Rocking in the Free World

Abstract

Abstract In 1988, Bruce Springsteen inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Dylan was a revolutionary,” he said. “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Six months later, Springsteen performed Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” in East Berlin. “I’m not here for any government,” he told the crowd in halting German. “I’ve come to play rock ’n’ roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” Four years earlier, both Democrat Walter Mondale and Republican Ronald Reagan had invoked Springsteen on the campaign trail, the same year the liberal Nation praised the musician’s “unmistakable progressive political message”—describing the very songs the arch-conservative National Review heard as “invested with a cowboy libertarianism.” Progressive and libertarian, anti-communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock ’n’ roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the Sixties and Seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the Eighties. How did rock ’n’ roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise—and the limits—of rock music as a political force in postwar America?