Topic: The Historical Legacy of American Popular Music (from 50s to early 90s)
By Gong Lei（江離）
Despite its unarguably deep effect to the society, the legacy of popular music has always been hard to pin down, especially when the whole phenomenon is still ongoing in history. Interestingly, though it is common for us nowadays to cite popular songs as cultural or historical references in our writings, one might not imagine that more than half a century ago, the genre was in fact a frequent target of cultural critiques among intellectuals. For example, the German sociologist Theodor Adorno had once harshly criticized in 1941 that popular music was not only flawed by its standardized structure and character, but was also detrimental to the society due to the “pseudo-individualization” that it was likely to induce in its customers’ mentality, as he elaborates,
“(the term means) endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keep the customers in line by doing their listening for them... making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to..., or ‘pre-digested’.” [1]
In other words, Adorno saw popular music as nothing more than a means of what he called the “culture industry” to dumb down not just the standard of art but also the minds of people. Certainly, when this essay was penned, he obviously did not expect the sea change that would later take place in the world’s popular music, especially in the scene of US and Britain during the 60s and 70s. Yet some of his accusations toward popular music as well as the industry that produced them, though impressionistic it might be, are worth pondering. For example, for questions like “has the development of popular music been just repeating itself in the past 70 years?”, or “if the listeners really aware of what they were listening to?”, it is not hard to take a stand on it, but one still could not completely deny that there would also be cogent argument coming from the other side. Nonetheless, a few things should be self-evident when we examine the history of popular music, especially after rock-n-roll had sprung up on its scene after the 50s. Firstly, is that no matter speaking of musical styles or lyrical contents, the spectrum of popular music after the 60s had become broader and more diversified than their predecessors. There were of course still plentiful standardized pop songs which followed the commercial formula in the hope of becoming a national hit, yet it was undeniable that a spirit of experimentalism had sprung up among various rock-n-roll artists (especially during the 60s and 70s) which was unseen in any of the preceding decades. Secondly, unlike what Adorno scathingly commented that the pop artists were all just puppets of the “culture industry”, many of them after the 60s did use their songs to express their individual thoughts as well as aesthetic pursuits instead of merely producing what the industry thought it was fit for the market. Lastly, my essay would argue that though originally produced just for entertainment, popular musics have now already become an indispensable component to the cultural identity of Americans. They are important not only because of their cultural contents, but also because that they had in fact bore historical witnesses to the change of the Americans’ value throughout the second half of the 20th century. And in many senses, they are as “serious” as the classical music that Adorno praised.
The 50s saw the rise of the early rock-n-roll musics in the mainstream culture, which was pretty phenomenal at the time not just because of their overtly energetic performance which might sometimes be seen as aggressive by the conservative adults, but also because they were mostly written and performed by black artists instead of the conventional “family-friendly” whites. While these early songs might not contain much profound intellectual contents, as their themes were often simplistic and straight-forward, the vehement energy that they emanated had crucially laid the foundation for the later flourish of different genres of rock music. Their styles were commonly dominated by a spirit of fun-having and unbridled impulsion, and the passion of their songs were intensified by the steady and accentuated backbeat which then became the hallmark of their musics. Perhaps one of the songs that could best exemplified this spirit was Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” in 1956, as its lyrics went, “You know my temperature's risin'/The jukebox's blowin' a fuse/My heart beatin' rhythm/And my soul keep-a singing the blues/Roll over Beethoven/And tell Tchaikovsky the news”. Its title was unquestionably declaring that classical music should give way to popular music, and though the music that it suggested to replace the former was referred to as “rhythm and blues”, the line “Well early in the mornin'/And I'm givin' you my mornin'/Don't you step on my blue suede shoes” might in fact be an implicit note of the author’s preference toward rock-n-roll music, as “Early in the Mornin” is a rather typical blue song sung by Louis Jordon in 1947 of which its tempo is relatively moderate and leisurely, “Blue Suede Shoes” was more of a rock-n-roll song with an upbeat pace. And aside from Chuck Berry, during the 50s we also see the rise of many other rock-n-roll superstars like Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. However, while rock-n-roll had undoubtedly won over the favor of a whole young generation, here also arose the problem of “cultural appropriation”. As more than one scholars have already pointed out, many of the early rock-n-roll hits were in fact songs composed by black musicians, yet due to racist reasons these songs needed to be “repackaged” and “covered” by the white artists, thus resulting in the situation that the latter were unscrupulously profiting from the works of the former. As Little Richard had once bitterly mentioned in an interview,
“They didn’t want me to be in the white guys’ way... When ‘Tutti Frutti’ came out... They needed a rock star to block me out of white homes because I was a hero to white kids. The white kids would have Pat Boone upon the dresser and me in the drawer ‘cause they liked my version better, but the families didn’t want me because of the image that I was projecting.” [2]
Therefore, as Briahna Gray remarks, the so-called “appropriation” per se was an issue of cultural exploitation and disrespect. And I would like to add that it also involves a kind of “cultural misinterpretation”, as Gray’s article has also mentioned, that despite being a great hit, the lyrics of Elvis Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” does not really make much sense for listeners.[3] The original song by Big Mama Thornton is actually about a woman who has grown sick of her “hound dog” man who always wants to arbitrarily vent his sexual desire on her, yet in Elvis’ sanitized version, it seems the whole song now becomes really about a real dog. The backstory of the suffering of black women was deliberately omitted, and this is certainly a perfect example to reflect the parochialism of what Adorno called as the “culture industry”. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the borrowing of external cultures in one’s artistic works ought not to be always viewed as a negative thing, as Kenan Malik points out, “Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one”, and with a serious and pure-minded attitude (instead of a frivolous or utilitarian one), the inclusion of elements from other culture can actually enrich the connotation of the artwork and foster reflections between us and other.[4] For example, nobody with the right mind would have accused George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” as an exploitation to the ideology of Transcendental Meditation or the Chinese I Ching. And even for some of the seemingly racist songs in the later decades, like David Bowie’s “China Girl”, there are also often a deeper meaning behind their ostensibly perverse lines (e.g the protagonist initially presented himself as a condescending figure to the girl and claims he’s got “plan for everyone”, but at the end we found that he is just an ordinary and insecure westerner who needed to depend on the transient comfort of an exotic woman). And with regard to the American popular music, we should be reminded that the 60s was also a time of great cultural and ideological clash, and one just need to have a look at the hippies movement in Haight Ashbury to get a clue of what “cultural blending” was. As the historian Charles Perry recounts in his work The Haight-Ashbury: A History, the “Fashions for buckskin, beads, Indian headbands, god's-eye yarn sculptures and rainbow diffraction gratings” were ubiquitous in the Haight and soon became the hippies’ “uniform”,[5] and the teenagers were also eager to identify themselves with the oppressed American Indians, as he notes,
“The Indians also had the glamour of psychedelic experience, since peyote worship was common on the reservations. There were some white ‘peyote boys’ in the Haight who were actually communicants of the Native American Church, and many times more who had never actually been to an Indian peyote meeting but wore headbands and turquoise jewelry as a badge of their sympathies.” [6]
And from an interview of Michael Randall (the founding member of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love), the commonly-seen Orange Sunshine drug labels were also originated from the color of the Buddhist robes, as the hippies thought that “The most damaging thing for LSD is light, so we choose a color that we thought would protect it”.[7] So situated in such a historical contingency, it was actually the responsibility of artists to make use of all these different cultural elements in their works in order to reflect the reality. And I would like to point out that given the unique historical legacy of the American colonialism as well as the latter’s relationship with the blacks and the Indians, some “appropriations” that made in the songs of the later rock artists were not just serving as a kind of symbolism in arts, but was also a manifestation of the self-interrogation and contrition they had for a collective “sinful” past. Regarding this, Neil Young is probably the most representative singer-songwriter that had displayed such an inclination. For example, in an early song “Broken Arrow” penned during his Buffalo Springfield years, he interweaves his performing experience with a refrain of seemingly unrelated yet surreal imagery,
“Did you see them in the river?
They were there to wave to you.
Could you tell that the empty-quivered
Brown-skinned Indian on the banks
That were crowded and narrow,
Held a broken arrow?”
Broken Arrow is not just a city in Oklahoma. It was also a branch of the Creek Indian who had been driven out of Alabama during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. And according to the account of George Shirk, who was the former mayor of the Oklahoma city, the name Broken Arrow was derived from a Creek ceremony after the Civil War, in which two of the previous opposing factions broke an arrow to symbolize their reconciliation.[8] The “appropriation” in the song is particularly intriguing, as listeners might feel that the sudden fade-in of the Indian scenario has actually rendered the noisy and soulless performing reality to seem fictitious, and their silent gesture also looks as if the past victims were somehow trying to offer peace to the rockers who were still more or less profiting on their culture and misfortune. Similar themes had also continued in some of Young’s most distinguished works during the 70s, like “Cortez the Killer” and “Pocahontas”. And in the song “Powderfinger”, in which the posthumous protagonist was also likely to be an oppressed indigenous people, Young depicts in first person narrative of how this twenty-two-year-old young man was murdered just because of his attempt to defend his homeland from some unknown intruders (Raised my rifle to my eye/Never stopped to wonder why/Then I saw black/And my face splashed in the sky). From the above, we can see that with a pure-minded attitude, the “appropriation” here was clearly not an exploitation, but rather was a tribute to the oppressed and an endeavor to establish links with the much obliterated national past and thus contrasting it with the present capitalist society. And sometimes some of the seemingly controversial lines in his songs, were also in fact a kind of “radical repentance” from the conscience of a sensitive white rocker.
Entering the early 60s, we saw a transient discontinuity of the rock-n-roll music as almost all the superstars had simultaneously gone offstage at the end of the former decade, yet there was also a new rise of social consciousness in the succeeding popular music. Motivated by various social causes, and also inspired by the folk music scene of the Civil Right Movement, the lyrics of many of the later songs in the 60s had reached a new level of intellectual complexity, as the subjects that they were encountering were no longer as simplistic as the 50s’ one. On one side there were of course successors to the “morally-upright” protest tradition founded by Woody Guthrie and his “This Land is Your Land” (e.g. Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, etc.), yet on the other side, there were also a new sense of ambiguity expressed by songs like “For What It’s Worth” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. The unity (or consensus) of this social consciousness was best embodied in the anti-war songs during that period, such as Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” and Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I'm Fixin to Die Rag”, while for the relatively reserved side, namely the artists who were less overtly political, many of them were also able to imbue their songs with sober social observation as well as subtle criticism toward both the conformist society and the rising commercialism of that time. For example, in the early 60s there was already the song “Little Box” by Malvina Reynolds which criticized the featureless suburban culture in the 50s’ society. As what Charles Reich summarizes in his well-known book the Greening of America, that during the 50s and 60s, the Americans were actually seeming to be living in a society that “no one created and that no one wanted”.[9] The loss of self, as well as the artificiality of work and culture, had made many people started to lose faith in their country and to feel that their whole lives had just been pointlessly “working for the machines” instead of the other way round. At the same time, in response to the rising commercialism as well as the “development-first” and “capitalism-solves-all” mindset that held by many people, some songwriters had also raised doubt on the credibility of these highfalutin assumption. For example, in the CCR’s song “Who'll Stop the Rain”, which sang “Five Year Plans and New Deals, wrapped in golden chains/And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?”, it had already indicated that mere ideologies (no matter it is capitalism or socialism) were not always as promising as it seems, as new problems would arise every time, and at the end the “rain” would still be besetting the ground. More caustic criticism came with Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi”, which later also became an anthem for environmental movement, as it cleverly remarks that “They took all the trees, and put ’em in a tree museum/And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them”. Perhaps a line from Neil Young’s “Tell me Why” could best sum up the thorny relation between the defiant rockers and the temptation of the upcoming consumerism, that is “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/When you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell?”. In short, the people who grew up in the 60s were often called as “the generation of commitment”, and this compliment is certainly not granted for no reason. The 60s might always be described as an era of turbulence and severe social cleavage, yet there was also a subtle space allowed by the time for people to balance oneself between the actualization of individual liberty and the fulfillment of social responsibility, and that is also what makes the decade’s experience historic and irreplicable to its witnesses.
And for the 70s, unlike its precursor, it was the time of what Tom Wolfe called as the “me” decade. Both the Vietnam War and the students’ movement were apparently winding down, yet the new generation now had to search for meaning in a much more indifferent and undisguisedly commercially-oriented world. As David Bowie, though not an American himself, observed in his song “Young Americans”, that in the early 70s, it was as if the whole America was actually undergoing a state of rapid oblivion,
“Do you remember, your President Nixon?/Do you remember, the bills you have to pay, or even yesterday?”
The sweeping impact of the newly-sprung consumerism was evident, and given that after the 60s there seemed to be no more lofty political goals or ideals left for the youngsters to pursuit, individualism thus became what they hailed in reality. Ironically, though people did yearn for uniqueness in their “beliefs”, it did not necessarily entail that they did have the “ability” to become unique in real life, and as the punk band New York Dolls bitingly remarks in their signature song “Personality Crisis”, that people “got to contradict all those times they were butterflyin about”, because they “walk a personality, talk a personality”. And in another song “Looking for a Kiss”, it also reflects the prevalence of the self-anesthetized narcotic culture among the teenagers of that time, as its protagonist protests the phenomenon that “When everyone goes to your house, they shoot up in your room/Most of them are beautiful, but so obsessed with gloom”, and the song advocates that people should not always look for a “fix”, but rather should really look for a “kiss” in their lives. The above description of the 70s might seem depressing, nevertheless, the emergence of punk rock in the popular music scene was indeed a comfort to many people, as their music also to an extent symbolized the revival of the great energy as well as the impulsion-driven spirit of the early rock-n-roll performers in the 50s. The message of their songs might sometimes seem too brief and rudderless for listeners to follow, yet their persistence in using the most primitive musical form to deliver their ideas had definitely revitalized the original liveliness of rock music. As Ramones sang in their debut single “Blitzkrieg Bop”, “What they want, I don't know/They're all revved up and ready to go”, the place that they were going after was unclear, and the kids are already “losing their minds”, but at the same time they were also generating “steam heat”. So maybe to borrow from a hippies’ mantra, which is that “everything’s in the future, you can’t pre-plan it”, and the most important thing is that we are still moving on with both our lives and musics. So in Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”, we can see the punk rocker continued to romantically “ride through the city tonight”, and discover “the city's ripped backsides”. Moreover, when Patti Smith joined the scene in 1976, she was even able to incorporate her poetic expressions (just like Bob Dylan did) into the punk rock music, thus expanding the intellectual horizon of the latter. And speaking of poetic, it is hard to neglect Bruce Springsteen too as he is also a central figure of the 70s’ music. Nicknamed as “The Boss” and is known for his sympathy toward the American working class, he has penned a number of epics which not only reflect the lives and struggles of the latter during that era, but also helped crafting and (re)defining what “American spirit” actually is after the rise of rock-n-roll. As in his early classic “Born to Run”, we could already see how the poetic and almost film-like lyrics was able to surprisingly fit into the sophisticated and multilayered musical arrangement, and thus eventually converting the whole thing into a kind of direct, explosive energy which is by no means inferior to the punk music. The song has also embodied a perfect blend between escapism and romanticism, as well as exhibiting a passion that was paradoxically stemmed from both hope and despair (e.g. “Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, its a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we were young”, and “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness/I'll love you with all the madness in my soul”). And three years later in his another classic “The Promised Land”, he put himself into the shoes of a fictitious young garage worker who had been struggling to set himself free from his insipid life by driving rudderlessly every night,
“I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start”
And after he spotted a storm that was forming from the distanced desert floor, he had even decided to charge straight into it as a means to test if his faith could really “stand its ground” against the onslaught of nature. To put it concisely, from Springsteen’s songs we can not only discover themes like romanticism and adventurism which was inherent in the traditional American spirit, but also a rough but sincere manner in his lyrical expression (e.g. “If you're rough enough for love/Baby I'm tougher than the rest”) which simultaneously invites and urges its listeners to explore and confront the unvarnished and sometimes brutal truth of the American reality along with the songwriter himself. To many people, his songs has definitely “stood its ground” in the test of time and still remains as some of the most iconic rock anthems of their country.
Up to the moment, it should already be indisputable regarding the deep effect that rock-n-roll music have had on the current culture of Americans. And apart from being an essential constituent of culture, it has also served as a remarkable medium for people’s communication and thus linking their sometimes starkly distinct experiences together. For example, as Doug Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, shares his wartime experience in his article, “(Popular) music was more than just background for us. It was our lifeline, a link to our existence ‘back in the world,’ connecting us with the things that enabled us, as the Impressions urged us, to ‘keep on pushing’”.[10] And after the war, as he mentions, it was also music that helped the soldiers to adapt and reintegrate into civilian life.[11] We can then see how music had brilliantly helped to bridge the gap of generations, as the younger people now would use the songs as a way to “connect” themselves with the war experience, while the veterans returning from Vietnam would also listen to popular musics as a means to reacquaint themselves with the society that they had long departed. Therefore, it could be said that though originally rebellious in image, rock-n-roll music has after all helped to reconstitute and consolidate the cultural identity of Americans throughout the second half of the 20th century. This side of its legacy should definitely be affirmed. However, while the success and profound influence of the US popular music is unarguable, one shall not overlook the fact that there were also doubts and misgivings arisen among songwriters regarding the cultural hegemony of their products, as what Bradley notes in his writing, “The dynamic was complicated by music’s peculiar status as both a center of political or cultural resistance and a manifestation of America’s high-tech supremacy”.[12] And if the essence of the early rock-n-roll music is about rebelling against oppression and authority, then the ethics of this supposedly guilt-free genre was now under questioned, as we can see in later songs like Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World”, which anguishedly cried out that “Don’t feel like Satan but I am to them (the Muslims in the Middle East)”. The subjects that rock music deal with had seemed to become heavier and darker as times went on, as in the 50s we were still able to hear some buoyant and leisurely melodies like “Rock Around The Clock”, yet once the context was unpremeditatedly switched to the early 90s, as embodied in the R.E.M.’s song “Drive”, it became the agonizing self-doubting line of “What if you rock around the clock?”. And as the song’s brutal and near-malicious opening suggested (“Smack, crack, bushwhacked/Tie another one to the racks, baby”), the genre might now have already become an inescapable ordeal that its practitioners were destined to pass through. The same feeling was also echoed in its perturbing closing line (“Hey kids, rock and roll/Nobody tells you where to go, baby”), as although the phrase “baby” was still tenderly murmured and repeated by the singer, we might now find that the meaning as well as implication of it is clearly not a repetition from the lighthearted, innocent old days.
15 May, 2021.
Footnotes
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W., "On Popular Music" (1941). Reprinted in Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998, pp. 197-209.
Bingham, Clara. Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul. New York: Random House, 2016.
Bradley, Doug, I Served in Vietnam. Here’s My Soundtrack. The New York Times “VIETNAM ‘67” series, MARCH 13, 2018.
Gray, Briahna Joy. "The Question of Cultural Appropriation." Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics & Culture, September 6, 2017.
HISTORY OF THE NAME OF BROKEN ARROW. From (https://www.brokenarrowok.gov/our-city/visit/visitor-info/history-of-the-name-of-broken-arrow)
Origin of Broken Arrow, Tulsa World, Aug 20, 1991. From
(https://tulsaworld.com/archive/origin-of-broken-arrow/article_297ec6c0-dde4-5e2c-ac04-9ef3c27a339f.html)
Swain, Joye R., It's Rooster Days in Broken Arrow, The Oklahoman, May 15, 1983. From (https://www.oklahoman.com/article/2024873/its-rooster-days-in-broken-arrow)
Malik, Kenan. "In Defense of Cultural Appropriation." The New York Times, June 14, 2017.
Perry, Charles, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, Random House, 1984. From
(http://cjayarts.com/pages/library/CharlesPerry-haight_ashbury.pdf)
Reich, Charles. "Reflections: The Greening of America." The New Yorker, Sept. 26, 1970, pp. 42-111.
