Was Sixties Enviro-Folk-Rock Simply a “Commodity Fetish”?
Wherein I Wonder Just How Subversive Folk Rock Was
(Part 16 of an eighteen-part series on Sixties folk rock and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Specifically, the series tracks the influence of environmentally themed songs from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in late 1962 to the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970.)
When I was teaching literary theory to undergrads in Central Pennsylvania, I was often surprised — and tickled — by the way my students responded to learning about Marxist theory. Many of those students were working class, and many were the first in their families to go to college. Given the conservative politics of the area — democratic strategist James Carville once described Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between” — I expected resistance to Marxist ideas. But in truth, once my students got past their fear that Marx = commie = bad, they quite readily grasped and accepted the gist of Marxist theory. You see, I would explain, Marx observed that the people who controlled the economic system got to make the rules and set up the political system and our societal structures to benefit themselves and perpetuate their privileged position. Well, of course, said my students. Duh. The rich have all the power, and the rich get richer. Doesn’t everyone know that? And then they could have fun tracing that dynamic in things they’d been reading — and in the daily news.
With that introduction, I’m hoping I won’t scare off too many readers by venturing into a Marxist reading of Sixties folk rock, focusing on the question of whether Sixties folk rock was really all that subversive. In Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, Mike Marquese summarizes Marxist critic Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on popular music as a product of the Culture Industry (Marquese 193–96). Essentially, Adorno’s point is that the Culture Industry, from the top down, appropriates dissent. The industry makes dissent safe and palatable, packaging and selling it to consumers, thereby satisfying their desires for a “commodity fetish.” Consumers may even think they are rebelling against the system (or The Man) but really are just playing their passive roles. Popular music, then, serves to make people content with the walls of the cell that society provides them with. You can decorate those walls any way you like, even covering them with slogans critiquing the system, making a display of your rebellious nature. And then you can contentedly lie back in your cell admiring your artwork and congratulating yourself on the power of your protest. You may even find yourself growing quite comfortable ensconced there within the walls of your cell.
But just how does music end up serving the purposes of the system even as it seems to raise a voice in protest? First, the music may be repetitive in structure and subject, offering comfortable and easy resolutions. At the same time, the Music Industry peddles a false individuation, with minor embellishments of personality and style to make it seem like there is something new going on when it’s really the same old same old.
Environmentally-themed music of the ’60s would seem to offer some evidence in support of Adorno’s theory. Green folk rock often makes environmental concern a problem solved by reform at the level of the individual: we all need to change our ways and do our part. So what are we supposed to do? Don’t litter. Appreciate nature. (Whoa, radical thought there). Or if you must assign blame, do it in word only but for heaven’s sake don’t be inspired to act. Think of the vague and comfortable sort of social protest in something like Scott MacKenzie’s “Flowers in Your Hair”: “all across the nation, it’s a new generation, people in motion.” The song is catchy as all-get-out, but no social institutions are really being challenged. And what is the nature of the radical action we are encouraged to take? Be sure to wear flowers in your hair. Yup, that’ll teach ’em. That’ll make them think twice. That’ll change the world.
To the extent that environmental problems are simply a matter of individual change (versus institutional change), some of the songs involved in the greening of the ’60s were as radical (not) as Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign. From the White House itself, power center of the military industrial complex, we are told that if we’d only stop littering along our highways, the natural world would be beautiful again. Oh, so the problem is not industry dumping toxins into our waterways and our atmosphere — it’s not city sewage systems emptying our you-know-what into rivers, streams, and bays — it’s not emissions from coal-burning plants or gasoline engines in our cars. It’s that gum wrapper you threw out the car window. So save the world by not doing that anymore. Whew! That was easy. At least we don’t have to think of alternative transportation systems or power grids, or require expensive scrubbers on industry smokestacks that might make our goods cost a penny or two more.
David Ingram also invokes Adorno in pointing out that the Sixties songs of pastoral retreat — while that may have been “the main mode by which the eco-utopian potential of music has been articulated in American popular music since 1960” (52) — could be serving a conservative rather than a progressive ideology. The appealing nature imagery of a song like, say, “Wild Horses,” would amount to a “defence of the status quo” by suggesting that “people are already happily reconciled with nature in the present, capitalist society” (Ingram 53–54). A more radical version of pastoral would suggest a retreat to nature that functions as a rejection of the bourgeois values of mainstream society.
Ingram ties the discussion in with Leo Marx’s distinction (in The Machine in the Garden) between simple and complex pastoral. Both are motivated by the yearning for retreat to a simpler life close to nature. But complex pastoral, rather than “helping to mask the real problems of an industrial civilization” (Marx 6), will “call into question . . . the illusion of peace and harmony” and introduce notes of “dislocation, conflict, anxiety” (25). Following up on Marx’s ideas (Leo, that is, not Karl) (or Groucho), Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination makes the case for pastoral’s revolutionary impulse when it recommends rural retreat in “opposition to industrial development” (Ingram 55). But when the retreat takes the form of individual encounters with nature in the form of a transcendental spirit quest, says Buell, then it is indeed compatible with the individualism that forms the basis of a capitalist system and is no longer fulfilling a revolutionary purpose.
So which is it in the case of the enviro songs of the folk-rock era? For the most part, the retreat to nature motif prominent in folk rock most often takes place in opposition to the capitalist and industrial values of the modern world. When Ten Years After sing that they are “going up the country,” it’s because they “got to get away”; they’ve got to “leave this city” and “all this fussing and fighting.” The impulse clearly rejects a rejection of mainstream values because the speakers cannot be content in the present, capitalist modern society. The fact that they couch that rejection in a melody and rhythm lifted from a song from the 1920s, Henry Thomas’s “Bull Doze Blues,” is telling. In essence, the song suggests that a return to traditional ways may be how we can, in the words of the Beatles, “get back to where we once belonged.”
Even when the industrialized city is not specifically invoked in the song, as is the case in the Incredible String Band’s “Log Cabin Home in the Sky,” we might read the opening line as a metaphor for what we need to escape: “all around the wide country, the winter has now begun.” The modern world, capitalist society — it’s all cold and harsh. But we can retreat to the fireside of our cabin. In the green songs of the Sixties there are frequently notes, too, of the “dislocation, conflict, anxiety” that (Leo) Marx sees as integral to complex pastoral. Note the unanswered question in Cat Stevens’s “Where Do the Children Play?” Note too that the escape from the modern world of skyscrapers and unending highways in “Where Do the Children Play?” is not a solo escape — it’s for the children, plural, not a solo spiritual quest. If it were simply a project in self-improvement, Lawrence Buell’s critique says that would render it an ineffectual pastoral retreat that does not challenge societal values. But the plea is made on the behalf of the society as a whole, for its future, which seems compatible with the “back to the land” impulse that underlay many of the era’s songs. The wish was for a new sort of communal society, not the life of a hermit.
It would seem, then, that most of the green songs of the era meet the qualifications for what Ingram, Adorno, Leo Marx, and Buell would consider a more resistant sort of pastoral that actively challenges the social status quo. Of course, there are plenty of songs that do not necessarily work by drawing telling contrasts between city and country or leaving us feeling at least a little bit discomfited. Songs that do no not challenge the bourgeois culture-at-large and do not suggest any sort of revolutionary alternative to the way things are. But I’m not quite ready to dismiss them as failures for not offering direct challenges to bourgeois capitalism — a.k.a., in the lingo of the day, The System. As I pointed out in my essay on folk rock as a “critique of modernism,” those songs that did little more than express appreciation for the natural world — “Here Comes the Sun” comes to mind as one example — may have had a profoundly persuasive effect just by reinforcing the message that nature is a positive thing. Then you leave it to a sympathetic listener to act on that predisposition — by, perhaps, supporting legislation to protect our land, water, air.
But among the environmentalist songs of the era, there were some that were more overt in raising a challenge to the core values and institutions of our materialistic (capitalist) society. Many of them, like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” did so with lyrics that were not shy about laying blame at the feet of economic and political power brokers. But just as potent an argument came from musical experimentation that keyed the listener in to the idea that some new way of looking at the world — and a new way of expressing our thoughts about it — was being presented to us.
Sixties folk rock explored ways of stepping out of the normative structures of popular song. It did so at times by using new instruments or atonality or different modal arrangements. The blending of electric instruments with traditional folksong structures, at the very heart of folk rock, was one such innovation. So too were the attempts to break out of the three-minute box that popular music had traditionally been packaged in — in songs like Dylan’s “Desolation Row” that took its time and space, in the vein of poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” or T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” to say what it had to say. Experiments in instrumentation surfaced in the use of the sitar in songs like The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” or the raga-like Rickenbacker-riffs in The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” Think of the modal experiments as well as the exotic array of instrumentation in much of the acoustic-psychedelic work of the Incredible String Band, or the jazz-like improvisation and musique concrète sound of something like Frank Zappa’s instrumental “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution” (1969) or “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask” (1970).
And, yes, above all, there were those more sophisticated and challenging lyrics that dared to venture beyond teen romance as subject matter — lyrics that even dared to make us think twice, it’s alright, about the comfortable platitudes that popular music had previously served up. All these experiments hardly served to accommodate listeners to any sort of social or political or economic status quo. The shocked reaction of the powers-that-be to Sixties music, their vociferous condemnation of it, tells you all you need to know about the discomfiting effect of folk rock’s experiments in form. I’m a little reluctant to make the claim that it changed the world — that seems a little too grandiose a claim — but it certainly did more than give us something pleasant to listen to while the Earth and contemporary society went to hell. It gave us something to think about.
Works Cited
Ingram, David. The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Marquese, Mike. Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.
