Countercultures: Music, Theory and Scenes
Pages 6 to 16
Cite this article
- WHITELEY, Sheila,
- Whiteley, Sheila.
- Whiteley, S.
https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.3572
Cite this article
- Whiteley, S.
- Whiteley, Sheila.
- WHITELEY, Sheila,
https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.3572
Notes
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[*]
I would like to acknowledge and thank my co-editor Jedediah Sklower for his support and enthusiasm throughout our planning and design of Counterculture(s) and Popular Music. What could have been a laborious task was instead a joyful exploration of the countercultures’ history, as well as its diverse manifestations.
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[1]
Simon Frith, ‘Rock and Popular Culture’ Radical Philosophy, 103. Radical Philosophy Group, Mathematics Faculty, Open University, Milton Keynes
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[2]
Whiteley, 2013.
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[3]
To an extent, this can be traced back to the romantic anarchism of the Beats, with its interest in Eastern mysticism, poetry, jazz and drugs and writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
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[4]
Although it is recognised that the fight against middle-class prurience led increasingly towards an explicit identification of sexual freedom with total freedom which, at its extreme, embraced pornography (including the so-termed ‘velvet underground’ advertisements for blue movies and classified ads, and play power’s ‘Female Fuckability Test’ (John Neville (1971) Play Power, London: Paladin, p.14). As such, while love was fundamental to the philosophy of the counterculture, there was nevertheless a marked difference between the transcendental spirituality promised to followers of the Majarishi Mahesh Yogi and the revolutionary liberation of the Yippie Party’s Jerry Rubin and his symbolic call for patricide.
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[5]
See Giovanni Vacca, Musique et contre-cultures en Italie : la scène napolitaine, pp. in Les Scènes Contre-Culturelles – Musique & Espace, pp
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[6]
As Jacque Attalli observed, noise contains prophetic powers. ‘It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible’. (1985, p.11)
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[7]
The mood is right for us to fight politics with music, because rock is now a media. Sure it’s basically recreation but because we’ve now applied new rules to the way it’s run, it’s also a weapon’. IT, 56, 1969
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[8]
Thanks to Jedediah Sklower for his thoughtful discussion of Lescop’s article.
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[9]
Albeit drawing on Beat philosophy as discussed earlier.
Our first edition of Counterculture(s) and Popular Music offers readers the opportunity to explore its history and how it has been theorised. It also provides an insight into the ways in which it emerged and took shape internationally in scenes that embraced its challenge to the dominant culture. In December, our sister edition, “Utopias, Dystopias, Anarchy” explores utopias and dystopias and sonic anarchy and freaks, focussing on the ways in which the 1960s counterculture embraced both an idealistic frame of reference and one where its emphasis on freedom and beat-hip bohemianism resulted in a bacchanalian orgy of rape and murder. As Simon Frith knowingly observed, ‘rock can’t just be consumed, but must be responded to like any other form of art – its tensions and contradictions engaged and reinterpreted into the listener’s experience’. Further discussions of Counterculture(s) and Popular Music are also being published by Ashgate in collaboration with Éditions Mélanie Seteun, so confirming its significance as a vital moment in the continuing history of popular music. As Andy Bennett writes in our Introductory article, ‘Reappraising Counterculture’, while ‘issues such as the essentially diverse, heterogeneous nature of both individuals and socio-political and cultural ideologies’ have been thoroughly explored in relation to ‘subculture’, there has been far less engagement with the counterculture and, as such, it remains a problematic concept.
What has emerged, from the 21 articles published in our three editions of Countercultures and Popular Music is its non-specificity…