Lost in the city: Yes's ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ and the expansion of musical expression in rock

Abstract

AbstractYes's ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ addresses one of the primary concerns of the counterculture: the alienation of the individual from humanity by the dominant consumerist, ‘plastic’ culture, represented by the city. In their expression of the effects of alienation, Yes expanded the musical vocabulary of rock, for while the allusive imagery of the song's text relates the locus of the protagonist and his being ‘lost’ amid the population of the city, the arrangement of the song and the purely instrumental passages lay bare the frustration of an individual unable to establish intimate, human relationships. Contemporary commentary on hippie perceptions of, and reactions to, mainstream culture provides a background to an analysis that demonstrates the descriptive power of the instrumental passages in this 1971 work.