The institutions had spent the end of the 1950s trying to regain control. The Payola hearings had wounded independent disc jockeys, Alan Freed was finished, Elvis Presley was in the Army, and Buddy Holly was dead. The rawer edges of early rock were giving way to young male singers whose songs, clothes, and public behavior…
Carnival Before the Seizure In fifteenth-century Florence, Carnival occupied the city physically. Songs moved through streets and public squares while masks loosened ordinary identities and seasonal excess temporarily rearranged the social order. The Medici tolerated and sponsored a civic culture in which spectacle and government were closely entangled. Carnival gave Florence a sanctioned place to…
The problem reached Avignon from inside the choir. By 1324, the papal court had become one of the great administrative centers of Western Christianity, and Pope John XXII governed an institution whose authority depended on more than doctrine. Authority also lived in ritual, in the repeated forms through which doctrine became audible and recognizable. Plainchant…
On February 3, 1959, the Winter Dance Party tour was already in trouble before an airplane ever left the ground. Buddy Holly had been crossing the Midwest on a bus whose heater had failed during one of the coldest stretches of the tour. The next performance was roughly three hundred miles away, so Holly chartered…
The electric guitar arrives in modern memory already screaming. Feedback hangs in the air, amplifiers cover the stage, and the player carries the posture of someone who has decided the room belongs to them. Rock culture built that image so successfully that rebellion can seem like a natural property of the instrument, something waiting inside…
In late 1912, Pablo Picasso assembled a guitar from paperboard, coarse thread, twine, and wire in his studio on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. The paperboard was the heavy laminated stock used for commercial hat boxes and shoe boxes. It bent, creased, and retained the pressure of the hands that worked it. Nothing about the…