The Rock Counterculture from Modernist Utopianism to the Development of an Alternative Music Scene

Abstract

This essay analyzes rock music’s countercultural status from the perspective of musicians’ and fans’ aspirations to a utopian transfiguration of everyday life. Relying on Fredric Jameson’s and Ihab Hassan’s reflections on (post)modernism, the present argument locates rock among the movements within modern culture seeking to counter alienation and reification. On this basis, the article investigates how aspirations to utopian transfiguration may empower rock to develop a full-fledged alternative to dominant culture. Taking into account the difficulties involved in using counterculture as a socio-historical keyword, this argument acknowledges that rock cannot fulfill its utopian promise. Yet the music makes possible the development of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a field of restricted production: musicians, fans, and journalists define codes and practices tracing out a perimeter of autonomy differentiating rock from commercial mass culture. This social space may in specific contexts serve as hub for a counterhegemonic coalition aiming to redraw the social field according to goals broader than those pursued by fragmented subcultures. The final section of the article investigates one of the channels through which rock’s sphere of restricted production gives a durable shape to its empowering agenda: the representation of labor practices eschewing the alienation of professional life. Rock, it is argued, stakes out its autonomy with regard to the capitalist labor market by making musical labor an area of personal fulfillment.