Popular Music and Society Vol. 33, No. 2, May 2010, pp.

163178

Im Set Free . . . : The Velvet Underground, 1960s Counterculture, and Michel Foucault
Matthew Bannister

This article explores concepts of freedom, repression, and sexuality in Western society and popular music, in relation to selected aspects of Michel Foucaults writing and the work of the Velvet Underground. Both were critically responding to the repressive hypothesis implicit in 1960s countercultural discourses of liberation from oppression, by highlighting the role of the gaze in power relations, its role in both disciplining and constructing sexual and other identities, and how possibilities for action or resistance can be enacted only through material and pragmatic interventions within existing power relations, rather than by reference to an imagined Utopia beyond power.

The late 1960s emergent rock counterculture was deeply idealistic: truth, freedom, peace, love, and self-expression were all intrinsic to a cultural agenda that stressed liberation from straight society, repressive social orders, personal neurosis, and commercial fakery. Utopia was to be achieved through a combination of mindaltering drugs, communal lifestyles, protest, agitation for social justice, and, of course, rock music. Much of this idealism was identied with the hippie counterculture in California and the UK (especially London). It all came to a head (pun intended) in 1967 with the Summer of Love, often viewed as the apotheosis of the 1960s dream, and concomitantly as an ideological battleground for subsequent commentators who have interpreted it as everything from the foundations of modern liberty to the primary cause of the present chaos (MacDonald 1). Part of the power of the 1960s utopian dream was the very familiarity of its rhetoric: terms like freedom, justice, and peace are taken as universal truths enshrined in the US constitution, the French revolution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are part of the Western project of enlightenment, creating the vision of a just future society . . . a humanistic social theory that is based . . . on some rm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature (Noam Chomsky, qtd in Foucault Foucault Reader 5). That in this instance they derived not from institutions
ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03007760903142889

164

M. Bannister

or governments but an apparently spontaneous groundswell of youth sentiment only added to their emotional resonance. Rock music, the voice of youth, led the charge towards a new dawn with anthems like All You Need Is Love (the Beatles) and Break on Through (to the Other Side) (the Doors). Rock musicians were heralded as the voice of a hopeful new generation with the power to subvert the Establishment. In the summer of 1968, the battleground became literal as student activists battled police on campuses in France and the United States. It soon became evident that state tolerance of the youth counterculture was extremely limited, and the Lefts dream that student uprisings would receive popular support swiftly faded. The failure of these revolts revealed the limitations of Marxism: Gone is the utopian dream of the idyllic, rational, democratic state in which alienation disappears (Foucault Politics xv xvi). The grand narratives of freedom and justice were also challenged by the emergence of new politicized identities (ethnicities, sexualities) which did not t the Marxist concept of class struggle. Within rock music, new, skeptical voices were also emerging. The New York band the Velvet Underground represented the antithesis of West Coast counterculture, emerging in 1966 like a hideous carbuncle on the face of a beautiful hippie child. Their rst album, The Velvet Underground and Nico, issued in the midst of the Summer of Love, was a bum trip, or perhaps a reality check. The points of difference with the counterculture were almost endlesspsychedelic drugs/heroin and amphetamines; free love/S&M; good times/bad times; West Coast optimism/Eastern cynicism; heterosexuality/homosexuality; transcendence/negation; community/alienation; popularity/obscurity. On its 1967 West Coast tour into the heart of the US counterculture, the band alienated hip entrepreneur Bill Graham and critics like Ralph Gleason, who described them as the urban evil of New York, while Variety termed them a three-ring psychosis that assaults the senses; Berlin in the decadent thirties said Los Angeles magazine (Hang onto yourself ; Barrios 152 53; Bockris 136). The bands visual performance, lyrical themes, and often assaultive attitude express[ed] uptightness and ma[d]e the audience uptightthe antithesis of dreamy West Coast communal good vibes (Frith and Horne 112; Bockris 132 33). Velvet Revolution? The Velvets would be a mere footnote in rock history if they had not been subsequently resuscitated by critics and musicians who recruited the band into their own personal projects of enlightenmentfor Lester Bangs they seek to free music from straitjackets of key and time signature which vanguard jazz musicians had begun to dispose of almost a decade before . . . a truly free music, where the only limits were the musicians own consciousness and imagination (Bangs 41). For Brian Eno, they deconstruct the conventional hierarchies of musical representation (qtd in Frith and Horne 117). For Jeremy Gilbert, they produce queer rock that challenges traditional gender hierarchies in pop music (Gilbert 43). According to these critics, then, it was the Velvets, not the counterculture, that were the true revolution.

Popular Music and Society

165

The problem with this approach is that it just substitutes another narrative in place of the conventional onethe Velvets were right all alongbut were too far out to be properly appreciated in their time: they were simply too abrasive for the mainstream to handle (Unterberger). The very unpopularity or marginality of the band is adduced as proof of their prophetic role as an avant-garde intervention that extends the boundaries of popular music. This kind of revolutionary thinking in terms of oppositions is precisely what Foucault found problematic in 60s radical politics. Foucaults thought was profoundly affected by his involvement with 1960s radicalism, and this contributed to his critique of revolutionary politics. As he writes in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus:
Then came the ve brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the rst major blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was taking place? An amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics? . . . A surge of libido modulated by the class struggle? Perhaps. At any rate, it is this familiar dualistic interpretation that has laid claim to the events of those years. (Deleuze and Guattari xi xii)

In Foucaults view, power and resistance are complementary rather than mutually exclusive categories. They are part of the same discourse, just as Marxism and capitalism are opposed, but share a founding belief in the primacy of economic relations. These apparent opposites need each other. This argument can be extended to dualisms like center/periphery and mainstream/avant-garde, which have dominated rock criticism, and consequently discussion of the Velvet Underground. Discursively we could say that both contemporary critics who hated the band and subsequent reassessments share a common discourse of marginalitythe band was weirdwhether in a good or bad way depends on what side of the fence youre on. Foucault was generally suspicious of advocacy: We are through with the intellectual who functions as a master of truth and justice by lending his or her voice to an oppressed consciousness (Politics xii)to say that one side is right or wrong. Rather, he endorses the idea that to resist is not simply a negation but a creative process (Halperin 60). In that light, a more balanced assessment of the Velvets comes from Ellen Willis, who, rather than lauding the band or recruiting them into some kind of movement for social improvement, concentrates on how the band worked: consciously using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material (much as pop artists used mass art in general) and rening, elaborating, playing off that material to produce . . . rock-and-roll-art (Willis 73). An emphasis on the Velvets material practice and creative process reveals some surprising afnities with the counterculture:
Ken Kesey embarked on the Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead in Frisco, and Andy Warhol left New York to tour the nation with his Exploding Plastic Inevitable . . . and the Velvet Underground. Both groups . . . claimed to be utilizing the possibilities of feedback and distortion, and both claimed to be the avatars of the psychedelic multimedia trend. (Bangs 42)

166

M. Bannister

However, unlike the West Coast culture, the Velvets did not proclaim a path to transcendent spiritual awareness. This approach is consistent with the Foucauldian insistence on practice, rather than intention: Foucaults example teaches us to analyse discourse strategically, not in terms of what it says but in terms of what it does and how it works (Halperin 30, emphasis in original). Feedback, distortion, and multimedia are not to be regarded as means to a higher truththey are material technological practices that can be used strategically to create effects and interventions which will differ according to how they are employed, who employs them, and what the cultural context is. The Velvets method was that of pop art, and here Andy Warhol is the key inuence. For Warhol, there really is only material (what Emile de Antonio describes as preoccupation with the thingness of things (Andy Warhol)), in the sense of both commodity and resistance to deep interpretation, the insistence that the surface reveals more than any in-depth examination or excavation of meaning from the text (Andy Warhol). This materialist insistence, that rock and roll is only stuff to be reshaped as the artist sees t, presents a clear challenge to Hegelian narratives of rock as Zeitgeist. And it nds strong echoes in contemporary European thought: An artist, a writer, a philosopher . . . experiments. He does not need to identify himself with a universal subject (Lyotard 15). The populism of 1960s rock culture identied artists with their audiences, as speaking for youth or specic ethnic groups. But the Velvets were under no obligation to advocate for anyone, and this granted them a degree of autonomy from the familiar dialectic of power/resistance. Rather theirs is the place of the specic intellectual who surveys local sites where power emerges from practice (Foucault Politics xv). The Velvet Underground and Foucaults work share somethinga sense of being in the 60s moment, but not entirely of it. Foucault, unlike many of his academic contemporaries, was prepared to commit himself to the students cause, while at the same time being highly skeptical of its rhetoric and ideology. Similarly the Velvets were a rock and roll band, but also anti-rock: the most inuential band to come out of white rocking Americaever . . . do they even count as rock and roll? Probably not . . . and thats what so important about them (Thompson 2). Their work is a critical engagement with rock and roll discourses of populism, liberation, sexuality, authenticity, and particularly messianic assertions about social change, a skepticism also evident in the Rolling Stones: But what can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band? (Street Fighting Man). Similarly unimpressed by the counterculture, the Kinks questioned its sexual mores (Barrios 149; Baxter-Moore 152; Cannon 199). Like Foucault, all these groups were caught up in a popular movement that emphasized resistance to the dominant social orderat the same time, their work casts doubt on the efcacy of a simple binary us/them model of power relations. The Repressive Hypothesis Perhaps the salient point of comparison between Foucault and the Velvets is their treatment of sexuality, which is a key theme in their work, in rock and roll, and in

Popular Music and Society

167

1960s discourse more generally (Frith and McRobbie 371). Since Freud, sex has been the focus of a liberatory project in Western thoughtto be freed by analysis, the talking cure, the lifting of layers of repression that revealed its essential truth, liberating neurotics from their unspoken neuroses and secret shame. This is what Foucault terms the repressive hypothesisthe argument that sex has been repressed by power, the bourgeoisie, and capitalism. The way to free ourselves from this repression is by talking about it, displaying it, and of course doing it, thereby achieving both sexual and political liberation. Books such as Comforts The Joy of Sex (1972), Reubens Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1969), and Masters and Johnsons Human Sexual Response (1966) testify to the increasing discursive prominence of sexuality in this period. Sexual liberation was central to the 1960s counterculture, and many saw rock and roll as its most powerful expressiona means by which sex could be spoken of, indeed celebrated as a natural desire, attaining freedom from bourgeois respectability and liberating body from mind. Rock and roll is discussed as releasing the pent-up sexuality of teenagers or as a reaction to middle-class puritanical oppression. This relates closely to a second point about ethnicityrock and roll incorporated the joyful carnality of black popular culture, as expressed in pleasure in movement and expression, the beat of the music and its repetitive nature. Sexuality also features in its critique: for example, the claim that popular cultures emphasis on sexuality is symptomatic of the easy gratications of mass cultural production which aim to lull the audience into accepting the capitalist status quo (Adorno and Horkheimer 38 39). Finally there is the feminist critique that rocks sexual liberation empowers mainly men. Foucault argues that sex has been annexed to the same kind of binary oppositional model that characterizes western thought about freedomto be free, you have to struggle against power, which is trying to oppress you. But in The Will to Knowledge, the rst volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that sex has not been oppressed. Rather it has proliferated in certain areasthere has been a long-running institutional discourse about sex, which corresponds to the degree to which it has been problematized in respectable society. Sex has historically been dened as a problem for authorityfor the Church it was to be tackled by confession; the sinner was to name and confess all his sexual thoughts. The naming of sex became a means by which the Church could assert its power over the individual. As the power of the Church waned and the state increased, this sexual discourse moved from being a matter between confessor and priest to a matter of the individual and the state (Will 26). Confession was formalized so it could serve as empirical evidence for scientic enquiry (Will 6567). The focus moved from censuring and punishing immoral acts to scientically investigating and interpreting the individuals who did them (Will 36).
What came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals . . . of those who did not like the opposite sex. . . . It was time for all these gures . . . to step forward and speak, to make the difcult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same, but they were listened to. (Will 38 39)

168

M. Bannister

But this scientization of sex as sexuality or scientia sexualis is neither an innocent nor a simply progressive move. Rather it is a way of linking the formerly private matter of sexuality with the general health of a society. On the one hand, there was an increasing concern with managing population, ensuring its health, purity, and vigor. This deployment of alliance centered on the married couple (Will 106). But the focus steadily shifted towards its (presumably more studiable) other, the deviant. Modern western societies . . . organize their practices through actively producing scandalous identities or subject roles, such as the delinquent, who serve as the other against which normality can be measured (Danaher, Schirato, and Webb 61). As such there was a growth of sex-related terms, a deployment of sexuality: homosexuality, masturbation, sexual deviancy, female hysteria. Most of these terms diagnose specic ills or aberrations that science then addressed to create a normal, healthy, productive sexuality: Foucault then argues that Freud reunited these two disparate strandsthe normal and abnormalin the Oedipus complex, which introduces sexual deviancy into the heart of the family drama (Will 130). Because the Oedipus complex is also about identity formation, it equates sexuality with subjectivitysex becomes the secret of identity, scrutinized and painstakingly revealed through the clinical/psychoanalytic gaze. Another way of saying this is that techniques such as confession and observation/classication of deviancy (the perverse implantation) are instrument-effectstypes of enquiry which, although seemingly neutral, construct their objects in advance, in this case a subject identied by and with his or her sexuality. The concluding chapter of Will indicates how these truth-generating discourses around sexuality are linked to a change in the nature of power in Western societyfrom a personication (God, the monarch, the father) that is directly interventionist and prohibitiveif you steal, your hand will be chopped offto a regulatory model (bio-power) which seeks rather to understand and shape subjects both through discipline of individuals and the regulation of populations (Will 140 44). Authority is internalized by the subjects, rather than having to be imposed. The key apparatus of bio-power is the gaze, which is not explicitly dened in Will but is in the earlier works The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish (Shumway 46, 53). In the former, the example is the patient/doctor relationship in Western medicine, and the movement towards a penetrating, scientic scrutiny of the patients body as the prerequisite for medical knowledge (Shumway 45). Discipline and Punish shifts the focus to criminal justicethe gaze becomes an alternative to punitive approaches such as isolation, exclusion (the dungeon), and physical punishment. Deviance is not to be locked away but to be revealed and examined through the panopticon, a surveillance device by which one sees everything without ever being seen (Foucault Discipline 202). The prison individuates its inmates (they are all in separate cells) and each cell is observed from a central point. The gaze as an instrument-effect creates effects without actually doing anything. Thus the panopticon is a perfection of power [which] should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary (Discipline 201) as inmates are (supposedly) obliged to act as if

Popular Music and Society

169

they are always under observation. This observational model is closely linked to scientic knowledgethe prison is also a laboratory where the differential effects of interventions on individual subjects can be measured and compared. Although this sounds repressive, Foucault emphasizes rather the constitutive or productive aspects of mechanisms of power (gaze, classication) that create the phenomena they purport to observe (Will 4748). They produce real effects in the form of deviant subjects who are understood (and try to understand themselves) in these terms: the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species (Will 43). The effects of this power are not simply regulatory. Once a term like homosexuality is in discourse, parties can position themselves differentially in relation to itcondemning or identifying with this new variety of deviance. It becomes the object of various power plays (Jagose 80). The Velvets description of perversities such as sadomasochism (Venus in Furs; Femme Fatale), homosexuality (Sister Ray), and transsexuality (Candy Says) transformed rock and roll discourse. The previously diffuse and romantic countercultural aura of sexual freedom was thus nailed down and particularized, objectied through details, which also had the effect of highlighting its most conservative assumptionthat heterosexuality would continue to be the norm. The point is not that there hadnt been deviant sexuality in rock and roll before, but that the act of naming unites previously disparate phenomena and transforms their meaning through inserting them in a discourse. The Velvets were rocks rst explicitly faggot band (Bangs 373; Bockris 109, 119, 139). The gaze in its various manifestationsconfession; surveillance; scientic, psychoanalytic, or objective observationis a dening feature of the Velvets oeuvre: the symbolic identication of both the Velvets and their fans . . . is not with the junkie, the paranoiac, the hustler or the freak, but with an idealized image of the detached observer who can walk through this urban twilight and . . . make it into something beautiful (Gilbert 39). There is certainly something of the panopticon in the way that their songs deal with a procession of alienated and deviant subjects, each locked in his or her own little subjective cell, confessing his or her truth to an invisible narrator. This distanced approachoutrageous in its refusal to be outragedis underlined by the songs lyrical and musical modes of address: inexpressive in the objectivity of their descriptions, in the way that they describe feelings from a second- or third-person perspective, or from the rst-person perspective of someone who doesnt seem to have any feelings at all (Heroin). On the rst album especially, the stiff, icy majesty of Nicos vocals and Lou Reeds deadpan talk-singing are underscored by the unyielding quality of the musical settings robotic, unswinging rhythms, the ubiquitous drone, and the dissonance and harshness of the sound, all smacking of an overall indifferencean inhumanity that Foucault has also been accused of (Danaher, Schirato, and Webb 31 32). The discourse of reportage often lurks in discussion of the Velvets lyrics, whether seen as uninching realism or, as more soberly proposed by Geoffrey Cannon to Lou Reed in interview, as a journalists ability to mirror what there wasand isto see in

170

M. Bannister

New York. Reed responds: How did you know? (Cannon 197). The journalistic/scientic imperative to investigate, to describe, to extract secrets from objects, and the objects corresponding compulsion to be known, structure point of view in the Velvets lyrics. They possess a matter-of-fact explicitness and exactness of description which makes the countercultures generalized romantic concept of love and sex look rather pale:
Put jelly on your shoulder Let us do what you fear most That from which you recoil but which still makes your eyes moist (Some Kinda Love) Severin, Severin, speak so slightly Severin, down on your bended knee Taste the whip, in love not given lightly Taste the whip, now plead for me (Venus in Furs)

This insistence on looking at specic practices rather than universalizing is contiguous with Foucaults insistence that we locate power at the extreme points of its exercise . . . where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices (Power/Knowledge 97). Moreover, the Velvet Underground insistently relates power to sex, literally through naming practices like sado-masochism, where power and sex are intertwined (even the bands name was taken from a book on S&M) (Bockris 98). Subjects achieve (sexual) satisfaction through power, not despite it: Dont you holler, darling dont you bawl and shout, Im feeling good now, gonna work it on out (Waiting for the Man). It would be tempting to say that pleasure in the Velvets is always pleasure at someones expense. But this might oversimplify practices like S&M, which are based on mutual consent. Rather, pleasure is always negotiated, as in the to-and-fro discussion between Margarita and Tom in Some Kinda Love. Pleasure is not prior to discourse.

Between Thought and Expression Confession is central to both Foucault (Will 59) and the Velvets, whether the rstperson frankness of Heroin, the prayer (Jesus), or the recurring device of recording a point of view: Stephanie says; Lisa says; Candy says. The use of confession here is not to be confused with confessional singer songwriters, whose music lyrics present, reveal, or express a personal point of view, usually identied with the singer what David Byrne has referred to as the exaggerated individuality that is the normal point of view . . . in rock (in Gans 52). This kind of reading is not particularly applicable to the Velvets; no one to my knowledge has ever interpreted Jesus as proof that they were Christians. Foucault writes: one does not confess without the presence . . . of . . . authority (Will 61), and similarly in the Velvets work, confession is always put in a dramatic context, whether through the device of reported speech or through the monstrosity revealed, which solicits a response from the listener

Popular Music and Society

171

(Heroin). The use of these devices emphasizes the way that the revelation of the speakers interiority is also a performance for an audience. It is usually sex that is spoken of: Lisa says that she has her fun/And shell do it with just about anyone; Candy says Ive come to hate my body, and all that it requires. The repetition of the formula X says functions as the chorus, which highlights the discursive event, rather than the content. This dramatization of the confessional mode tends to highlight its social, rather than its personally expressive function. The obligation to tell the truth makes sense only if we imagine that someone else will understand and interpret our truth. It is a demonstration of the gaze as an invisible power that disciplines subjects by making them reect on their own (sexual) behavior: It was . . . through a certain mode of domination . . . that the subject could . . . tell the truth (Foucault Politics 3839). However, confession is not just about abasing oneself before authority. It can perform other functions. The supposed objectivity of the gaze is complicated by the luridness of the subject matter, allowing the gazer a double pleasure. Like the reader of a crime novel identifying with the detective, the revelation of solving the crime, of being in control, has an extra payback in the voyeuristic contemplation of the spectacle of criminal perversity (Reeds lyrical debt here is to the hard-boiled but also clinical style of Raymond Chandler) (Bockris 70). This oscillation between voyeurism and detachment clearly draws on Warholthe lurid and sensational are presented in a totally matter-of-fact manner. Indeed, confession can provide sexual pleasure for both parties, literally, in Venus in Furs: now plead for me. When Lisa says . . . shell do it with just about anyone, the relation of confessor/confessee is charged, as power and pleasure mix together:
This form of power demanded constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise. . . . There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure. This produced a two-fold effect: an impetus was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further . . . the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encircled it . . . .They were xed by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they received. (Foucault Will 44)

For Foucault, the gaze is part of a circuit of pleasure: The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and . . . the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power . . . [producing] perpetual spirals of power and pleasure (Foucault Will 45, emphasis in original). Although the gaze appears disinterested, Foucault argues that it does change things. In the Factory, a milieu the band would have been familiar with, Warhols gaze guratively represented by the mechanical dead eye of the cameraincited outrageous performances from his would-be superstars, most notably his screen tests, where Warhol simply set the camera running and walked away, giving debutantes a blank canvas on which to perform, and to fail, which was for Warhol the point of the exercise: By making himself the prime witness of [their] pathetic dream of

172

M. Bannister

autonomy, Warhol has achieved his own airtight image of autonomy . . . a master of passive power (Sargeant 9092; Koch 121). To fail is to crack, to give up ones persona, and confess ones truth, and this is the exact moment that many Velvets songs capture (Bockris 113). Film is a mirror, and the mirror is adjunct to the gaze, analogous to the confessor/confessee relationship and its power dynamics. To look in the mirror is to invest ones self-image with the social awareness of its mediation, and is generally a mark of those who are already abnormally visiblei.e. the woman, the madman, the non-white, just as the feminine act of admiring oneself provides for the viewer both pleasure and moral condemnation of vanity. Mirrors or self-reections occur in a number of Velvets songs: Ill be Your Mirror, Pale Blue Eyes, Candy Says, Im SET FREE, and Beginning to See the Light. These can be subdivided into two groups, reecting the self (Beginning to See the Light, Im Set Free), and reecting others (Ill be Your Mirror; Pale Blue Eyes). Of course, the confession/reported speech songs (X says) can also be read as mirroring. The key lyric in Candy Says, What do you think Id see, if I could walk away from me?, seems especially pertinent to the sexuality/identity theme if the song is about transsexual/Warhol superstar Candy Darling (who also turns up more explicitly in Reeds Walk on the Wild Side). The self-reexive songs deal with states of narcissistic grandiosity and messianic delusion. Beginning to See the Light and Im Set Free employ a religious discourse (much in evidence on the third album, The Velvet Underground) of personal salvation. On Beginning, Reed interjects whoops and appeals into the lyric like an old-time gospel preacher: I wanna tell all you people, now. He sounds elated, but hes not making a whole lot of sense: Some wine in the morning, a little breakfast at night. By the end of the song, his solipsism is plain to see: There are troubles in these times/But whoo! none of them are mine! Im Set Free also employs quasi-religious paradoxes: Ive been set free/Ive been bound; I was blinded but now I see. But the climactic lines suggest that true freedom is achievable only in death: I saw my head laughing, rolling on the ground/and now Im set free. This paradox, literalized through the impossibility of seeing ones own severed head (except in a dream), demonstrates that liberation needs a witnesstaken together, the songs suggest that freedom and love (specically religious) are mutually incompatible or, as Reed put it elsewhere, some kinds of love/are mistaken for vision (Some Kinda Love). Freedom requires a relational contextit is dened by power. Pale Blue Eyes and Ill be Your Mirror are much gentler, more conventionally romantic numbers. As such, they appear a lot more reciprocal; the reexive imagery in these songs tries to include the Other: Ill be your mirror, reect what you are, if you dont know; If I could make the world as pure and strange as what I see/Id put you in the mirror I put in front of me (Pale Blue Eyes). The conditional if suggests some doubt about whether this is possible, however. The sum total of these references seems to suggest that self-knowledge is a delusion unless it is shared, but in the act of sharing it loses its claim to absoluteness because it is always mediated. Of course, this is precisely Foucaults point about discourse and identityidentity is not within us,

Popular Music and Society

173

it is what we continuously create in interaction with others. Although Foucaults gaze may at rst seem oppressive, it also means that all human identities are constructed through gazes of various kinds. To be ourselves, we need to be seen by others being ourselves. There is no exterior place where one can be outside the gaze or outside power. Describing the ways it has functioned institutionally does not mean that the gaze or power as instrument-effect is only a tool of domination; rather it is an omnipresent resource that can be used by anyone.

The Velvets and Ethnicity The Velvets work also critiques the dominant discourse on Afro-American (black) ethnicities in relation to popular culture. For example, Norman Mailers White Negro argues for emergent black culture as a return of the repressed to Western civilization; in other words, the repressive hypothesis (Bannister 34 35, 46 47). In rock culture, ethnicity was similarly interpreted as (il)legitimating rocks origins in a pure folk culture: the illicit coupling of marginalized blues and country traditions spawn[ing] a bastard wild child (Keightley 125). Keir Keightley comments further: rock historians have misinterpreted . . . taste for African American music . . . as overt political statements. Instead, white youth . . . adopt this music as a sign of youths own, privileged difference, expressing . . . their refusal of the mainstream (125). Finally, blackness in rock has been heard as related to projects of sexual emancipation and freedomidealized, stereotyped as noble savageryboth more liberated, more in touch with nature, but also more uninhibited and dangerous. The Velvets relation to ethnicity is complexwhile black musical inuences are clear, especially in their later work (Reeds singing, Sterling Morrisons bluesy guitar playing, a fondness for improvisation over repetitive rhythm structures), other parts of their output, particularly their rst two albums, suggest almost a negation of blackness, through a combination of European high art references, an alienated, assaultive aesthetic of leaden rhythms and harsh grinding timbres. Listening to the outtakes on Peel Slowly and See, one notices how carefully the band expunged other genres from their recorded output and thereby any comfortable framework of listener references. Reed claims that at early Velvets rehearsals you could be ned for playing a blues lick, although this was probably a response to the contemporary popularity of white appropriations of the blues (Bockris 92). In Im Waiting for the Man, black culture is not idealized eitherits where you get your drugs from:
Hey, white boy, what you doin uptown? Hey, white boy, you chasin our women around? Oh pardon me sir, its the furthest from my mind Im just lookin for a dear, dear friend of mine.

Im Waiting for the Man turns a fantasy of blackness into a much more concrete description of a real-life interaction, in which the power positions of black and white

174

M. Bannister

are reversedthe man is not a white boss, as in working for the man but a black dealer. Black men call the narrator boy and he calls them sir, reversing the assumptions of white supremacy. The narrators relationship to the man is totally dependentindeed Reed actually sings the sexually suggestive waiting for my man, implicitly paralleling his quest for the needle with his awe at black manhood. In the nal verse, however, the narrator, having presumably got his x, now takes the position of mastery attributed to the man. This moment reproduces the instinctual assumed nature of blackness (but is also a part of the high). Tomorrow he will have to go back to the black source to score again. This reading suggests an ironic historical account of perceived white male inadequacy in popular musicalways dependent on the black injection for a life-giving x. Reed later wrote his own version of Mailers White Negro in I Wanna be Black (on Street Hassle). Alternative music has been profoundly inuenced by the way the Velvets developed a new musical language for expressing bad vibes without using the blues (which could be played authentically only by black blues men) (Bangs 146, 278). I dont think the Velvets denied the importance of black musicrather, like Foucault, their work registers a skepticism about any attempt to capture the exact essence of things . . . [rather] they have no essence or . . . their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms (Reader 78). The Velvets doubts about rocks origins were just as profound as Foucaults about Western reason. Conclusion: To Find a New Illusion Many commentators have accused the Foucault of History of Sexuality of nihilismif power is everywhere, how are we supposed to resist it (Halperin 21 22; Danaher, Schirato and Webb 31 32)? However, Foucaults active support for oppositional movements is well documented, the key being that he avoided appealing to universals such as freedom and truth but instead empowered minorities to speak for themselves: the effect of Foucaults political approach to discourse is not to collapse truth into power but to shift the focus of our attention from matters of truth to matters of power (Halperin 31, original emphasis). Foucault counsels survival and resistance, not liberation (Halperin 31), working with existing discourses, rather than seeking to escape them: We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse . . . there is not on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the eld of force (Will 100 01). In the eld of rock and roll discourse, there is no better example of this strategic approach than the Velvet Underground. In terms of enabling others to speak, we have only to look at the multifaceted inuence of the band on subsequent music, especially alternative rock. Only a thousand people bought the rst Velvet Underground album, but all of them went out to form a band (Brian Eno, qtd. in Frith and Horne 112). Punk and 80s alternative rock are all unthinkable without the Velvet Underground. Mark E. Smith . . . Siouxsie (and the Banshees) and Ian

Popular Music and Society

175

Curtis . . . would certainly have known all the words to Heroin, just as could be said of Ian McCullough [sic ], Bobbie Gillespie [sic ] or Johnny Marr (Gilbert 36). The point about a song like Heroin is not so much its words as its chords (I IV throughout) and its simple rhythm, which can be easily mastered by even a rank amateur. Similarly, feedback and distortion effects are within reach of anyone with an amplier and fuzzbox. Such effects dont depend on expert knowledge and may even be impeded by it. The Velvets approach enabled new forms of production by democratizing rock discourse so that non-musicians could participate. This is not to say that alternative rock is the voice of the marginalized, even though it might represent itself that way, but it did allow a whole lot of different kinds of music to be made. Likewise, the fact that indie rock often draws on traditional binaries of freedom from oppression (of mainstream music) and Utopian ideals of free music (see Lester Bangs) should not blind us to the fact that in practice indie is always a negotiation with a dominant discourse, rather than a simple negation of itfor example, that it is a form of capitalism. David Hesmondhalgh has shown the complex relations of production between UK indie labels and the industry, how indies balance nancial viability with street credibility, making a living without selling out. The perversities the Velvets catalogued gave rise to new sexually ambiguous stars like Bowie (Chambers 132 35). That is, they established camp as a rock category, as a possible subject position. For Jeremy Gilbert they produce queer rock that opened up new gender positionalities, which may be true to some degree, but it has a certain familiar air of advocacy about itthe Velvets were good because they freed people up, they dreamt of a better future and so on (Gilbert 43). It would be simplistic to say that the Velvets promoted homosexuality as a lifestyle or as a politics of difference. Homosexuality and androgyny were, for Bowie et al., personae that could be employed, but also taken off again. Foucault argues that:
Gay sexuality is to be thought of as a dynamic mode in which the refusal of a more traditional lifestyle emanates from a sexual choice that transforms ones mode of being; sexuality should be used to experiment, to invent new relations in which desire is problematized in a world of polymorphous perversions. One should not be a homosexual but one who clings passionately to the idea of being gay. 24) (Lhomosexualite

Identication rather than identity is the keyto be homosexual is not so interesting as the possibilities of becoming or acting, which in turn suggests that subjectivities are constituted through engagement in various social discourses, rather than pre-existing, solid identities. In White Boys, White Noise, I explore the possibilities the Velvets and Warhol opened up for new types of ambivalently masculine personae in punk and alternative rock. For many musicians and music fans growing up in the 1970s, searching for a rationale and/or modus operandi for participating in an increasingly reexive, selfcritical, and fragmented rock culture, the Velvets anti-utopian rhetoric clearly hit the

176

M. Bannister

spota band that seemed to afrm the vitality of rock and roll, while never having been compromised or vitiated by its mass cultural agenda (commodication) or by countercultural rhetoric about saving the world. The Velvets insistence on specicity and their ironic awareness of their own practice, their skeptical refusal to believe in the grand narrative of rock, equipped them for an age of disillusionment and reassessment. Which is not to say the Velvets are entirely pessimistic:
Jenny said when she was just ve years old There was nothin happenin at all . . . . She started shakin to that ne ne music You know her life was saved by rock n roll

On rst hearing, Rock and Roll would seem to y in the face of the thesis of this essay, an apparently utopian hymn of praise to the redemptive power of rock music. Rock and Roll is a meta-textlike Chuck Berrys Rock and Roll Music, Led Zeppelins Rock and Roll, the Rolling Stones, Its Only Rock and Roll, and I Love Rock and Roll (popularized by Joan Jett) and so on. Such songs are usually afrmative and rst-person: the music is identied with its performance and thereby its putative subject. However, meta-texts can also be reexivereminding us that a performance is not identical with its subject. In the Velvets song the promised redemption is qualied: about ve years old is a little young to be in need of saving. It is narrated in the past tense and is specic in time and placeNew York, the past, dancing to the radioand is third-person observation, as Velvets songs often are. The claim that rock and roll can save lives is clearly a situational oneyes, dancing to the radio is a ne thing, but it is just a moment, specic and concrete. That is, rock and roll is not transcendent but valuable for particular persons (fans) in particular moments. While [punk] denied that rock and roll represented the emotional life or real social experiences of its fans, it reconnected the music and the fan (Grossberg 118), partly by denying that rock music does what people say it does. This shifts the emphasis away from rock and roll itself , from what it means to how it works, a thoroughgoing materialism which was part of the Velvets aesthetic and accordingly also became part of punk (Willis Velvet 73). Lawrence Grossberg describes popular music as a mode of functioning, or a form of affective empowerment, the point being that the power of the music lies not in what it says but what it does, in how it makes one move and feel (113). It doesnt depend on the mediation of meaning. This is consistent with Foucault: the economy of discoursestheir intrinsic technology . . . this, and not a system of representations . . . determines . . . what they have to say (Will 68 69). To apply this idea to the Velvets and 1960s rock is perhaps to suggest that rock and roll works, but not by being reduced to a single set of identications. Rather the rock formation has to be understood as a temporary and almost fortuitous alignment of a number of economic and cultural elds, which led to the articulation of a particular set of possibilities. In this sense, it was, as the Velvets termed it, a new illusion.

Popular Music and Society

177

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993. 29 43. Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Vintage, 1987. Bannister, Matthew. White Boys, White Noise. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Barrios, Greg. An Interview with Sterling Morrison. All Yesterdays Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966 1971. Ed. Clinton Heylin. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006. 139 54. Baxter-Moore, Nick. This is Where I BelongIdentity, Social Class, and the Nostalgic Englishness of Ray Davies and the Kinks. Popular Music and Society 29.2 (2006): 145 65. Bockris, Victor. Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Cannon, Geoffrey. The Insects of Someone Elses Thoughts. All Yesterdays Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print, 1966 1971. Ed. Clinton Heylin. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006. 196 200. Chambers, Iain. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, 1985. Comfort, Alex. The Joy of Sex. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Danaher, Geoff, Tony Schirato, and Jen Webb. Understanding Foucault. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. Intro. Michel Foucault. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1973. . Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. . The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. . The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. dans lAntiquite . Masques 13 (1982): 15 24. . Lhomosexualite . Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977 1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988. . Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London, New York: Methuen, 1987. Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. Rock and Sexuality. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 371 89. Gans, David. Talking Heads. New York: Avon, 1985. Gilbert, Jeremy. White Light/White Heat: Jouissance beyond Gender in the Velvet Underground. Living through Pop. Ed. Andrew Blake. London: Routledge, 1999. 31 48. Grossberg, Lawrence. Is There Rock After Punk? On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 111 24. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Hesmondhalgh, David. Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre. Cultural Studies 13 (1999): 34 61. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory. Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1996. Keightley, Keir. Reconsidering Rock. Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 109 42. Koch, Stephen. Stargazer: Andy Warhols World and His Films. London: Calder & Boyars, 1974. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Tombeau de lIntellectuel. Paris: Galilee, 1984. MacDonald, Ian. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico, 1998. Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. San Francisco: City Lights, 1957. Masters, William, and Virginia Johnson. Human Sexual Response. Toronto and New York: Bantam, 1966. Reuben, David. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). New York: St. Martins Paperbacks, 1969.

178

M. Bannister

Sargeant, Jack. Voyeurism, Sadism and Transgression: Screen Notes and Observations on Warhols Blow Job and I, a Man. Underground U.S.A: Filmmaking beyond the Hollywood Canon. Ed. Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider. London: Wallower, 2002. Shumway, David. Michel Foucault. Charlottesville, VA, and London: UP of Virginia, 1989. Thompson, Dave. Alternative Rock. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000. Unterberger, Richie. The Velvet Underground. All Music Guide 29 June 2008. ,http://www. allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?pamg&sql11:giftxqr5ldde. Willis, Ellen. Velvet Underground. Stranded: Rock And Roll for a Desert Island. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Da Capo, 1996. 71 83.

Discography
Reed, Lou. Street Hassle. Arista, 1978. The Rolling Stones. Beggars Banquet. Decca, 1968. The Velvet Underground. Loaded. Cotillion, 1970. . Peel Slowly and See. Polydor, 1995. . The Velvet Underground. Verve/Polygram, 1969, 1985. . The Velvet Underground and Nico. Verve/Polygram, 1967, 1985. . White Light/White Heat. Verve/Polygram, 1968, 1985.

Videography
Andy Warhol. The South Bank Show. BBC, 1987. Hang onto Yourself. Dancing in the Street. BBC, 1996.

Copyright of Popular Music & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.