Dirty Summer of Love: We're Only In If You Take off Your Clothes & Do the Funky Uncle Remus

[alice wellintown]

Due to the artists like Zappa, rock has reached the level of higher,
ironical self-awareness – which, in fact, questions the aforementioned
statement by Gerald Graff, concerning the postmodern status of
psychedelic rock of the late 60s. As is known, the aesthetics of
postmodernism hardly allows any ideological bias – and it was just in
times of the hippie revolution that rock music entered its “age of
ideology”, having gone through the “naive” experiences of Presley or
Beatlemania. Quite naturally, the ironic revaluation of this ideology
should have taken place later – the history, however, does like to
take truly unexpected turns: in the year of 1967, almost in the zenith
of “summer of love” , there appeared the album We’re Only In it For
The Money by Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention, ruthlessly
satirizing the ideology of flower children, and, on the artistic side,
providing a fine example of postmodern “controlled (rubbish dump)
chaos”.

Indeed, many came together in the crazed kaleidoscope of rock culture
of the late 60s: ideologies, anti-ideologies, revolutionary rhetorics
of the MC5, pacifist vibrations of Country Joe McDonald, Rimbaud-like
gestures of Jim Morrison, modernist ambitions of building monumental,
closed forms (Iron Butterfly), postmodern collages and structural
“discontinuity” (Zappa), “classical” ambitions (Procol Harum),
contemporary minimalism evolving into atonal noise (The Velvet
Underground). It could be reasonably argued, then, that rock did
experience, at the same time, the ethos of constructive modernist
innovations and the syndrome of postmodern, “nihilist” deconstruction
– which can be most clearly seen on the example of Frank Zappa and
Captain Beefheart: one of the most consistent, “postmodern” violators
of all conventions possible and a typical purveyor of rock
abstractionism, coming from definitely modernist sources.

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