talking about my book, the republic of rock: music and citizenship in the sixties counterculture @ at the carol rifelj faculty lecture series, the orchard room (room 103), the franklin environmental center at hillcrest, middlebury college, 4:30 pm.
Why did rock music matter so much to participants in the 1960s counterculture? How did the music flow through the very channels of Cold War American military and consumer empire to foster fleeting bubbles and atmospheres of, if not dissent exactly, then a kind of restless quest for a more fervent mode of democratic and collective belonging. Tracking rock music’s contexts and connections from the city of the Summer of Love, San Francisco, to the country in which the United States waged war, Vietnam, and beyond that trans-Pacific interaction to a broader global sense of youth solidarity, this talk shares the story of the Republic of Rock, a territory of sound and feeling that defined the 1960s counterculture and which, even now, continues to be misunderstood if even recognized at all.
