""Meet the new boss/same as the old boss"": British rock music and the rhetoric of class, 1963--1970
Description
Rock and roll music helped transform British conceptions of class and social stratification through its role as the premier medium in Britain's booming popular culture industry in the 1960s. The 'texts' people used to describe their social status change in the postwar era, and were often borrowed from popular music. Such texts included not simply music and language but fashion, ideas, politics, literature, even people's every-day behavior. British rock and roll helped break down old post-Victorian individualist values and replace them with the values of professionalism, thus reasserting the dominance of the middle classes at the center of British life At first, the music was lionized for its mythical working-class values, and which led many young people to believe that they were on the verge of living in a classless society. Furthermore, British rock and roll's working-class youth values proved exportable, especially to America, and it presented many entrepreneurs with an outlet for their energies. For this reason, rock and roll in Britain had to be taken at least somewhat seriously by the cultural establishment As British rock and roll matured, however, musicians expanded their horizons toward a common Romantic cultural ground---spiritual, exotic, pastoral, individualistic and communitarian at the same time---that invited middle-class professional values into the music. 'Rock and roll' became 'rock' music, imbued with 'progressive' values and disdaining the commercialism of 'pop' music. The best way to get wealthy and respectable in the British music industry was to act as if one did not want wealth and respectability. Eventually, that meant that the wealthiest progressive acts were those that eschewed the British market for America, where their Romantic values made them exotic and celebrated. By 1970, British rock music had become a cog in the machinery of middle-class cultural dominance, far removed from its origins in working-class youth rebellion