ABSTRACT

By the mid-2000s, as rock had slowly ceded its popularity on the charts to hip-hop and pop acts, it seemed that the rock star was becoming a vanishing breed. In his 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, David Shumway, a popular music studies scholar and professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that it is not simply the dearth of rock stars that is alarming, but rather their inability to reach the public consciousness and have a broad cultural impact. He uses as his main point of comparison, the emergence of rock stars such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles during the 1960s and the politically powerful ways in which they were seen to galvanize a strong countercultural identity and sense of community. Over time, Shumway contends, popular music has become increasingly fragmented, smashed into thousands of niches that have rendered the iconic power of those 1960s stars a thing of the distant past. He views this development bleakly, as a sad commentary on popular music’s marginalized cultural position. Shumway’s polemical piece raises a number of intriguing questions: Are the politicized rock stars that Shumway describes truly gone, or can you think of recent artists who have affected contemporary culture in significant ways? Conversely, what are we to make of the many songs from hip-hop and pop artists (such as Shop Boyz’ “Party Like a Rock Star” and Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana’s “Rock Star”) that celebrate the rock star as a symbol of excess or individual empowerment?1 Why have such songs proliferated in recent years? What relevance does this notion of the rock star hold for today’s audiences?