Carol Burnett Show, had lasted longer than five years. And the longevity of Burnett’s program arguably had much more to do with the comedic brilliance of Burnett and her co-stars Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, and Vicki Lawrence, than it did with the appeal of the format. The sensibility of the 1970s was clearly detrimental to the artifice inherent in the variety show; when Burnett broadcast her farewell, she frankly stated that she thought it classier to leave the air before she was asked to do so.
But although forms of realism were the rule in 1970s TV programming, the shows they helped to make obsolete did not disappear entirely. Thanks to syndication, television programs from the 1960s began to appear as reruns alongside those from the 1950s. In 1970, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had established the Financial Interest Syndication Rules, which took effect in 1971 and reduced network control over local stations by loosening restrictions on the rebroadcast of former prime-time material and narrowing prime time to three hours per night. As a result, we could suggest that although the social values of a seeming liberal consensus dominated the sets during prime time, syndication made available several pictures of rival social values. In a given day, a family might be able to watch Father Knows Best, followed by Bewitched, both in reruns; and after the evening news with Walter Cronkite, it might be time to watch Maude. Three competing visions of the suburbs, in incommensurate styles, preaching irreconcilable values—and yet they all made themselves available in the space framed by the buttons of the set, behind the glowing glass.
And the sitcom was only one television genre among many. Local stations were just as happy to recycle cartoons, westerns, a few dramas, and hundreds of movies from Hollywood’s studio era. Syndication also offered an important venue for the fading variety show, allowing programs such as Hee-Haw to continue their vaudevillainy uninterrupted. The American population was already close to saturated with TV sets, so the images, plots, and music of all these performances were close to inescapable and offered a newly enriched repertory of possible worlds in which viewers could locate themselves imaginatively, with wildly various results extending into everyday life. This is one important source of what many critics have described as the “irony” infecting the generational consciousness of the Thirteeners. Television’s recycling processes resulted in an endless set of lessons about the uses of convention. Perhaps children and teenagers, if they tried hard, could imagine Archie Bunker or Mary Richards as figures that incarnated important aspects of contemporary reality; but their juxtaposition with Gilligan, Arnold Ziffle (the pig), Wally and the Beav, made the artifice of all shows equally clear.
In music as well, the question of convention became pressing in popular music. It is probable that the notion of a common youth culture grounded in rock’n’roll always lay at a substantial distance from everyday reality. Nevertheless, the reminiscences of an awful lot of people in the 1950s and 1960s suggest that such a fiction did enjoy a certain compelling glamour. This vision of unity could not be sustained in the 1970s, for two reasons. First, massive changes in the recording industry at the beginning of the decade allowed the fragmentation of the seemingly cohesive audience of the 1960s into niche markets and grounded an explosion of genres and subgenres. There was no simple “rock” by the beginning of the decade, there were a multitude of rock and pop styles. These places were hard to stand in for long. Either the style changed or you did. Second, the youth culture that seemed stable as long as it belonged to a single generational cohort began to fracture as a newer cohort with different values began to coalesce as an audience. This expansion shattered the illusion of a common taste.
Some critics were resentful. P. J. O’Rourke, in a parodic critical account of whale song recordings for the Boomer magazine Crawdaddy, begins his observations with a glance at the decade’s complex ecology of music genres: “One of the most important trends in popular music of the 1970s has been the disappearance of any single dominant sound. In place of one current pop fashion we have, now, dozens of individual styles, each appreciated on its own terms. Some AM and FM radio stations mix these genres so freely that in an hour of air time you can hear country-western singers, heavy-metal rock groups, folk artists, reggae bands, whales, dolphins, and porpoises.”21
Although it would be tempting to read this statement as at least neutral, if not approving, the rest of O’Rourke’s column makes clear his distaste for this state of affairs. When he compares genres that he despises to whale songs, it is clear he means no kindness to any of them. Disco, new wave, and punk all sit within O’Rourke’s baleful sights, and his deadpan wrath extends to encompass the music industry that has made their flourishing possible, along with the cetaceans whose sounds offer him his pretext for the display of contempt.22 The rest of his review makes clear that his fundamental objections arise not only from his ideas about musical artistry (especially technical ability), but from his vision of the public taste for “good” popular music being corrupted by the forces of the market. (His musical-moral values tally closely with those that Martha Bayles would express two decades later.) I think that at its root, O’Rourke’s distress here comes less with particular musical genres than the profit motive that allows them to circulate freely, to be picked up by whoever wants to claim them. That is, his trouble comes from the threat posed by a particular mercantile process to the hierarchy of musico-social values he esteems.
This anxiety about the disruptive effect of rival musical genres and the values they embody continues to the present. The concern over explicit representations of violence and sexual behavior have usually drawn the most attention, of course, since long before the invention of rock’n’roll. An equally vexed but less politicized debate has centered around the question suggested by O’Rourke’s animadversions: “authenticity” and “commercialism.” Dozens of historical accounts that appear in books and television documentaries trace a line of musical descent from the country and R&B (rhythm and blues) fusions of the middle 1950s to a hazily delimited collection of 1960s musics called “rock,” which then fragments in the 1970s, leaving various successor styles and genres that claim to be the true heirs of this earlier tradition. This narrative is not one of musical style alone because it entails arguments about the shape of the music industry through which the music appeared and about the audiences who made the music matter. Among the most crucial features of this tradition was its perceived commitment to authentic expression, seen especially in the ways that the music’s refusal of normative expressive decorum caused disquiet among “the establishment.” It is important to recognize this commitment to authenticity as a claim to “realism.” To be authentic was to resist fictions always, in favor of truth. By doing so, rock could be taken as a mode of rebellious utopianism, underwriting the attempts of its partisans to resist and critique the oppressive conventions of their society.
This myth is a strong one. It promulgates any number of luminous goods whose power to attract us has not faded, nor should it. But rock’s requirement for authenticity and realism required that many popular styles that depended on fantasy and convention be rejected, and that even within rock, the music’s inherent propensity to fictions—its love of conventions—be watched carefully.23 The burst of conflicting styles and genres that began the 1970s made it impossible for listeners to imagine a unified generational audience hearing a naturalized music that spoke truth to power. Popular music subsided into its bad old ways, hustling its multiple audiences for a buck. Where had its antinomian potential gone?
Rock was always a jealous god. There had been any number of pop styles left out of its narrative accounting, and they had proceeded in their own ways despite the true believers. In the shattering of the social fabric in the 1970s, it seemed that any number of marginalized communities could make a play to renegotiate the representational contracts that had held them captive in American popular culture. Shows like All in the Family, after all, demonstrated the processes of social negotiation in all their vulgar and ambiguous splendor. The confusion of the airwaves meant that the same process could happen musically, too. As it happens, the styles that seemed most alluring to many of these minority communities were those that had been unsuitable for inclusion in the rock myth. It was not that this other music had ever gone away; it was that with the fantasy of consensus shattered, it was suddenly more free to make its presence felt. The bemusing shifts of the top-forty charts mirror the intricate social negotiations whose uncertainty made up the “problem of the 1970s.” By beginning to unpack some of the musical and social issues at stake, we