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
John Lennon, “Revolution,” and the Politics of Musical Reception
ABSTRACT The Beatles recorded two starkly different musical settings of John Lennon9s controversial 1968 song ““Revolution””: One was released as a single, the other appeared on the White Album (as ““Revolution 1””). Lennon9s lyrics express deep skepticism about political radicalism, and the single, with its lines ““But when you talk about destruction/…… you can count me out,”” incited rage among critics and activists on the Left. Lennon appears less opposed to violent protest in ““Revolution 1””——recorded first, though released later——where he sang ““you can count me out——in.”” The reception of ““Revolution”” reflected a focus on the words and their apparent political meanings, largely ignoring the musical differences between the two recordings of the song. Moreover, the response to ““Revolution”” had much to do with public perceptions of the Beatles. Their rivals the Rolling Stones, seen as a more radical alternative voice, released the equally political ““Street Fighting Man”” at virtually the same moment in 1968. The much more favorable public reaction to the latter had at least as much to do with the way the bands themselves were perceived as with differences between the songs.
The lights that failed: European international history, 1919-1933
PART I: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE, 1918-1929 1. The Hall of Mirrors: Peacemaking in the West 2. Distant Frontiers: Peacemaking in the East 3. Revolution from the Left: The Soviet Union and the Post-War Settlement 4. The Primacy of Economics: Reconstruction in Western Europe, 1919-1924 5. The Primacy of Nationalism: Reconstruction in Eastern and Central Europe 6. Revolution from the Right: Italy, 1919-25 7. The Geneva Dream: The League of Nations and Post-War Internationalism 8. New Dawn? Stabilisation in Western Europe after Locarno 9. Faltering Reconstruction: Cracks in the Locarno Facade 10. Troubled Waters: Uncertainties in Italy, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union 11. Faltering Internationalism: Disarmament and Security after Locarno Conclusion: Europe Reconstructed? PART II: THE HINGE YEARS, 1930-1933 12. The Diplomacy of the Depression: Economics and Foreign Policy 13. Beyond Europe: The Manchurian Crisis 14. The Poisoned Chalice: The Pursuit of Disarmament Conclusion: The Hinge Years Appendices Select Bibliography