“Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture” with Laura Sikes

If you like what we do please subscribe to the show at Patreon.com/everythingisideology or give a one time donation at buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyShow notes: Welcome back to Everything is Ideology. I’m your host Dr. Lee Caplan. I’m joined by Dr. Laura Sykes, and we will be discussing her recently published essay “Rolling Stone Magazine: Co-opting the Counterculture.” Today’s episode is really about a tension—between aesthetics and politics, between counterculture and capitalism, and between what something claims to be and what it actually does in the world and we start with her work on rock criticism—especially figures like Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner—but very quickly the conversation opens up into the role of the Magazine Rolling Stone helped shape not just music culture, but the way people understood themselves as part of a movement, even when the political commitments behind that movement were in contradiction. Along the way, we talk about things like the use of New Left aesthetics without the politics behind them, the role of gender and race in music criticism, and how ideas get packaged, circulated, and sometimes stripped of their original meaning. There are moments where we zoom in—on specific articles, specific figures—and others where we step back and think about the broader question: what does it mean for culture to feel radical without necessarily being radical. It’s a conversation that moves between history and the present, and it raises questions that are still very much with us.Biography: Laura Sikes is from West Monroe, Louisiana. She attended Louisiana State University for her undergraduate degree. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, studying under Joan Shelley Rubin. The focus of her research is rock and roll criticism from its origins in the 1960s through to today. Of particular interest to her are cultural hierarchies, radical politics, print culture, race, and gender. Her dissertation, In the Groove: Rock Criticism from 1966-1978, examines Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Lester Bangs, and Jann Wenner, analyzing their contributions to musical, cultural, and political discourse. She is currently adapting it for publication as a book. She is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University—Texarkana. There, she runs the Red River Center for Regional History and Culture. She is also the editor of the Red River Series for the Texas A&M University Press. She is a proponent of public history.Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/38/1/22/217706/Rolling-Stone-MagazineCo-opting-the-Counterculture