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Academics |
The Republic of Rock: Music, Vietnam, and the Making of a Counterculture, 1965-1975 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010) This cultural history follows rock music's circulation between San Francisco and Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the surprising flow of rock music between these two places, and beyond them to the rest of the world, gave shape to the hippie counterculture as a new kind of global public sphere. The first part of the book examines San Francisco's streets, parks, and psychedelic dancehalls, which were ground zero for rock music's explosion of vibrant public engagement and interaction. As they made music, danced, took drugs, put on costumes, met strangers, and formed new affiliations and institutions, participants in the "San Francisco scene" used rock as a medium for social experimentation. The explosive ideas and practices unleashed by their experiments spread in many directions, but one of the most important was toward Vietnam. Most of the American GI's bound for the war zone departed from the San Francisco Bay Area. When they arrived in Southeast Asia, they brought traces of the hippie counterculture with them through rock music's sounds and styles. Rock ultimately became a means of expressing individual and shared discontent with the Vietnam War experience. It did so even as it flowed through official channels, such as the Armed Forces Radio Network, which broadcast an acid-rock program called (what else?) the Sgt. Pepper Show, and through the Entertainment Branch, which organized soldier rock bands to perform for fellow troops. As in other parts of the world, South Vietnamese and other Asian youth also drew inspiration from Anglo-American rock music for their own purposes; in the process they generated new, transnational connections and community. Simultaneously, the dark energies of the Vietnam War surfaced back on the home front in rock music and the hippie counterculture, completing a circuit of communication and collective identity-formation around the globe. This unusual circulation of rock from San Francisco to Vietnam and back again has been preserved in little-used archival materials such as poster art, radio broadcasts, concert recordings, the underground press, military holdings, memoirs, oral histories, architecture, and film footage. Studying these, we glimpse (and hear!) how older forms of civil society and citizenship gave way to a hybrid public sphere, a "republic of rock," that defied assumed divisions between culture and politics, the personal and the public, the emotional and the rational, the local and the global. The legacy of this hybrid - one might even say psychedelic - global public sphere not only offers a new way of understanding the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also provides historical context for comprehending contemporary struggles to fashion a successful civic culture in the shadow of American military power and consumer allure both at home and around the world. 2008: "Infinity Goes Up on Trial: The Questioning of Psychedelic Art at the Whitney Museum." Review of the art exhibition "Summer of Love: Art of the Pyschedelic Era," from The Sixties: A Journal of History Politics, and Culture 1, 1 (2008). A video excerpt from "'Entertainment Vietnam': The Civics of Rock Music in the Vietnam-American War (and the Return of the Cultural Turn)," my presentation at the March 2008 OAH Conference, appears on Rick Shenkman's History News Network blog (note: scroll down to view video). We were all a bit bleary-eyed at 8am on a Sunday morning, but like Hendrix on the final morning of Woodstock, we performed nonetheless. Thanks to fellow participants on the panel "War at the Crossroads: Rethinking Memory, Culture, and Conflict in Vietnam": Meredith Lair, Erik B. Villard, and chair Marilyn Young. 2007: "The Psychedelic Public and Its Problems: Rock Music Festivals and Civil Society in the Sixties Counterculture,"in Media and Public Spheres, ed. Richard Butsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2005: "The Multitrack Model: Cultural History and the Interdisciplinary Study of Popular Music," in Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines, edited by Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey (University Press of Mississippi, 2005). Review of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock 'n' Roll, Kandia Crazy Horse, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), in Journal of Popular Music Studies 17, 3 (December 2005), pp. 352-361.
"Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret? When the Subterranean Went Pop"; review of Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art by Mike Marqusee and Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History by Devin McKinney, H-1960s, H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online Discussion Listserv (June 2005). "To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn: The Pivot of the Sixties"; review of Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern by Marianne Dekoven, H-1960s, H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online Discussion Listserv (March 2005). Review of Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place by John Connell and Chris Gibson, eds., Journal of Popular Music and Society (February 2005). 2003: See mention of my paper, "Funny Folk: Rethinking Purity in the U.S. Folk Revival" in Alex Ross, "Rock 101," New Yorker, 14/21 July 2003. I served in the role of "academic theoretician" in Layla Cooper's excellent essay, "One-Track Mind: Is Record Collecting Really Just a Guy Thing?", Bitch Magazine 20, Spring 2003 (note: article not online; only print edition available). |