most of all links rock music with other artistic genres that are not even possible without mass media, especially film and video. Indeed, in recent years it seems that rock music—and “popular music” (a term that will require further interrogation) more generally—has been increasingly absorbed into the Hollywood/Los Angeles entertainment machine, with the movie business at the heart of this complex.
Therefore the question has to be asked: Does the corporate serpent wend its way over all forms of rock music, including progressive rock? Taking the “nontechnological” elements that went into rock music, there is a solid core of rebellion. But make these elements dependent upon electricity (and advanced technology more generally), and it appears that there is always a ready recipe for cooptation. In the case of the industry-promoted “rebels,” such as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince (or some of the younger generation, for example the “angry” or “bitter” music of an Alanis Morrisette), antiestablishment postures cannot help but be somewhat contrived, even while certain social conventions seem to be contravened. For sure, the “rebellious” aspect of certain rock superstars is simply posture. Yet, I am not convinced that this is entirely the case with any of the first three artists—or “artists formerly known as”—whom I named; there I think the motives are more of a mixed bag, that there are some honest motivations mixed in with an attempt to negotiate a very difficult cultural and economic arena. The point remains, however, that there is something problematic about saying that some rock music has “sold out” or “gone commercial,” when the connection with commercial imperatives is so built into the emergence and development of the very form.
Without being reductivistic or deterministic about it, there remains a great deal to be said for the claim that every form of culture bears a significant relationship to the social formation in which it arises, and to the mode of production that is at the heart of any given formation. Rock music could not have existed in the time before advanced industrial economy and global social relations. These relations are unequal and for the most part predatory, even though they are also part of a single, global, competitive mode of production—the stage of capitalism that Lenin called imperialism. One hundred or more years into this development, we now have systems of media that are productive of consciousness on a level unimagined in previous centuries. It might be said that imperialism plus MTV/CNN/etc. equals “postmodern capitalism.” Rock music, then, is the form of music that has arisen in this time and against this background.
Furthermore, and to reiterate, rock music is unthinkable without electric amplification, electronic sound modification, and advanced recording technology. The electric guitar (and perhaps in a lesser, though also related, way, the electric bass guitar) is at the center of rock music. “Acoustic” sounds in rock music play the role of “relief” or dynamic contrast, and, for the most part, are not really acoustic anyway (as anyone who has watched an edition of “MTV Unplugged” can see). Theodore Gracyk, in Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, goes so far as to argue that rock music is so thoroughly mediated by technology that, in fact, its technology is its art. In his book on English progressive rock, Edward Macan identifies sampling technology as one of the innovations that led to the downfall of progressive rock—if a person can, by pushing a button (or a single key on a keyboard), activate a sample and thereby play a passage that even the most brilliant virtuoso could not play, this would seem to make a rather large dent in the attractions of virtuoso rock music (see p. 191). I’m pretty sure that Gracyk has little use for progressive rock anyway, so Macan’s argument would, from Gracyk’s perspective, provide a fitting capstone to his overall argument—that, with rock music, technology is what it’s really all about.
But let’s back up a minute. Gracyk’s arguments concerning the way that technology, especially recording technology, affects rock music, right down to its very “ontology” (as he puts it), are insightful, but wouldn’t this argument have to have as its destination a music that is mainly produced with, as Beck Hansen says, “two turntables and a microphone”? In thinking about this, perhaps I am starting to have some sympathy for the “real rock ’n’ roll” types who, among other things, are skeptical of progressive rock for its displacement of the electric guitar from center stage (an issue that I will return to). One doesn’t have to be a Luddite or to think there is no room in rock music for some of the new technical innovations, such as sampling or MIDI (or, earlier, electronic keyboards and synthesizers), to think that there’s a problem when the music, increasingly, is no longer being played by people whom you would ordinarily call “musicians” (though talented technicians they may be).4 Perhaps I am simply expressing a prejudice of the pre-postmodern sensibility however. As Fredric Jameson argues, the thing that allowed for the cult of the “modern artist” (the great genius who could aspire to be the “world’s greatest painter”—“a Picasso” or some such) was the charm of the fact that, in an age of mass production, the artist practiced an older, perhaps even outmoded, craft (see Postmodernism, pp. 305–311).
This is not simply a prejudice, however; it is a considered worry concerning what might happen when, even in the realm of music, people become “mere appendages of the machine” (as Marx put it). In terms of rock music’s deal with the technological devil, however, one might say, “in for a dime, in for a dollar.” When it comes to understanding society and culture in the large, there is a great deal to be said for a structural approach:5 social structures (which include, as Freud demonstrated, structures of the mind) shape what people, whatever their intentions, will be able to do. Social structures set the terms for human intentions and achievements. (This is not to imply that these terms are set univocally or through an absolute determinism.) The originators of rock music—at least, the musicians, as opposed to the technicians and the record company people—brought a sense of rebellion on many levels. But perhaps the commercial and technological terms of global, imperialist, and even postmodern capitalism meant that, despite this intention, what they would create instead was just a new form of distraction, always already coopted by the entertainment industry. After all, these new rock musicians already had at least a few toes in this door (and some jumped in with both feet).
In recent years, it has become especially easy to reach the same conclusions concerning “popular” music that Theodor Adorno reached in the immediate postwar period, namely that this kind of music is simply a product of an emerging “culture industry,” a product designed to distract people from the real conditions of life in global capitalist society. This is music as palliative, salve, drug, distraction, and mere amusement. To the extent that there seems to be a “rebellious element” in this music, it may be that it is no more than what Paul Piccone, extending Adorno’s analysis, called “false negativity.” Piccone’s argument is that the culture industry, as well as the larger capitalist society of which it is a part, actually needs some elements that appear to be rebellious or not simply affirmative of the status quo, for two reasons. First, there has to be some form of entertainment for those who have some inkling that something might be wrong with the way things are. The idea is to channel this feeling into a purely existential realm—such as listening to your records by yourself or with a few similarly alienated friends, thereby, at most, only becoming part of a “taste public” that never gets beyond the minimal social consciousness of there being a few others out there who like some of the same things. Second, the system itself needs to allow some creativity at the margins, in order to regenerate itself—given that it mainly depends on dull, administrative apparatuses (whether these be bureaucracies of the state or corporations) composed of “well-adjusted” individuals who are not supposed to think in any critical or creative way. The system itself needs a new idea from time to time, so it allows a little “free” or “wild” space, though this is carefully controlled and also carefully channeled.
We should note that, for Adorno, most Western classical music is in the same fix—it also tends to be “affirmative,” in the sense of affirming the way things already are. But rock music, especially, is so rigged in advance to be affirmative in this way that Adorno does not see any way out. Now, in Adorno’s scheme, there are only two kinds of music, really: Western classical music, which is compromised most of the time, and “popular music,” which seems fundamentally compromised.
