...This chapter presents the author’s reflections about the music of the Sex Pistols and other rock bands. She also considers the reasons behind her dislike for women’s-culture music. She says that rock-and-roll music boldly and aggressively lays out what the singer wants, loves, hates, and in so...

.... He’s the ‘all right, this will do’ savior and the perfect antihero for the seventies because he is the embodiment of the dead sixties dream. Ziggy is the space-race anticlimax, Manson and Altamont and Nixon’s reelection and the breakup of the Beatles made sexy. Rock ’n’ roll ecdysis is a crucial...

... indulged them. Sociologists attributed the alarming rise of forbidden behavior among young people at the time to rock ’n’ roll music, parental indifference, post-World War II restlessness, and too much affluence. The author’s father, Oscar Waldemar Lindberg, fit well in that paradigm. Left to their own...

... rock ’n’ roll as a major force in making desegregation possible during the 1950s and 1960s, without acknowledging how racist the music industry is. Musicians such as Johnny Otis and Preston Love write the truth about the industry and then spur bitter reactions from readers who do not understand...

.... The records turned out to be driving, snarling, harderthan-Stones rock-and-roll, with tough, sophisticated lyrics. “Substitute” was—though I didn’t think in such terms then—the best rock-as-paradox song ever written. (“Street Fighting Man” is second.) It embodied the tension between the wildness of rock...

...This chapter presents the author’s reflections about Elvis Presley’s performance at the new International Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969, his first concert in nine years. Elvis, the very definition of rock-and-roll for its vociferous defenders and detractors, became the first rock-and-roller to switch...

... to achieve that kind of stature in what was basically a male club, the only sixties culture hero to make visible and public women’s experience of the quest for individual liberation, which was very different from men’s. If Janis’s favorite metaphors—singing as fucking (a first principle of rock-and-roll...

...Written by New Yorker’s inimitable first pop music critic, this book presents the perspective of a radical and rational political realm, to look at rock-and-roll, sexuality, and above all, freedom. Here the text captures the thrill of music, the disdain of authoritarian culture...

..., grafted literary and philosophical subtleties onto the protest song, revitalized folk vision by rejecting proletarian and ethnic sentimentality, then all but destroyed pure folk music as a contemporary form by merging it with pop. Since then rock-and-roll, which was already in the midst of a creative...

... Bowie, Roxy Music and its offshoots, and the New York Dolls. By 1977, the same duality had surfaced in new ways, with new force, under new conditions, to become the basis of rock-and-roll’s new wave. The Velvets suggested continuity between art and violence, order and chaos, but they also posed...

...This chapter talks about charges made against Black music during the 1950s, fueled by obvious racial double standards. Being pro-Black, Johnny Otis was accused of “polluting” the American youth by promoting indecent, offensive, and even immoral Black music; with rock ’n’ roll and RnB detractors...

... notes and noise for noise’s sake; they were partial to sweet, almost folk-like melodies; they played the electric viola on Desolation Row. But they were basically rock-and-roll artists, building their songs on a beat that was sometimes implied rather than heard, on simple, tough, pithy lyrics about...

.... The auchapterthor notes a paradox in music, or more precisely, rock and roll, citing the lyrics of bands such as Deadly Nightshade and the Sex Pistols: even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged her struggle for liberation. sexism anger male power right feminism...

... of freedom that nevertheless had a similar economic foundation. If Janis’s favorite metaphors—singing as fucking (a first principle of rock and roll) and fucking as liberation (a first principle of the cultural revolution)—were equally approved by her male peers, the congruence was only on the surface...