Aesthetic Realism Explains Rock and Roll and Our Lives

Abstract

This is an inquiry into what rock and roll as art can say to us about our very lives. It is based on the following principle of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by American poet Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Six well-known rock and roll recordings are looked at for how they make a one of opposites — principally, inner feeling and outward expression, also wildness and precision, continuity and discontinuity, pleasure and pain; and how the seeing of these aesthetic opposites as one in the music of rock and roll can inform us about how we, as human beings, want to be in our everyday lives in order to be happy and truly expressed.