Raga Rock: Popular Music and the Turn to the East in the 1960s

Abstract

In this paper we analyse one particular interaction: the development of a self-consciously “Eastern”-sounding music within Western pop music. We understand this in the context of several “journeys to the East”: some virtual (the interest in oriental religions, the adoption of Eastern musical forms) and some real (the journeys taken to the East by some musicians and by thousands of young people). We will consider, first, the milieu within which these changes took place, and then analyse the methods, scale and motivations of those Western artists who took inspiration from Eastern, mainly Indian, music in the 1960s and 1970s to create what became known as “raga rock.” Our aim is to demonstrate that these developments added up to a “neo-orientalism”: resembling the older, imperial orientalism in its tendency to simplify and romanticize the East, but different from it in the passionate sincerity of its admiration for certain Eastern forms, which were taken to the point of challenging dominant cultural and even political norms within the West.