How the Velvet Underground and Václav Havel built a blueprint for toppling totalitarians and other censors
Matt Welch & Nick Gillespie | December 18, 2011
The arrival of amplified rock music performed by free-spirited longhairs was not, to put it mildly, greeted with enthusiasm by the Cold Warriors of the West. Nearly a decade after Elvis’s pelvis dislocated social mores and Frank Sinatra denounced rock as “the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth,” rock ’n’ roll refuseniks were still crying bloody murder. In September 1964, National Review founder and tireless anticommunist William F. Buckley reacted to pop music’s British Invasion with a spasm of Victorian disgust: “Let me say it, as evidence of my final measure of devotion to the truth,” Buckley huffed. “The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes.’”
Keep on Rockin' in the Free World - Reason Magazine
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