John Lennon, “Revolution,” and the Politics of Musical Reception

Platoff, John

doi:10.1525/jm.2005.22.2.241

Cited by 40 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Audience research at the time demonstrated that words were frequently incidental to listeners' responses to rock music. 82 Instead, as Peter Wicke has argued, 'the supposed protest character of rock's musical appearance relieved it of the necessity of taking a clear political position in its lyrics. he power of this music was in its efect on the senses.'…”

Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era

Adlington¹

2018

J. R. Music. Assoc.

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Politics and the popular in British music theatre of the Vietnam era 12,104 words (15,921 words including footnotes) Abstract: British music theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall's recent proposition that Brecht's music theatre set the terms for younger British composers' experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers' anxieties about music's capability to convey socio-political messages, and their reluctance to accord popular music a progressive function. The entanglement of Vietnam war activism and rock music forms the backdrop for analyses of two works that do address Vietnam directly -George Newson's Arena and Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine (both 1971)both of which also pass pointed comment on different popular music traditions. Both works highlight the difficulty in emulating Brecht's model in an era when the concept of 'the political' was being significantly redefined, and the cultural gap between activist cadres and the wider population was unprecedentedly visible. figures. Of the atom bomb, class relations, civil rights, gender equality or anti-colonial struggle, there was nonein contrast to prominent theatrical works of the time from a number of American, Dutch, German and Italian composers. 3 Vietnam, too, eluded the attention of British composers, in spite of significant opposition to the Vietnam war in Britain, which climaxed with two highly-publicised demonstrations in London on 17 March and 27 October 1968. By 1967, two-thirds of the British population were opposed to PrimeMinister Harold Wilson's support for the United States' campaign in Vietnam, a view reflected in the editorials of most newspapers. 4 The first of the 1968 protests in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square attracted a crowd of 10,000, and the second an estimated ten times more, the tussles with police being broadcast around the country via a live television relay. Despite the widespread concern about the conflict, this movement too failed to generate a mass following amongst the wider British public, in part (as we will see) because of the way in which leading activists identified with aspects of the counterculture and so alienated mainstream public opinion. Nonetheless, as I will describe in the following pages, the movement made an impact upon British rock musicians, a number of whom aligned themselves with anti-war activists; and it proved influential too upon the development of both established and alternative theatres in Britain.A valuable corrective to the picture of political disengagement on the part of composers has recently been offered by Michael Hall's book Music Theatre in Britain, 1960Britain, -1975, which unearths two music theatre pieces premiered in 1971 that do, in fact, squarely address the conflict in Vietnam. 5 Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine takes the form of a parable about a folk singer whose surrender to commercial forces is symbo...

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Section: IImentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era

Adlington¹

2018

J. R. Music. Assoc.

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“…Its release in the United States coincided with demonstrations in Chicago during the August Democratic Party Convention, which imbued the song with an uncanny timeliness. 63 The fleeting reference to "Dancing in the Street" may simply be an embedded invocation of the band's rhythm-and-blues origins, from which their albums of 1966 and 1967 had strayed. Or perhaps it referred to the song's use in civil rights demonstrations starting in 1967; the 1964 lyric hints at this adoption as a rallying cry with its call for the spontaneous enactment of embodied freedom.…”

Section: Social Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mick Jagger as Mother

Peraino¹

2015

Social Text

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Jagger is most certainly a mother figure and he's a mother hen to the whole thing.-David Bowie, Rolling Stone, 1974 David Bowie said it. The idea is grotesque-intentionally shocking-yet oddly compelling. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones have always been positioned as the antithesis of parents, if not of mothers more specifically: "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?" the tabloids asked, before the band even had a hit record. 1 What can we learn by following Bowie's lead of thinking of Mick Jagger as mother? In this article I intend to do just that through an assemblage of material-songs, performances, film, video, and images, as well as historical and theoretical texts-that supports Bowie's observation. As an enduring cultural icon of rock 'n' roll, Mick Jagger embodies a musical and gestural crossroads of race, class, gender, and sexuality-a site of subversive ambiguities as well as rampant imitation and commodification. Mick Jagger and dissident sexuality is a topic as old as the Rolling Stones themselves (now over fifty years as a working rock band). The standard celebratory narrative locates Jagger's performance of sexuality as part and parcel of his and the Rolling Stones' performance of race, as historian Andre Millard neatly asserts: "What Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took from the bluesman image was the sense of unrestrained and powerful sexuality, the former in his performance and the latter in his guitar playing. The mythical bluesman was both blessed and cursed by his sexual appeal to women." 2 Yet Jagger's gender bending and homosexual intrigues have been noted by rock journalists since 1969 (a significant year discussed below). Most dismiss Jagger's and the Stones' gender

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“…Lennon incisively critiqued violent struggle in his song Revolution and his subsequent exchange with John Hoyland in Black Dwarf (see Platoff 2005 andLynskey 2011, Chapter 8). He skewered what he perceived to be the revolutionary left's posturing, dogmatism, callousness, nihilism, historical amnesia and reductionist class analysis-and then proceeded to join the movement in the early seventies.…”

Section: Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Beatles' Politics

Collins¹

2012

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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This article argues that the Beatles did much to legitimise pop as a means of political expression, to devise organisational structures to support such political activity and to politicise those who produced and consumed pop music. • critiques the Beatles' political motives, attitudes, techniques and accomplishments. • explains why the Beatles' political development was a process of trial and error in which they sought out strategies and ideologies to their liking. • explores how the Beatles' politicisation altered existing conceptions of politics and pop.This article argues that the Beatles were instrumental in bringing together the hitherto divergent and mutually uncomprehending realms of politics and pop. Though not innovative political theorists, the Beatles were inventive political strategists who rehearsed virtually every technique subsequently used by politicised musicians. They practised consciousness-raising, lobbying, patronage, abstentionism and civil disobedience. They founded utopian institutions and considered the relative merits of anarchy, democracy and revolutionary socialism. The multitude of political strategies adopted by the Beatles testified to their difficulties in finding one congruent with their outlook and temperament. Furthermore, the anti-authoritarianism which formed the one consistent aspect of their political worldview was simplistic and their solutions were correspondingly unrealistic. They nevertheless did much to legitimise pop music as a means of political expression, to devise organisational structures to support such political activity and to politicise those who produced and consumed pop.

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John Lennon, “Revolution,” and the Politics of Musical Reception

Cited by 40 publications

References 3 publications

Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era

Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era

Mick Jagger as Mother

The Beatles' Politics

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