|
Research |
Northwestern History Department Biography Northwestern College of Arts & Sciences Academic Adviser Biography Everybody Get Together: The Civics of Rock Music in San Francisco and Vietnam and the Making of the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) Why was rock music so important to participants in the 1960s counterculture? Drawing on untapped archival materials and new oral history interviews, this book offers a history of rock music in the crucially-linked locations of San Francisco and Vietnam. In these two places, rock generated an unexpectedly robust associational life. The music was never simply about dropping out of society, as many have argued, but neither was it about diving into a straightforwardly radical politics. What made rock matter was that it fostered a deep but troubled engagement with the meanings of individual citizenship and shared civic life in postwar America and the world. The music did so in ways that powerfully connected the personal to the public. Everybody Get Together begins in San Francisco during the mid-1960s, when the city became ground zero for countercultural efforts to use music to probe what a more just, democratic, and free public life might be like. Subsequent chapters follow the circulation of rock to Vietnam in the years after the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the music fostered surprising spaces of association, debate, and discussion for America's "citizen-soldier" GIs as well as for non-Americans caught up in the United States military intervention. Listening to and glimpsing rock's "sound civics" in action reveals the counterculture to have been an effort by participants to confront, make sense of, and even transform the expanding power of American mass consumerism and military might, particularly as U.S. corporations adopted new strategies of hip capitalism and the American military adopted new models of technological and managerial warfare. The counterculture emerged, in crucial respects, from rock's direct circulations between San Francisco and Vietnam. Moreover, it took shape within the symbolic fusing worldwide of the city of the Summer of Love and the country in which America waged war. Uneasily but inextricably part of American power in the decades after World War II, rock music also suggested how art and culture came to matter as much as direct political action to the vexed project of achieving a more democratic global civil society in San Francisco, Vietnam, and places beyond. 2009: Blog for The Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual. This is a research workshop, co-sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Civic Engagement, that I am convening at Northwestern University. We welcome participation online at HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) where you can create your own blog, participate in online discussions, and investigate developments in the digital humanities. Review of Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era Exhibition, in Journal of American History 96, 1 (June 2009). 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). |