Rock and roll has always rubbed against the grain of Establishment standards. Since its rowdy arrival in the 1950s, the genre has symbolised the ideals of youthful rebellion and opposition. Thus in Philosophizing Rock Performance, Wade Hollingshaus finds it disconcerting that rock historians have favoured positivistic models of historiography that uphold values and beliefs bred by the Establishment, rather than observing ‘a historiographical practice more ethically appropriate for an exploration of rock’ (p. xiv). An Assistant Professor of Theater Arts Studies at Brigham Young, Hollingshaus is well qualified to broaden the ways in which we interpret and record rock history. In this book, he applies a ‘methodology supported by an accompanying philosophy’ in order to ‘locate some fissures that can be opened up into thresholds for new directions’ (p. xv).
He presents three case studies on Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie that offer alternative interpretations of key aspects of these figures' careers. The essays do not form a sequential narrative, although in later chapters the author circles back to ideas introduced earlier in the book. As support for his theories, Hollingshaus draws on the writings of Foucault, Certeau, Rancière, and other Continental philosophers, and his familiarity with their works allows him to adeptly weave their ideas into his arguments. The target audience is academics, but serious music fans and those who are intrigued by critical theory can peruse its pages without feeling overwhelmed by the concepts or terminology therein.
Chapter 1, ‘Bob Dylan and the Gestures of Youth’, revisits Dylan's (in)famous performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when the iconic troubadour ‘went electric’ by using an electric guitar, in putative defiance of the festival's all-acoustic traditions. For Hollingshaus, this moment represented in Dylan's career the definitive ‘gesture’, a central tenet in his creative philosophy that celebrates an artwork's wholeness and recognises the importance of exterior factors in determining its reception. Conventional wisdom holds that the Newport audience booed at Dylan for betraying his allegiance to folk, but this was not Dylan's first appearance using electric instruments, nor was it the only performance featuring electric instruments at that year's festival. By brandishing a modern electric instrument instead of a traditional acoustic guitar, Dylan vouchsafed to his audience a vision of the future – of rock's surpassing of folk in popular culture, of the dominance of technology in music-making, and of new means of musical distribution and consumption – the impending Electronic Age. As Hollingshaus put it, Dylan ‘reorganized … [the audience's] spatiotemporal experience’ by rendering intelligible new ontological categories (p. 6).
Hollingshaus clarified that the audience's jeers were specifically directed at Dylan's performance of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. This anthem proclaimed Dylan's transformation from a preserver of folk traditions to a forward-thinking rocker who cultivated his own image and wrote original songs that celebrated the gesture of protest in and of itself, unrelated to specific causes like civil rights or the Vietnam War. The song reached its definitive form in the recording studio only a week before the 1965 Newport Festival, and the careful planning and happy accidents that coalesced to produce the final, brilliant result made the recording process the ‘principal and authoritative artistic object’ (p. 30). This chapter reaches its conclusion through some dense philosophical pathways, but in essence the author posits that like his 1965 Newport audience, Dylan also felt burdened by the pressure of the future exerting itself onto the present.
Chapter 2, ‘The Life and Electrocution of Jimi Hendrix’, fully develops the topic of electricity first sparked in Chapter 1. After assuring readers that his approach is not ‘revisionist history’ (p. 42), Hollingshaus challenges the conventional belief that the legendary guitarist died from vomit inhalation after overdosing on sleeping pills, arguing that, ‘because Hendrix spent so much of his life trying to resist the Establishment, it seems disingenuous to accept an Establishment explanation of his death’ (p. 42). He situates Hendrix in a distinguished historical lineage of ‘electricity mystics’ (p. 144), including Nikolai Tesla and Benjamin Franklin, and he presents a fascinating history of electricity from an age when it was a mysterious, misunderstood force to its modern application in radios and guitar amplifiers. Electricity symbolised progress, modernity and enlightenment, and it was the lifeblood of rock and roll; for Hendrix it served as the ‘basis of his artistic practices and the center of his understanding of the universe’ (p. 53).
Hendrix's mastery of electricity through controlled feedback and sonic manipulation allowed him to serve as a semiconductor of spiritual energy for his audiences. But the circuit tragically tripped when Hendrix's body and spirit broke down over the pressures of stardom, relentless touring and substance abuse. Hendrix's audiences changed too with his growing popularity, increasing in size and their demand to be entertained rather than enlightened. This broken circuit consumed any energy that Hendrix put out instead of recycling it, electrocuting the guitarist to death. Or so the author would have us believe. His persuasive writing avoids conjecture, although Hollingshaus does overplay his hand at the essay's end by proposing that the energy released upon Hendrix's death triggered a ‘avalanche breakdown’ (p. 92) of rock star deaths at age 27, including Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain.
Chapter 3, ‘A Political Bowie’, highlights two oddities of the British rocker's career: his apoliticism and his breadth of activities. Hollingshaus assumes that they are interrelated and argues that despite Bowie's claim that his art was ‘totally apolitical’ (p. 96), his urge to ‘explore the artistic potential of every medium he can find’ (p. 97) makes his art inherently political in its democratic ideology. Hollingshaus views Bowie's entire life as a meta-artwork in progress, guided by the concept of visuality or ‘image’, which he relates to Debord's theory of spectacle (p. 95). While David Bowie is undisputedly a rock innovator whose artistic contributions are impressive and diverse, he is hardly the only British rocker of that era whose creative ambitions propelled them past the outposts of rock music's conventional boundaries, including Peter Gabriel of Genesis and The Who's Pete Townshend (whose name is misspelled twice in this chapter).
This chapter is the most discursive in the book, and the author flirts with fanboyism during the 15 pages he spends discussing Bowie's ‘flux of doing stuff’ (p. 113). He elucidates how Bowie's various roles throughout his career, including Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and Aladdin Sane, allowed him to reinvent himself and explore new mediums, free from the onerous expectations of critics and audiences. Hollingshaus would have been wise to point out that even ‘David Bowie’ was a role invented by David Robert Jones, and when Bowie's remarks on his artistic philosophy are quoted, more attention is needed to inform the reader which Bowie issued that particular statement. This chapter lacks the lockstep logic and argumentative clarity that distinguished the first two chapters, which belies its prime position as the culminating essay in the book.
Hollingshaus presents some provocative theories that thwart conventional rock discourse, and he should be commended for putting these three luminaries in an historical context that is closer to rock's true spirit. Unfortunately, the author's command of philosophy outshines his musical expertise, and rock music at times seems like a cultural product that conveniently accommodates a particular philosophical tenet. Those few musical observations he does include are more from the perspective of an admirer than an authority, e.g. his assessment of the opening to Bowie's 1974 hit ‘Rebel, Rebel’ as a ‘fairly difficult [guitar] riff’ (p. 135) signals his inexperience on rock's most important instrument – the electric guitar. Nevertheless, Hollingshaus is a strong writer who makes the philosophical meat of his book digestible to a broad audience, and he succeeds in providing a well-crafted model for exploring new directions in rock historiography.
