Rock Music

What experience of reality is to be found in the music? What significance and what cultural values
are locked up in the hammering, motoric rhythms and the often shrill sounds that are transmitted to
a mass audience through the songs?
Rock songs are not art songs, whose hidden meanings should be sought in their form and structure.
It was only those people who believed they had to defend these songs against their real character as
a popular art form who never viewed them in this way.
The reality is that rock music stands right in the middle of the commercial whirlpool of mass culture,
of the undifferentiated circulation of cultural assets, messages, images and soundsbut a synthesis
that was able to follow its own laws of aesthetics in the context of media communications,
precisely because it only met fragments of this and that, rather than being weighed down by the
millstone of tradition. Even rock n roll was in fact nothing but a commercial conglomeration of
playing styles and traditions torn from their original contexts from the Afro-American blues and
rhythm & blues tradition as well as from different regional dance music styles of county music.
To see young rock fans merely as passive puppets dancing on the economic and ideological apron
strings of the capitalist music industry is a gross oversimplification of the problem. This thesis refuses
to recognize the cultural potency of class conflict and the struggle over meaning and value in relation
to the popular arts which results from the social contradictions of capitalism. Rock fans are not an
undifferentiated mass of manipulated consumers. Their relationship with this music, with the values
that it embodies and the meanings which circulate in it follow socially very diverse everyday
experiences which even the music industry must go along with upto a point, making a similar
distinction between social groups, if it wants to market its products successfully.
The origin of such a comparison is a fundamental lack of understanding of the aesthetic strategies
which support an experience of art embedded in everyday life. Rock is not considered through the
critical apparatus of contemplation, of consideration by visual or aural means its reception is an
active process, connected in a practical way with everyday life. Rock songs are not objects of
contemplation, to be assessed according to how much hidden meaning they reveal in their
innermost structures. Their banality and superficiality, their shrill, colourful and trivial nature are not
flaws.
Rock songs are cultural texts, which circulate in the profane language of gestures, images,
fashionable ideas and sounds, linked to the unprepossessing elements of everyday life, to the
events without prestige.
These are new experiences of art, linked to the technology of mass communication and mediated in
the daily lives of their recipients. These experiences have resulted in a concept of music for which
the conceptual stance of the aesthetics of art is unsuitable. They have robbed the academic art
expert of his authority, because in this social model of art, the popular art form, everyone is an
expert. This is the deeper truth of Chuck Berrys fifties rock n roll song ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN.
The first chapter places the study of rock music into a broader cultural context, probing the
questions of the commercial value as opposed to the aesthetic value of the art, and the vast changes
due to a change in the medium, mode of recording, and popularity.

Second Chapter

Rock n roll was now the name given to that sales category in which the products on offer, and any
calculations concerning these, met the needs of the teenage record buyers.
Even if it may seem erroneous, rock songs can be compared to the window of the car in Barthes
model. Just as the form and composition of the window determine the segment of reality which is
visible through it, yet it is not the window but the scenery beyond which attracts the eye of the
onlooker so it is with rock songs. Lyrics and Music anchor them in the cultural contexts of leisure,
the everyday life and lifestyle in which they function, determining in the same way a particular,
social, segment of reality. But beyond these contexts, more comprehensive meanings are enclosed
which are as equally little formulated in lyrics and music as the scenery is displayed on the window;
but just as much linked with the lyrics and music of the songs as the view of the scenery remains
determined by the form and composition of the window. And just as the car moves through the
scenery so that new segments of reality become visible without the form and composition of the
window changing these always limit the onlookers field of view in the same way so rock songs
can be moved through the cultural scenery, always encompassing new meanings without the lyrics
and music changing. The same songs had a quite different meaning in American high schools than
they did in the leisure structures of British working-class teenagers.