Bugging Out: Protest Music, the Vietnam War and the American Counterculture
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Authors
Wilson, John
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Protest music , Vietnam War , Music history , Countercultural history , American history , Cultural history
Alternative Title
Abstract
By the 1960s, music and musicians in the United States yet again assumed new roles in the production of culture and the geopolitical Cold War, as music became an avenue of political expression and musicians cultural icons. As rock and roll traversed the radio waves and emanated throughout the bedrooms of American youth in the 1960s, a new power, analyzable through rock and roll and underpinned by youth anti-war and countercultural movements, redefined notions of citizenship, patriotism, and democracy in the United States. The technological, cultural, and demographic changes of the post-World War II era helped facilitate the emergence of a rock music genre that expressed a skepticism of American imperialism, anti-draft sentiments and an understanding of citizenship that emphasized disobedience.
To ascertain a better understanding of the cultural transformations that shaped the United States in the 1960s, this thesis evaluates the influence of rock and roll music on the anti-Vietnam and anti- imperial discourses of the American anti-war and countercultural movements. Despite the historical complexity of conceptualizing, defining and analyzing a movement as far-reaching and multifaceted as the American countercultural movement of the 1960s, this thesis contends that an historical analysis of music provides a window through which historians and other academics alike may begin to discover new linkages, insights and discontinuities that would further nuance our understanding of such a recent and pivotal period of American political, social, and cultural history. Music simultaneously and paradoxically bridged and divided elements of the countercultural movement, providing, as an art, a means through which messages of frustration, rebellion, or refusal could be communicated despite the pressures of censorship and, in some instances, marketed to the popular mainstream.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.