| | | | | | put together. You didn't have to bring anything to it for it spoke to the body rather than the intellect. As a music manager put it then, ''rock and roll music is one of the most vital revolutionary forces in the West it blows people all the way back to their senses and makes them feel good, like they are alive again in the middle of the monstrous funeral parlor of Western civilization." 27 Not only were you able to experience the sound's vibrations running through your entire body, a huge crowd could respond identically to a given beat, generating a Dionysiac. sensation in everyone. Sharing marijuana surely helped. As Todd Gitlin remembered it, "the point was to open up a new space, an inner space, so that we could space out, live for the sheer exultant point of living."28 More so than the other arts then, rock epitomized what was going on. Yet, if we look at its undercurrents, we cannot fail to notice how in tune it was with a consistent characteristic of the American psyche: although the celebration may have been pagan in its effusive bodily displays, it nevertheless remained thoroughly evangelical in spirit. It was, in other words, a populist reaffirmation of natural instinct, of vital impulse over the need for ratiocination. In the end, the culture industry had no trouble hijacking this audience, taking it for a ride, giving the kids an illusion of antiestablishment rhetoric while simultaneously reaffirming traditional distrust toward rationality and artistry.29 This point, however, requires some elaboration. | | | | | | | | | In a remarkable essay now largely forgotten, Richard Hofstadter once emphasized the continuing importance of anti-intellectualism in American life.30 Working from the point of view of the fifties (they feel just like the nineties), Hofstadter focused his attention on the continuing values in the history of this country that militate against those who elevate the life of the mind. Foremost in his judgment was the influence of the Protestant evangelical movement which, early on, rebelled against the mediation of the learned clergy, insisting that the common man was naturally capable of understanding right from wrong without the help of any special learning. Uniting these believers, Hofstadter wrote, was "the feeling that ideas should above all be made to work, the disdain for doctrine and for refinements in ideas, the subordination of men of ideas to men of emotional power or manipulative skill."31 The sense of independence, of having but oneself to count on was nurtured as well by the Westward | | | | |
