ABSTRACT
Rock, in other words, described a more ambitious music than pop, in terms of form, content and impact: Rock ideologues wrote about records' political and poetic significance; rock musicians both represented a subversive community and realized complex private dreams and feeling. The 1960s still stand ideologically as a moment of great musical significance, but it worked at the time as a series of moments of more or less triviality. Hippie musicians began to identify with romantic artists generally—writers, painters, poets; they began to assume a culturally well educated audience even while proclaiming their own superiority to it. The politics of musical memory—the struggle to determine what the music meant then, why that matters now—is complicated by its double setting: to play Sgt. Pepper is to hear it as music in the context of corporate rock and postpunk pop and as music then.
