In the 1980s, performers and champions of art rock in Britain coined the word rockism, a term of disapproval for their North American counterparts’ austere and deadly earnest performance style (see Chrisgtau “Decade: Rockism”). Since Kelefa Sanneh revived and popularized the term in the United States in 2004, rockism has become the name for the jurisdiction straight white men exercise over matters of taste in popular music. Today, rockism encompasses—and sometimes conflates—aesthetic preferences and social prejudices, leading to objections that the term has been stretched beyond coherence (see J. Rosen; Woods; Wolk). Of course, one could defuse allegations of rockism by noting rock’s many internal divisions and the subsequent difficulty of locating their unified, hostile relationship to other genres and their fans. Yet, something keeps most rock fans, artists, and critics in conversation with each other and not with, say, church musicians. Despite their sometimes sharp disagreements, the champions of classic, hard, punk, mod, metal, and subsequent rock styles have shared “a field of argument over the origins, directions, and posterity of the music” (Saul xii).1 It may be helpful, then, to think of rockism as the conduct of debates that produce the distinction “between the ‘mass’ and the ‘art’ in mass art [which] has been the distinguishing ideological project of rock culture since [the late 1960s]” (Keightley 109).2 Across most of its genres, the following practices have become signs of rock’s transcendence of its roots in the Hit Parade: writing one’s own material, providing one’s own instrumental accompaniment, producing dense concept albums rather than catchy dance singles, and following one’s muse resolutely, in spite of pressure from fans and record labels.3 As debates ensue over whether certain artists, fans, and genres adhere to these values, rockism assigns autonomy, authenticity, and authorship (see Keightley 134)—virtues that reflect an ideal hero more than any actual artist. Rockist proceedings conclude by disclaiming these hagiographic activities, declaring that the aforementioned qualities were already present in the sources. Complex figures appear in rock’s moral fables as types such as rambling bluesmen, innocent country girls, savvy pimps, and dissolute sellouts. Once dressed in these characters, they are prepared to teach about the corrupting effects of an urban, money economy on individuality.Before the rockism debate is retired as what some would deem another fruitless exercise in identity politics, it is worth considering the race and gender contours of rock’s archetypal cult artist and prostitute. Such a review shows that rock’s archetypes have been race- and gender-specific and that these raced and sexualized characters have incited visceral desires to purify, protect, and strengthen rock in relation to competing genres. In this essay, I trace rock’s identity-coded market moralities not to resistance to mass culture in the Cold War era but to a longer line of anticommercial ideologies designed to preserve (or create) white male freedom.4 Adopting this historical frame allows confrontation with the deep dreams ofthe rockist imaginary and opens the possibility of redistributing rock’s cultural and economic capital beyond revaluing black roots musicians and derided pop divas. To achieve this fundamental change that both sets of anti-rockists want would entail engaging a theory of volition that can account for agency’s inseparable components of self-assertion and submission to external power.5 In imagining that transformation, I have often returned to a resonant line from classic rock’s founding year of 1967, the insistent opening of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”: “There must be some way out of here.” However, instead of assigning that declaration to “the joker,” I assign it to the hooker, in the hopes that centering and embracing the compromised figure of the prostitute offers some way out of rockism’s constraining notion of freedom as a state of permanent rebellionMy approach combines two traditions in the critique of rock that have usually been pursued separately. On one side, scholars and journalists interested in rock ideology have rightly noted that Romanticism and Modernism provided rock an aesthetic morality deeply opposed to commercialism (see Frith “The Magic;” Gracyk 176-202; Keightley 111). While they brilliantly demonstrate rock’s slippery capacity to be in mass culture while expressing disdain for it, their writing on aesthetics often separates rock and its parent cultures from their connections to broader labor struggles—despite the fact that professional artists have long understood themselves to be we now call culture workers. More attention to the dream of free labor inspiring cultural workers suggests that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetics bequeathed rock ideology not only an anticommercial ethic but also emblematic “blacks and women” to symbolize the corrupting power of market culture—and the imagined benefits of exile from it.6As the classic rock consensus emerged, critics were treating the study of aesthetics and identity politics separately, separately with Ellen Willis lamenting rock’s co-optation by high-minded bohemians in 1968 (420) and Patricia Kennealy-Morrison flatly calling the same cohort male chauvinists in 1970 (358). Norma Coates recently reconciled these approaches, linking rock critics’ opposition to mass culture to their depiction of it as feminine—even female (66).7 Rock culture, Coates argues, shaped and deployed the figures of teenyboppers and groupies as tasteless consumers of mass culture or disposable commodities, respectively. Her study of the gendering of mass culture calls for a companionate approach to that culture’s racialization, a project I begin by attending to figures such as the country virgin and the rambling bluesman. Complementing Coates with an examination of race and masculinity in rock ideology, Christophe den Tandt argues that, in enforcing to rock’s austere aesthetic, male rockers simulate the operation of a self-regulating guild of musical craftsmen, free from corporate control. His depiction of rock’s attempt to uphold a “nineteenth-century artisan ideal” in the twentieth century (and the twenty-first) through white males’ technical mastery of African-American skills mirrors the arc I trace (Tandt 384). As Tandt finds the artisan ideal preserved in the classic rock band, I find dynamics of nineteenth-century blackface resounding in rock nostalgia’s capacity to locate working whites’ lost liberties in the lives of economically marginal blacks. I would add that, in addition to claiming street smarts through identification with black men, they also maintain a place for pastoral innocence by celebrating “cool-eyed country girl[s]” with “vanilla-fresh” voices (“Into the Pain of the Heart”).8Unlike students of rock aesthetics, those who focus on racism and sexism in rock often characterize its definition of artistry as a transparent cover for identity-based exclusion. For example, journalist Kelefa Sanneh asks: “The pop star, the disco diva, the lip-syncher, the ‘awesomely bad’ hit maker: could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world?” (Sanneh). Unless one imputes secret political conservatism to all white men in the early rock community, it is not a foregone conclusion that people who staked out “an oppositional relationship to mainstream culture” should have created a conservative’s dream canon of self-made white men (Coates 67). My concern here is not how, say, Bruce Springsteen’s skeptical representation of the American Dream in “Born in the USA” was rebranded as a patriotic anthem. Rather, I am interested in how the energies put into erecting and safeguarding rock’s aesthetic integrity produced a canon that, by and large, aligns with the pursuit of white male freedom, even when the subjects are not white men.Highlighting the small number of people among the canon-makers and the canonized that are not straight white Anglo-American men risks simplifying complex operations to a simple exclusionary reflex.9 Rock’s canon-makers have not always reacted involuntarily to identity’s apparent physical features. Rather, they have seized upon sonic and visual evidence to cast artists as exemplary characters in cautionary tales about the market. Perhaps sheer racism, sexism, and homophobia informed rockism’s oversight of popular music criticism in the disco era (see Echols, “Shaky Ground” 162-65). Yet, today, even avowedly right-wing institutions have adopted a “rhetorical register of disaffiliation” from explicit advocacy of social inequality (Wiegman 119). While now offering belated plaudits to overlooked “blacks and women,” rock ideologues have continued to distribute the dividends of critical attention and long-term profits according to moral distinctions between ascetic artists and debased whores. In so doing, the ideology’s ever-present capacity to make characters distinct from artists’ visible social identities has only become more apparent. Consequently, before critics tabulate the number of women and minorities on a “best of” list or in a personal music collection as proof of rock’s sheer power to exclude, they should be sure that rockism has not worked its alchemy; because rockism is perfectly capable of remarkable reinventions, transforming Mick Jagger into “Madonna the Panderer” and Joni Mitchell into “Miles Davis: Streetwise Pimp and Restless Artist”—as in the cases below.Fulfilling Rolling Stone’s invitation to close its twentieth anniversary issue with sage words about the essence of rock, Bob Dylan renewed critiques of show business expressed at the magazine’s founding in 1967. Dylan championed a motionless stage persona he thought black men epitomized: “Howlin’ Wolf, to me, was the greatest live act, because he did not have to move a finger when he performed—if that’s what you’d call it, ‘performing’” (Loder 303). Ideological mystification is clearly at work here, for, if the musician did not move a finger, he could not have played his guitar.The real curb on exhibitionism here is not the bluesman’s refusal to perform for audiences but Dylan’s refusal to recognize that show business requires one to, well, show.Opposing two ideals from the US market—black restraint and white pandering—Dylan also situated performing as a close neighbor to prostitu-tion.10 He aligned the strutting Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger with achick performer, whom he imagined as a whore: “Showbiz—well, I don’t dig it. I don’t go to see someone jump around. I hate to see chicks perform. Hate it____[T]hey whore themselves. Especially the ones that don’t wear anything. They fuckin’ whore themselves” (Loder 303). By suggesting that Jagger’s titillating movements identified him with the striptease of a Madonna, Dylan sought to remind his longtime friend of a truism from the days when they were listening to folk-blues records on opposite sides of the Atlantic: “it’s still hipper and cooler to be Ray Charles, sittin’ at the piano, not movin’ shit. And still getting across, you know? Pushing rhythm and soul across” (Loder 303).11 Once again, Dylan inaccurately perceived a black male performer to be immobile. In truth, the Right Reverend Ray moved so much—using his entire body to conduct the band—that it often appeared he would fall off his piano bench! That journalist Kurt Loder did not note Dylan’s failures of reportage is an index of an ideology’s capacity to produce theories, ways of seeing that determine not only the way objects are ranked but also the way they are identified at the outset.Unlike the misrepresentation of Ray Charles, Dylan’s generalization about women performers did strike interviewer Kurt Loder as false. He quickly asked if Dylan would dare class “even someone like Joni Mitchell” with chicks who give their virtue away instead of men who horde it. The legend laughingly corrected himself: “Well, no. But, then, Joni Mitchell is almost like a man” (Loder 303). This gender reassignment shows the terms by which rockism has to create that which it later interprets. The degraded whore is such an essentially feminine figure that the ideology must resignify a female person as a masculine proxy in order to praise her. Similarly, a white male performer who is judged sufficiently liberated from commercial demands can be detached from his fellow white cover artist Pat Boone. While Boone became a laughing stock for producing diluted “white” versions of black artists’ hits, Jagger was racially repositioned as heir to the original mojo of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters.12Enlivening dead metaphors about prostitution that might otherwise prove unremarkable, Dylan provided the dramatis personae for a morality tale in which musicians progress, like pilgrims, through a world fallen into commerce. He tapped into dichotomous imagery in rock that has saddled singing (white) chicks with the burden of representing the pandering sellout while using soulful (black) instrumentalists to epitomize underground artists who dramatize withholding. As should be clear, neither Dylan’s women nor his blacks corresponded to actual living persons. Seen through the tint of rockist lenses, complex and contradictory performers appear either as praiseworthy masters of cool or as suspect purveyors of heat. Once juxtaposed, they serve as moral reference points for artists—and critics—attempting to grasp those elusive liberties that the Age of Revolutions was to have guaranteed white male citizens two centuries prior.While one could supplement Dylan’s vivid allegory with numerous additional examples, a recurrent trope from the critical archive about Joni Mitchell will illustrate the utility of the raced and sexualized characters in rock’s enduring market allegories. Mitchell’s admittance into the canon has been accompanied by repeated references to cosmetics as impediments to rock’s requisite truth-telling. One voice during the opening of PBS’s 2003 biography of Joni Mitchell (perhaps that of MTV’s Bill Flanagan) praises her as “unique because of the fact that she’s not going to put lipstick and makeup on the truth” (Lacy and Bennett 1:16). The same year, another critic took up the theme, commenting that those who hear Mitchell sing her 60s classic “Both Sides Now” with an aged and cracked voice get “the simple truth without lipstick or makeup” (Knelman). Continuing the theme, Mitchell biographer Karen O’Brien opposes “the natural vigour” of her subject, Bonnie Raitt, Marianne Faithfull, and Joan Baez to “the ersatz, painstakingly tended youthfulness of Cher and Tina Turner” (9). In O’Brien’s judgment, the women in her quartet never abandoned their connection to rock’s roots in unadorned folk style. Unlike Cher and Tina Turner, whose allegedly excessive stylization made them fodder for imitative drag queens, rock’s innocent country girls grew into still-unvarnished women.13It is not, of course, identity-based discrimination alone that can uproot as entrenched a rocker as Tina Turner from the genre. Rockers would like to think their genre thrives on the naked power of its raw sound while vacuous pop survives only because its empty sounds are paired with expensive visual supplements (i.e., manicured stars and music videos). (see Frith, “Pop Music” 96). The result is that consumers of these faddish products—whether hit singles or cosmetics—are thought to absorb those objects’ qualities, becoming trivial, indistinguishable, and decadent themselves (see Walter Hughes, qtd. in Echols, “Shaky Ground” 162). If framed not as the dynamo of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue but as another vapid idol of a set of tasteless gay consumers, Turner can lose her claim in rock as surely as Mick Jagger can become a chick performer.Ironically, this critically acclaimed Joni Mitchell who eschews lipstick and makeup bears as little relationship to the historical performer as Dylan’s unmoving Ray Charles to the one available in concert footage. Equally false is the refrain that Mitchell “never showed her tits” (Christiansen; Echols, “Soul of a Martian” 219). In fact, she rotated exposure and artifice, appearing on album art from 1972 to 1977 naked (from behind), bikini-clad while floating in a pool, and in blackface drag. Mitchell actually did employ lipstick, makeup, and other enhancements to assume her alter ego of Art Nouveau, a black male pimp and jazz musician who appeared on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) and in two films. Art’s unveiling announced the release of Mitchell’s first double-LP (a loose concept album), studio experiments with multi-tracking her guitar, and departures from the soaring melodies and autobiographical lyrics that had established her popularity. Aligning herself with street blackness, jazz music, and Miles Davis in particular, Mitchell proclaimed herself a restlessly creative artist who followed her muse more than the market. Forgetting that the commercially unsuccessful music of this period was accompanied by a thoroughly cosmeticized persona, critics invariably cite this period in awarding Mitchell a place in rock’s canon.14Journalist Stephen Holden once contended that canonizing Joni Mitchell would rid rock of its “most serious bias: its disdain for folk-oriented soft-rock, especially when made by women” (Holden). He could not have anticipated that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would honor her as a black male jazz musician. Oddly enough, misrepresenting her race and gender worked to make her authentic because, from a rockist standpoint, a black male street figure could not be inauthentic. Thus, at the confounding conclusion of the lipstick debates, Mitchell enters the canon in full-body blackface drag while Tina Turner—whose primary misrepresentation has been her cavalcade of wigs—must stay at the gay club with her iconic wigs and drag imperson-ators.15 One would think that the example of David Bowie would have prepared rockists to see enhancements such as lipstick and makeup as potential routes to liberated expression. Such a viewpoint is not dominant, however, because rockism proceeds from centuries of antitheatrical jeremiads that envision performance halls filled with unscrupulous prostitutes who use cosmetics, costumes, and pretense to sell what should never have even been seen.When considering the enduring bias against performers in anti-commercial invective, it is instructive to return to the etymology of prostitution. This return reveals that railing against the commercial involves suspecting not only misrepresentation but also mediation in toto. Literary critic Catherine Gallagher observes that prostitute comes “from the Latin, pro meaning ‘before’ and statuere, meaning ‘to setup or place.’ Toprostitute is thus to set something, oneself perhaps, before someone else to offer it for sale” (22n35). The fall into the marketplace results from a fall into representation; being seen is a precursor to being sold. Considering the traditional desire to protect art from the contamination of commercial exchange, it is ironic that the prostitute is linguistically conjoined with the statue, an art object designed to be shown.Robert Christgau alludes to this puritan dread of the visual in his sharp depiction of rockism and its effects. There is a bit of good-natured ribbing in Christgau’s portrayal of US-American rockers “so uncomfortable with the performer’s role that they strive to minimize it,” yet end up projecting not sincerity and immediacy but, instead, “conscious, and rather joyless, fakery” (“Decade: Rockism”). His logic points to a crucial link between exposure and solicitation: that the objection to selling out has contained within it a presumption that “stand[ing] out” is always the first indication of prostitution (Gallagher 22). The only reason to exhibit, in this paranoid logic, is to sell (out) to leering lechers located either in management or in the audience. Consequently, aesthetic ideologies opposed to commercial exchange and popular access reinvent artists as people whose only duty is to please themselves, redeeming the prostituted performer as onanist.16To engage the etymology linking prostitute, statue, and exhibitionist performer in this way is to do more than play a mere word game. Though these characters operate at the level of figurative comparison, they played a role in historical attempts to make distinctions among overlapping populations of industrial laborers, theatrical entertainers, slaves, and prostitutes—a process that parallels the attempt to distinguish rock from pop, despite their shared mass cultural origins. Just as rock was a new object in twentieth-century culture, so the unpropertied white male citizen was a new object in Anglo-American society. Establishing whether he was more like an aristocratic gentleman, a slave, or a prostitute would determine what kind of respect and wage he would merit. In seeking both money and honor for their new art form, white male rock critics had a rhetorical model in the ongoing struggle to establish their political status. As I proceed into a radically condensed history of Anglo-American discourse around prostitutes, slaves, and vagabond ramblers, I want to emphasize that the racially and sexually specific nature of these characters predates mass culture, though the progress of antidiscrimination affected their utility.Embedded in rockist disdain for the prostitute is a fear of sexual slavery with roots in the types of thinking engendered in early Anglo-American capitalism and its spheres of uneven development. In slave societies, a system of forced labor included sexual exploitation as one of its economic tools (see Morgan 1); in imperial centers, self-declared wage slaves and prostitutes worked in near proximity to earn liquid capital in industrializing cities (see Wallerstein 279). It has often been said that the explosion of industrial capitalism enhanced social mobility and thus fueled movements to level hereditary social distinctions. In this era, white men without property or title were promised promotions from involuntary serfdom to labor mobility, ancient obligation to negotiated wage, subjection to citizenship, and social deference to “horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7). Though the subject of the monarch was recast in the form of the self-determining citizen, the archive houses countless comparisons of the wage earner’s life to that of a prostitute or a slave. The irony is that the free man’s sense of proximity to these unfree figures was especially acute after he was awarded “liberty” in the form of the franchise and the wage contract.It would not be an exaggeration to say that bonds among white men of different stations were forged by an insistence that, though they alternately craved and dreaded participation in a money economy, they should never be confused with slaves and prostitutes, who were imagined as forms of currency lacking self-determining capacity. It was not that ambitious white men did not want to put a price on themselves; it was that they needed to be able to disavow ever having done so. The notion of liberty they took up was one distributed downward from a landed aristocracy suspicious that the need for money necessarily made one susceptible to bribery and coercion (see Isaac 113, 130; Rozbicki). The gentry’s liberties included condescension, leisure, and command—privileges that those who had to work to eat could hardly exercise. For white wage laborers to feel they enjoyed an equal share in this newly redistributed liberty, they would have to cultivate a willed obliviousness to their own vulnerability to the caprice that characterizes all transactions in a money economy. Ambivalently positioned, they invented opposing figures: one a vagabond or confidence-man who touched down in the commercial realm only when his money ran out, the other an amalgam of slave and prostitute whose will and dignity were entirely overridden by monetary transactions. While supposedly free white men rubbed shoulders in the muck with the latter, they identified in their imaginations with the former.Considering this situation from that cradle of industrial capitalism, nineteenth-century London, sociologist Roderick Ferguson notes that the prostitute became a galvanizing figure for a wide array of philosophies and social movements opposed to the wage labor system (9). Assessing Karl Marx’s canonical remarks on the prostitution of the worker, Ferguson observes: “The prostitute symbolizes the dehumanization or [,] more specifically, man’s feminization under capitalist social relations” (8). This disem-powering outcome rendered the revolutionary promise of liberation hollow and made it clear that the proletarian owned only his own body—and perhaps that of his wife or child—while the landed capitalist’s assets simply began there. For all his disputes with the theorists of capitalist economics, Marx concurred that, in a free society, a man would own himself at the least. Unlike Adam Smith and John Locke, he saw man’s alienation from that first property in the rise of the wage contract under capitalism (see Pateman and Mills 17). Thus, he viewed the prostitute as the perfect representation of this condition, in which industrial workers, like sex workers, “ha[ve] only that labor that resides in [their] bod[ies] to sell” (Ferguson 7-8). As Jean-Christophe Agnew demonstrates in a brilliant discussion of the co-evolution of commercial theatre and capitalism’s mediated economy, Marx may as well have said “actor” in the place of prostitute. For prostitutes, vagrants, actors, and wage workers were typically drawn from the same regions and social classes and, in fact, often engaged in exchanges that blurred the distinction between economies—formal and informal, licit and illicit (see Agnew; Burnett; Davis; Pullen).17The rhetorical power of the metaphor of prostitution has been so great that the term often seems capable of denotative description without reference to actual prostitutes. However, it is worth wondering at campaigns for liberty that managed to equate sex work and industrial labor and, for that matter, how the exchange of a man’s power to work for liquid capital came to be seen as effecting a gender reassignment. If anything, Marx’s male worker becomes a form of currency, not a female.18 Yet, a masculinist conception of proletarian liberation promulgated the idea that capitalism’s great evil was the reduction of men to the status of currency and generated outrage by substituting for that a reduction of status from male to female. Dylan’s portrayal of whores is clearly indebted to this history of working-class consciousness.As a slave to sin or to consumer demand, the nineteenth-century prostitute often shared a conceptual bed with the chattel. In the Jacksonian United States, the white male workers at the fore of the labor movement feared a racial reassignment as well as the gender reassignment discussed above, as made evident in their vociferous objections to wage labor as “white slavery.” In the first decades of the nineteenth century, slavery itself was considered a violation if the subject was white. By the latter part of the century, abstract liberty had been so thoroughly connected to birth as a white male that the only people deemed white slaves were white female prostitutes (see Roediger 72).19 Abolitionists also contributed to the crossing of the prostitute and the slave. Iconic texts and images defined slavery as primarily about the sexual violation of enslaved women.20 As Michael Newbury details, literary celebrities of the antebellum United States joined this chorus by comparing the crowd’s desire for their public appearances to the graphic torture and sexual abuse of the slave (160).Building on George Rawick, historian David Roediger contends that white workers in the antebellum North played the plantation darky as a way of revisiting the easeful life they nostalgically associated with their lost agrarian pasts (95-96). Of course, easy living was, historically, the prerogative of the landed aristocracy. Consequently, working whites were better able to live out their fantasies of black leisure and license. Indeed, to inhabit those fantasies, they needed only to take from the folk’s bottomless well of cultural property, rather than to engage in potentially fatal conflict with economic elites over economic property.21 If blackface performance constituted an implicit critique of life under the tyranny of capitalism’s workday, it also marked a limit of cross-racial identification. Far from aligning politically with black workers, white actors and audiences used their leisure time to enjoy unstructured black life vicariously or through performance.22While there was no unanimous white response to blacks’ transition from slaves to vagrants and sharecroppers—nor even consistency in any one artist’s engagement with the racial imaginary—the twentieth century witnessed successive social and artistic movements that ventriloquized blackness as a way to criticize market culture. Along with folk survivals the world over, stylistically undomesticated African-American speech was thought to ward off the disintegrating and alienating effects of market culture (North, Preface). Modernists, beatniks, folkies, and hippies were twentieth-century heirs to a nineteenth-century tradition of inhabiting imaginary black lifestyles full of pleasures denied to those whites who behaved according to regulation (see Saul, Part I; G. Wald, “Mezz Mezzrow”).During the industrial period, from the 1820s to the 1970s, the dissolute prostitute and the black man who had not sold (or could not sell) his soul served as important figures, screens onto which enfranchised and ambitious people projected their fears and desires.23 To the ext