Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Derek Dysart
Audiobook
9 hr 36 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the sixties and seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the eighties. How did rock 'n' roll become enmeshed with so many different competing ideas about freedom? And what does that story reveal about the promise-and the limits-of rock music as a political force in postwar America?

About the author

Nicholas Tochka writes about the politics of postwar music-making in Eastern Europe and the Americas. He is completing one project on citizenship in postsocialist Europe, and another about the invention of the sixties in the United States. He works at the Conservatorium of Music and the University of Melbourne.

Derek Dysart came to the world of spoken audio first via college radio, and later through hosting an interview podcast. After enjoying a career in software, his love for storytelling and connecting learners to information made audiobook narration a natural fit.

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