Has music ever been subversive?

What if "counterculture" actually preserves the status quo?

Looking back over the last half century or so, there’s been no shortage of moments when musicians have sparked tremors of widespread shock, outrage and alarm:

Jim Morrison of The Doors singing “girl, we couldn’t get much HIGHER” on The Ed Sullivan Show… The Sex Pistols cursing during a televised interview with talk show host Bill Grundy… GG Allin eating his own shit and mutilating himself onstage… Slayer citing a list of gruesome atrocities committed at Auschwitz during the breakdown section of their most infamous song… Bushwick Bill of The Geto Boys rapping about raping a woman, slitting her throat and then having sex with her corpse… Cannibal Corpse’s Chris Barnes upping the ante on the same scenario by imagining yanking his victim’s “ruptured bowel from her insides, de-virginized with my knife” then literally eating her out (chewing on her vulva and guts)… Varg Vikernes of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem burning down a string of churches and murdering his own bandmate, who himself had taken a picture of another bandmate’s dead body, which Mayhem used as an album cover…

The list, of course, goes on and on—and that’s before you even factor for artists whose rhetoric was deemed threatening enough that governments and/or political elements mobilized to suppress them by force: Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, the leading lights of Brazil’s Tropicália movement (Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, etc), Ice-T and Body Count, etc…

In fact, even without such dramatic examples, it’s fair to say that musical movements across the board trigger fear and resistance in whatever generation of adults happens to be at the helm when those movements emerge from the margins and start encroaching on mainstream awareness. So it’s easy to form an impression of music as a powerful engine of social change (as the late hippie/Boomer icon David Crosby described it to me in 2022), or even as a catalyst for the destruction of the existing social order. But what if that’s actually an illusion? What if iconoclastic music—the stuff we think of as a counterweight to established norms—actually ends up having the opposite effect?

What if counterculture actually functions as a conservative force? I don’t mean politically conservative, but conservative in the sense of an agent that ultimately preserves the status quo. Because, more and more, I’ve come to see counterculture as a mechanism that eventually comes to reinforce conventional notions of how we’re supposed to live. The more anti-establishment a given artist, style, or trend looks on the surface, the more potential their work has to shepherd audiences back into the familiar confines of the herd…

For now, let’s set aside the shadowy links between the MKUltra experiments of the 1960s and the proliferation of LSD among acts like The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Crosby Stills & Nash, and others.¹ Let’s also set aside the ties between the recording industry and the privatization of prisons, and what the implications of those ties must be when you consider the unrelenting promotion of gangsta rap attitudes in the near-40-year period since the late 1980s.² And let’s look past the fact that intelligence/defense agencies like the CIA and Department of Defense take an active role in film and television production.³ Ditto for the CIA’s role in backing the 20th-century abstract expressionist movement (specifically: Jackson Pollock).⁴

Those are all fascinating rabbit holes to fall into. So is the argument that capitalism, by its very nature, neutralizes the subversive power of all art movements by reducing them to commercial products. We’ve seen it time and again—with rock and roll, punk, heavy metal, hip hop, etc: whatever subversive seeds of potential those musical forms possessed was ultimately subsumed in the relentless churn of the marketplace. Alas, “dangerous” art ends up being commodified and placed on a rack to be absentmindedly consumed by the masses—ultimately becoming as harmless as the stuffed animals and assorted plastic trinkets one finds lining the shelves at Walmart…

Does all music get reduced down to truck-stop kitsch eventually? Maybe! And even if we were to remove mass marketing and profit from the equation, I’m guessing we’d get to the same place, where pearl clutching and calls to action about moral decay inevitably lead to shrugging indifference. This de-sensitization—where artforms once viewed as degenerate come to be seen as harmless, even wholesome—occurs with or without the aid of the capitalist machine. No matter how groundbreaking an art movement might be in its beginning stages, all art eventually gets “co-opted”—not just by corporate commerce, but by time. Because, well… it’s human nature to get used to things to the point that we barely notice them anymore.

I actually have no issue with this cycle. I have no problem with Slayer, for example, ending up in a car commercial⁵, or with rapper Snoop Dogg doing a show with Martha Stewart. That’s because I don’t look to music to help me push past the guardrails of the culture I’m required to find a way to live within. Or, to be more precise, music isn’t my preferred avenue to butt-up against those guardrails. I’ve never actually believed in music as a legitimate pathway to revolution. In fact, I don’t even believe in revolution—in the literal sense—as a viable pathway to “revolution” in a broader sense, i.e: a shift towards a more illuminated way of being.

Largely, that’s because I’ve come to suspect that people on some level want to be… if not controlled outright, then at least corralled. And while I certainly think it’s worth exploring the examples where there appear to be external forces tweaking the public’s perceptions, I feel like people would essentially seek the same thing from art even if it weren’t sponsored, installed, co-opted, or otherwise tampered-with in some way. And what is it that so many of us are seeking? The answer, I would argue, is the thrill of achieving momentary flight from the mundane.

Art, as we know, is often made by people who live unshackled from the social constraints to which the majority of us are expected to adhere—whether they can afford to live that way, or whether their drive is so strong that they just hurl themselves past the rules that govern us as social pack animals. But when artists stew too long in the broth of their own indulgence, when they emotionally implode and fall prey to drug addiction, excess, and narcissism… that’s a signal to the rest of us that we’re safer staying put right where we are. Because, for norms to evolve in any significant way, we need to summon the collective will to participate in adjusting them and moving them forward. That requires co-participation in the process. Without that extravagant gestures of rebellion reveal themselves as cartoonish acts of futility.

Back in the mid-2000s, I was at an underground rock club in the city I live in, and a punk/hardcore band that was already old by that point started its show with one of its guitar players jumping into the crowd with the neck of his guitar pointed—intentionally—at the heads of people of the audience.

“Wow,” a friend of mine enthused breathlessly, “the energy!”

Annoyed, I left the club. I didn’t think there was anything impressive about this at all. And it struck me then that you’d have to feel really confined in your life for an appalling, obnoxious, empty gesture like that to look like freedom to you. If that’s freedom, I don’t need it. Don’t get me wrong: I feel like there are many dynamics that constrict us in our ability to be true to ourselves. But we could use less “rebellion” and more alignment between our need to both belong and our need to individuate.

Music that wears the brave face of sticking its middle finger to the establishment only gets us so far. If you want a revolution, it’s already in you waiting to be actualized. No one’s going to lead you to it, certainly not the latest artist who’s staked their identity on railing against the very structure that the rest of us depend on, whether we like it or not.

I have a lot more to unpack on this, but I’ll leave it there for now.

1. There are quite a few sources available on the MKUltra project, but the Wikipedia page on the subject is surprisingly comprehensive, thorough, and extensively sourced. What we know publicly about the experiments—according to declassified U.S. government documents—points to a web of institutional abuse so unimaginably depraved that it makes even the most terrifying horror films pale in comparison. And the idea that MKUltra may have been the catalyst for the hippie counterculture is, well, quite mind-blowing considering that the hippie ethos is often framed as a shattering of societal norms. I would recommend starting with the “Documented Subjects” section of the Wiki page. For what it’s worth, in his 2014 book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, late author Dave McGowan argues that U.S. military and intelligence elements loomed large within “the dark underbelly of a hippie utopia.” I think this Reddit post and this comment in response both make sensible arguments for and against McGowan’s thesis.

2. None other than former NWA frontman and gangsta rap icon Ice Cube made the case in 2023, during an appearance on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast, that the promotion of gangsta rap encourages criminal behavior that funnels people into the pipeline that feeds the prison industrial complex. Ice Cube isn’t the first to make this assertion, but it’s utterly astounding coming from him given that Cube is one of the original progenitors of gangsta rap—he’s basically the first face of the whole gangsta aesthetic as we know it today.

3. See here, here, here, and here.

4. See here, here, here, and here.

5. Granted, Slayer was featured in a commercial for Scion, a now-defunct Toyota subsidiary that collaborated on marketing campaigns with several left-of-center heavy bands, including The Melvins, Meshuggah, Immolation, Revocation, etc.