markus heuger's
beabliography

Beabliography

Abstract 0320

McConnell, Frank D. (1971), "Rock and the politics of frivolity." In: Massachusetts Review, 1971, 12, 1 (Winter), 119-134.

In this article McConnel suggests that "the room in which we can take rock seriously ... is a good deal wider than we have allowed ourselves to see." Rock is expressing the "imagination of America." A review is presented of the time period out of which rock music arose — the 1960's. These were years of the exhaustion and disappearance of the old fictions of liberalism and conservatism. They were also marked by an awareness of the human reality in precarious tension with the public structures of leadership, and thus, of the precariousness of individual political response. Rock is then viewed in the context of the literature of that time and a tendency toward a reductive and humanizing irony referred to as the "politics of frivolity." A Beatles' song is quoted which points out that "in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."