Another boring day in paradise: rock and roll and the empowerment of everyday life

Abstract

About five years ago, I began to teach courses on the cultural history of rock and roll. My approach was simple: I would try to describe the texts, interpreting the significance produced by the unique synthesis of musical texture and lyrical content. Then I would suggest correspondences to the situation of its audiences which were mediated through the institutional practices of production and consumption. The music obliquely represented and responded to the structure of experience of at least certain portions of its youth audience. As I sought more adequate readings, the correspondences became increasingly refracted; the music had to be located in an overdetermined context: class, race, subcultures, gender, as well as age, exerted unequal pressures on and were represented in rock and roll. Nevertheless, my students – as well as the rock and roll fan in me – were noticeably dissatisfied. While they often assented to my readings, it was clear that my readings failed to capture something important, something which was intimately connected to rock and roll's power as well as to its cultural politics.