ENG Free topic 1-3: Rebel Sounds, Radical Visions, and Countercultures: U.S. Popular Music in Literature and Visual Media since the 1960s

From the protest anthems of the 1960s to the Grunge-fuelled angst of the 1990s, certain forms of U.S. popular music have been understood in terms of their relationship to various “countercultures” and “subcultures.” This course explores the cultural histories and representations of U.S. popular music from the 1960s to the present. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which in which genres including rock, soul, punk, and hip-hop have been associated with dissent, rebellion, and identity politics. We will also consider U.S. popular music vis-à-vis countercultures as they have been depicted in other media: literature (fiction and non-fiction); television, film, and emerging digital platforms.

In terms of cultural history, the course will trace how San Francisco’s hippie movement helped define the countercultural spirit of the late 1960s; how venues like CBGB became crucibles for punk with bands such as the Ramones; and how the Seattle Grunge scene redefined authenticity in the 1990s. Topics will include the psychedelic experimentation of the Sixties, the “Satanic Panic” and the PMRC’s “Filthy Fifteen” in the 1980s, and the cultural reverberations of hip-hop and other genres. Readings, audio recordings, and viewings will pair cultural theory with primary works—songs, zines, music videos, and films. Students will examine how popular media challenge dominant narratives, how subcultures become commodified, and how the politics of resistance continue to evolve in the digital age.

In terms of representation, the course will also consider how U.S. popular music has informed and been mediated by various other cultural (especially textual) forms. While (“alternative”) rock and hip-hop continue to be imagined—and imagine themselves—as sub- or counter-cultural modes of expression, they have been widely incorporated into (and commodified by) mainstream, even “highbrow” cultural institutions. As such, the course will also consider how U.S. popular music’s rise to cultural respectability, even canonicity, has been explored in and facilitated by modes of writing: novels, music journalism, and memoirs. The pioneering “countercultural” journalism of writers like Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and Ellen Willis took rock music seriously and has itself become canonical. The generic conventions of the “rock memoir,” established in the 1970s, have been transformed and elevated by critically acclaimed books—also part of a twenty-first century “memoir boom” – like Bob Dylan’s Chronicles (2003) and Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010). When Dylan in 2016 became the first American since Toni Morrison to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and when Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2018, the awards reignited debates about the “literary” and “artistic” qualities of popular song—debates that dated back to Dylan’s adoption in English departments during the 1970s. The Nobel moment also brought into focus the deeper relationships between popular music and literary culture that have developed over the last four decades. Since the publication of Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street (1973), which features a rock star protagonist based partly on Dylan, U.S. novelists have taken popular music and its material (counter)cultures as a subject for fiction. Prominent examples include Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006), in which the legacies of Sixties radicalism also loom large, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which ponders the aftermath of punk and the tension between countercultures and commerce.

Ultimately, this MA course situates U.S. popular music and its enduring associations with countercultural expression as a defining force in the story of modern American identity—a story also shaped by popular music’s relationship to other (textual and visual) media