ABSTRACT
The rock–folk argument is not about how music is made, but about how it works: rock is taken to express a way of life; rock is used by its listeners as a folk music – it articulates communal values, comments on shared social problems. There were two components to the rock–folk argument: firstly, the music was an authentic 'reflection of experience'; secondly, the music reflected the experience of a community – there was no distinction of social experience between performers and audiences. Rock ideologues like Jon Landau claimed their music as folk in order to distinguish it from the rest of pop: rock was popular music that was not 'imposed from above', that did not fake emotion. The radical tradition of American folk music was primarily the creation of a group of metropolitan, left-wing bohemians: their account of 'the people' was as rooted in myth and their own circumstances as was that of their more respectable, bourgeois, folk predecessors.
