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Once a medium of vapid love lyrics, popular music in the 1960’s has taken on a new seriousness. In the words of popular songs, young musicians have begun to express their alienation from and disdain for American institutions and mores. Part of this has taken the form of traditional attacks on war and intolerance. More significant, however, have been criticisms of the quality of life in an affluent society. In their music, youth have worried about such things as the impact of technology on man, the confused state of American sexual practices, and the repressive nature of supposedly democratic institutions. Affirming a strong faith in the freedom of the individual, song writers have turned their backs on pragmatic reality and have sought freedom in a transcendental exploration of man’s internal reality. Part of this has been done with “mind-expanding drugs,” and many songs have urged listeners on to the use of hallucinogens. For youth, music has come to serve the function of helping to define and codify the standards of their own subculture. And it has also put them in touch with more serious critiques of American life made by the intel- lectual community.

Robert A. Rosenstone, Ph.D., Pasadena, California, is Associate Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. He has written articles on both the Radical Right and the Radical Left for such publications as the Journal of American History, Engineering and Science and the South Atlantic Quarterly. Dr. Rosenstone has also edited a volume entitled Protest from the Right (1968). He is author of a forthcoming study of the Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

* The author would like to thank his student and assistant Michael Henery for his research help on this paper, and even more for his aid in bridging the generation gap.

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132 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

AT the beginning of the 1960’s, no- body took popular music very seri-

ously. Adults only knew that rock n’ roll, which had flooded the airwaves in the 1950’s, had a strong beat and was terribly loud; it was generally believed that teen-agers alone had thick enough eardrums, or insensitive enough souls, to enjoy it. Certainly, no critics thought of a popular star like the writhing Elvis Presley as being in any way a serious artist. Such a teen-age idol was simply considered a manifestation of a sub- culture that the young happily and inevitably outgrew-and, any parent would have added, the sooner the better.

Today, the view of popular music has drastically changed. Some parents may still wonder about the “noise” that their children listen to, but important seg- ments of American society have come to recognize popular musicians as real artists saying serious things.1 An indi- cation of this change can be seen in magazine attitudes. In 1964, the Saturday Evening Post derided the Beatles-recognized giants of modern popular music-as “corny,” and Re- porter claimed: “They have debased

Rock ‘n Roll to its ultimate absurdity.” Three years later the Saturday Review solemnly discussed a new Beatles record as a “highly ironic declaration of disaf- fection” with modern society, while in 1968 Life devoted a whole, laudatory section to “The New Rock,” calling it music “that challenges the joys and ills of the . . . world.” 2 Even in the intel- lectual community, popular music has found warm friends. Such sober jour- nals as The Listener, Columbia Univer- sity Forum, New American Review, and Commentary have sympathetically sur- veyed aspects of the “pop” scene, while in The New York Review of Books-a kind of house organ for American academia-composer Ned Rorem has declared that, at their best, the Beatles “compare with those composers from great eras of song: Monteverdi, Schu- mann, Poulenc.” 3

The reasons for such changes in atti- tude are not difficult to find: there is no doubt that popular music has become more complex, and at the same time more serious, than it ever was before. Musically, it has broken down some of the old forms in which it was for a long time straight-jacketed. With a wide- ranging eclecticism, popular music has 1

The definition of “popular music” being used in this article is a broad one. It en- compasses a multitude of styles, including folk, folk-rock, acid-rock, hard-rock, and blues, to give just a few names being used in the musi- cal world today. It does so because the old musical classifications have been totally smashed and the forms now overlap in a way that makes meaningful distinction between them impossible. Though not every group or song referred to will have been popular in the sense of selling a million records, all of them are part of a broad, variegated scene termed “pop.” Some of the groups, like Buf- falo Springfield, Strawberry Alarm Clock, or the Byrds, have sold millions of records. Oth- ers, like the Fugs or Mothers of Invention, have never had a real hit, though they are played on radio stations allied to the “under- ground.” Still, such groups do sell respectable numbers of records and do perform regularly at teen-age concerts, and thus must be consid- ered part of the “pop” scene.

2Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 237, March 21, 1964, p. 30; Reporter, Vol. 30, Feb. 27, 1964, p. 18; Saturday Review, Vol. 50, August 19, 1967, p. 18; Life, Vol. 64, June 28, 1968, p. 51.

3 “The Music of the Beatles,” New York Review of Books, Jan. 15, 1968, pp. 23-27. See also “The New Music,” The Listener, Vol. 78, August 3, 1967, pp. 129-130; Columbia University Forum (Fall 1967), pp. 16-22; New American Review, Vol. 1 (April 1968), pp. 118-139; Ellen Willis, “The Sound of Bob Dylan,” Commentary, Vol. 44 (November 1967), pp. 71-80. Many of these articles deal with English as well as American popular groups, and, in fact, the music of the two countries cannot, in any meaningful sense, be separated. This article will only survey Amer- ican musical groups, though a look at English music would reveal the prevalence of most of the themes explored here.

THE MUSIC OF PROTEST 133

adapted to itself a bewildering variety of musical traditions and instruments, from the classic Indian sitar to the most recent electronic synthesizers favored by composers of “serious” concert music.

As the music has been revolutionized, so has the subject matter of the songs. In preceding decades, popular music was almost exclusively about love, and, in the words of poet Thomas Gunn, “a very limited kind [of love], constituting a sort of fag-end of the Petrarchan tradition.” The stories told in song were largely about lovers yearning for one another in some vaguely unreal world where nobody ever seemed to work or get married. All this changed in the 1960’s. Suddenly, popular music began to deal with civil rights demon- strations and drug experiences, with interracial dating and war and explicit sexual encounters, with, in short, the real world in which people live. For perhaps the first time, popular songs became relevant to the lives of the teen- age audience that largely constitutes the record-buying public. The success of some of these works prompted others to be written, and the second half of the decade saw a full efflorescence of such topical songs, written by young people for their peers. It is these works which should be grouped under the label of “protest” songs of the 1960’s, for, taken together, they provide a wide-ranging critique of American life. Listening to them, one can get a full-blown picture of the antipathy that the young song writers have toward many American institutions.

Serious concerns entered popular music early in the 1960’s, when a great revival of folk singing spread out from college campuses, engulfed the mass media, and created a wave of new “pop” stars, the best known of whom was Joan Baez. Yet, though the concerns of these

folk songs were often serious, they were hardly contemporary. Popular were numbers about organizing unions, which might date from the 1930’s or the late nineteenth century, or about the trials of escaping Negro slaves, or celebrating the cause of the defeated Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Occasionally, there was something like “Talking A- Bomb Blues,” but this was the rare exception rather than the rule.”

A change of focus came when per- formers began to write their own songs, rather than relying on the traditional folk repertoire. Chief among them, and destined to become the best known, was Bob Dylan. Consciously modeling him- self on that wandering minstrel of the 1930’s, Woody Guthrie, Dylan began by writing songs that often had little to do with the contemporary environment. Rather, his early ballads like “Masters of War” echoed the leftist concerns and rhetoric of an earlier era. Yet, simul- taneously, Dylan was beginning to write songs like “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which dealt with civil rights, nuclear war, and the changing world of youth that par- ents and educators were not prepared to understand. Acclaimed as the best of protest-song-writers, Dylan in mid- decade shifted gears, and in the song “My Back Pages,” he denounced his former moral fervor. In an ironic chorus claiming that he was much younger than he had been, Dylan specifically made social problems the worry of sober, serious, older men; pre- sumably, youths had more important things than injustice to think about. After that, any social comment by Dylan came encapsulated in a series of surrealistic images; for the most part, he escaped into worlds of aestheticism,

“The New Music,” loc. cit., p. 129. 5 Time, Vol. 80 Nov. 23, 1962, pp. 54-60,

gives a brief survey of the folk revival,

134 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

psychedelic drugs, and personal love relationships. Apparently attempting to come to grips in art with his own per- sonality, Dylan was content to forget about the problems of other men.”

The development of Dylan is impor- tant not only because he is the leading song writer, but also because it parallels the concerns of popular music in the 1960’s. Starting out with traditional lib- eral positions on war, discrimination, segregation, and exploitation, song writ- ers of the decade turned increasingly to descriptions of the private worlds of drugs, sexual experience, and personal freedom. Though social concerns have never entirely faded, the private realm has been increasingly seen as the only one in which people can lead meaningful lives. Now, at the end of the decade, the realms of social protest and private in- dulgence exist side by side in the popu- lar music, with the latter perceived as the only viable alternative to the world described in the former songs.’

THE NEGRO IN SONG

In turning to the protest songs of the 1960’s, one finds many of the tradi- tional characters and concerns of such music missing. Gone are exploited, im- poverished people, labor leaders, “finks,” and company spies. This seems natural in the affluent 1960’s, with youths from middle-class backgrounds writing songs. Of course, there has been one increas- ingly visible victim of exploitation in this decade, the Negro; and the songsters

have not been blind to his plight. But, egalitarian as they are, the white musi- cians have not been able to describe the reality of the black man’s situation.8 Rather, they have chronicled Northern liberal attitudes towards the problem. Thus, composer-performer Phil Ochs penned works criticizing Southern atti- tudes towards Negroes, and containing stock portraits of corrupt politicians, law officials, and churchmen trembling before the Ku Klux Klan, while Paul Simon wrote a lament for a freedom rider killed by an angry Southern mob.9 Similarly white-oriented was Janis Ian’s very popular “Society’s Child,” concerned with the problem of interracial dating. Here a white girl capitulates to society’s bigotry and breaks off a relationship with a Negro boy with the vague hope, “When we’re older things may change/But for now this is the way they must remain.” 10

Increasingly central to white-Negro relationships have been the ghetto and urban riots, and a taste of this entered the popular music. Phil Ochs, always on top of current events, produced “In the Heat of the Summer” shortly after the first major riot in Harlem in 1964. Partially sympathetic to the ghetto- dwellers’ actions, he still misjudged their

6 Wills, op. cit., gives a good analysis of his work. Though he is very quotable, there will, unfortunately, be no quotations from Dylan in this article because the author cannot afford the enormous fees required by Dylan’s publisher for even the briefest of quotations.

7 It must be pointed out that, in spite of the large amount of social criticism, most songs today are still about love, even those by groups such as Country Joe and the Fish, best known for their social satire.

8 This article is concerned almost exclusively with music written and performed by white musicians. While popular music by Negroes does contain social criticism, the current forms-loosely termed “soul music”-make comments about oppression similar to those which Negroes have always made. The real change in content has come largely in white music in the 1960’s.

9 Phil Ochs, “Talking Birmingham Jam” and “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” I Ain’t Marching Any More (Elektra, 7237); Simon and Garfunkel, “He Was My Brother,” Wednesday Morning 3 A.M. (Columbia, CS 9049). (Songs from records will be noted by performer, song title in quotation marks, and album title in italics, followed by record company and number in parentheses.)

THE MUSIC OF PROTEST 135

attitudes by ascribing to them feelings of shame-rather than satisfaction-in the aftermath of the destruction.’ A later attempt, by Country Joe and the Fish, to describe Harlem ironically as a colorful vacation spot, verged on patronizing blacks, even while it poked fun at white stereotypes. Only the closing lines, “But if you can’t go to Harlem . . ./Maybe you’ll be lucky and Harlem will come to you,” followed by sounds of explosion, thrust home what indifference to the ghetto is doing to America.12 The most successful song depicting the situation of the Negro was “Trouble Coming Everyday,” written by Frank Zappa during the Watts uprising in 1965. Though the song does not go so far as to approve of rioting, it paints a brutal picture of exploitation by mer- chants, bad schooling, miserable housing, and police brutality-all of which affect ghetto-dwellers. Its most significant lines are Zappa’s cry, “You know some- thing people, I ain’t black, but there’s a whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white.” No song writer showed more empathy with the black struggle for liberation than that.’3

POLITICIANS

While the downtrodden are heroes of many traditional protest songs, the vil- lains are often politicians. Yet, politics rarely enters the songs of the 1960’s. Ochs, an unreconstructed voice from the 1930’s, depicts vacillating politicians in some works, and Dylan mentions cor- rupt ones early in the decade. But the typical attitude is to ignore politics, or, perhaps, to describe it in passing as “A yardstick for lunatics, one point of

view.” 14 It is true that the death of President Kennedy inspired more than one song, but these were tributes to a martyr, not a politician.’5 If Kennedy in death could inspire music, Lyndon Johnson in life has seemed incapable of inspiring anything, except perhaps con- tempt. In a portrait of him, Country Joe and the Fish pictured the, then, President as flying through the sky like Superman (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a man insane/It’s my President L. B. J.”). Then they fantasized a Western setting:

Come out Lyndon with your hands held high

Drop your guns, baby, and reach for the sky

I’ve got you surrounded and you ain’t got a chance

Send you back to Texas, make you work on your ranch.16

One traditional area, antiwar protest, does figure significantly in the music of the 1960’s. With America’s involvement in Vietnam and mounting draft-calls, this seems natural enough. Unlike many songs of this genre, however, the current ones rarely assess the causes of war, but dwell almost exclusively with the effect which war has on the individual. Thus, both Love and the Byrds sing about what nuclear war does to children, while the Peanut Butter Conspiracy pic- tures the effect of nuclear testing on everyone: “Firecracker sky filled with roots of fusion … /We’re so far ahead we’re losing.” 17 Most popular of the

11 Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Any More. 12 “The Harlem Song,” Together (Vanguard,

VSD 79277). Copyright by Joyful Wisdom Music, Inc.

14Strawberry Alarm Clock, “Incense and Peppermints,” written by John Carter and Tim Gilbert, Strawberry Alarm Clock (Uni., 73014). Copyright by Claridge Music, Inc.

15 Phil Ochs, “That Was the President,” “I Ain’t Marching Any More; the Byrds, “He Was A Friend of Mine,” Turn! Turn! (Co- lumbia, CS 9254).

16 “Superbird,” Electric Music for the Mind and Body (Vanguard, 79244). Copyright by Tradition Music Company.

17 Love, “Mushroom Clouds,” Love (Elektra, EKL 4001); the Byrds, “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” Fifth Dimensior (Columbia,

136 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

antiwar songs was P. F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction,” which, for a time in 1965, was the best-selling record in the country (and which was banned by some patriotic radio-station directors). The title obviously gives the author’s view of the world situation; the content deals mostly with its relationship to young men like himself: “You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?” 18 There are alternatives to

carrying a gun, and defiance of the draft enters some songs, subtly in Buffy St. Marie’s “Universal Soldier” and stri- dently in Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Any More.” 1 Perhaps more realistic in its reflection of youthful moods is the Byrds’ “Draft Morning,” a haunting portrait of a young man reluctantly leaving a warm bed to take up arms and kill “unknown faces.” It ends with the poignant and unanswerable question, “Why should it happen?” 20

If many songs criticize war in general, some have referred to Vietnam in par- ticular. The Fugs give gory details of death and destruction being wreaked on the North by American bombers, which unleash napalm “rotisseries” upon the

world.21 In a similar song, Country Joe and the Fish describe children cry- ing helplessly beneath the bombs, and then comment ironically, “Super heroes fill the skies, tally sheets in hand/Yes, keeping score in times of war takes a superman.” 22 No doubt, it is difficult

to make music out of the horrors of war, and a kind of black humor is a common response. In a rollicking num- ber, the Fugs, with irony, worry that people may come to “love the Russians” and scream out a method often advo- cated for avoiding this: “Kill, kill, kill for peace.” 23 And one of Country Joe’s most popular numbers contains the fol- lowing:

Well come on generals let’s move fast Your big chance has come at last We gotta go out and get those reds The only good Commie is one that’s dead And you know that peace can only be won When we blow ’em all to kingdom come.24

The injustice and absurdity of Amer- ica’s Asian ventures, perceived by the song writers, does not surprise them, for they feel that life at home is much the same. The songs of the 1960’s show the United States as a repressive society, where people who deviate from the norm are forced into conformity-sometimes at gunpoint; where those who do fit in lead empty, frustrated lives; and where meaningful human experience is ignored in a search for artificial pleasures. Such a picture is hardly attractive, and one might argue that it is not fair. But it is so pervasive in popular music that it must be examined at some length. Indeed, it is the most important part of the protest music of the decade. Here are criticisms, not of exploitation, but of the quality of life in an affluent soci- ety: not only of physical oppression, but also of the far more subtle mental oppression that a mass society can produce.

YOUTH AS VICTIM

Throughout the decade, young people have often been at odds with estab- lished authority, and, repeatedly, songs

CS 9349); Peanut Butter Conspiracy, “Won- derment,” written by John Merrill, Great Conspiracy (Columbia, CS 9590). Copyright by 4-Star Music Company, Inc.

19 Buffy St. Marie, “Universal Soldier,” Southern Publishing, ASCAP; Ochs, I Ain’t Marching Any More.

20 The Notorious Byrd Brothers (Columbia, CS 9575).

21 “War Song,” Tenderness Junction (Re- prise, S 6280).

22 “An Untitled Protest,” Together. Copy- right by Joyful Wisdom Music.

23 “Kill for Peace,” The Fugs (Esp. 1028). 24 “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die,” I Feel

Like I’m Fixin’ to Die (Vanguard, 9266). Copyright by Tradition Music Company.

THE MUSIC OF PROTEST 137

picture youth in the role of victim. Sometimes the victimization is mental, as when the Mothers of Invention com- plain of outworn thought patterns and say “All your children are poor/Unfor- tunate victims of lies/You believe.” 25

On a much simpler level, Sonny Bono voices his annoyance that older people laugh at the clothes he wears, and he wonders why they enjoy “makin’ fun” of him.26 Now, Bono could musi- cally shrug off the laughs as the price of freedom, but other songs document oc- casions when Establishment disapproval turned into physical oppression. Thus, Canned Heat tells of being arrested in Denver because the police did not want any “long hairs around.” 27 The Buffalo Springfield, in a hit record, describe gun-bearing police rounding up teen- agers on the Sunset Strip, and draw the moral, “Step out of line the men come and take you away.’”28 On the same theme, Dylan ironically shows that adults arbitrarily oppose just about all activities of youths, saying that they should “look out” no matter what they are doing.29 More bitter is the Mothers’ description of police killing large num- ber of hippies, which is then justified on the grounds “They looked too weird . . it served them right.” 30 Though the incident is fictional, the Mothers clearly believe Americans capable of shooting down those who engage in deviant behavior.

Though the songs echo the oppression

that youngsters have felt, they do not ignore the problems that all humans face in a mass society. Writer Tom Paxton knows that it is not easy to keep one’s life from being forced into a predeter- mined mold. In “Mr. Blue” he has a Big-Brother-like narrator telling the title character, a kind of Everyman, that he is always under surveillance, and that he will never be able to indulge himself in his precious dreams of freedom from society. This is because society needs him to fill a slot, no matter what his personal desires. Of that slot, the nar- rator says, “You’ll learn to love it/Or we’ll break you.” And then comes the chilling chorus:

What will it take to whip you into line A broken heart? A broken head ? It can be arranged.x1

Though no other writer made the mes- sage so explicit, a similar fear of being forced into an unwelcome slot underlies many songs of the period.

The society of slotted people is an empty one, partly described as “TV dinner by the pool,/I’m so glad I fin- ished school.” 32 It is one in which people have been robbed of their hu- manity, receiving in return the “tran- sient treasures” of wealth and the use- less gadgets of a technological age. One of these is television, referred to simply as “that rotten box,” or, in a more sin- ister image, as an “electronic shrine.” This image of men worshipping gadgets recurs. In the nightmare vision of a McLuhanesque world-where the me- dium is the message-Simon and Gar- funkle sing of men so busy bowing and praying to a “neon god” that they can-

26 “Laugh at Me,” Five West Cotillion, BMI.

by Cotillion Music, Inc.-Ten East Music -Springaloo Toones. Reprinted by permission.

29 “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (Columbia, KCS 9463).

138 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

not understand or touch one another. Indeed, here electronics seem to hinder the process of communication rather than facilitate it. People talk and hear but never understand, as the “sounds of silence” fill the world.”3 Such lack of communication contributes to the indif- ference with which men can view the life and death of a neighbor, as in Simon’s “A Most Peculiar Man.”34 It also cre- ates the climate of fear which causes people to kill a stranger for no reason other than his unknown origins in Straw- berry Alarm Clock’s “They Saw the Fat One Coming.” s5

Alienated from his fellows, fearful and alone, modern man has also despoiled the natural world in which he lives. With anguish in his voice, Jim Morrison of the Doors asks:

What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravished and plundered and ripped her

and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the

dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her

down.S6 In a lighter tone but with no less serious an intent, the Lewis and Clark Expedi- tion describe the way man has cut him- self off from nature.

There’s a chain around the flowers There’s a fence around the trees This is freedom’s country Do anything you please.

With a final thrust they add, “You don’t need to touch the flowers/They’re plastic anyway.” 37

This brings up a fear that haunts a number of recent songs, the worry that

the technological age has created so many artificial things that nothing nat- ural remains. Concerned with authen- ticity, the songsters are afraid that man himself is becoming an artifact, or, in their favorite word, “plastic.” Thus, the Jefferson Airplane sing about a “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” while the Iron Butterfly warn a girl to stay away from people “made of plastic.” 38 The image recurs most frequently in the works of the Mothers of Invention. In one song, they depict the country as being run by a plastic Congress and President.39 Then, in “Plastic People,” they start with complaints about a girl- friend who uses “plastic goo” on her face, go on to a picture of teen-agers on the Sunset Strip–who are probably their fans-as being “plastic,” too, and finally turn on their listeners and say “Go home and check yourself/You think we’re talking about someone else.” o4 Such a vision is frightening, for if the audience is plastic, perhaps the Mothers, themselves, are made of the same phony material. And if the whole world is plastic, who can be sure of his own authenticity?

LoVE RELATIONSHIPS

Toward the end of “Plastic People,” the Mothers say, “I know true love can never be/A product of plasticity.”41 This brings up the greatest horror, that in a “plastic” society like the United States, love relationships are impossible. For the young song writers, American love is viewed as warped and twisted. Nothing about Establishment society

s “Sounds of Silence,” Sounds of Silence (Columbia, CS 9269).

34 Sounds of Silence. 35 Wake Up . . . It’s Tomorrow (Uni.,

73025). 36 “When the Music’s Over,” Strange Days

37 “Chain Around the Flowers,” The Lewis and Clark Expedition (Colgems, COS 105). Words and music by John Vandiver. Copy-

right 1967 by Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Inc. Used by permission. Reproduction pro- hibited.

38 Surrealistic Pillow (Victor, LSP 3766); “Stamped Ideas,” Heavy (Atco, S 33-227).

s9 Uncle Bernie’s Farm,” Absolutely Free. 40 “Plastic People,” Absolutely Free. Copy-

41 Ibid.

THE MUSIC OF PROTEST 139

frightens them more than its attitudes towards sex. Tim Buckley is typical in singing that older Americans are “Afraid to trust in their bodies,” and in describ- ing them as “Faking love on a bed made of knives.” 42 Others give graphic por- traits of deviant behavior. The Fugs tell of a “Dirty Old Man” hanging around high school playgrounds; the Velvet Underground portray a maso- chist; and the Mothers depict a middle- aged man lusting after his own thirteen- year-old daughter.43 The fullest indict- ment of modern love is made by the United States of America, who devote almost an entire album to the subject. Here, in a twisted portrait of “pleasure and pain,” is a world of loveless mar- riages, homosexual relationships in men’s rooms, venomous attractions, and overt sadism-all masked by a middle-class, suburban world in which people consider “morality” important. To show that natural relationships are possible else- where, the group sings one tender love lyric; interestingly, it is the lament of a Cuban girl for the dead Che Guevara.44

The fact that bourgeois America has warped attitudes towards sex and love is bad enough; the songsters are more worried that such attitudes will infect their own generation. Thus, the Col- lectors decry the fact that man-woman relationships are too often seen as some kind of contest, with a victor and van- quished, and in which violence is more acceptable than tenderness.45 Perhaps because most of the singers are men,

criticisms of female sexual attitudes abound. The Mothers say disgustedly to the American woman, “You lie in bed and grit your teeth,” while the Sopwith Camel object to the traditional kind of purity by singing, “I don’t want no woman wrapped up in cellophane.” 46 This is because such a woman “will do you in/Bending your mind with her talk- ing about sin.”” All the musicians would prefer the girl about whom Moby Grape sings who is “super-powered, de- flowered,” and over eighteen.48

Living in a “plastic” world where hon- est human relationships are impossible, the song writers might be expected to wrap themselves in a mood of musical despair. But they are young-and often making plenty of money-and such an attitude is foreign to them. Musically, they are hopeful because, as the title of the Dylan song indicates, “The Times They Are A-Changin.’ ” Without de- scribing the changes, Dylan clearly threatens the older generation, as he tells critics, parents, and presumably anyone over thirty, to start swimming or they will drown in the rising flood- waters of social change.49

In another work, Dylan exploits the same theme. Here is a portrait of a presumably normal, educated man, faced with a series of bizarre situations, who is made to feel like a freak because he does not understand what is going on. The chorus is the young genera- tion’s comment to all adults, as it mocks “Mr. Jones” for not understanding what is happening all around him.50 42 “Goodbye and Hello,” written by Tim

43 The Fugs; “Venus in Furs,” The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve, V6-5008); “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” Absolutely Free.

44 The United States of America (Columbia, CS 9614).

45 “What Love,” The Collectors (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, WS 1746).

46 We’re Only in It for the Money; “Cello- phane Woman,” The Sopwith Camel (Kama Sutra, KLPS 8060). Copyright by Great Honesty Music, Inc.

47 “Cellophane Woman.” Copyright by Great Honesty Music, Inc.

48 “Motorcycle Irene,” Wow (Columbia, CS 9613).

49 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. 50 “Ballad of a Thin Man/Mr. Jones,” High-

way 61 Revisited (Columbia, CS 9189).

American Academy of Political and Social Science

American Academy of Political and Social Science

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