ABSTRACT
As avant-gardists, the Stooges were committed to ongoing change and evolution. Along with their deliberately anti-pop stance, this put them in a particularly difficult position in terms of building a wider audience and selling records. As Pierre Bourdieu elucidates, On one side are the dominant figures, who want continuity, identity, reproduction; on the other, the newcomers, who seek discontinuity, rupture, difference, revolution. Already the Stooges had passed through several stages of development, from the non-rock, performance-art experimentalism of 1967, to their free-form heavy rock jams of 1968, to the deliberately simplistic rock’n’roll configuration of 1969, with more change to come in 1970. Throughout history, such iconoclastic musicians have been responsible for key advances, both in musical form itself and ways these new forms impact the wider society.
