Monday 11 May 2009
This is Part I of the foreword to Peter Doggett's There's a Riot Going On.
In June 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released a record entitled Some Time in New York City. It was a collection of protest songs and political anthems, tackling subjects that ranged from America’s prison system to the British ‘occupation’ of Northern Ireland. Packaged like a street newspaper, it amounted to nothing less than a trumpet-call for revolution, from the world’s most prominent rock musician. Thirty-five years later, the audacity of Lennon’s project is still breathtaking.
Despite Lennon’s hopes that he might become the standard-bearer for youthful radicalism, his ‘political’ album was widely derided. ‘What can one say when confronted with incipient artistic suicide?’ asked Rolling Stone magazine, which had previously supported Lennon’s career. The same review dismissed the record as ‘embarrassingly puerile’, ‘awful’, ‘shallow’, ‘derivative’, ‘sloppy’, ‘witless’ and ‘egotistical’ – critical judgements that have been reinforced ever since.
Less analytical listeners responded more openly to Lennon’s message. Raised in an atmosphere of polite English conservatism, I was ripe for the illicit thrill of rebellion in 1972. Some Time in New York City appealed to my emerging sense – I was just 15 years old – that there might be life beyond conformity. It fulfilled my adolescent desire for idealism, without any unsettling ambiguity. Already an undiscriminating admirer of Lennon’s work and public persona, I inhaled the record’s revolutionary spirit, and was radicalised by my initial exposure to its slogans and propaganda. ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’ introduced me to the concept of feminism, a principle that suddenly seemed shockingly, blindingly obvious (and, for too many years, impossible to connect to my own life). ‘Luck of the Irish’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ provided a guide to the history of English colonialism. The police and politicians were corrupt and barbaric. The people were ready to rise against their oppressors. The album was full of such unthinking certainties; and so was I.
The naivety was not mine alone. It was clear that Lennon’s mutation from pop icon into agitprop minstrel had been fuelled by borrowed rhetoric and second-hand emotions. His artistic judgement appeared to have been distorted by his infatuation with his recent acquaintances, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the anarchic leftist group the Yippies, and black power activist Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. By the time Some Time in New York City was released, two of its songs – pleas for the release of radical heroes John Sinclair and Angela Davis – were out of date, as their subjects had already been freed. Others were built upon a crassly simplistic view of political reality, and were tinged with paranoia, a childish pleasure in rabblerousing, and Lennon’s willingness to believe everything that he had been told by his comrades. Nowhere in the album was there a moment’s awareness that this radical energy might be about to expire, and that the revolution might prove to have been a chimera, which had bewitched and then betrayed a generation.
Yet for all its faults, lyrical and analytical, Some Time in New York City blazed with an intensity rarely equalled in Lennon’s work, testifying to the zeal of his conversion to ultra-left radicalism. From its artwork to the epic grandeur of its production, the record declares his glorious faith in the inevitability of revolution. It was a message that might have been designed to appeal to a teenager searching for a horizon beyond the mundane predictability of English bourgeois life.
John Lennon and I weren’t alone in the assumption that revolution was both inescapable and desirable. What’s apparent as one scours the back pages of history, and speaks to those who participated in the tumultuous events that occurred between 1965 and 1972, is that the hope, or fear, of a violent assault on the established order linked young and old, socialist and conservative, rich and poor. Visions of how this revolution might arrive, and what it might achieve, varied from person to person, and continent to continent. Some envisaged a peaceful reorientation of social and economic power; others imagined a bloody war between classes, races or genders. What was common to all these dreams and nightmares was the belief that Western society, and its global power structure, could not survive unchanged; that there could be no hope of world (or local) peace until some degree of liberation was offered to the oppressed people of the planet.
The exact identity of those oppressed souls was a matter of subjective opinion. Feminists sought the liberation of women from male dominance and aggression. African-Americans wanted an end to racism and, in many cases, the establishment of their own exclusive homeland. Students in Paris and New York fantasised about the overthrow of the restrictive educational system that, in their view, smothered free thought and expression. Committed Marxists required nothing less than the toppling of global capitalism, and thereafter an end to imperialism. Africans dreamed of the day when their colonial masters were banished from the continent. And across the world, all these forces were united in the campaign to end the Vietnam War, and exile America’s soldiers and ‘advisers’ from South-East Asia.
Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, a bewildering array of radical organisations (and acronyms, from SDS to the IRA) began to dominate the news. Perhaps inevitably, these groups often had wildly different goals, and when their agendas coincided, they tended to set upon each other, rather than their agreed enemy. Equally inevitably, the forces of authority around the world witnessed this threatening activity, and assumed that a global conspiracy was at work. Their response was to unleash waves of oppression that stretched from mild persecution (arrests, water cannons, eavesdropping, infiltration) to appalling violence (torture, massacre, attempted genocide).
As communications around the world improved, and young people began to form their own information networks, via underground newspapers and the shared language of rock music, these disparate struggles and battles began to coalesce. It was therefore now possible for a student in England to be suffering nothing worse than mild dissatisfaction with his or her teachers, but to feel acute solidarity with guerrillas in Vietnam, student rioters in Mexico City, anti-government rebels in Czechoslovakia, the Black Panther Party in California, and liberation forces in South Africa or Rhodesia. (It was sadly much less likely, at least until the early 1970s, that this fictitious student would have expressed much solidarity with the feminist movement, especially if he were male.) Bulletins from these far-flung frontlines filled the pages of the International Times and the Berkeley Barb, the East Village Other and Oz, and no doubt hundreds of equivalent periodicals in the non-English-speaking countries of the world. Even a 15-year-old schoolboy with the most limited grasp of world events could easily determine which side he was on.
This incendiary climate was heightened by the feverish commentary provided by the era’s most potent youth icons, the rock stars. The youth movement now shared its own culture – or rather counter-culture, running in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, racism and emotional repression. Under this spotlight, there was a price to be paid by any counter-culture hero (or, more rarely in these pre-feminist times, heroine) who failed to offer the correct response on any issue from Vietnam to the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. And so ‘revolution’ entered the rock lexicon – rarely defined or explained, but a catch-all refrain that symbolised a generation’s quest to overturn the old order and replace it with a new climate of liberation, that would free body, mind and soul.
Anyone – a 15-year-old teenager in England, perhaps – who was attracted by the seductive power of rock, and the flamboyance of its emotional and political rhetoric, found themselves swept into what appeared to be a life-or-death struggle for survival and freedom. The songs told the story: not just Lennon’s parade of revolutionary anthems, but Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Volunteers’ (‘got a revolution’) and ‘We Could Be Together’ (‘up against the wall motherfuckers’), the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’ (‘the time is right for fighting in the streets’), the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (‘I’ll tip my hat to the new revolution’) and dozens more besides, berating the war, racial hatred, rabid commercialism, sexual restrictions, and the lavish crimes of that evil entity known as ‘the man’. Carried on this tide of radical fervour, one didn’t need expert knowledge of ghetto America or the Cambodian jungle to imagine that revolution was imminent, thrilling and inevitable. Small wonder that governments and authority figures around the world took this awe-inspiring rhetoric at face value, and prepared to repel a global assault on the establishment and all its orthodoxies.
And then, during 1972, just as John Lennon declared that the revolution was nigh, the radical impulse withered and died. Its demise seemed mysterious and ominous, not least for the future of radicalism. Minor advances had been achieved, presaging more meaningful developments to come: feminism was admitted to the debating table, sexual barriers were lifted, America’s government slowly eased the plight of its ghetto children, and most crucially, US troops left Vietnam. None of these apparently progressive developments was remotely secure, however; all of them could, and many of them would, be clawed back at a moment’s notice.
The withdrawal of American soldiers from South-East Asia should, one might have imagined in 1970 or 1971, have marked a massive shift of power away from the establishment and towards the forces of dissent. Instead, for a complex variety of reasons, dissent simply disappeared. Student riots ceased, the black power movement imploded, revolutionary organisations turned on their own members, and the revolution ran out of energy, passion and joy. Predictably slow to receive the message, rock’s radical superstars continued to spout incendiary rhetoric for a few more months, and then turned aboutface. Suddenly there was no more talk about revolution; no more anthems designed for the barricades. A collective embarrassment seized the most visible icons of the revolutionary left. Those who had survived (and many had perished along the way) plunged into rampant egotism, self-enlightenment, drug abuse, religious cults, Hollywood celebrity status, anything that would protect their fame and leave them free of political responsibility. For the audience that had obtained its political information from rock star radicals and their activist buddies, the reversal was both bewildering and deeply disillusioning.
Almost immediately, history began to be rewritten. John Lennon was merely the most prominent of the former radicals who recanted their beliefs, bemoaned their own naivety, and derided those who maintained the principles that they had once espoused. This rejection of the past could take many forms, from Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s multiple religious conversions, to Yippie activist Jerry Rubin’s transformation from a dangerous radical into a stockbroker. Yet some of the counter-culture’s political tenets were confirmed by the passage of time. There was general agreement, for example, even among those who had been ‘running’ the war, that America’s involvement in Vietnam had been a flawed enterprise from the start; a consensus, too, that African-Americans and women had been discriminated against, and that a more liberal approach to racism and sexism might bear fruit. But the apocalyptic imagery of revolution, which had provided an unsettled landscape for half a decade or more, was abandoned and left to rot by the roadside.
Such disturbance could not be forgotten forever. The fault-lines beneath Western society remained. At moments of crisis – during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, perhaps, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – the distant rumblings of the past were heard once again, as a fresh generation of the angry and oppressed began to expose the cracks. Western governments and power structures responded with an unprecedented level of paranoia, callously using the potential threat of terrorist outrage as a blunt device to shape public opinion and quell dissent. Most insidious of all was the malignant manipulation of the media that forms one of the cornerstones of power in the 21st century. Under these circumstances, there was a grim symmetry – not to mention an inevitability – to the fact that images of the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s and early 1970s began to resurface, not as a threat to the status quo, but as chic artefacts from a more innocent age.
Next week we'll be publishing Part II: The Curse of Leadership.
Peter Doggett has been writing about music and popular culture since 1980, for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. His previous books include his critically acclaimed study of country-rock and the culture of the American South, Are You Ready for the Country, and The Art & Music of John Lennon.
In June 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released a record entitled Some Time in New York City. It was a collection of protest songs and political anthems, tackling subjects that ranged from America’s prison system to the British ‘occupation’ of Northern Ireland. Packaged like a street newspaper, it amounted to nothing less than a trumpet-call for revolution, from the world’s most prominent rock musician. Thirty-five years later, the audacity of Lennon’s project is still breathtaking.
Despite Lennon’s hopes that he might become the standard-bearer for youthful radicalism, his ‘political’ album was widely derided. ‘What can one say when confronted with incipient artistic suicide?’ asked Rolling Stone magazine, which had previously supported Lennon’s career. The same review dismissed the record as ‘embarrassingly puerile’, ‘awful’, ‘shallow’, ‘derivative’, ‘sloppy’, ‘witless’ and ‘egotistical’ – critical judgements that have been reinforced ever since.
Less analytical listeners responded more openly to Lennon’s message. Raised in an atmosphere of polite English conservatism, I was ripe for the illicit thrill of rebellion in 1972. Some Time in New York City appealed to my emerging sense – I was just 15 years old – that there might be life beyond conformity. It fulfilled my adolescent desire for idealism, without any unsettling ambiguity. Already an undiscriminating admirer of Lennon’s work and public persona, I inhaled the record’s revolutionary spirit, and was radicalised by my initial exposure to its slogans and propaganda. ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’ introduced me to the concept of feminism, a principle that suddenly seemed shockingly, blindingly obvious (and, for too many years, impossible to connect to my own life). ‘Luck of the Irish’ and ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ provided a guide to the history of English colonialism. The police and politicians were corrupt and barbaric. The people were ready to rise against their oppressors. The album was full of such unthinking certainties; and so was I.
The naivety was not mine alone. It was clear that Lennon’s mutation from pop icon into agitprop minstrel had been fuelled by borrowed rhetoric and second-hand emotions. His artistic judgement appeared to have been distorted by his infatuation with his recent acquaintances, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the anarchic leftist group the Yippies, and black power activist Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. By the time Some Time in New York City was released, two of its songs – pleas for the release of radical heroes John Sinclair and Angela Davis – were out of date, as their subjects had already been freed. Others were built upon a crassly simplistic view of political reality, and were tinged with paranoia, a childish pleasure in rabblerousing, and Lennon’s willingness to believe everything that he had been told by his comrades. Nowhere in the album was there a moment’s awareness that this radical energy might be about to expire, and that the revolution might prove to have been a chimera, which had bewitched and then betrayed a generation.
Yet for all its faults, lyrical and analytical, Some Time in New York City blazed with an intensity rarely equalled in Lennon’s work, testifying to the zeal of his conversion to ultra-left radicalism. From its artwork to the epic grandeur of its production, the record declares his glorious faith in the inevitability of revolution. It was a message that might have been designed to appeal to a teenager searching for a horizon beyond the mundane predictability of English bourgeois life.
John Lennon and I weren’t alone in the assumption that revolution was both inescapable and desirable. What’s apparent as one scours the back pages of history, and speaks to those who participated in the tumultuous events that occurred between 1965 and 1972, is that the hope, or fear, of a violent assault on the established order linked young and old, socialist and conservative, rich and poor. Visions of how this revolution might arrive, and what it might achieve, varied from person to person, and continent to continent. Some envisaged a peaceful reorientation of social and economic power; others imagined a bloody war between classes, races or genders. What was common to all these dreams and nightmares was the belief that Western society, and its global power structure, could not survive unchanged; that there could be no hope of world (or local) peace until some degree of liberation was offered to the oppressed people of the planet.
The exact identity of those oppressed souls was a matter of subjective opinion. Feminists sought the liberation of women from male dominance and aggression. African-Americans wanted an end to racism and, in many cases, the establishment of their own exclusive homeland. Students in Paris and New York fantasised about the overthrow of the restrictive educational system that, in their view, smothered free thought and expression. Committed Marxists required nothing less than the toppling of global capitalism, and thereafter an end to imperialism. Africans dreamed of the day when their colonial masters were banished from the continent. And across the world, all these forces were united in the campaign to end the Vietnam War, and exile America’s soldiers and ‘advisers’ from South-East Asia.
Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s, a bewildering array of radical organisations (and acronyms, from SDS to the IRA) began to dominate the news. Perhaps inevitably, these groups often had wildly different goals, and when their agendas coincided, they tended to set upon each other, rather than their agreed enemy. Equally inevitably, the forces of authority around the world witnessed this threatening activity, and assumed that a global conspiracy was at work. Their response was to unleash waves of oppression that stretched from mild persecution (arrests, water cannons, eavesdropping, infiltration) to appalling violence (torture, massacre, attempted genocide).
As communications around the world improved, and young people began to form their own information networks, via underground newspapers and the shared language of rock music, these disparate struggles and battles began to coalesce. It was therefore now possible for a student in England to be suffering nothing worse than mild dissatisfaction with his or her teachers, but to feel acute solidarity with guerrillas in Vietnam, student rioters in Mexico City, anti-government rebels in Czechoslovakia, the Black Panther Party in California, and liberation forces in South Africa or Rhodesia. (It was sadly much less likely, at least until the early 1970s, that this fictitious student would have expressed much solidarity with the feminist movement, especially if he were male.) Bulletins from these far-flung frontlines filled the pages of the International Times and the Berkeley Barb, the East Village Other and Oz, and no doubt hundreds of equivalent periodicals in the non-English-speaking countries of the world. Even a 15-year-old schoolboy with the most limited grasp of world events could easily determine which side he was on.
This incendiary climate was heightened by the feverish commentary provided by the era’s most potent youth icons, the rock stars. The youth movement now shared its own culture – or rather counter-culture, running in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy of capitalism, imperialism, sexism, racism and emotional repression. Under this spotlight, there was a price to be paid by any counter-culture hero (or, more rarely in these pre-feminist times, heroine) who failed to offer the correct response on any issue from Vietnam to the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. And so ‘revolution’ entered the rock lexicon – rarely defined or explained, but a catch-all refrain that symbolised a generation’s quest to overturn the old order and replace it with a new climate of liberation, that would free body, mind and soul.
Anyone – a 15-year-old teenager in England, perhaps – who was attracted by the seductive power of rock, and the flamboyance of its emotional and political rhetoric, found themselves swept into what appeared to be a life-or-death struggle for survival and freedom. The songs told the story: not just Lennon’s parade of revolutionary anthems, but Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Volunteers’ (‘got a revolution’) and ‘We Could Be Together’ (‘up against the wall motherfuckers’), the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’ (‘the time is right for fighting in the streets’), the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (‘I’ll tip my hat to the new revolution’) and dozens more besides, berating the war, racial hatred, rabid commercialism, sexual restrictions, and the lavish crimes of that evil entity known as ‘the man’. Carried on this tide of radical fervour, one didn’t need expert knowledge of ghetto America or the Cambodian jungle to imagine that revolution was imminent, thrilling and inevitable. Small wonder that governments and authority figures around the world took this awe-inspiring rhetoric at face value, and prepared to repel a global assault on the establishment and all its orthodoxies.
And then, during 1972, just as John Lennon declared that the revolution was nigh, the radical impulse withered and died. Its demise seemed mysterious and ominous, not least for the future of radicalism. Minor advances had been achieved, presaging more meaningful developments to come: feminism was admitted to the debating table, sexual barriers were lifted, America’s government slowly eased the plight of its ghetto children, and most crucially, US troops left Vietnam. None of these apparently progressive developments was remotely secure, however; all of them could, and many of them would, be clawed back at a moment’s notice.
The withdrawal of American soldiers from South-East Asia should, one might have imagined in 1970 or 1971, have marked a massive shift of power away from the establishment and towards the forces of dissent. Instead, for a complex variety of reasons, dissent simply disappeared. Student riots ceased, the black power movement imploded, revolutionary organisations turned on their own members, and the revolution ran out of energy, passion and joy. Predictably slow to receive the message, rock’s radical superstars continued to spout incendiary rhetoric for a few more months, and then turned aboutface. Suddenly there was no more talk about revolution; no more anthems designed for the barricades. A collective embarrassment seized the most visible icons of the revolutionary left. Those who had survived (and many had perished along the way) plunged into rampant egotism, self-enlightenment, drug abuse, religious cults, Hollywood celebrity status, anything that would protect their fame and leave them free of political responsibility. For the audience that had obtained its political information from rock star radicals and their activist buddies, the reversal was both bewildering and deeply disillusioning.
Almost immediately, history began to be rewritten. John Lennon was merely the most prominent of the former radicals who recanted their beliefs, bemoaned their own naivety, and derided those who maintained the principles that they had once espoused. This rejection of the past could take many forms, from Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver’s multiple religious conversions, to Yippie activist Jerry Rubin’s transformation from a dangerous radical into a stockbroker. Yet some of the counter-culture’s political tenets were confirmed by the passage of time. There was general agreement, for example, even among those who had been ‘running’ the war, that America’s involvement in Vietnam had been a flawed enterprise from the start; a consensus, too, that African-Americans and women had been discriminated against, and that a more liberal approach to racism and sexism might bear fruit. But the apocalyptic imagery of revolution, which had provided an unsettled landscape for half a decade or more, was abandoned and left to rot by the roadside.
Such disturbance could not be forgotten forever. The fault-lines beneath Western society remained. At moments of crisis – during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, perhaps, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – the distant rumblings of the past were heard once again, as a fresh generation of the angry and oppressed began to expose the cracks. Western governments and power structures responded with an unprecedented level of paranoia, callously using the potential threat of terrorist outrage as a blunt device to shape public opinion and quell dissent. Most insidious of all was the malignant manipulation of the media that forms one of the cornerstones of power in the 21st century. Under these circumstances, there was a grim symmetry – not to mention an inevitability – to the fact that images of the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s and early 1970s began to resurface, not as a threat to the status quo, but as chic artefacts from a more innocent age.
Next week we'll be publishing Part II: The Curse of Leadership.
Peter Doggett has been writing about music and popular culture since 1980, for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. His previous books include his critically acclaimed study of country-rock and the culture of the American South, Are You Ready for the Country, and The Art & Music of John Lennon.
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