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Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology

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Peter Wicke sees Rock Music as a phenomenon of social action. This phenomenon produces new experience in art, that, within the framework of a highgrade, technology-dependent mass culture. Of course, while this characteristic of rock music functions as a aesthetical developement in the history of mass culture especially, it makes possible to express the real estates of teenager's life. Peter Wicke, as an analysist and social scientist, introduces a new vision to understand, not only for the rock music, but for the mass culture as a experience of everyday-lives. I think music, as a culture, must have a support which maintain its existence. In this sense, rock music also must have any kind of support for its existence. Wicke structures the support of rock music with the need of teenagers and midea industry. This vision of social-structural idea become a yardstick to explain the social phenomenon of teenagers' rock-cult. So we, from the vision of social-dependent characteristic of rock music, understand the real estates that rock music and its industry. Now from this book, we have establish a landscape of mass culture that is dominant to our everyday-lives.

The two things to know about this book before reading this review are 1) Originally published in 1987- almost 25 years old. 2) Written by a professor of music at a Berlin University who has a background in Frankfurt School Philosophy. The Frankfurt School has been trying it's hand at cultural studies since the 50s, but they are handicapped by being German. German professors have little feeling for the world of d.i.y. music and this limit decreases their ability to comment intelligently on popular culture.

Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology is half of an amazing book, and half a flaming pile of dog poop. The first half is amazing, the second half, focusing on "case studies" of the British Punk movement in the 70s and synth-pop of the early 80s are so bad that they almost wreck the entire book.

Wicke presents the familiar narrative of rock dressed up with careful language from the cultural studies wing of the Frankfurt school. This approach really nails it on the head for everything before the hippie revolution, and badly misses on everything afterwards, perhaps because Wicke completely ignores the impact that the Love Generation had on the entire music industry. He also badly misses by failing to discuss any aspect of the American DIY scene from 1967 onwards. Hello? British punk did not invent d.i.y. British punk did not invent independent music. Independent record labels and d.i.y. aesthetics existed any american recorded music as early as recorded music itself existed and continued well into the "rock era."

In "Rock Music" Wicke attempts to create a working superstructure to describe the components of rock music. Like other books I've read in this area recently, this book made me want to take parts of it and write a different book, one that focuses more on the emergence of rock music from rhythm and blues and country music in America in late 1940s and early 1950s. One of the points Wicke makes, that successful rock music is based on sounds not song, is something that got me thinking for sure, but it requires more exploration of what came before rock music to really understand that transition.

As Kurt Blaukopf, an renowned Austrian sociologist of music pointed out, sociologists have a tendency to pursue minutely specialized approaches and then overgeneralize about them. Fricke's prose is somewhat professorial (maybe the translation from German helped), but he seems to have a better handle on the rock phenomenon as a whole than the great majority of academics. David Szatmary's social history of rock is more meaty and interesting, but Fricke gets the big picture better.