A Matter of Electricity: William Burroughs and Rock Music (original) (raw)
Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture
Burroughs, Bowie, and the Reshaping of the Counterculture: William S. Burroughs Meets "Ziggy Stardust", 2021
This essay situates the 1974 Rolling Stone interview with David Bowie and William Burroughs within the larger context of shifts in counterculture politics and strategies in the 1970s.
2018
In a letter to Allen Ginsberg sent in 1955, William Burroughs claims that his novel Naked Lunch sketches ‘the sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age’ (Burroughs, 1994b, 255). In response to the discontent of the ‘atomic age’ Burroughs forges his own aesthetic arsenal that he will later claim supersedes the power of nuclear weapons. By using literature as a means to ‘change fact’ (Burroughs, 2010, 55), alter consciousness and ‘make things happen’ (Burroughs, 1994a, 32), Burroughs will, in 1970, come to realise techniques for attacking political opponents, creating ‘fake news’ and altering the course of the Cold War (Burroughs, 2005, 17). William Burroughs moves from forging aesthetic techniques aimed at carving out a niche for authentic subjectivity in the modern age to suggesting guerrilla methods for mass media control
Forces of Chaos and Anarchy: Rock Music, The New Left and Social Movements, 1964 to 1972
Doctoral Dissertation , 2017
This dissertation engages an unresolved debate on the ‘rock aesthetic’ in New Left Review, between Perry Anderson and David Fernbach while pointing toward a new dialectical social theory with which to analyze cultural form in general and music in particular. The debate was in the first instance methodological, formal/technical vs. lyrical contextual analysis. Within this methodological debate we see inscribed the misunderstanding the sixties New Left had of the sixties counterculture, and thus the conditions of possibility for a missed encounter. Rock music was neither a direct instantiation of the times, as Anderson implies, nor was it an entirely new form that must be schematized sui generis with a new set of axioms, as suggested by Fernbach. Indeed, it was both and then some. In engaging this debate, I use canonical figures of the era as my primary case studies as well as what I call my excursions – miniature analyses that capture the broader point I am making in my cognitive mapping of the cultural production of the long sixties. From this project’s standpoint, it was the Left that missed an encounter with the counterculture, not the counterculture that missed an encounter with the Left. To continue this engagement, I have deployed what I have called a theory of the missed encounter. I engage what could have taken place, that is to say, if the implicit metaphysical and practical connection between rock music culture and the Left had been consummated, by examining why this could not have taken place, why there was a missed encounter. As against the more commonly theorized Popular Front and Punk eras which I stipulate as consummated encounters, the sixties, aesthetically and politically – did not coalesce in the same sense. The Missed Encounter, for me, is a heuristic, a point-of-departure. I presume, thus, with my own analysis that once one goes beyond mythology, a missed encounter is readily apparent. The purpose of my rethinking of the rock music canon is not positivist proof of a missed encounter, rather it is to formulate the ‘sixties question’ through the premises of its existence.
The Rock Counterculture from Modernist Utopianism to the Development of an Alternative Music Scene
Volume !, 2012
This article analyzes rock music's countercultural status from the perspective of musicians' and fans' aspirations to a utopian transfiguration of everyday life. Relying on Fredric Jameson's and Ihab Hassan's reflections on (post)modernism, the present argument locates rock among the movements within modern culture seeking to counter alienation and reification. On this basis, the article investigates how aspirations to utopian transfiguration may empower rock to develop a full-fledged alternative to dominant culture. Taking into account the difficulties involved in using counterculture as a socio-historical keyword, this argument acknowledges that rock cannot fulfill its utopian promise. Yet the music makes possible the development of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a field of restricted production: musicians, fans, and journalists define codes and practices tracing out a perimeter of autonomy differentiating rock from commercial mass culture. This social space may in specific contexts serve as hub for a counterhegemonic coalition aiming to redraw the social field according to goals broader than those pursued by fragmented subcultures. The final section of the article investigates one of the channels through which rock's sphere of restricted production gives a durable shape to its empowering agenda: the representation of labor practices eschewing the alienation of professional life. Rock, it is argued, stakes out its autonomy with regard to the capitalist labor market by making musical labor an area of personal fulfillment. Rock music-modernism-the counterculture-the sociology of the cultural field-the representation of musical labor
The Big Music: Essays on Rock, Art, and Popular Culture
These essays, elaborated over two decades, approach several aspects of rock culture: the significance of rock as a cultural practice in the field of twentieth-century art; the representation of musicianship; and the analysis of lyrics.
The Sixties Are Dead: Long Live Their Legacy: The Politics and Poetics of Counterculture
2018
The sixties was an era of great social and cultural upheaval. It was a period of mass mobilization that attempted to redefine "America" by addressing issues of racial exclusion, sexual subordination and nationalism. Opposing a predominantly materialist interpretation of the American dream and its master narrative of American exceptionalism, the 1960s generation sought a number of ways to convey the Zeitgeist of the period. Rock music, radical activism, consciousness-raising groups, anti-disciplinary politics as well as alternative lifestyles that adopted willed poverty, communal living, drug experimentation and non-Western, non-Christian practices and beliefs created a powerful yet loosely organized cultural movement, known as the counterculture of the 1960s. While it is difficult to define a phenomenon which exhibited a variety of co-existing, and often conflicting, cultural practices, my focus in this paper is on the adversarial tendency of the sixties as it manifested i...
This study takes its point of departure from two problems that regularly recur in historical accounts of rock music. The first problem consists of a strong tendency among many writers to neglect much mainstream rock from the 1970s, often to focus on the rise of punk and its transformation into new wave in the second half of the decade, or perhaps also to chronicle the emergence of disco and the strong reactions to it. Bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Elton John, the Eagles and many others are frequently mentioned only in passing, while highly successful progressive rock bands such as Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Yes are neglected almost entirely. 1 The second problem is that rock music from the 1966---69 period -frequently referred to as 'psychedelic' music -is often kept separate from the mainstream 1970s rock that follows. There is even a tendency on the part of some writers to view the early seventies as a period of decline for rock, resulting in a celebration of psychedelia without much consideration of its clear musical effect on the rock that followed. 2 These two tendencies result in unbalanced historical accounts ofrock that not only leave out much of the music many listeners today associate with 'classic rock', but also miss some of the important larger themes in the development of the style as a whole. 3 One historical thread that can be traced almost all the way back to rock's earliest days in the mid-1950s is the theme of musical ambition -the idea that pop can aspire to be a 'better' or more sophisticated kind of music by employing techniques and approaches often borrowed