Rock’n Roll and the Convolution of Authenticity
When it comes to music, the debate over authenticity is endless. As Griel Marcus has noted, a musicologist, when confronted with the claim that a particular musical style seemingly developed out of nowhere, can always point to an antecedent. Nevertheless, rock’n roll and the culture it created seemed to come out of nowhere.
The precursors to rock’n roll were the blues of Black musicians and a style of country played by whites. Lyrically, both styles reflected the dominate artistic mode of the prewar decades, realism. And just as realism best expressed the desperation of the Depression, it too proved the only voice capable of expressing the Black experience in America—an experience that, repackaged in the postwar revolt against realism, became the spirit of rock’n roll.
Since the 1920s Black intellectuals had observed that the only truly American artistic creations—ragtime, spirituals, and jazz, among others—were produced by Blacks. Thus it is no surprise that the first rock’n roller was, according to Marcus, Robert Johnson, a Black country blues singer and guitarist from Mississippi. Johnson’s music embodied much of what became so popular and, indeed, so controversial about rock’n roll: sex, sin, and a touch of soul. Beyond the three S’s, Johnson articulated a feeling that every American at once feels and rejects—failure.
The myth of American Dream, inextricably linked to the notion of American exceptionalism, runs deep in the United States, and much like capitalism, seems only to strengthen with every challenge to its ideological hegemony. But for Black Americans the idea of exceptionalism does not hold the same weight. Exceptionalism, if it existed at all, came at the cost of their sweat and blood, of their citizenship, and their personal autonomy. In his remarkable study of the ironies of American history, C. Vann Woodward overlooked the twentieth century’s ultimate irony—that Black culture was as American as it gets; that within Black culture were the tools, the language, capable of describing what every American felt but had no way of expressing. Marcus put his finger on it when he said, “To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes”.
Johnson’s country blues became the template for what eventually emerged as rock’n roll. The “founder” of rock’n roll, Sam Phillips, knew what he was looking for in the 1950s when he got bored with what he heard emanating from his speakers. He was looking for a white man who could channel and produce the nuances of Black blues and rockabilly. But even more, the fatalism of Black blues and white country was merely a reflection of the status quo. Phillips wanted something new. “Gimme something different, gimme something unique,” he told Harmoinica Frank, the first musician Phillips hoped would usher in a new musical style. And although Frank embodied much of what made rock’n roll so popular later, he did not channel the groove of Black music. And here, of course, is the root of yet more irony.
Phillips eventually found what he was looking for in Elvis Presley. Elvis had the looks and the voice. He had the producer and the producer had the songs. White radio stations were reluctant if not downright resistant to play “Black” styles of music sung and played by Blacks. But when Elvis took on the dirty Blues, he, despite the shockwaves he sent down the spine of suburban parents, embodied a certain type of authenticity. An ironic type of authenticity. The music was American. For mainstream popular culture, however, at least initially, rock’n roll could only be American if it was sung and played by white people. Instead of acknowledging the creative genius of Black Americans, white culture simply expropriated the style. Rock’n roll became an “authentic” American cultural production. Its roots were American. It was sung by Americans. How could it not be American?
Yet the cultural impact of rock’n roll had as much to do with modal theft as with the audience it reached and the milieu in which it was received. While rock’n roll was very much a form of administered negativity, it created such a buzz, such a stir, because it appeared to threaten the recently sewn fabric of the postwar sociocultural paradigm. Rock’n roll was dangerous, rebellious, licentious, corrupting. It was absurd. And it made people feel alive and removed the manacles of conformity. Others followed. Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan.
But then Elvis got too big and too famous. He sang gospel and country songs. He sang everything. He became a caricature of himself. And so did rock’n roll. Musicians like Dylan and writers like the Beats, turned nonconformity into an aesthetic that could not last. Appropriation by mainstream popular culture defused the aesthetic’s revolutionary potential, reconfiguring it into a socially acceptable commodity. Elvis was exposed. The idea of his authenticity had been revealed as another myth. As Marcus points out, “it is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its own myths”. What had seemed to many as scary and subversive had become sanitized and stale by the late 1960s. Once in the hands of white producers and disc jockeys, the music became the voice of that beautiful American illusion, even if early audiences decried it as the devil’s music. The apparatuses of the dominant culture had reached out to the margins and pulled rock’n roll into its orbit.
Ultimately, the fascination with authenticity, whether by artists and intellectuals rejecting the massification of culture or by the appropriation of the avant-garde by the purveyors of kitsch, is a product of the social hierarchies created by capitalism. The avant-garde, whether consciously or subconsciously crafted, cannot escape the confines of the system in which it was created. Here, I disagree with Daniel Belgrad’s interpretation of the COS. Instead of a way out, a force of liberation, the COS is another product of the system it purports to reject. Like its later incarnations under the paradigm of postmodernism, like the fate of rock’n roll, it is an example of administered negativity.
Even the avant-garde, particularly abstract expressionist art, was a tool if not a product of the capitalist modes of production and consumption. Abstract expressionism, remember, arose out of Popular Front artists’s disillusionment with Soviet communism and the abandonment of realism. But as Eva Cockroft shows in her essay “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” abstract expressionism served the American state as a form of anticommunist propaganda. During the Cold War the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Central Intelligence Agency put on exhibitions of abstract expressionist art throughout the United States, parts of Latin America, and in Europe. The purpose of these exhibitions was to “‘let it be known especially in Europe that America was not the cultural backwater that the Russians. . . were trying to demonstrate that it was’”. Moreover, the overall apolitical nature of the postwar avant-garde—the separation of art and politics— made art forms like abstract expressionism the perfect tools for selling the world “on the benefits of life and art under capitalism”. Postwar avant-garde: capitalist abstraction. Kitsch and popular culture: reification of the avant-garde. The avant-garde and popular culture: two sides of the same capitalist coin.
Of course, the notion of cultural “authenticity” is problematic. It assumes a lack of dynamism. Yet nothing is static. If anything, culture is always in the process of becoming, and any attempt to pin it down without attention to change over time limits any explanatory power the culture and its study might have. Authenticity, moreover, refers to an undisputed origin. And while we can trace rock’n roll to its roots in rockabilly and the blues, those two musical styles have their own origins, too. Hence, as the above epigraph intones, authenticity is really an illusion. It springs from our attempts to not only uncover the origins of something, but also from our human tendency to establish temporal boundaries. In fact, historians and philosophers are probably the most guilty of perpetuating the authenticity illusion.
What is more, Belgrad argues for the COS’s ability to challenge popular culture by freeing itself from the influences of corporate capitalism. But is that really possible? Is the unconscious mind free from the context in which it develops? Is it not merely another product of the system of production and consumption? And what about the audience? Certainly they are not free from the contextual burdens of capitalism. Like its progeny, postmodernism, the COS engendered a false threat to the system. By providing a challenge that the system easily thwarted, it only reinforced the its hegemony.
Similarly, rock’n roll music failed to upend the dominance of popular culture. Instead, mass culture appropriated the music and its creators and its rebellious, nonconformist aesthetic, softened the edges, and sold it for millions of dollars. And as for authenticity, the fact that rock’n roll originated in the Black experience in America destroys any claim to authenticity. But, as I mentioned above, the search for authenticity is the wrong cultural project. Rock’n roll is truly American because it embodies the myths Americans have constructed about themselves from the beginning. In actuality, it is racist, sexist, and above all, capitalistic. Rock’n roll is American because what we believe about it is a lie.
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