This was rock and roll’s heritage: a participatory experience, rooted in an ecstatic religious tradition. Black rock, or “rhythm and blues,” performers of the 1950s and ’60s—including such stars as Little Richard, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and many others—acknowledged their obvious debt to black church music, often moving effortlessly from religious to secular songs and back again. Except for Elvis Presley, who was devoted to gospel music, white performers were not always so gracious, often simply stealing their songs from black performers, unaware of their religious origins. But one way or another the chain was completed—from pre-Christian African ecstatic rituals, through African American Christian forms of worship, to African American secular rhythm and blues, and finally to the mostly white rockers who inspired white kids to “riot.” The early rock audiences who stomped and jumped out of their seats to dance were announcing, whether they knew it or not, the rebirth of an ecstatic tradition that been repressed and marginalized by Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries.
Opposition, Triumph, and Decline
The establishment reaction to rock and roll was swift and almost universal. “No other form of culture …” the rock historians Martin and Segrave claim, unaware of the Europeans’ suppression of indigenous cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “has met with such extensive hostility.”28 With the passage of decades, the late 1950s and early 1960s opposition to rock has acquired a quaint comicality, but at the time it was daunting to the music’s purveyors, if not to the performers and fans. Clergymen joined psychiatrists in calling for bans of the “obscene” and disruptive new music. Disk jockeys vowed never to play the stuff, sometimes burning stacks of the offending 45s to advertise their commitment to “good” music, as opposed to the faddish new “junk.” Cities, as we have seen, mobilized their police forces against the fans, and some did their best to discourage visits by rock musicians. Civic leaders denounced rock as an incitement to juvenile delinquency, violence, and sex. No wonder, then, that most of the major record companies initially eschewed rock and roll, leaving it to smaller, independent companies to test the new music’s profitability.
Unnoted at the time was the way antirock commentary almost precisely echoed the language that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans had used to denounce the “native” ecstatic rituals they encountered during their phase of imperialist expansion. Aware only of its black roots, the enemies of rock attacked it as “jungle music,” “tribal music,” and even, weirdly, “cannibalistic.”29 The conductor of the BBC symphony orchestra opined that rock wasn’t really new, because it “had been played in the jungle for centuries”—never mind the later centuries of African American innovation, carried out in the fields of the American South. Similar references to “jungles” and “savages” peppered antirock rhetoric, with the industry publication Music Journal editorializing that teenage rock fans were “definitely influenced in their lawlessness by this throwback to jungle rhythms. Either it actually stirs them to orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves), or they use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions and the complete disregard of the conventions of decency.”30 Images of undisciplined “savages” losing control under the influence of a compelling rhythm reinforced the idea of rock and roll as a threat not just to public order but to civilization itself. To complete the historical parallel, some clergymen raised the possibility that rock and roll would “turn young people into devil worshippers.”31
In one way, the critics were right: Rock was much more than a musical genre; it was becoming, by the mid-1960s, the rallying point of an alternative culture utterly estranged from the dominant “structures,” as the anthropologist Victor Turner would term them, of Government, Corporations, Church, and Family. Spilling out of theaters, rock drew the fans to more expansive and congenial venues—“psychedelic ballrooms” lit by mind-dissolving strobe lights, and the outdoor sites of rock festivals from Monterey to Woodstock. In these settings, young people began to assemble all the ancient ingredients of carnival: They “costumed” in torn jeans, tie-dyed T-shirts, granny dresses, feathers, and billowing scarves. They painted their faces and perfumed themselves with patchouli. They shared beer, wine, vegetarian snacks. They passed around joints. Young antiwar activists, like myself, could take a holiday from our usual work of persuasion and organizing, because peace was already in the air.
The hippie rock fans had re-created carnival—and more. To most participants rock festivals were something beyond temporary interruptions in otherwise dull and hardworking lives. These events were the beachheads of a new, ecstatic culture meant to replace the old repressive one—or, as Jim Miller puts it, “a bucolic and cosmopolitan utopia, a world of benign liberty, happy nonconformity, and miraculously nonpossessive individualism, an egalitarian city-state where the dancers with the face paint freaking freely in the crowd were now as much the stars as anyone’s music up on the stage.”32
One way to expand the festival into an ongoing community was to take to the road and go from one concert or festival to another. “Deadheads,” fans of the Grateful Dead, formed a floating community that followed the band from city to city in “elderly bread vans and decommissioned school buses painted with rust primer and furnished with curtains and the kind of mattresses that are chucked under lampposts at 3 A.M. On their windows were stickers showing skulls or tap-dancing skeletons, talismanic to the Dead.”33 A former Deadhead writes of his fellow fans:
I would see them again at the Meadowlands, at Madison Square Garden and up in Boston, all the way across the country to San Francisco and back east again. I would find things to love in the parking lots, and in the hallways of the arenas. Strange, clumpy pyramids of naked deadheads writhed intertwined in asexual hallucinogenic ecstasy. Angel boys stood wide-eyed and grinning on the same square of asphalt for hours. Angel girls spun in the same tight circle all night, bells jangling on their ankles … Food and drink were shared freely, drugs and even tickets too. You could count on running into the same people from city to city, grubby nomads who would find you among thousands of unknowns and greet you with unfeigned warmth.34
The counterculture’s dream of an ongoing ecstatic community incensed Victor Turner. He could see the parallel between rock festivities and the ecstatic rituals of small-scale societies; he understood rock’s challenge to the dominant society, stating, somewhat woodenly, that “rock is clearly a cultural expression and instrumentality of that style of communitas which has arisen as the antithesis of the ‘square,’ ‘organization man’ type of bureaucratic social structure of mid-twentieth-century America.”35 But, as we saw earlier, Turner rejected the rock culture’s aspiration to replace “square” culture with a permanently festive way of life. Communal ecstasy, or communitas, as he put it, could only be “liminal,” or marginal and occasional. Any attempt to make it a daily experience would be destructive of structure and hence of civilization. Quite possibly, this distaste for the hippie counterculture helped shape his anthropological theories, or at least his insistence that collective ecstasy be consumed only in measured and scheduled doses.
Opposition to rock persists into our own time, only in less egregiously racist and sometimes more historically sophisticated forms. Political conservatives tend to categorize it as a manifestation of the “permissiveness” of the “toxic 1960s,” during which “traditional values” were supposedly undermined by hedonism and self-indulgence. On the occasion of Jerry Garcia’s death, for example, the right-wing Washington Times dismissed rock as “merely the sounds they [the Grateful Dead] made in worshipping an infantile hedonism that infests the culture yet,” and went on to sound the “jungle” theme: Rock is a reminder of “how fragile civilization always is, how close the darkness of the forest surrounds.”36 Or we find on the Web site of Pastor David L. Brown today an attack on rock for its “sexuality” and “lawlessness,” followed breathlessly by: “But that is not the only problem! The beat of rock is nothing new. Pagan, animist
ic tribes had the ‘rock beat’ long before it came to America. They use the driving beat to get ‘high’ and bring them into an altered state of consciousness … You see, the beat ‘is a vehicle for demon infestation.’”37
Rock, of course, survived to see its early enemies eat their words. Most important, it proved to be a moneymaking commodity, capable of enriching recording companies and performers, while its live audiences, no longer containable in theaters, moved on to fill football stadiums and even larger venues in what were often truly ecstatic events. The market had spoken: By the late 1960s the no-longer-new music not only rocked but ruled. Having become a successful commodity itself, rock was quickly enlisted to market other commodities, from cars to financial services. Rock was, by the 1980s, almost inescapable—offered around the clock on thousands of radio stations, sampled in commercials, bowdlerized as Muzac, or deployed in its original form to provide shopping-friendly background music at stores like Kmart, the Gap, and Express. At the same time it was evolving into so many diverse forms—acid, disco, punk, heavy metal, alternative, house, techno, et cetera—that “rock and roll” became an almost impossibly large and blurry target. Rock and rock-derived music was everywhere, from sports events to churches; in fact, the above statement by Pastor Brown was actually directed at “Christian rock.”
Certainly commercialization had a debilitating effect on rock. The defiant self-assertion of a song like “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” is lost, for example, when that song becomes part of the background noise in a shopping mall. Worse still, businesses sought to appropriate the defiance itself, as when, in the 1990s, “new economy” companies used it in commercials to project their newness, coolness, and all-around impatience with the old. There is no better way to subvert a revolution than to enlist it in the service of moneymaking.
Quite apart from its employment as a marketing tool, rock’s sheer ubiquity may have had an even greater taming effect simply by severing its life-giving connection to physical participation and collective pleasure. Rock that can be heard everywhere is rock that can be heard largely in places where a physical response is impossible. What better way to desensitize people to a beat than to force them to hear it in scores of settings, like shopping malls, where no response is acceptable or permitted? Since you can’t start dancing to the tunes pumped into a RadioShack or Winn-Dixie—at least not without risking the interference of a security guard—you learn to sever the neural connections linking the perception of rhythm to its expression through muscular motion. This lesson is repeated in our lives every day: Resist the rhythmic provocation. No matter how tempting the beat, you must stand still or remain in your seat.
But something happened in the rock rebellion, traces of which persist not only in today’s club scene but in the most banal settings for rock, like shoe stores and supermarkets. Rock and roll reopened the possibility of ecstasy, or at least a joy beyond anything else the consumer culture could offer. Drugs, particularly marijuana and LSD, contributed to the revival of the ecstatic possibility; so did the sexual revolution, which meant, in the 1960s and ’70s, not just male exploitativeness but women’s demand for female orgasms too. People of course continue to seek pleasure through shopping, drinking, and forms of prepackaged entertainment that are mildly engaging at best. But the news is out, and has been at least since the 1960s: We are capable of so much more.
Rock and roll no doubt encouraged indulgence in drugs and sex, but it hardly needed them as accompaniments, speaking as it did from ancient traditions of collective ecstasy achieved solely through rhythmic participation. As no less an expert than Joseph Campbell remarked of a Grateful Dead concert he attended—rather soberly we must imagine, since he was a conservative and already elderly man at the time: “That was a real Dionysian festival.”38 Dionysus had briefly deigned to visit the cultures of his historic enemies, and, every so often, when an otherwise dreary “classic rock” station lets loose with Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” or Junior Walker and the All Stars’ “(I’m a) Roadrunner,” it is possible to imagine that he will come again.
11
Carnivalizing Sports
For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States; soccer worldwide: These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls “Saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotions which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives.”1 In a stadium or at an arena, the audience has been expected for decades to leap up from their seats, shout, wave, and jump up and down with the vicissitudes of the game. This relative freedom of motion, combined with the crowding in the bleachers, creates what another sports scholar, drawing on the language Durkheim used to describe ecstatic religious rituals, considers “an in-group effervescence that generates a communal solidarity.”2 A Mexican soccer fan reports on his own experience of self-loss in the crowd: “At some point you get the feeling that you don’t care what happens to you … If something were to trigger a riot, I would want to participate … Everyone is one unit, you don’t have any responsibility.”3 And on a Web site offering information on Korean tourism, the emotional transports of local fans are offered as one of the country’s selling points.
There is no denying the awe-inspiring chill of the solidarity reflected in the Korean street cheerers. Brought together by a game, the Koreans still show us what it’s like to want to be a part of something larger than yourself, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what the larger meaning of screaming and crying in front of a stadium screen with thousands of other people really means.4
Meaning may be the wrong thing to ask for in a setting where powerful collective emotions are controlled by the motions of a ball or puck. One reason sports events generate so much collective excitement is simply because we expect them to, and we know that the physical expression of this excitement—the shouting, jumping up and down, et cetera—is not only permitted but expected as well. Sports events can be thought of, quite apart from the game, as a medium for generating collective thrills—a not entirely reliable one, since some games are dull and one team must always lose anyway, but in at least one way more effective than many rock concerts. At a concert held in a theater, everyone faces toward the stage and sees little of the other concertgoers except for the backs of their heads. Sports stadiums, however, are round, so “the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators.”5 People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A’s or Manchester, but they are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.
There were, in the early twentieth century, few other settings in which to find the communal elan offered by sports—only marginal ecstatic religious sects, at least in the industrialized countries, and little by way of exuberant public festivity to compete with the drama of the moving ball. As the century wore on, sports expanded and tightened their grip on the public imagination, calling forth elaborately organized networks of fans in the United Kingdom and South America, encroaching on and altering the celebration of traditional holidays, like Thanksgiving in the United States. As early as the 1920s, the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen could reasonably describe American sport as a national “obsession.”6
By the latter part of the century, the increasing commercialization of sports fueled another growth spurt, perhaps most dramatically in the United States: Televised sports moved into prime time and, beginning in the 1980s, required dozens of cable channels to carry twenty-four-hour coverage of games and commentary. At the same time, the possibility of viewing live games in person began to grow along with the nation’s stadium seating capacity. A hundred and one stadiums were built between the years 1980 and 2003,7 each with a capacity of about seventy thousand. The ancient Romans had centered th
eir civic life on the arena, building one for every city they conquered or created; Americans seem determined to do no less, often giving a higher priority to stadium construction than to routine expenditures for public services such as education, including school sports.8
But a spectacle, even one at which a certain amount of rowdiness is tolerated, has its limits. In the 1950s, American commentators often rued the disappearance of neighborhood baseball games as more people came to the sport vicariously, as spectators rather than as players and “stars” themselves. Whether the fans eventually grew impatient with their relatively passive role is hard to say; we have few firsthand accounts of the fan experience other than those provided by sports journalists, whose profession places them squarely within the sports industry. But beginning in the 1960s in the United Kingdom and somewhat later in the United States, sports audiences were carving out new and often creative forms of participation—much as rock audiences were refusing to sit quietly through performances. Spectators began “carnivalizing” sports events, coming in costume, engaging in collective rhythmic activities that went well beyond chants, adding their own music, dance, and feasting to the game. The parallel to rock audiences is not incidental; part of what brought sports audiences to life in the late twentieth century was rock ‘n’ roll itself.
Dancing in the Streets Page 23
