Rocking in the Free World

Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-0-19-756651-0
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 165 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free.

Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tochka, Nicholas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik Nichtwestliche Musik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein Musikkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface and Acknowledgments

- Prologue: Popular Music as Political Theory

- 1 How Rock 'n' Roll Invented the Teenager

- 2 How Americans Rocked Cairo (and London, and Moscow, and Tehran, and.)

- 3 How Trash Became Art

- 4 How the Rock Counterculture Dug Deeper

- 5 How Songwriters Revealed Our Inner Truth

- 6 How Rock Got Real Again

- 7 How We Taught the World to Sing

- Epilogue: Rocking in the Free World

- References

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nicholas Tochka writes about the politics of postwar music-making in Eastern Europe and the Americas. In 2016, Oxford University Press published his first book, Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Socialist Albania. He is currently completing one project on citizenship in postsocialist Europe, and another about the invention of the Sixties in the United States. He works at the Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne in Australia, and plays both bass and guitar.