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Literary Review
MUSIC
Rock and radicalism
SHELLEY WALIA
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Peter Doggett’s latest focuses on the politics of music and the music of politics.
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There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of 1960s Counterculture; Peter Doggett, Canongate, £25.
For me, the 1960s generation stood for the use of imagination and the joy of dissidence that unlocks our full humanity.
The decade forcefully emphasised the need for an oppositional stand to the note of endism in western thinking that stood for the suppression of history and of political opposition, an end of the subject and the superseding of the individual by the systems that govern us. It was a decade of opposing ideologies and relativism.
Immense possibilities
The iconic rock stars exuded the spirit of energy and held out immense possibilities of a new tomorrow, but the dream ended in a lifestyle that drowned itself in drugs and sex. However, its compelling worldview for a revolutionary turn of events did have a deep impact on most of the post-1960s radicalism in the world.
It was with this passion that I read Peter Doggett’s books, which have been an inspiration to the later generations who had the inclination to recover a period that saw the rise of student power and rock stars that lived and sang active politics.
Doggett is a leading journalist who has written extensively on country rock music, edited Record Collector for more than a decade, and currently writes for Mojo and Q. His definitive biographies of John Lennon and Lou Reed and his The Beatles, Let It Be/Abbey Road arouses a sense of nostalgia. His immensely readable book Are You Ready for the Country? inspired a keen enthusiasm for the history of country rock music.
His latest book There’s a Riot Going On is an in-depth evocation of 1968 and its counterculture that resounds with riots in Chicago and the Chicago conspiracy, but somewhat ignores the meaningful uprisings in Paris, Berlin, Prague the anti-communist tenor of the 1960s generation, and the following of left politics in Latin America, which gets its queue from the heady spirit of 1968.
Though he draws attention to the personal life of Mick Jagger and the decadence of his contemporaries, he misses out on the deeper concerns of rebellious students and workers in Paris and Czechoslovakia, or Germany and the insurgency in Italy in 1968, or the neo-fascist confrontation with opposing forces in Greece or Spain. The Prague Spring of 1968 is the single event that inspired most dissident movements around the world, but it merits no mention in the book.
Radical ideologies
Nevertheless, Doggett gives a detailed account of the politics of music and the music of politics along with many anecdotes that illustrate the palpably present ideology of radicalism in rock festivals like the Woodstock and in the music of John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, or The Who and Nina Simone who gave vent to the revolutionary movements of the time, though underlying their radicalism was an obvious posture and a flirtation with revolutionary ideas.
The relationship of rock with radicalism, according to Doggett, is rather suspect and his analysis shows the unfortunate trajectory of an avant-garde revolutionary movement that ended in the failure of rock music “to overturn the old order and replace it with a new climate of liberation”.
Though the book evokes a deeply felt sense of history of the period, Doggett offers a scathing critique of the expectations of revolutionary fervour from the musicians, as well as the superficial involvement of singers in airing revolutionary ideas only at a theoretical level and as a form of ideological pretension that gave them stature of intellectuality and leftist leanings.
Collapse of hope
Though we do have musicians like Dire Straits whose music has been rather radical, the world of contemporary music has once and for all transcended the social and political responsibility of popular music.
This argument underpins Doggett’s very original critique of the legacy of the 1960s carried forward to our days of greed for property and profit that marks the inherent character of capitalist strategies at co-opting most musicians enabling them to ‘laugh all the way to the bank’.
As Doggett argues, “faith in utopia was betrayed by commercialism and naivety”. ‘Streetfighting Man’, the slogan of Mick Jagger, became a rarity. It was the end of radicalism and the collapse of hope for a revolution.
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