Rock Music as Modernist Resistance to Commercial Culture

The Modernist Roots of Aesthetic Resistance

The end of the 19th century brought with it a host of changes which, driven by technology and spreading urbanization, brought the entire world under the sway of the Industrial Revolution. Factories, tenements, and immigrants filled the cities of Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and with them came overcrowding, urban blight, aesthetic conformity, and the seedlings of mass consumerism. The artistic community produced an organic resistance to this social impulse, represented by its commitment to abstract visual forms. As early as the 1880s, the modernist movement in art, literature, and design began to present itself as a refuge from rigid Victorian ideals of aesthetic appeal — and from the very definition of what could be labeled as art.

This moment of inflection may seem in some ways a far cry from the throttling adrenaline of a Led Zeppelin concert, the stark alienation of a Radiohead album, or the sheer poetic insight of a Bob Dylan lyric. But in a sense that will be explored further here, these passing citations in rock music reflect a larger aesthetic in this mode of expression that renders it a social force of considerable power. Though over its fifty-year history rock music would undergo considerable change — cycling through a perpetual ebb and flow of artistic evolution and commercial prioritization — at those points where both conditions seem to have been satisfied, rock comprises a modernist statement that makes new usage of old forms by attempting always to strip away socially imposed conceits.

Before entering into a discussion of rock music both as a form of popular culture and as a mode of artistic protest, it is appropriate to return briefly to the era of the Industrial Revolution. By virtue of the trauma and change it foisted upon all people of the world, industrialization caused those with expressive outlets to seek dramatic reconsiderations of form. The assumed notions of visual art-form convention, architectural necessity, and craft conformity were rejected in favor of individualist aesthetic parameters. In modernism was represented an ambition on the part of the artist to be removed from the equation of commoditization characterizing life with the inception of industrialization and its materialist tendencies. Thus, efforts to strip away the social packaging of any expressive medium would result in a broad-based philosophical change in what was to be regarded as artful.

The infusion of specifically European principles into the American craftsman's impulse brought to the fore an emphasis on abstractions of color, shape, and proportion. Figures such as Lewis Comfort Tiffany, renowned for his trademark glass innovations, and architect Louis H. Sullivan, who brought the cubist abstractions of Art Nouveau to the Midwest through the vessel of what is now Norwest Bank Owatonna, helped to make modernism a form of populist resistance to aesthetic conformity (ArtsMIA, 1).

Rock and Roll as Populist Modernism

In the manner of greatest importance to its identity, rock music was at its purest to be taken as such a populist notion. Upon its emergence into popular consciousness in the 1950s, rock and roll was derided by its critics — informed by no small degree of racism toward a music inspired by black R&B combos of the prior decade — as a form of music requiring the least of talents. Compared to the virtuosity of jazz or the form and precision of classical music, rock and roll was indeed a more basic, even primitive form of expression. Before the medium was expanded by postmodern experimentalism, this primitive nature was regarded by many as rock and roll's strongest and most defining feature.

The democratic nature of a musical idiom with this level of accessibility did not mean that every young person could grow up to be Elvis Presley — a singular talent, at least to those with the foresight to recognize it at the time of his emergence — but it did mean that everyone could have a shot at expression within its parameters. And more than that, the earliest accomplishments of rock and roll speak to the modernist instinct to remove the layers of affectation, aesthetic convention, and perpetuated value systems in order to return to a point at which the mode of expression could stand on its own.

The wild, thin sound of early rock and roll demonstrates to a clear point that the previous generation's syrupy string arrangements, big band orchestras, and ballroom waltzes were to go the way of that same generation's segregation, social conservatism, and arch-materialism. The rattling menace of early Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Bill Haley succeeded brilliantly at undermining the conventions which had previously dressed music in so much slick fanfare. When the conceits of a materialist society were brushed aside, it is perhaps not surprising that what remained was an expressive tendency toward inarticulate rebellion, sexual primacy, and youthful disaffection.

Commercial Co-optation and the Postmodern Dilemma

This would be true only in the early years of rock and roll, when the rise of the above-named figures represented a serious threat to American conservatism. When rock and roll's bastard child — rock music — emerged in the early 1960s with such towering figures as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, the relationship between rock music and modernist ideology became fragmented and confused. Elvis had demonstrated massive commercial appeal in a form that his detractors viewed as a passing youthful fancy. Thus, in the years that followed, the forms used to render some of the evolutionary moments in musical expression were co-opted to meet the very commercial conceits they had been authored to reject.

And of course, with figures such as the Beatles, their incredible musical ingenuity combined with their monumental commercial success only further complicated the notion that truly free expression and commercialism must naturally remain separate from one another. The concept of pop music as reflected in this discussion invokes the dilemma of postmodernism.

Works Cited

ArtsMIA. (2005). Modernism. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Klages, M. (2003). Post-Modernism. University of Colorado at Boulder.

Lack, T. (1999). Consumer Society and Authenticity: The (Il)logic of Punk Practices. Nothingness.org.

McRobbie, A. (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. Routledge.

Storey, J. (2005). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Prentice Hall.