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
Revolt into style
From Futurism to Dogme, filmmakers have regularly thrown down the gauntlet with new sets of laws for their art
Problems in Analyzing Elements of Mass Culture: Notes on the Popular Song and Other Artistic Productions
James T. Carey's recent analysis of changing patterns in the popular song ("Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song," American Journal of Sociology 74 [May]: 720-3 1) displays a problem long confronted by students of mass society: To what extent can cultural expressions be taken as valid indicators of social behavior or of shifting aspects of mood and national character? His analysis is admirable in that it replicates the earlier study of Horton. It is provocative in that it suggests what many sociologists now feel: that elements of rapid change now characterize the nation's youth. His remarks on the shifting character of the intimate relationship between 1955 and 1966 suggest that rules are being rewritten regarding the nature of the self and its affiliations with others. Notwithstanding these features, I fear that Carey's analysis reveals a number of the problems inherent in any investigation that attempts to relate attitudes to behavior when no direct observation of the involved subjects is undertaken. In this brief note I should like to indicate four problems involved in analyzing aspects of popular culture, be this the study of popular songs, novels, paintings, or poetry. In the main, my remarks are directed to the tradition represented by Carey's work, and not to his study per se. A fundamental problem in such studies stems from the long tradition that has regarded artistic productions as social facts. By regarding such productions as social facts, the analyst is relieved of the burden of demonstrating what meanings these productions have for the artist and his audience. It is too frequently assumed that such meanings can be identified by a capable analyst, independent of the interpretations brought to such works by the artist or his audience. In my judgment, artistic productions must be seen as interactional creations, the meanings of which arise out of the interactions directed to them by the artist and his audience. This is well seen in the long tradition of religious paintings which attempt to recreate the Crucifixion. Each century has produced its own meanings of this event, and these meanings are couched in different s yles of dress, different gestures, and different symbols attached to the Christ figure. In no sense can the meaning of the event or the painting be judged independent of the meanings brought to it by the artist and his time. If artistic productions are seen as interactional creations, a second problem must be recognized. A work of art may not evoke the same response in