New Left in Victorian Drag: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
The Rolling Stones' first television program was mostly, but not only, an at- tempt to capitalize on the blunder that the band's friendly rivals, the Beatles, had made with their home movie, Magical Mystery Tour. The Beatles' movie aired on the BBC on Boxing Day in 1967, bewildering fans and irritating crit- ics. The Stones' television program, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in December 1968, aimed to one-up the Beatles in capturing rock performance on film. Unlike the Beatles' music movie, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Cir- cus was never aired, and a quasi-consensus has formed that has dismissed the project accordingly and stigmatized it as an aesthetic failure. However, as a cultural text, the Rock and Roll Circus program remains a key document of the era. The mise-en-scene for the Rolling Stones' performance, the rock show as circus act, a subject chosen by the band and followed through on by the program's director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was, I will argue, chosen with deliberate care. The Stones' movie was meant to build a pow- erful link between the new rock music and the British working-class past, an attempt to consolidate two different political movements, traditional working-class struggles with current youth politics. This chapter sets the Rock and Roll Circus project in the specific historical contexts of British popular music and the emerging cultural un- derground. I hope to explain how the scheme, aimed at building a bridge between rock music and radical politics, reveals broader transformations in what constituted aesthetics and politics at the time. 1 Historicizing the Stones' film allows us to grasp the changing definitions of art and politics in the British '60s. The Rock and Roll Circus project originated in an effort to make rock political by explicitly aligning the music and musicians with working-class struggles against capitalism. I argue that the final product discloses Jagger and his band's commitment to a self-conscious work ethic that sidesteps the question of rock politics; instead, the guiding assump- tion is that the politics of rock music is a consequence of how audiences
Revolution in the head : the Beatles' records and the sixties
As dazzling as the decade they dominated, The Beatles almost single-handedly created pop music as we know it. Today, their songs are cited as seminal influences by stars like Oasis, Blur and Kula Shaker. Eloquently giving voice to their time, The Beatles quite simply changed the world. Fully updated to include material from The Beatles Live at the BBC and the Anthology series, this acclaimed book goes back to the heart of The Beatles - their records. Drawing on a unique resource of knowledge and experience to 'read' their 241 tracks - chronologically from their first amateur efforts in 1957 to 'Real Love', their final 'reunion' recording in 1995 - Ian MacDonald has created an engrossing classic of popular criticism in which the extraordinary songs of The Beatles remain a central and continually surprising presence.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.