*Ø* Blogmanac | Apolitical Blues -- Rock and Roll as Cultural Studies

Love this Little Feat song.................
gets to feeling that way at times........J-9


Apolitical Blues
By Lowell George of Little Feat

Well my telephone was ringing
And they told me it was Chairman Mao
Well my telephone was ringing
And they told me it was Chairman Mao
You can tell him anything
'Cause I just don't wanna talk to him now

I've got the apolitical blues
And that's the meanest blues of all
Apolitical blues
And that's the meanest blues of all
I don't care if it's John Wayne
I just don't wanna talk to him now


“What Is Rock Music, Anyway?”

The approach I propose for an answer to the question raised in the title is informed less by what is commonly termed
"American Studies" than by what I would describe as "Cultural Studies with a focus on the United States." This differentiation is not merely a splitting of hairs. What is labeled "American Studies" is by and large the product of a specific development in the 1940s and 1950s, of World War II and the Cold War that soon followed, when the chief makers of U.S. policy deemed it imperative that the United States be established as the positive force in global politics, the polar opponent of the totalitarian forces of fascism and communism. The United States, and what it stood for, were to be set up as a counterweight not just in political-ideological terms. To establish a proper positive model, cultural work was also needed. This, at least, was what many people thought in Washington, and for that purpose, two government agencies, USIS and USIA, promoted especially a new field of study which was named by sleight of hand and somewhat too grandly "American Studies"—as if, indeed, the United States encompassed all of the Americas.

So as not to be mistaken as a left-over cold warrior—a threat that has gained renewed validity by George W. Bush's appointments—I propose to do "Cultural Studies with a focus on the United States." This is not merely a stale joke. Traditional American Studies have much to do with the promotion of U.S. ideology—usually wrapped in the study of American culture, or rather such elements of American culture as the chief U.S. ideologists regarded as worthy of promotion. Popular culture therefore received only limited attention—hardly any, to be true—from traditional American Studies. Cultural studies, conversely, is not only open to the study of popular culture but actually seeks to do away with traditionalist distinctions between high culture and low, conceptualizations which embrace art as worthy of study while denigrating popular culture. Cultural Studies takes up precisely those issues which traditional approaches have neglected intentionally. Rock music falls squarely into the lot of cultural expressions American Studies has traditionally neglected. And certainly, of all forms of cultural expression that emerged in the Western World after World War II, rock music is the one that has had the greatest mass appeal. Thus, rock music all but imposes itself as a crucial field for Cultural Studies.


Lawrence Grossberg, a cultural theorist has worked to analyze the history of pop culture, its effects on contemporary society, and how cultural agents now rely more on pop culture to initiate change, bypassing the political legislature.


"Hegemonic leadership has to operate where people live their lives. It has to take account of and even allow itself to be modified by its engagement with the fragmentary and contradictory terrain of common sense and popular culture. This is where the social imaginary is defined and changed; where people construct personal identities, identifications, priorities and possibilities..,"

Green Grass, Running Water and An Act of Violence
Grossberg

[From Easy Riders
American Culture on the Road
An Internet Anthology]