Written by: gfesadmin on March 7, 2013

It is quite possible that the most important location in American counterculture history is the tiny Oklahoma town of Okemah.  Do I have your attention?  Great.  We will get back to Okemah in a moment, but first on to the central argument of The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

The authors claim that much of counter culture is based on erroneous assumptions based in Marxian and Freudian thought.  Specifically, Marx’s critique of capitalism through the commodity fetish, that workers were particularly objective and abstracted, thus they needed to be liberated.  Thus, capitalist society was essentially oppressive and consumerism was a way to control and impose.  Freud’s view of society was that it worked to control the deep sexual and physical aggression just below the surface of all humanity.  Thus, society is inherently oppressive.  These philosophies, even though they rarely touched on reality or connection to actual people and mass society, influenced a glut of thinkers and artists, who when startled by the horrors of modern fascism, and the subtle relativism and nihilism of postmodernism, shifted their views towards the central goal of freeing themselves and their fellow man from the clutches of oppressive society.  The main problem was that the common man never voted for them.

Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912.  His family was poor, his father a member of the KKK probably involved in the lynching of a black family, and his mother psychologically disturbed by Huntington’s disease.  Guthrie learned his musical skills from African-American bluesmen, and the traditional ballads (borrowed from Ireland and Wales) of the poor whites affected by the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl, and the Okies living in California.  In was with this setting that the poor Okie rose to prominence as a folk singer, symbol of the common man, union advocate, and communist party friend.  He frequently played with the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” written on his guitar.  Of course, the years before WW2 were America’s great experiment with communism, yet Guthrie was never anti-American, even serving in the military during the war.  Above all he wanted to tell the true stories of the American experience, especially those of the downtrodden and poor.

What Guthrie ultimately did, besides being a collector of the American song and experience, was lend real credibility to the progressives, artists, communists, and other intellectual elites.  Guthrie was a real life survivor of gut-wrenching, rural poverty, yet without even a high school education, he had made himself America’s budding poet laureate, and helped birth the popularity of folk and protest music.  He would also influence a slew of musical careers and probably set the groundwork for much of American popular music.

If Heath and Potter have a weak point in their thesis, it is that they fail to differentiate counterculture and its place in world history.  There have always been countercultures.  From the flamenco wails of Gitano culture in Spain, to the deep blues, gospel and jazz of African American culture, and many more, there have always been those that spoke out and fought against the status quo.

Let’s be clear, when Heath and Potter talk about “counterculture” they are referring specifically to the contemporary mélange of particularly American influenced counterculture that traces its explosion in the 60’s movements unwittingly influenced by Freud and Marx which imploded into nihilistic postmodern and narcissistic individualism.   This type of counterculture has thus found its locus in blind allegiance to stand out, in being cool. Thus, it becomes oblivious to its own self-critique, all the while lapping up counterculture consumer products, as it revels in the elitism of the critique of mass culture, globalization, and capitalism, unaware of the inherent contradictions and logical fallacies in their own thinking. 

This is where Heat and Potter’s critique is particularly weighty.  The problem isn’t with leftist or progressive movements, or even “the system,” it is instead the inertness of the counterculture movement to be anything more than an abstraction of its own false assumptions.  To be sure this is more than just an issue for the leftist counterculture.  So much of American culture has been absorbed into the postmodern relativism of consumer ambivalence.  This is readily apparent in the fact that two of the last centuries most scathing protests songs of the US, This Land is Your Land by Guthrie and Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, have been completely misunderstood and turned into patriotic anthems by most.  A more careful listen to both reveals the irony that leads to disillusionment:

Guthrie’s lyrics are set in the Great Depression:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I’d seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

And Springsteen’s appear against the backdrop of the Vietnam War:

             Had a brother at Khe San fighting off the Viet Cong

            They’re still there he’s all gone

            He had a woman he loved in Saigon

            I got a picture of him in her arms

            Down in the shadow of the penitentiary

            Out by the gas fires of the refinery

            I’m ten years burning down the road

            Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go

Heath and Potter, of course being on the left, lament this inertia, and would not find hope for change and advancement in Christian or even conservative movements.  They are simply incredulous that the left has been completely consumed by consumerism and non sequiturs.  It is hard not to agree with Heath and Potter here. Here in Spain, many suffering under the crippling financial crisis were given hope during the 15-M Movement protests began.  Students took over the main squares of cities throughout Spain in protest against banks, capitalism, and income inequality.  However, there connection with working class Spaniards quickly fell apart, as the camps soon become experimental communes where people voted by their emotions, wiggling fingers, depending on how they felt, all the while breaking down into pet projects like animal rights.  After only a week, the Granada movement fizzled into a small group of elitist, hippie, okupa (known for illegally occupying other people’s houses) factions.  My unemployed friends were marginalized and disappointed, not only by the government, but also by the counterculture that was supposed to support them.  These movements seem sheer vanity in comparison to the movements like Tiananmen Square and the Arab Spring.  English folk- punk singer Frank Turner seems to agree with Heath and Potter’s assessment of the current state of popular political action and solidarity in his song Love Ire and Song:

When you realised your parents had let the world all go to sh*t
And that the values and ideals for which many had fought and died
Had been killed off in the committees and left to die by the wayside
But it was worse when we turned to the kids on the left
And got let down again by some poor excuse for protest
Yeah by idiot f*cking hippies in 50 different factions
Who are locked inside some kind of 60’s battle re-enactment
And I hung-up my banner in disgust and I head for the door

So what happened?  What happened that shifted the idealism of 60’s that led young students to stand in solidarity with African-Americans in the South, even to the death, and volunteer in mass for the Peace Corps, to now find their activism in Burning Man, wiggling fingers, and pot smoking?

Quite possibly we can find the answer in the hinterlands of Minnesota, in a small town called Hibbing.  There a Jewish family would give birth to one Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham, who would go on to become one of the greatest shape shifter’s of all time, taking on the name of Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, and thus obscuring his past in American mythology as Bob Dylan.  A devotee of Guthrie, a teenage Dylan would abandon his life in Minnesota to visit the dying Guthrie in New York (who also contracted the genetic Huntington’s disease) and would take on his mantle, copying his style and ethos.  It is easy to forget that Dylan would become one of the faces of the Civil Rights movement, performing before Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech during the March on Washington.  His earliest recordings were emblematic of Guthrie, full of protest songs, songs about the common man, comedic songs, anti-war screeds, and songs focused on the plight of African-Americans in the South.  Dylan was the face of a generation, but also the darling of the folk and protest movement.

It is possibly here where a shift in American society was either mirrored in Dylan or affected by him.  In 1965, Dylan the ever changing lone rebel cowboy feeling constrained and controlled by the folk movement, plugged in and began overlaying absurdist-modernist lyrics on top of traditional rock and blues.  The change led to outright rejection by the protest crowd and a number of famously confrontational performances.  Dylan became enigmatic, and continued to make electric recordings forever altering popular music (he influenced the Beatles to change their sound and lyrics) so that rock and pop could be serious and philosophically subversive.  Here Dylan forever altered counterculture as well making it cool.  Yet, here counterculture became counter just for its own sake.

As an analysis, we have to wonder if Dylan was all that intentional.  Possibly he had sensed the impending darkness of the postmodern age, or maybe he even over expressed his own romantic sense of cutting edge individualism.  Possibly his generation had done what they set out to, they had made a difference.  Or maybe the cost of true protest and societal change had been too high.  In Dylan’s case, it is quite possible that he never wanted to be a counterculture icon.  Dylan would of course reinvent himself many more times… failed lover, born again evangelical, and recluse.  However, through it all, Dylan has always stressed that he was just channeling the American song, a repository of American traditional culture and experience.

Maybe this is the final answer to the conundrum.  Maybe the true value of a counter culture is found in its embeddedness to real life people and experience. In fact, it must be down and dirty and for and of the people.  As Guthrie was an Okie familiar with real people’s suffering and by his own admission just stealing the ethos of oppressed blacks in the blues of Leadbelly. Maybe the failure of contemporary counterculture is a hyper individualism and an elitism that claims to know best and speak for people it has no real compassion or connection to.

Possibly this is where Christianity can step into the conversation.  An activist faith, that believes in incarnating love in culture, the value of all humans, and calling people to the unity of both the particular and diverse in personal and communal salvation just might have something to say.  Perhaps it is the real counterculture. The authors of The Rebel Sell stress the need for well thought out legislative action.  I agree, but maybe it also time for leaders to recapture the true essence of counterculture to affect change.  History tells us that Christianity has much to offer here.

*Okemah and The Melody of Riot is also the name of a 2005 album by Son Volt.

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