white “captain” in the earlier songtext who
“don’t know the mind” of the narrator, who in turn “laughs just to keep from cryin,”’
becomes the woman in Leadbelly’s addressed relationship.

19 The full history of the connection between blues musicians and Satan appears in
Spencer’s chapter titled “The Mythologies of the Blues,” pp. 18-34.

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20 General biographical information from these two texts goes undocumented since
the same key anecdotes and histories appear in each of the works in addition to hundreds
of articles by other writers.

21 Before Kirk Hammett’s hiring, Metallica’s lead guitarist was Dave Mustaine, who
went on to form the band Megadeth after being fired by Hetfield and Ulrich for chronic
substance abuse.

22 The character’s name is Joe.

Chapter 6

23 Opera and Drama. Trans. W. Ashton Ellis, 1893. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1995: 47.

24 In the summer of 1999, these photos had been replaced by a loaned collection of
original poster artworks advertising concerts staged by a number of the bands represented
in the HFM’s displays.

2 5 All phrases and terms appearing in quotation in this section are taken from the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Program. New York: Marvel, 1995.

26 As for that newly-emptied space at the top of the pyramid: One can easily guess
the first thing to go up there after the Hall moved out. Or more accurately, who went up
there. Think postage stamps; think dreadful black-velvet paintings at comer gas stations
on hot summer afternoons. Think Blue Hawaii. In the words of Jim Henke, the HFM’s
curator: “He stands as the single most important figure in the development of rock and
roll.” And so the choice makes sense. Where else would a deity like “king” Elvis sit but
at the top of the world he created?

27 The Beatles had become a main-floor exhibit, with both instruments and costumes
adorning HFM mannequins, in the summer of 1999.

Chapter 7

28 This is where it all falls apart, right? After all, how do educators committed to
radical pedagogy reconcile their own expertise in a subject with the desire to promote the
construction of meaning and knowledge by their students? Having donned the “hats” of
historian, ethnographer, et al. described by Stephen North, and thus having by default
played the role of “master/expert” in working through my numerous analyses and
critiques, I am making a distinction between the kind of “non-expert” pedagogy which I
describe here and the kind of scholarship which, by necessity, precludes an application of
classroom methodology due to a vastly different audience and purpose.

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