Blog Post #1 assignment

members of nickelback

An example I would use for something that originally started as subversive or dangerous would be the genre of rock music. First being coined as "rock and roll" with musical roots in various genres such as blues, rhythm and blues, and country music, it was viewed as music that could be considered as multi-racial. Because the majority of rock and roll was performed by African American individuals during the heavily racially charged 1940s, the subversiveness of the rock genre might have not come from the content of the music, but rather from the people who were playing it. Two decades after from the 50s to 60s, white musicians were at the forefront of rock and roll with such notable figures as Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, and most notably the "King of Rock and Roll" Elvis Presley. The dangerousness of rock music to some degree could be attributed to how different it was to the predominant genre of music, crooning. Crooning was a soft and smooth style of singing that was considered intimate whereas rock and roll and loud and fast accompanied by the electric guitar. Alongside the sometimes provocative lyrics and jerky movements that were introduced by people such as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley with their signature moves being the duck walk and rubber legs respectively, it served as a very large contrast to the crooners who stood on stage and serenaded. In an era where social norms about sex were largely taboo and evangelical Christianity was on the rise, rock and roll played a role as the revolter against the dominating ideals of a 1950s America. 

An example used by Ott and Mack in their document "Myth, Doxa, and Hegemony" of something that originated as dangerous and subversive in popular culture but was absorbed back into the dominant cultural ideology was the punk movement. Punk started as an offshoot genre of rock and roll and morphed into one that empathized the revolt against conformity, social norms, and consumerism, basically western. society and capitalism. Ironically, punk culture was absorbed back into the system by means of commercialism as retail stores sold their fashion and media "sanitized" the punk movement, and thus was beaten by the ideology that it sought to fight against. As time progressed and changed, so did rock and roll, it morphed into different genres and was eventually consumed by the dominant ideology in the form of the genre concentrating on the more radio-friendly pop music. An example of a band who had evolved their style to succeed in a, one would say "dying market" would be Nickelback. Along with another band called Creed, they would abandon the edgy style of grunge and punk and would instead evolve their style into songs that were romantic and narrative-driven, contrasting the anger and angst of the grunge and punk eras prior. Because of this change, Rock magazine Rolling Stone magazine would label them both the worst bands of the 1990s for essentially selling out to a more commercially driven genre of music. As Chad Kroeger, the leading singer of Nickelback himself said: "I would dissect every single song that I would hear on the radio or every song that had ever done well on a chart and I would say, 'Why did this do well?'" As a result, Nickelback willingly abandoned their ideology, sanitizing their lyrics, and chose to become part of the dominant capitalist hegemony.