Fluent Essays

Respond to these questions based off the short reading; 1. If you had to write an article about todays pop culture/youth culture compared to the 1960s, what conclusions would you come to?2. How was the Rolling Stone culture back then connected to what was going on politically in America? rolling_stone.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview ROLLING STONE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE The mix of speed and mayhem, coupled with cheap production costs, was perfect for early television, and Roller Derby was the most popular show on ABC during the network’s infancy. The popularity of the sport was such that in 1949 the playoffs of the National Roller Derby League sold out New York’s Madison Square Garden for a week. A large part of the Roller Derby audience has always been women, in part because the Roller Derby was almost the only sports activity prior to the 1970s where female athletes could be seen on television. In addition, the Roller Derby integrated very early and many of the skaters were black or Hispanic, among them Ronnie Robinson, son of boxing great Sugar Ray Robinson. In 1950, Leo Seltzer’s son Jerry took over the Roller Derby and moved the base of operations to southern California, then to northern California in 1958. The home team Bay Area Bombers achieved the most success. With stars like Charlie O’Connell, Ann Calvello, and ‘‘The Blonde Bomber’’ Joanie Weston, the Bombers dominated the sport and Weston was the star of the show. She was, according to sports writer Frank Deford, ‘‘not only the best skater, but she clearly looks the part as well. With her bleached blonde pigtails flowing out from beneath her shiny black pivot helmet, Joanie appeared like a brave Viking queen in full battle regalia.’’ With huge local shows, which often outdrew those of the expanding Oakland Raiders football team in the early 1960s, the popularity of Roller Derby remained strong. The sport spread to more cities and to other countries, and had ten full-time teams at its peak of popularity. Yet, in 1973, only two years after drawing a record 35,000 people to the Oakland Coliseum, Jerry Seltzer folded the league, selling out to a rival organization based out of Los Angeles called Rollergames. Rollergames was even more outlandish than Roller Derby and featured more professional wrestling gimmicks such as death matches. The Rollergame league’s Los Angeles T-Birds, which once featured a huge woman skater with the number 747, was the most dominant team until Rollergames folded in 1975. Like its cousin, professional wrestling, Roller Derby is considered a trash sport. But fewer people have admitted to watching it than actually do. Eventually, the popularity of Roller Derby found its way into mainstream popular culture. The film Kansas City Bomber (1972) featured Raquel Welch as a Roller Derby queen; Rollerball (1975) starred James Caan and was a futuristic parable set in a society where an ultra-violent Roller Derby-like sport is used to give antisocial feelings an emotional outlet, thus becoming the most popular mass pastime. In 1978, the TV show Roller Girls, centered on the fictional Pittsburgh Pitts Roller Derby team, lasted for less than ten episodes. Numerous attempts at comebacks have been equally unsuccessful. The International Roller Derby League was formed in 1979, but appeared only in the Bay Area and, in 1986, a souped-up version of Rollergames that included ‘‘a wall of death’’ appeared on ESPN. It lasted less than a season. The most recent revival took place in 1998 and looked to have a chance at success with Jerry Seltzer, as President of the World Skating League, again at the helm. The WSL put together six teams to produce Roller Jams for the Nashville Network. While the concept remained the same, the packaging was much different. Rather than roller skates, skaters in the new league donned roller-blades and tightfitting latex uniforms, and special effects and rock music were introduced to accompany the event. The late 1990s sport was faster and sexier than ever before, and Seltzer expressed the belief that the resurgence of pro wrestling in the 1990s, coupled with the wide attraction of roller-blading, would put Roller Derby back on top for the twenty-first century. The other inspiration for the new look Roller Derby was Joanie Weston. Even after the Roller Derby folded, Weston kept skating, training new talent, and holding exhibitions in the Bay Area in an attempt to revive the sport. When she died suddenly in 1997, Roller Derby was thrust back into the news. After reading Weston’s obituary, TV executive Stephen Land was ‘‘inspired to get together with TNN and make Weston’s dream come true.’’ Weston has lived on through ESPN’s Classic Sports Network show, Roller Super Stars, which features old tapes of the golden years of the ‘‘blonde bomber’’ and her teammates. —Patrick Jones FURTHER READING: Deford, Frank. Five Strides on the Banked Track: The Life and Times of the Roller Derby. Boston, Little Brown, 1971. Werts, Diane. ‘‘What Goes around Comes Around—Like Roller Derby.’’ Los Angeles Times. January 8, 1999. Rolling Stone Almost two years before the Saturday Evening Post—‘‘America’s magazine’’—first folded in 1969, a small magazine named Rolling Stone began in a San Francisco print shop. With the look of an underground newspaper, Rolling Stone targeted a young readership that was attuned to the counterculture. Whereas the Post conveyed a consensus within American culture, Rolling Stone had more in common with Playboy’s approach as the embodiment of a particular lifestyle. At its height, Rolling Stone’s cover became an icon in itself—for many, it served as a cultural barometer. At different points in its history, the biweekly had been regarded as a daring antiestablishment voice, or a slick mainstream media product. The magazine’s one main constant was its music coverage. Rolling Stone deemed rock musicians and their music to be newsworthy, which helped to legitimize one of the key elements of 1960s’ oppositional culture. The inception of Rolling Stone marked the changes in U.S. culture following the 1960s: one such change held that the personal— one’s lifestyle, even the kind of music one listened to—is political. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher, was a 21-year-old dropout from Berkeley when he began Rolling Stone with only $7500 in borrowed capital. ‘‘Rolling Stone is not just about music,’’ wrote Wenner in the inaugural issue, ‘‘but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces.’’ The magazine’s name was taken from a song, by blues legend Muddy Waters, that borrowed its title from an old proverb: ‘‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’’ Rolling Stone’s look—newsprint on a quarterfold format—was of an underground newspaper, although that was the furthest thing from Wenner’s mind. The intention from the beginning was to make the magazine look as professional as possible, with column rules and Times Roman type. Wenner, who derisively referred to ‘‘the hippie press,’’ wanted to be as legitimate as Time magazine. Despite Wenner’s efforts, outsiders saw Rolling Stone as part of the underground press, a perception that lasted into the 1970s. The magazine took its slogan, ‘‘All the News That Fits,’’ from the New York Times’ ‘‘All the News That’s Fit to Print’’—it was a facetious swipe and a description of the limitless space allotted to Rolling Stone’s writers. The magazine’s focus on music as a newsworthy topic distinguished it from any other publication before it. Its 267 ROLLING STONE interviews with musicians (later to include actors, politicians, and other celebrities) went beyond the fan magazine’s interest in personal likes and dislikes, and probed the creative processes behind the music instead. One of the magazine’s early record critics, Greil Marcus, declared in Robert Anson’s Gone Crazy and Back Again: ‘‘I am no more capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking of Herman Melville, than I am of reading Jonathan Edwards without putting on Robert Johnson’s records as background music.’’ After barely getting off the ground—the first issue had a press run of 40,000 copies where all but 6000 of them were returned—the magazine had a circulation of 325,000 by 1974, a figure that reached 1.25 million in 1998. Along the way, the magazine dropped its quarterfold format for a regular tabloid style and four color. In 1974, 16 percent of its readership was over 25 with a median age of 21. By the end of the 1990s, its original audience was older and more like yuppies. Once a necessity to young Americans, the 1990s Rolling Stone faced heavy competition from other music magazines and MTV. Wenner, dubbed the ‘‘hip capitalist’’ by journalist Robert Draper, once offered the early subscription incentive of a free roach clip (to hold marijuana joints). Hip promotion aside, the magazine’s steadily gaining reputation for publishing ‘‘some remarkably good reportage,’’ as the New York Times was forced to admit in 1973, was what gave Rolling Stone its foothold. Wenner’s magazine thrived on reporting the cultural events of the late 1960s for which it seemed best suited. While mainstream newspapers condemned the tribal goingson at the Woodstock festival, Rolling Stone reported that the festival crowd temporarily constituted New York State’s third-largest city and successfully policed itself. When 1969’s Altamont festival selfdestructed into violence, Rolling Stone weighed in with the headline, ‘‘Let It Bleed,’’ and assigned blame to anyone even remotely involved with the festival. Its hard-hitting reporting of Altamont was in sharp contrast to the establishment press that lazily reported facts and figures: how long the traffic jam was, and the estimated crowd, all the while giving no impression of the orgy of violence that ensued there. Somehow, the optimistic possibilities, ahead of the magazine in the late 1960s, dissipated as it entered the 1970s. The shootings at Kent State in 1970 provoked many on the staff to steer the magazine towards more political coverage. Wenner fought off the revolt and insisted the magazine remain focused on music, which resulted in several resignations. This was problematic because rock music also limped into the 1970s. Many of rock’s new legends—like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin—were either dead, or else they were defunct like the Beatles. As rock critic Jon Landau expressed it, as quoted from a 1974 New York Times book review: ‘‘Bob Dylan has lost much of his impact . . . the end of the Beatles as a group is now irreversible . . . there are no longer any superhumans to focus on.’’ Enter Hunter Thompson, the iconoclastic writer who became a celebrity through the magazine’s pages. Thompson, the ‘‘Gonzo Journalist,’’ practiced a bombastic style of writing that pushed aside objectivity, and forced the writer into the stories he covered. Thompson was a cultural outlaw: open about his drug abuse and alcohol consumption, his prose could be gifted in its insights on one page and babbling nonsense on the next. The writer who once wrote that President Richard Nixon had ‘‘the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad,’’ managed to find himself, during the 1968 campaign, with the president in Nixon’s limousine, where they talked about football. It was the kind of inconceivable situation that endeared Thompson to Rolling Stone’s readers. Issues that carried Thompson’s installments of his infamous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 268 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE sold out quickly. Soon Thompson was covering the 1972 presidential election for the magazine, which was beginning to display a unique ability to transfer rock-and-roll panache to more sober pursuits, like literature and politics. Rolling Stone quietly became a literate magazine that happened to cover music. More influential celebrities were granting lengthy interviews, like the ones that had been popularized in Playboy. The magazine’s literary credentials were further established by the appearance of authors Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote; Richard Goodwin, former speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, helped to give it political cachet. It won the 1970 National Magazine Award for its pieces on Altamont and Charles Manson. Now recognized for challenging its readers’ assumptions, Rolling Stone had the envious ability to cover stories in ways that major newspapers couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Rolling Stone’s breakthrough followed in 1975, after being contacted by a San Francisco attorney who claimed he provided refuge for fugitive Patty Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper-chain heiress. ‘‘The Inside Story,’’ as the article was titled, scooped the major media outlets on what was an intensely followed story. It was widely recognized that Rolling Stone’s Patty Hearst story was the biggest journalistic event since the New York Times printed the Pentagon Papers five years before. Perhaps the magazine’s toughest critics were its readers and its staff; every decision, from the changes in format, to the kind of advertising Rolling Stone accepted, was subjected to active debate. According to Draper, it was simply that ‘‘Rolling Stone’s staffers wanted nothing so much as to set a good example for their peers. When they did not, their readers cried ‘sellout’—a charge that perhaps no other magazine had ever yet faced.’’ After Rolling Stone’s move to New York in 1977, the magazine’s culture was altered. Bit by bit, the look and content steered towards more market-driven concerns—Wenner was eager to shake the magazine’s hippie image in pursuit of mainstream success. The fragmented music scene and the aging readership helped to underscore the editorial drift that ensued. The magazine, once a haven for writers escaping the establishment press, was put in the unusual position of watching its writers defect to the mainstream press. ‘‘Few things sound less glamorous,’’ proclaimed Louis Menand in a 1991 New Republic piece, ‘‘than ‘the counterculture’—a term many people are likely to associate with Charles Manson.’’ Rolling Stone’s constituency had changed. Faced with competition from other music magazines, like Spin (alternative music) and Vibe (hip-hop/ rap), the 1990s presented the challenge of a young audience who could get their music news without having to read Rolling Stone. The magazine responded by increasing its content towards fashion and technology. Out of touch with even its core topic, Rolling Stone gave covers to major 1980s rock acts like U2 and Talking Heads behind Time and Newsweek. ‘‘Yet this was where the magazine found itself at the close of the eighties,’’ Draper’s book concluded: ‘‘respected but no longer relied upon, a force among other forces—an institution, surely, and like many such institutions, disregarded.’’ —Daryl Umberger FURTHER READING: Anson, Robert Sam. The Rise and Fall of the Rolling Stone Generation. Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1981. Arnold, Martin. ‘‘Rolling Stone Is Still Gathering Readers, Revenue and Prestige.’’ New York Times. October 22, 1973, 32. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE Draper, Robert. Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History. Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1990. Granatstein, Lisa. ‘‘RS Rolls out Fresher Look.’’ Mediaweek. August 10, 1998, 6-7. Menand, Louis. ‘‘Life in the Stone Age.’’ New Republic. January 7, 1991, 38-44. Nelson, Alix, review of The Rolling Stone Reader. In New York Times, April 14, 1974, sec. 7, 19. Seymour, Corey. ‘‘On the Cover of Rolling Stone: A Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Special.’’ Rolling Stone. December 10, 1992, 147-154. Weir, David. ‘‘Rolling Stone Gathers No Marx.’’ Salon. http:// www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/06/09media.html. 1998. The Rolling Stones While the Beatles and other exponents of ‘‘the British Invasion’’ served an updated version of rock ’n’ roll to the United States, the Rolling Stones emerged in 1963-1964 as the most prominent of the British acts who brought the Afro-American musical form of blues to a young, white American audience. The group was at the peak of their musical and cultural significance at the end of the 1960s, when their violent lyrics and brooding blues-rock seemed to reflect the potentially cataclysmic clefts in American society. After the early 1970s, the Rolling Stones made very few musically or politically radical records, but their famous 1960s songs continue to resound. The Rolling Stones ROLLING STONES Mick Jagger and Keith Richards attended the same primary school in Dartford, England, during the late 1940s, but lost touch until a legendary reunion at Dartford railway station in 1961, when Richards’ interest was piqued by Jagger’s selection of Chuck Berry records. Jagger and Richards soon began to play with slide guitar afficiando Brian Jones. The trio recruited jazz drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, Jones naming the fledgling group the Rollin’ Stones after a Muddy Waters song. In April 1962, aspiring pop-group manager Andrew Oldham saw the Stones at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond, London. Oldham later reminisced: ‘‘I knew what I was looking at. It was sex.’’ Oldham negotiated the Stones’ contract with Decca Records in early 1963. The group’s earliest recorded songs were a compromise between expurgated rhythm and blues (R&B), and pop ballads intended to exploit the popularity of the Beatles. In early 1964, however, Oldham began to promote the Rolling Stones as the antithesis of the ‘‘Fab Four,’’ ordering the band to abandon their ‘‘Beatle boots’’ and leather waistcoats and to accentuate the slovenly, surly sexuality which he had seen have such an effect on audiences at their early Crawdaddy gigs. Oldham’s propaganda included planting newspaper headlines such as ‘‘WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE?’’ When the Stones’ arrived for their first tour of the United States in June 1964, American newspapers fulminated that the ‘‘New Beatles’’ were a disgrace compared to the adorable, mop-topped originals. Old-school crooner and compeer Dean Martin made sneering references to the Stones’ long hair during their appearance on Hollywood Palace. But hip American youths embraced the Stones, not least because the Beatles had been coopted by their parents, and, as Lillian Roxon later noted, ‘‘No one had ever seen a white man move on stage the way Jagger moved.’’ The Rolling Stones’ commercial appeal to young Americans was confirmed when the single ‘‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,’’ a sexually aggressive anthem of disillusion with society, reached number one in June 1965. A run of similarly incendiary hit singles followed, before the 1967 albums Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request, a disastrous foray into fay Anglocentric psychedelia, revealed the extent to which the Stones had neglected their R&B influences during their immersion in the ‘‘Swinging London’’ scene. Nevertheless, the Stones remained notorious during the ‘‘Summer of Love.’’ Jagger and Richards were busted for possession of drugs at the latter’s English country home, and the June 1967 court case was a very public microcosm of the clash between traditional moral strictures and the liberalized youth culture burgeoning on both sides of the Atlantic. In May 1968, ‘‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’’ was released, instigating an astonishing period during which the Stones harnessed sinister and salacious lyrics to an intense, rootsy sound. Their finest album, Beggars Banquet, released in late 1968, featured ‘‘Streetfighting Man,’’ on which Jagger pondered his position as a figurehead for an imminent revolution, and ‘‘Sympathy for the Devil,’’ an ironical ode to their own demonic image which incorporated a topical reference to the murder of Bobby Kennedy. In June 1969, Brian Jones was sacked and replaced by young blues virtuoso Mi ... Purchase answer to see full attachment