Abstract
This article examines avant-garde ‘freak out’ recordings in rock music: extended album tracks that suggest madness in their sonic anarchy, conceptual absurdity and amateur technique. Products of the counterculture rooted in the historical avant-garde, these recordings by musicians in the 1960s and 1970s rejected musical conventions of song structure, meaning and competence in their attacks on an emerging music industry. While such extreme recordings bring to the fore the uneasy relationship between art and rock, avant-garde recordings by pop musicians are not antithetical to rock, but part of its discourse of rebellion. This article demonstrates how recordings of this kind ranging from the hippie era of the 1960s to the postpunk era of the late 1970s functioned more as aggressive acts of resistance to social and musical convention than attempts to elevate popular music to a higher level of art.
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