The civics of rock: sixties countercultural music and the transformation of the public sphere

For the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, rock music was not only mass entertainment, but also a form of public life. While many scholars have argued that rock was incompatible with civic participation, this book claims that in music scenes such as San Francisco, in poster art and dancing, on the radio and in print publications, rock served as a flash point for dilemmas of citizenship and civil society. As frequently as it deteriorated into escapism and hedonism, rock also created an atmosphere of inquiry in which the young might listen, think, move, and feel their way through issues of public and civic interaction, such as identity, belonging, power, and democracy. Even when exported by the American military to Vietnam or when circulating to youth movements worldwide, far from eclipsing public life, rock music transformed it into a mass-mediated mode of association that prefigured the civics of global society