ABSTRACT
Rock music permeates all areas of social life, from supermarkets to homes. The intensity of its reception ranges from the fanatical devotion of youth subcultures to cheery accompaniment for household chores. The following deals primarily with analysis of the stars in rock music and rock’s relation to consumerism. It does not pretend to be exhaustive of its subject-other obviously important factors like sexuality are artificially left aside. Marxism has tended to attack rock music (and earlier, swing music) because of its commodity basis, and has upheld folk music as ideologically superior. The American Communist Party consciously used folk music as part of its political strategy in the 1930s and 1940s.1 Thus, following the Bolsheviks’ example, classical and contemporary popular music (the swing and jazz music favored by the new American urban population) were declared to be “tools of the ruling class.” The canons of socialist realism, that proletarian art should be “national in form and revolutionary in content,” led to the search for a national folk music. The folk music of rural Southern hamlets selected for this task, however, was a foreign, esoteric form to urban dwellers outside the South who made up an ever-increasing proportion of the American population after 1920. The impact of this musical strategy never went beyond its Southern, rural roots. Radical folk singers took shelter in their extreme isolation, waiting for the revolutionary leap that never occurred.2
