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
The East End : four centuries of London life
The East End is on the seaward side of London and its history is inextricably linked with the most complex docklands of any industrial society, serving what used to be a great trading nation and an Imperial power. As well as goods entering the port, generations of immigrants have flowed in - Protestant Huguenots from France, Irish labourers fleeing the potato blight, Jews escaping Russian pogroms, and Indians and Pakistanis. This study examines the evolution of the Tower Hamlets - Bethnal Green, Poplar, Hackney and Stepney - and sifts through the facts relating to an area notorious for its violent crime, political unrest and poverty. He argues that the area is a microcosm of the tensions apparent in British society as a whole, derived from the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the age of the railway, the two World Wars and the current invasion of the young rich.
The Politics of Truth: Power in Nietzsche’s Epistemology
This article concerns first a curiosity found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In the midst of a heated attack on Christianity, Nietzsche detours into a discussion of epistemology. I argue that this turn indicates the importance of epistemology, and illustrates its political and moral character. The weak, who cannot tolerate uncertainty and shades of gray, seek to impose an epistemology of clarity and certainty. At the same time, the strong, who revel in ambiguity, seek to enjoy the richness and subtlety of a non-dichotomous view of the world. This is a political struggle because the weak cannot allow the strong’s epistemology to exist, let alone prevail. It is not surprising, then, that Nietzsche talks about epistemology in the midst of attacking Christianity: its view of truth is essential to its mission of taming the nobles. Here, I consider Nietzsche as a political thinker in a different light. Political battles are fought far beyond the halls of government. Nietzsche is a political thinker; one, however, who looks at politics in an uncommon way.