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Rock Music: A Musical-Aesthetic Study

Author(s): Peter Wicke and Richard Deveson


Source: Popular Music , 1982, Vol. 2, Theory and Method (1982), pp. 219-243
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/852983

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study

by PETER WICKE

Music has rarely exerted such positively hypnotic fascination on such


masses of listeners as it has since the meteoric rise of the English
group, the Beatles, at the beginning of the 1960s. Under this influence
the leisure behaviour of young people began to undergo lasting
change, focusing around music to an extent that no one - despite the
periodically recurring waves of enthusiasm for specific vogues within
dance music - would have thought possible.* Young people in their
thousands took up music making as a leisure activity once again, to say
nothing of the masses that a single rock concert was capable of mobilis-
ing. At the same time, music has become a sociopolitical problem on a
scale never seen before, concerning teachers, sociologists and psycho-
logists equally - and it has become so in both capitalist and socialist
societies, even though with quite different emphases.t Evidently,
then, for a whole age group with a lower age limit of about twelve (and
steadily falling) and an upper limit of between twenty and twenty-five
(when family responsibilities intrude - see Dollase, Riisenberg and
Stollenwerk 1978), the process of attainment of selfhood within society
is being realised, essentially, with reference to the assimilation of this
kind of music.
The attitude of musical scholarship towards this phenomenon has
certainly been far more cautious, even though it is its own specific
subject-matter that was and is in question; and indeed one can still
hear it said that 'the continual background noise of pop and beat music
around us ... [is] neither able nor willing to enhance and enrich
human relationships, the common life or the enjoyment of the indi-
* In the German Democratic Republic it can be assumed, for example, that the fourteen
to twenty-five age-group listens to this kind of music for an average of two to three
hours a day. See Hahn 1977 and 1979, Bisky 1975 and 1981. Analogous data on the
extent and intensity of young people's encounter with rock music can also be found in
publications by youth sociologists from West European countries. See especially
Dollase, Rilsenburg and Stollenwerk 1974, Br6mse and Kitter 1972, and Wiechell
1977.
t In addition to the literature cited in the above note, see for example Fletcher 1964, Lees
1967, Miller 1967, Davies 1969, Robinson and Hirsch 1969, Jost 1976, Baacke 1969, 1971
and 1972, Wiechell 1975, Bacskai, Makara and Vitanyi 1970, Bontinck 1974, and
Blaukopf and Mark 1976.
219

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220 Peter Wicke

vidual' (Siegmund-Schultze 1978, p. 11) - this despite the


these forms of music are also a dominant factor in the ever
tice of socialist musical culture. Simply to dismiss suc
anachronistic is surely not enough, since behind them lies
methodological problematic of wide-ranging significance.
The reasons for such scepticism lie in conservative attitu
idealist concept of culture. Against the background of a ge
concept of music based solely on what has traditionally, by
agreement and through historical circumstances, been iden
'art' or 'serious' music (a concept derived from a particular n
century musical tradition: symphony, chamber music,
parts of musical reality are necessarily seen as marginal in si
as commercial deformations of art, on the one hand, and a
forms anticipatory of art, on the other. But to appeal, in the fa
to a concept of art that also incorporates, on grounds of 'b
depth', the actual mass character of everyday musical expe
immediately to run the danger of ignoring what is in fact the c
tory relationship between art and entertainment that has ari
ically as a consequence of the thorough-going capitalisation
(as well as other) culture and which continues to operate; a
leading to an unconceptualised or pluralistic eclecticism. Ne
practical, cultural and political goals of socialist society nor
cal, conceptual account of musical history can be based on
additive approach, unconcerned with inherent contradi
simply taking the various forms of musical practice as they
result of doing this is to support a cynical attitude of 'to eac
Nevertheless, it is apparent that the premises of the classica
artistic tradition, though they still apply, indirectly and negati
reference-point for the artistic avant-garde, have never bee
not now, of universal relevance to the musical experien
masses.

In the last analysis, what needs to be done


drawing of theoretical conclusions from the rea
that practice moving and moved by the masse
the masses in society, the economy, polit
activities is borne in mind; and secondly, th
matically and in terms of aesthetic theory, of t
this class, which are substantially condition
And to do this, not, for instance, in order t
and types with belated aesthetic legitimat
relate to the masses. However, conclusion
conceptualised interpretation of the notions
assessed and reached only if the kinds of m

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 221

lished outside the traditional institution of the 'concert hall' are


acknowledged. These kinds of music function in connection wi
systems of electronic mass communication that create historica
altogether novel forms of artistic production, distribution and assim
tion, which cannot be validated in terms of individual self-express
in the 'work of art' or of emphatic claims to knowledge in accordan
with the work-of-art ideal. And these species of music would th
need to undergo a theoretically mediated analysis attempting to sh
what aspects of them derive, within the overall context of life-styl
from the particular character of the relevant institutionally organi
social relationships affecting musical activity and assimilation - that
to say, from their real social functioning as mass forms of musica
practice - and are leading to new, or at least differently centre
aesthetically mediated values and value relationships.
The requirements which thus arise certainly go beyond the tr
ditional bounds of the discipline of aesthetic theory: the more so si
here the historical survival of musical forms, in quasi-self-evid
proof of their 'artistic character', cannot be a substitute for theoret
effort. Indeed, this is not the least of the reasons for the uncertaint
(or worse) induced by the constant fascination still exerted by roc
music in particular - a fascination bound up with highly developed
aesthetic structures, even as these are traditionally understood,
terms merely of the degree of differentiation and complexity of th
musical material. For, if a marxist, mass-centred conceptualisation
music theory - this especially - is to retain its raison d'etre and avo
succumbing to an 'aesthetics of bad faith' - invoking the masses
name, but in fact referring to a specialised connoisseurship - then i
traditional theoretical and methodological apparatus is put in qu
tion. A fixation with sound-forms* cannot do justice to phenomen
such as rock music. What is needed here is a new interdisciplin
approach aimed at the social anatomy of musical practice and exposi
the real functioning and aesthetic specificities of sound-shapes and
shaping processes within this. A discussion of some paradigma
aspects of the development of rock music will serve to illustrate t
point. If, in the process, the music's functional situation within th
totality of the capitalist organisational context is pushed into the ba
ground, that is not merely because the rock music of capitalist cou
tries continues to play a very considerable role in the awareness of
young people in the German Democratic Republic but, above
because an adequate theoretical approach to such music, and hence
assessment of its cultural and political importance and of its profi
* klingende Gebilde; later klangliche Gestalt and Klanggestalt (both translated as 'sou
shape') are used.

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222 Peter Wicke

within socialist musical culture, can be achieved only if the


studied in the context in which it has actually arisen.

The music which sprang up in 1959-60 in the English i


region of Merseyside, under the name 'Mersey beat',* w
spread around the world as 'beat music', and which has now
acquired the settled name 'rock music', was at first merely a
continuation of the original American rock 'n' roll of the fifties
changed circumstances, under changed assumptions and thu
quite different outward appearance. Conservative Britain, i
to other West European countries, had met the earlier rock'n
with a considerable amount of resistance, culminating even
strict prohibitions: for example, some performances of Ame
'n' roll films were prohibited by the police and some perfor
rock 'n' roll musicians were banned (see Miller 1978, p. 19). T
of enthusiasm for rock 'n' roll in Europe in general had not a lit
with a film featuring the rock 'n' roll star Bill Haley, The B
Jungle (1955), a feeble story skilfully employing the marketing
of linking the music with a school revolt. Rock 'n' roll, in f
contrary to the subsequent publicity treatment it receiv
bourgeois media as a 'musical revolution', the 'start of a new
Shaw 1969, p. 1) - was little different from every other mu
exported to Europe from the USA from the twenties on
instance those derived from early jazz, swing and bebop
words, it was a music-industry product, calculated purely in
entertainment value and based on one-time native popul
practices of various regional and ethnic types, in this case
western swing, boogie and various rhythm and blues playin
(see Kuhnke 1978). The only difference from before was that
was presented as a caricature of itself: rhythm and blue
Johnny Otis recounted that, 'We found that we moved
audiences more by caricaturing the music, you know, overd
shit - falling on your back with the saxophone, kicking yo
(quoted in Chapple and Garofalo 1977, P. 234). Thus me
rhythmic features were projected with extra emphasis into
ground, so that their sensory-motor intensity became a vog
(the catchword was 'hot'), as did stage gags, which are m
* Cf. the title of a magazine first published in Liverpool in July 1961: Mersey
Leading Beat Paper. The appearance of this magazine can be seen as a sym
relatively broad-based development in regional music. The frequently
assertion that this kind of music goes back to the Beatles is incorrect: the B
British recording dates from late 1962. This may serve to refute the pers
that it was the Beatles who, so to speak, 'invented' the music, and it thus
see the social circumstances out of which it in fact emerged.

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 223

characteristic of rock 'n' roll than any musically defined criterion: the
keyboard acrobatics of a Little Richard, the 'duck walk' of a Chuck
Berry squat-strutting across the stage with his guitar, Bill Haley's
saxophonist toppling over backwards till his head touched the floor,
and, of course, Elvis Presley's 'animal hip gyrations', which one
Chubby Checker, a singing idol now long forgotten, converted in 1960-1
into a new mass sports activity for dancers of all ages - the twist. One
feature of the original rock 'n' roll, actually, was a novelty in music-
historical terms: its disreputable aura as a generational symbol for
young people (and, still, a multiracial one). Rock 'n' roll represented a
common way of thinking and feeling on the part of a whole generation
of middle-class American youth: it served as the epitome of their sense
of life. Nevertheless, it was not their 'medium of expression', as was
made out all too readily after the event (see, for instance, Kaiser 1972,
pp. 322ff.), but rather a kind of youth status symbol. This, though, had
to do less with the concrete nature of the music than with the social
environment into which (unintentionally, without a doubt) it entered
it was a question of the social situation of post-war youth in the USA
These young people grew up, to be sure, in an atmosphere of relativ
material well-being, since war production had brought the America
economy into a phase of stable prosperity; but as a result they felt a
the more sharply and oppressively the mechanistic soullessness o
work-and-consumption, consumption-and-work, of the America
'way of life', especially against the cold-war background of recurren
stirrings of anxiety about ultimate, pointless nuclear self-destruction
A conflict between the hopes and wishes of young people, with a ro
largely outside the social division of labour and the power structure
and their future form of existence as a depersonalised mass labo
force is, in fact, all the more profoundly grasped and experienc
within the context of relative freedom from immediate material need
or, indeed, of a certain level of middle-class luxury. All the expecta-
tions of happiness perceived by this generation - apparently going
beyond material well-being but for the most part all too closely bound
up with it - were projected by them onto a kind of music, rock 'n' roll,
which they claimed as their own and in which, given the overt presence
of black rhythm and blues influences, within an atmosphere pregnant

* The weakness of the causal link between this music and the social environment it
entered is shown by the way in which it reached public consciousness. This goes bac
to a commercial radio programme on the station WJW/Cleveland which disc-jocke
Alan Freed started in 1953 and named 'The Moon Dog Rock 'n' Roll House Party'. Th
show was widely transmitted and taken up by stations in other American state
Freed's selections, kinds of music which had all been around for a long time, proved to
have such an effect on sales that they were eventually marketed under the tag 'rock'n'
roll', which Freed had introduced. See also Gillett 1970, pp. 15ff.

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224 Peter Wicke

with militant racism, dissent from the dominant culture industry was
already pre-programmed. How little rock 'n' roll was really 'their'
music, rather than the shrewd commercial exploitation of their pur-
chasing power, within the context of a polarisation of generations -
propelled, as this was, by the textile, clothing and cosmetics indus-
tries, as well as the music industry, in order to give some body to the
emerging consumer image of 'youth' - all this would require separate
study (for which see Wicke 1980, pp. 144ff.).
Nonetheless, the aura that attached itself to American rock 'n' roll
was reason enough, in Britain, for it to be met with mistrust and,
eventually, prohibitions. The very name 'rock 'n' roll' - a euphemism
for the sexual act borrowed from blues language - was enough to cause
genuine shock among a British public already proverbial for its puri-
tanism. Two additional distinguishing features marked the British
reception of the music. The first was an eventually unsuccessful
attempt, especially in the industrial agglomerations where great social
tensions prevailed (Miller 1978, pp. 9ff.), to stave off American rock 'n'
roll with bans and sanctions and to replace it with the slick dilutions
represented by the stereotyped hits of home-grown stars such as Cliff
Richard or Tommy Steele.* Behind this move, to be sure, lay deeply
entrenched interests in the British record industry which did not wish
to lose significant market shares to foreign imports (ibid. p. 7). The
second feature is connected with the skiffle revival, seen and fostered
in Britain as a regeneration of commercial big-band jazz.t In this
revival young people, particularly, took to their instruments in posi-
tively epidemic proportions. Rock 'n' roll fever found itself a base here
among young amateur performing musicians, using typical skiffle-
group forces (quickly simplified down to three guitars and percus-
sion), who tried without more ado to play for themselves the music
that the official media had withheld from them (ibid. p. 16). In the
process the model was adapted: the original musical numbers were
reduced, essentially, to harmonised melody and a basic metrical-

* 'Of the 8i British rock 'n' roll hits of 1959, only three had a close affinity to the kind of
music that had crossed the Atlantic four years earlier in the form of rock 'n' roll:
"Chantilly Lace" by Big Bopper, "High School Confidential" by Jerry Lee Lewis, and
"Stagger Lee" by Lloyd Price' (ibid. p. 21).
t Revival jazz bands had sprung up in England in the 1940s. They took their bearings
from what were seen as the 'authentic' classic bands of early New Orleans jazz. Skiffle
groups first developed within these bands as small formations adopting the repertoire
of American folk music, which had become known in England in the early 1950s,
notably thanks to the ethnologist Alan Lomax; the typical forces of these groups
were banjos, guitars, washboard (substituting for percussion) and bass (or its home-
made imitation, a box, broomstick and piece of wire). In conjunction with CND, in
which skiffle groups took part, bringing their music up to date with appropriate new
texts, this style of music became extraordinarily popular.

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 225

rhythmic structure, and the latter, in the form of a high-tension ela-


boration of fundamental accentual patterns, became the defining fea-
ture of what later spread across the world as 'beat music' - a term
derived from the music's dependence on metrical regularity (the beat)
and on rhythmic accentuation within the metre (for further details see
Wicke 198o, pp. 14off.).
However, the changes which then began to take place in music for
dances and mass musical entertainment cannot be understood merely
as musical changes, as changes in the way in which music was per-
formed. The real innovation here, in fact - within the specific
sociocultural milieu of an extremely heterogeneous street and pub
culture* and on the basis of a way of performing music which could be
mastered by non-experts and which was virtually played into existence
by them - was, initially, a new, spontaneously organised musical
practice, that is to say, one in which execution and assimilation were
spontaneously regulated to one another. And what was new here was
that it was a synthetically manufactured media-product of mass musi-
cal culture, rock 'n' roll, that was being reintegrated as a spontaneous
form of organisation of musical practice - a fact which was to have
crucial consequences.
The production and distribution of music on the highly socialised
level of mass industrialised manufacture with division of labour, and
its economic exploitation in accordance with the law of exchange
value, is in no sense merely a process external to the music. On the
contrary, as a form of social practice music always bears the stamp of
the social nature and concrete organisational structure of the rela-
tionships through which it is produced, distributed and assimilated. If
these relationships carry the stigma of exchange-value characteristics,
then this carries with it a growing tendency towards homogenisation
on the part of the perceptual, concrete aesthetic character of the musi-
cal sound-shape. The traditional bourgeois hit is a paradigmatic in-
stance of this. The musical content here is absorbed, not as a possible
object of explanation and of aesthetic assimilation on the basis of its
specific sound-shape, but merely as a means of entertainment and as a
vehicle for bourgeois individuality that has degenerated into private-
ness and is searching for its identity - in other words, it relates exclu-
sively to its interaction within the life-practice of the individual. The
sound-shape itself ultimately becomes exchangeable, focused more
and more on only the most general structural features and on merely

* This milieu has been described in great detail. The streets and pubs of Liverpool saw
encounters between folk-music styles, skiffle, the musical products of the mass media
and musical styles of differing ethnic origins; and even pop-art events had a firm hold
here. See Griffin 1964, Seuss, Donnermuth and Maier, 1965, especially pp. 38ff.

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226 Peter Wicke

superficial 'appeal'. It thus degenerates into 'effective', only nom


varied arrangements, 'tasty' sound-flavourings of unconnected
dies in the 'smart', busy rhythmicisations of industrialised
nance. (For similar findings, though resting on different theo
assumptions, see the work of the Freiburg cultural theorist
Prokop: Prokop 1972, 1973 and 1974.)
Wolfgang Fritz Haug has written of the principle of 'aesthetic abst
tion', by which he means the aesthetic 'staging' of a comm
perceptual appearance, consequent upon growing indifferen
wards its practical and functional value, its use-value (see Haug 1
1971B, and 1975). In contrast with this, music functioning as a
modity, where the perceptual appearance is in no sense external
art-specific aesthetic 'use-value', is in an exactly reversed situa
Here, exchange-value as the specific form of value of the comm
function, mediates the tendency for the practical/functional asp
use-value (music for dancing, music as background, compensation
traction) to increase in importance, in inverse proportion to the
tic aspects of use-value (the perceptual experience of musical pro
becomes more and more exchangeable). To be sure, this reversal
aesthetic-abstraction effect within the artistic situation itself go
in hand with a process of commodity-aesthetic abstraction fro
musical content: that is, the proliferation of perceptual appear
represented by record covers, performance gestures, image-bu
etc. It has the precise consequence, however, that the recip
attention is transposed to those aspects of the musical sound
that can be of practical, functional value in the widest sense, as
tainment':* rhythm, as motoric stimulus for dancing, but also as
nominal) dynamisation of time and sense of life; melody, as iso
identification-object serving as a psychic compensation for em
deficits; nominal variety in musical arrangement, serving to ab
surplus or momentarily unemployed attention-potential; te
perfectionism, as a kind of irresistible promise and guarant
use-value with functional properties as perfect as those in the t
ogy-fetish itself. This, however, leads not only to a loss of
musical, structural coherence in favour of merely nominal ens
of isolated, though practically and functionally conditioned, 'ap
effects, but also, precisely, to homogenisation on the part of th
crete, perceptual, aesthetic character of the sound-shape in

* This term refers to the multifaceted and diffuse use-situation (Gebrauchszusamm


encompassed in the everyday employment of the word.
t The purest expression of this to date has been in so-called disco music, a
stereotype developed in the late 1970s, using recording and arrangement tec
that make possible a technically perfect sound, even when transmitted in bi

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 227

Vogue becomes the principle of meaning. Behind it lies nothing other


than the tendency, inherent in the capitalist mode of production in
general, towards the universalisation of exchange: the tendency for
needs to be reduced to the lowest common denominator of an ever
greater multitude of potential purchasers.*
In contrast, when it became possible for musical form and style to b
influenced within the context of spontaneous relationships of musica
practice - a practice such as began to form in the club scene in the
Liverpool area, with Mersey beat - then the actual sound becam
significant once more. Musical content realised in sound-shapes taking
this-specific-form-and-no-other revived in value, even though what
initially emerged were merely new versions of the long-familiar. Thu
music, even within the practical, functional context of the organise
dance, became capable again of being experienced as socially sign
ficant through its specific shape. Within these relationships of musica
performance and assimilation, however, it was now not a mere ab
stract symbol of the community of a generation of young people, a
rock 'n' roll had earlier been; it was seen, in fact, as something sus-
tained by young people themselves. Given this independent aestheti
valuation of the sound-shape in its own right, socially produced in a
practical, functional context and once again experienced as significant
by virtue of the spontaneous, unmediated, direct relation betwee
musicians and public, a relationship towards music was establishe
out of which the crucial internal musical dynamic principle of rock
music arose: the power of sound, valued and experienced as signi
ficant in terms of its perceptual character. In contrast with rationalistic
constructivism, reflected in musical structural events based on 'work
of art' architectonics that are ciphers needing to be decoded and
intellectually understood, the immediate perceptual intensity an
character of sound in rock music 'unloosed chains of associations and
fantasies which included the entire life-situation of the young and
interpreted them afresh' (Naumann and Penth 1979, p. 17). The term
'sound' encapsulates this concept, and 'feeling', 'drive', 'involvement'
and 'power' are criteria for any adequate aesthetic assessment of it.
These four terms have established themselves, both among rock musi-
cians and their public, as aesthetically evaluative descriptions of the

halls and disco palaces. The musical content is reduced entirely to the formulaic
padding-out of the stereotype; it is limited to the uninterrupted and unending repeti-
tion of a few scraps of phrases.
* Marx speaks of capitalist production as production which takes place '. . only in
relation to circulation', as '. . . production that makes exchange values its exclusive
content' (Marx 1974, p. 168). Elsewhere he refers, in connection with capital, to the
. universality with which it irresistibly drives forward' (ibid. p. 314).

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228 Peter Wicke

perceptual intensity and quality of musical content. 'Feelin


empathetic understanding of musical content: its percep
prehension. 'Drive' denotes the motoric intensity of music, p
as an apparent increase in tempo without any actual acceler
temporal flow. The apparent acceleration is achieved by
density of metrical and rhythmic accent-patterns. 'Involve
notes the degree of identification with music: an assumed
tween music and the individual performing or assimilating i
indicates the perceptual intensity of music in terms of son
loudness.

The aesthetics of rock music, then, are based on different assum


tions from those which are seen as permissible in the traditional v
of art. Individuation, such as has become a norm in terms of the ae
thetic principle of originality; subjectivity of expression, via an e
more differentiated structured formation of musical processes; c
structivism, that is, the rationalised shaping of a multifaceted work
art self-sufficient as a whole and dedicated to the contemplative s
mergence of the individual experiencing his own subjectivity
thereby attaining self-consciousness - these, being postulates of a
aesthetic that developed entirely under the auspices of bourg
individualism, of the individual's knowledge, as individual, of
world and the self, and of the experience and development of his o
particular abilities and potentialities, have no part to play in r
music. Instead, the aim of rock was from the start directed not at
experience of individuality but at the experience of collectivity. It
its place, therefore, in a long historical tradition of mass forms
musical practice (see especially Otterbach 1980) which are based on
musical activity of many people interacting at the same time and in
same way - forms which structure bodily movements and proces
and which enable bodily experience to become an aesthetically me
ated pleasure. Here the creation of variants of structural form
crystallised from collective use is the formative principle on whi
sound is contoured. Seen in these terms, rock music is merely
extension, in a new social form, of a tradition that is already centu
old and carries over into the present various formative modal
achieved via relatively stable patterns of use: modalities such as t
centring (though not by any means of the same type as Europ
principles of tonality); metres imitating processes of movement; p
portional, symmetrical relationships within the musical flow, whic
a result are easily grasped and perceived; arrangements and groupi
of a restricted number of complex basic elements capable of b
stored in the memory.
However, this tradition, in the use-situation developed by youn

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 229

people within the Liverpool club scene, acquired its own distinctive
kind of meaning: the perceptual intensity of sound, often so heavily
amplified as to suggest physical tangibility,* became the direct expres-
sion of their hopes, wishes, demands and expectations of happiness.
This in turn frequently extended into an unrestrained demonstration
of mastery of techniques of sound production and manipulation, self-
validated through their sheer scale, and often directed revealingly
outwards in the form of stage and show-business gestures, which
compensated for conflict-filled experiences of reality, and which were
heavily stylised in order to emphasise a quasi-ritualistic employment
of technology.t The perceptual character of the sound, together with
the imaginative delight in physicality that was both experience and
effect of this music, were seen as bringing to life everything that in the
everyday world had to be subordinated to the rationalised demands of
school and work. Ultimately, however, the music gives vent with
unprecedented clarity to a conflict of a general nature which the
capitalist social system has produced and regularly reproduces, in the

* Amplification systems with an effective output of between seven and ten thousand
watts (as compared with maximum outputs of fifty watts in amplification systems in
domestic radio equipment) are no rarity in this music. See Souster 1975, pp. 155ff. This
has given rise to accusations by medical writers that the noise levels may be de-
trimental to health. See Psychologische Fragen der Ldrmforschung 1964. Although warn-
ings of this sort are to be taken seriously, in view of the constant increase in environ-
mental stresses on mankind, the physical and perceptually immediate presence of
sound through loudness is an aesthetic component of this kind of music which cannot
be got around by means of administratively determined decibel levels (as has been
occasionally attempted in the GDR). In addition, the figures for amplification outputs
are often incorrectly interpreted. That is, the huge growth in amplification potential
that has been seen during, say, the past ten to fifteen years in no sense means that yet
higher loudness levels are being aimed at. The reason for this is technical. Amplifiers
that have been modulated up to their output limits produce considerable sound
distortions. It is the attempt to eliminate this factor and to retain a clean, transparent
sound quality, by employing as high an output reserve as possible in the electro-
acoustic system, that underlies the introduction of these amplification outputs.
t 'Not just with the sequencer, but with the general application of synthesisers, a
strange technology cult has - unfortunately - been gradually gaining in significance.
The ... alleged need to have available as large a repertoire of sounds and effects as
possible inevitably leads to an enormous accumulation of electronic equipment ...
Awe-inspiring technology ... becomes a calculated visual effect and part of the
musician's image. Tangerine Dream have also been experimenting with gigantic
technical effects, and in a publicity photo they have built them into a kind of "electro-
nic altar" ' (Behrendsen and Rilsenberg 1978, p. 147; see also pp. 136ff.).
The symbolic content of musicians' stage gestures is a subject worthy of separate
study. There are many different expressions of the ritualisation of technology here: the
accumulation of electronic systems that the performers can in most cases scarcely
master any longer (a synthesiser usually has several million different possible sounds,
of which a dozen are used at the outside - and yet every self-respecting group has
several such pieces of equipment at a given time); the commonly seen self-
surrendering and ritualistic solemnity with which keyboard players, especially, use
their instruments; the sexually symbolic gestures of guitarists.

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230 Peter Wicke

form of a positively schizophrenic cleavage of personality: whereas, in


the sphere of consumption, in the important sectors of the capitalist
economic structure constituted by the leisure, culture and holiday
industries, a personality type is socially produced for which the model
is 'consumer pleasure' - infantile desire for possessions, unrestrained
satisfaction of needs, cultivation of the play instinct and spontaneity of
behaviour (especially of purchasing behaviour, of course) - on the
other hand, the work process based predominantly on wage labour
gives rise to demands on the personality such as self-restraint, renun-
ciation of needs, diligence, willingness to work, thrift and submissive-
ness towards authority. Young people react to such conflicts from
within a social space in which aesthetic practice can still become a
counter-project. The difference between their daily life and the sen-
suousness of sound in the musical experience - as it were, prefiguring
spontaneous self-realisation - has, certainly, created mass awareness
of the fact that individual bourgeois existence excludes those very
forms of life in which imagination and creativity, sensuousness and
community can be realised in freedom from all bourgeois deforma-
tions; it has at the same time, however, diverted the protest thereby
articulated into a political utopianism of individual self-realisation via
unrestrained spontaneity and beyond all social necessity. 'Thus they
come to terms with their alienated leisure in alienated forms', to quote
the comment of Jiirgen Habermas (1956, p. 221) on the spread of rock
'n' roll fever back in 1956 - an assertion that was only to become even
more emphatically valid.
For rock music was itself integrated into the circuit of exploitation of
capital. At the end of 1962 the British firm EMI, the world's biggest
entertainment concern, took the Beatles under contract; ten years later,
in 1972, the annual turnover of the American music industries alone
amounted to 7.376 thousand million dollars (Chapple and Garofalo
1977, p. 172). Rock became a huge-scale, highly monopolised and
depersonalised form of industrial enterprise,* and one in which the

* Production and distribution in the capitalist record industry is controlled throughout


the world by a few really gigantic corporate conglomerates: EMI, CBS, RCA-Victor, etc.
CBS, for example, the biggest United States record producer, had eleven labels on the
market in 1970. (Originally the label was identical with the manufacturer; today, as a
result of mergers, several labels commonly belong to a single firm.) CBS also owns
some hundreds of regional radio and television stations, big national television and
radio production networks, the CBS publishing group, manufacturing and sales
concerns in entertainments electronics (Pacific Stereo Hifi), record shops, the Discount
Records store-chain and companies manufacturing musical instruments (Steinway
keyboard instruments, Fender guitars, Rogers percussion instruments, Rhodes-E
pianos and Leslie loudspeakers). By means of overlappings of capital and personnel at
directorial and other levels, CBS is linked with, among other bodies, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Atlantic Refining Company, the Council of Foreign Relations and the

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 231

use-situation previously developed by young people was transformed


into a commercially calculated element in the realisation of exchange-
value. The spontaneous attitudes towards music and towards one
another that had been the real practice of young people were thus
increasingly displaced onto the music itself, as a promise of use-value
that was now merely symbolised in sound. The formerly real social
interaction with the music was, so to speak, incorporated into it and
now became the programmatic meaning of its sound-shape. From this
arose increasingly differentiated formal shapes and increasingly differ-
entiated and nuanced sound-images, because perceptually intense
metrical and rhythmic stimulation of bodily movement was by itself no
longer enough; whatever had previously been at least partially realised
in interaction with the music now had to be brought into being by
projection onto it.
This process released an enormous volume of artistic productivity:
the pace of development, the profusion of different, sometimes even
conflicting conceptions of music and performance, are testimony of
that (for an initial survey see Hartwich-Wiechell 1974). But these al-
ways remained exclusively tied to the immediate perceptual force of
sound. 'Expression' in this situation is not the transformation of mean-
ing into structural interrelationships of semantic musical units de-
coded according to the inner logic and appropriateness (hence also
expressive force) of their combined overall structure: it is the immedi-
ate perceptual experience itself. Rock music is not rational, like music
in the European art tradition; it is dynamic, shaped by bodily move-
ment, a communicational complex of musical patterns and images of
movement that is to be experienced and understood in perceptual,
bodily terms. It was to this end that the potentialities of sound produc-
tion and manipulation created by electronic technology were more and
more extensively and variously deployed (see Souster 1975), and sty-
listic elements and compositional techniques that had once belonged
to strictly separate spheres of musical practice have been adapted and
integrated for the sake of their sound value, irrespective of historical
implications. Admittedly, the separation of spheres was not thereby

CIA. (Information following Lippincott 1970, pp. 124ff., Chapple and Garofalo 1977,
pp. 226ff., CBS Annual Report 1973 and 1975.)
Similar information could be provided for all the big record companies. They are
corporate groups in which the production and distribution of records forms only one
branch of the total enterprise, and which attempt to control internationally the whole
social process of communication. Moreover, these corporate groups are also intricately
connected with one another in terms of the owners of capital (quite remote from
music) who lie behind them. To put it in a nutshell, but without exaggeration: the
production and distribution of music is, in regard to turnover, one of the most
important economic branches of the capitalist social system.

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232 Peter Wicke

abolished - contrary to the euphoric statements of many rock publica-


tions (e.g. Meltzer 1970, p. 15) - since the highly variegated stylistic
elements were never utilised in their original sense but only for their
effect as sound. Nevertheless, new musical and artistic experiences
were introduced which, particularly in regard to the attitude they
evidenced towards the equipment and institutions of the audio-visual
mass media, do in fact signal a qualitatively new factor in the develop-
ment of musical practice.
In its developed form, rock music is, both socially and musically
speaking, a product of the profound, historically quite novel changes
in the conditions of musical production and assimilation that have
been brought about by the mass media. Conservative cultural criticism
in the Adorno mould, in both its bourgeois and marxist varieties,* has
all too quickly passed over this aspect by pointing out the scarcely
veiled commodity character of the mass media and the mechanisms for
deflecting needs and stabilising authority that are based on them; and,
on the other hand, such criticism has never given its sanction to any
kind of production and assimilation of music other than that under-
written by classical bourgeois ideals. However, mass communication
and its institutions, the mass media, signify far more for the artistic
situation than just a quantitative increase in access to music for the
individual and a potential democratisation of musical enjoyment.
Walter Benjamin drew attention early on to qualitative changes in this
connection, from the standpoint of the 'technical reproducibility' of the
work of art (Benjamin 1970). In the production and assimilation of
music, too, the mass is more than just a quantitative dimension. It has
to be understood primarily as a specific form of organisation of musical
practice giving rise to crucial consequences for the development of
music, consequences which, precisely, cannot be disposed of simply
by appeal to the anti-artistic character of the capitalist culture industry,
even though this is indeed the framework within which these
processes at first occur.
The mass production and reception of music that has become tech-
nically, economically and socially possible with the development of the
mass media represents a new quality of social development (Marx's
Vergesellschaftung), a new quality in the organisation of musical activity
in which the masses, in addition to their previous economic character
as producers and consumers, have become a necessary precondition of
music in their social character qua masses: that is, as carriers of a social
function in which there is a thorough-going abstraction from the
particular existence of the individual for the sake of the homogeneity of
* A typical instance of the latter is Gerschkowitsch 1974. For a critique of this conception,
see Mayer 1978.

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 233

a social function that can only be exercised by many people simul-


taneously.* To the extent that musical practice could be subsumed
economically under the principle of the realisation of capital - when,
that is, the destruction of historico-social forms of life in which music
had still been firmly anchored as a self-created activity led to a mass
demand for music on a scale made socially possible by the conversion
into capital of the objective preconditions of musical performance - it
became involved in an ever more complex network of specialised
processes of manufacture and distribution, based on the division of
labour, the function of which not only presupposed mass production
and a mass of potential consumers but also, with the existence of music
in mass-reproduced form, produced the mass as the specific social
character of the recipient. Such mass forms of music now exist, less
because a large number of recipients have the same musical needs than
because these needs become similar (transcending all ethnic, national
and social barriers), since the individual here can be a recipient of
music only in association with others. It is not only musical production
that occurs in so highly socialisedt a form (with the separation of roles
of the composer, arranger, lyric writer, performer, studio musician
and producer, as well as the technical synthesis of music by over-
dubbing, the actual creative process itself has long been affected): the
recipient too comes under a societal form. Indeed, the mobilisation of
the social productive forces now necessary for the production and
distribution of music is no longer conceivable in any other way. The
development of such productive forces in music is only possible with
* In the past the relationship between class and mass remained in large degree outside
the purview of marxist-leninist social theory - not least in consequence of the ideolo-
gical connotations which the concept of the mass has had in bourgeois social science
since the work of Gustave Le Bon, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset.
Lenin, of course, made a clear distinction between the class of the workers and the mass
of the working population, the distinction being a question of the degree of revolution-
ary consciousness and organisation, as essential preconditions for the revolutionary
transformation of society. In his essay 'Left-wing Communism - an Infantile Disorder'
Lenin elaborates on this specific aspect, making the fundamental assertion that
'masses and classes can be contrasted only if the overwhelming majority in general,
not divided according to status in the social system of production, is contrasted with
the categories that do have a particular status in the social system of production' (Lenin
1969, p. 26; see also pp. 43ff.).
Walter Benjamin was the first to attempt to develop positively the concept of the
mass as a specific social character in which aspects of life-circumstances and cultural
processes are brought to bear involving, in the course of socialisation, quite different
classes and social strata. He wrote: 'The orientation of reality towards the masses and
of the masses towards reality is a process of enormous significance for both recognition
and perception' (Benjamin 1970, p. 381).
A summary of the various positions vis-d-vis the concept of the mass and its political
and philosophical contents can be found in Pracht et al. 1978, pp. 402ff.
t In the marxist sense which refers to the division of labour and to cooperation as a new
quality of universal interdependence in production and society.

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234 Peter Wicke

the development of perception as a social mass process - that is,


perception in a social form which implies new, directly or indirectly
collective qualities within the perception of individuals.
Under capitalist organisation these processes are certainly accom-
plished as a mere additive summation of individuals. None the less,
within them music and musical practice are constituted in a quite
different way from that obtaining under, say, the bourgeois concert-
hall model (for the processes involved there see Heister 1977). It is true
that, economically speaking, the commodity relationship, and the
system of private ownership (or non-ownership) of commodities that
comes under it, mean that the situation remains one comprising many
separate individuals; musically, however, it now becomes increasingly
transformed into a qualitatively new kind of collective musical as-
similation, just as, correspondingly, music itself here is no longer a
product of the creativity of the prominent individual but the resultant
of many individuals acting cooperatively together. Thus the economic
form of the assimilation of music as a commodity is one involving
many separate individuals, a form of isolated consumption of a com-
modity like any other. Its aesthetic assimilation as music, however,
cancels out the individual subjectivity of the separate person by means
of a necessarily collective process of experience. This is because the
music, in order to be able to reach as many potential purchasers as
possible, must involve the 'many' (that is, the masses) aesthetically,
and can no longer function as an activity and confirmation of indi-
viduality.
The traditional bourgeois hit continues to live on the apparent bridg-
ing of this contradiction; it implies individuality while having long
since failed to possess it. This is connected with the fact that such hits
retain musical characteristics going back to a far lower level in the
socialisation of the production and distribution of music within the
overall capitalist situation than that which subsequently emerged in
the 1950S with rock 'n' roll - as a result of which the music industry
thoroughly reorganised itself again (see Chapple and Garofalo 1977,
pp. 27ff.) - and later with rock music. The hit, by adapting ready-made
items of a musical language that transposes individual subjectivity into
sound-form, restitutes 'expression' on the traditional work-of-art
model, even though with mass standardisation it has long ceased to
possess this, and it thereby creates a vacuum into which the individual
can, and is meant to, project himself. The hit-song's message, 'Es-
pecially for you', becomes the ideology of a kind of music which
attempts to reconcile the contradiction between the totalised public
character of modern mass communication and the regressive private-
ness of the individual. It is no accident that the gesture of direct, highly

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 235

personal, often positively intimate address by a fictional partner is


always the basic model here (see Hahn 1972): however, the highly
socialised form of production, with its splitting of even the creative
element into isolated, partial tasks, exposes this aura of intimacy from
the outset as the commodity-aesthetic halo of a soberly calculated
industrial product. This contradiction in the social function of the
traditional bourgeois hit - between socialisation in production and
privatistic individualisation in assimilation; between public distribu-
tion and intended intimacy of reception; between (deformed) indi-
viduality and the sociality of the separate individual qua recipient -
could also be demonstrated systematically in musical terms, though
this cannot be pursued here.
It is part and parcel of the specific conditions of the emergence of
rock music, already sketched, that, within the same overall social
context, it effects in musical terms a different relationship towards the
social processes of mass communication from that obtaining in the case
of the traditional hit. Rock music, in the use-situation originally de-
veloped by young people, had been orientated towards a collective
process of experience from the start and gave rise to a corresponding
aesthetic, which, not by chance, had and continues to have its roots in
the traditions of Afro-American music, especially blues. In contrast to
European music, collectivity, or 'community', is an intrinsic consti-
tuent of Afro-American music, a residue of the totally different func-
tional basis and presuppositions of music in African cultures (see
Kubik 1973, Dauer 1977). For rock music, too, the musical reference to
a 'community', to the great masses of young people behind the music -
to the consciousness of mutuality crystallising from it, bridging all
social, national and (in the USA, in particular) racial differences - is a
crucial and distinctive social and aesthetic factor. The great mass
festivals of the past - 'Woodstock' has come to stand for them all -
reflect this in their overt search for the immediate experience of com-
munity. So does the fact that rock music has found its appropriate form
of existence in the mass medium of the disc; indeed, with the 'concept
album' the disc medium has become an integral element of the musical
form. In fact, the disc gives a potential guarantee that the music can be
effective across all frontiers, and with rock music this is not merely an
external fact - not merely the sign of literal commercial success - but
makes possible the mutuality, the consciousness of the collectivity of
the musical experience, in which the individual can be at one with the
'community' of fans and can find comprehension and confirmation as
part of the 'many'. Rock music has meaning only by reference to
masses of listeners and in terms of the musical experience of the
collectivity lying behind it. In this situation the mass of recipients no

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236 Peter Wicke

longer functions merely as a quantitatively defined sum-total of indi-


vidual purchasers but becomes a crucial and distinctive musical and
aesthetic factor. This is conditional, however, upon the mass existence
of the reproduced original. The consequence is that in rock music a
reassessment has taken place: the reproduction now functions as the
original, the live performance is measured against the recording, and
technical equipment is seen not as an external aid to reproduction but
as a characteristic of the musical original, employed as part of the
artistic conception. The relationship between music and industrial
techniques takes on a new character, in the sense that technological
intervention is not now simply acquiesced in as an anti-artistic pro-
cedure but becomes an independent constituent, in its own right, of
the total operation of musical production based on division of labour
and hence aesthetically productive as part of the creative process. The
equipment and institutions of the mass media have become the direct
social preconditions for the existence of rock music: the musical sound-
shape becomes possible and meaningful only in symbiosis with the
technology and institutions of mass communication. This fact points
far beyond the limits of the bourgeois cultural situation and the deter-
mination of these processes in capitalist form, and indicates a social
character on the part of musical practice which equates to the level of
socialisation of musical production reached in the mass media.
To the extent, however, that the reference to masses of listeners
is a crucial and distinctive aesthetic factor, and no longer merely an
external one, this at the same time, and antithetically, produces the
optimum conditions for the realisation of capital via music, since
the conditions of technological production and reproduction of
music within capitalist society are a component part of the capital
of the music industry, which then accordingly becomes an integral
constituent condition of the music. This has led to a process of
capital concentration in the music industry on a scale previously un-
known.

When compared to other American industries the record industry seems


highly monopolized. In 1973 the Top 4 record corporations accounted for 52.8
percent of all records and tapes sold ... By comparison in1962 (when figures
are available) the four largest petroleum refining companies accounted for 50.3
percent of oil industry sales, the four largest rubber corporations accounted for
48.1 percent of rubber sales, the four largest primary iron and steel corpora-
tions for 40.2 percent, the four largest makers of food products for 12.5 percent,
the four largest apparel manufacturers for 4.9 percent ... When all parts of the
music industry are taken together, record companies, distributors, and retail-
ers, and when the degree of vertical integration is also considered, the music
industry must be seen as a highly monopolized sector of U.S. business.
(Chapple and Garofalo 1977, p. 93)

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 237

Behind this lie strong agglomerative tendencies, though these tenden-


cies became noticeable only after the mid-196os, when the rock busi-
ness began to expand. They involved both the horizontal concentra-
tion of capital, that is, the relation of record companies to one another
(world-wide), and also vertical integration, that is, the integration of
music-industry capital into corporate groupings formed out of unre-
lated branches of the economy that have been merged into larger
financial units under a single overall management. 'The merger move-
ment in the sixties was greater than any other merger period in the
history of American capitalism, even more than the era of trusts at the
turn of the century' (ibid. p. 83). Rock music, more than any other
previous form of music, is subsumed under the mechanisms of the
exploitation of capital and is organised as a powerful multinational
business with a level of monopolisation and internationalisation that
can be compared, in every sense, with branches of the economy such
as the motor industry, whose structure is typical of state-monopoly
capitalism in general. This organisational structure of production,
however, stands in quite extreme contrast to the experience of collec-
tivity that distinguishes the assimilation of the music, and which the
music itself mediates. The social character of musical practice is in
contradiction to the music's own social form within the overall state-
monopolistic social situation. Thus the basic contradiction of capital-
ism is directly reproduced in musical practice.
The attempt to bridge this contradiction aesthetically - to reconcile
the socially antagonistic polarities of the music by means of constantly
new formal modalities in, and through, the process of creation of
musical objects - has been a crucial distinguishing and motivating
factor in rock music. And because, in attempting to resolve its own
antagonisms, rock music incorporates and makes experienceable what
is otherwise supposed to be kept repressed (in the musical products of
capitalist mass culture), it is, in the final analysis, an authentic compo-
nent of contemporary music.* The necessary condition for this to be so
was that the use-situation previously developed by young people, and
carried over into rock music as a programmatic requirement of musical
production, always remained latent and could even be preserved
through work in groups, since here the creative processes that had
become isolated as separate divisions of labour are brought together

* In this connection a closer examination of lyrics would be necessary. See Urban 1979, a
brilliant study which succeeds convincingly in showing that rock lyrics are a clear
expression of their age and a social reflection of the people's wishes, hopes, moods
and feelings. Urban isolates those features which go beyond the individual particular-
ities of their authors and represent something general: social experience that has
entered the language.

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238 Peter Wicke

again and are thus in large degree withdrawn from technological


control by capital.
Rock music's attempt actually to make good its claims to collectivity
- claims which set it in permanent contradiction to the social mechan-
isms to which it owes its existence within the overall capitalist situation
- is not merely a crucial motive force in its development, but has also,
finally, given it an aura of progressivism: political progressivism, no
less. In the latter half of the 1960s in particular, in conjunction with the
youth movement and student revolt, this reached a peak. There was a
direct identification of aesthetic and political practice which seemed to
be made good in the music through the inherent contradiction be-
tween it and the social circumstances of its existence. 'When the mode
of the music changes, the walls of the city shake', was the vigorous
formulation of Tuli Kupferberg, writer and musician in the then promi-
nent American political-rock band The Fugs (Kupferberg 1967). Jerry
Rubin, one of the intellectual leaders of the 'countercultural under-
ground' then developing out of the youth and student movement,
especially in the USA, wrote in the same vein: 'Rock 'n' roll marked the
beginning of the revolution' (Rubin 1970, p. 19). And when the Rolling
Stones embarked on their first American West Coast tour they were
greeted with a manifesto hailing them as the militant vanguard of an
approaching world youth revolution:

Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle
against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world
hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts. We fight in guerrilla
bands against the invading imperialists in Asia and South America, we riot at
rock'n' roll concerts everywhere ... Comrades, you will return to this country
when it is free from the tyranny of the State and you will play your splendid
music in factories run by the workers, in the domes of emptied city halls, on the
rubble of police stations, under the hanging corpses of priests, under a million
red flags waving over a million anarchist communities ... ROLLING STONES -
THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA HEARS YOUR MESSAGE! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!
(Quoted in Eisen 1969, p. 72)

This politicisation of rock music was to leave deep traces. The recep-
tion of the music became converted into a mystical ritual of emancipa-
tion: it was ritualised into a symbolic act of self-liberation and self-
realisation in which reality and musical experience were fused into a
single point around which the individual, in a world full of social
disintegration and superstitious technology-fetishism, could find a
way back to the self as a value and a potentiality - and this was equated
with social revolution. Rock music was thus seen as a social force, as a
power for change, as revolutionary potential. As a world view and
life-style it acquired a socio-utopian dimension through a fetish-like

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Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study 239

mystification of its sound-shape. And this decisively coloured both the


musical comprehension on which rock was based and its inherent
musical structuring, and remained attached to it.
To the degree that the production of rock came under the control of
capital, it was the assimilation or reception of the music that became
increasingly politicised. The sound-shape, together with the socio-
utopian element superimposed upon it, consolidated to form a distinct
communicational syndrome from which the musical structuring de-
rived its meaning-content. The expectations of self-realisation and
happiness which the individual could no longer fulfil in his practical
life-activity became an objective property of the fetish of sound. And
this was true for the musician as well as his young public. The musi-
cian, too, gives himself up to his product in almost exhibitionistic
fashion. He lives it out in public, as it were, in the act of performance,
with every movement and gesture of his body. He celebrates the ritual
whereby the fetish of sound is to be venerated. Hence, too, the pro-
nounced cult of spontaneity in the aesthetics of rock music, since
spontaneous self-expression seemed to contain the secret element
capable of endowing mere sound with the 'at the same time percep-
tible and imperceptible'* force of a mode of social liberation. But what
is seen here as the meaning-content of the musical structure - the
socio-utopian superaddition of the expectations of happiness of a
whole generation of young people - is in the last analysis identical with
the fetishism that exchange-value generates universally, with com-
modity fetishism the characteristic form of specifically bourgeois social
relationships. Never before, indeed, have the specific formative condi-
tions of music penetrated so directly into its very sound-shape. On the
other hand, however, this has also given rock music a reality-content
that has repeatedly prevailed over the repression-mechanisms of the
bourgeois culture industry and has lost none of its fascination to this
day.

In actuality, of course, the development of rock music proceeded in a


far more differentiated fashion than can be portrayed in an outline
concentrating on certain central theoretical questions. This has not
been crucial here, however, as compared with the methodological
problematic that can be read off from it. Mass forms of music of this
kind can only be treated as an intrinsic component part of social
practice. More importantly, it is only from this point of view, and not in
terms of an abstract ideal of art, that meaningful speculations about
rock music's perspectives and the necessary alternatives within the
* Karl Marx used this adjectival construction (sinnlich-iibersinnlich) to characterise the
fetishism of commodities (Marx 1967, p. 85).

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240 Peter Wicke

context of a socialist musical culture are possible. Rock music is the


most recent link in a long historical chain of development of mass-scale
and mass-based forms of music, and it represents a level of socialisa-
tion of musical practice that already points beyond the limits of the
bourgeois cultural situation in which this process has taken place. This
inevitably raises the question of how the possibilities that have thereby
accumulated might be made musically, aesthetically and politically
productive. But it is just this question which cannot be discussed
merely by reference to musical structures - as the development of rock
music itself, with its illusory attempt to dissolve its own particular
social contradictions via music, has emphatically shown. Rock music
has been unable to find its way out of these contradictions while
remaining within the overall capitalist context in which it is produced
and distributed, even though it has derived enormous aesthetic
productivity from this; its productivity, in the end, has repeatedly
worn itself out against the resistances of its social form. Out of the in-
escapable disillusionment of the mid-197os new ideas also inevi-
tably emerged, directed not only at musical structures but also, and
primarily, at the institutionally organised structures of production and
distribution of rock music. These had the aim, in fact, of deploying the
music's potentialities in favour of a progressive political commitment
orientated towards contemporary class struggles. Large-scale move-
ments such as, in Britain, 'Rock against Racism' (see Hetscher 1980)
and, in the German Federal Republic, 'Rock against the Right' (see
Floh de Cologne 1980, Leukert 1980) have developed, and small co-
operatives of musicians (for instance, 'Rock in Opposition': see Wicke
1981) have formed a political and cultural avant-garde for alternative
kinds of production and distribution of rock music. From here it would
be possible to trace the line of argument further and discuss the
development of rock music within the framework of a socialist culture
and form of life. This, however, raises wide-ranging questions and
would call for the outlining of a socialist mass culture. The question of
the extent to which the possibilities present in the forms produced
within the capitalist situation have actually been fulfilled in the rock
music of the socialist countries can be no more than raised here - a
concluding question which, however, it is to be hoped will stimulate
discussion on a broader basis.
(translated by Richard Deveson)

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