Pamela Des Barres

Forced to write a music review for my high school radio station, which I predicted would be extremely tedious to produce, I chose a band with a unique sound that used the lead singer’s volunteer service with the California Coalition for Women’s Prisoners as a focal point for their new album, We the Common. Before I knew it, I scheduled a phone interview with Samantha Rogers, who, on several occasions, worked with the lead singer, Thao Nguyen, at CCWP.

With the birth of disco brought all things shiny. Diana Mankowski an American historian says that it was disco dancers who “broke the mold when it came to fashion, allowing freedom, creativity and individuality to reign supreme”. She also speaks about Ed McCormack an American journalist for the ‘Rolling Stones’ who often visited clubs such as

Fanny demonstrates the obsession of sex and pleasure in the society. She chooses to have multiple partners because of her own personal pleasure. She uses no reasoning nor morality and instead focuses on her own self-interest. Furthermore, she and the rest of society perceives multiple partners as a requirement of the citizens as shown by: “you ought to be…promiscuous” (43). Fanny demonstrates the foundation of society on sex and pleasure.

In the last 60 years music has changed a great deal but while you were in the fallout shelter you missed out on one of the most influential music performers of all time and that is The Beatles. The Beatles took the America by storm when they arrived in 1964. With their influential stylings and their new sound on music everyone fell into “Beatle-Mania”. While you were in the fallout shelter you missed out on all the music that came about because of The Beatles, through their influence it brought forth a new way people saw rock and how many people interpreted it. One of America’s best musician and proclaimed as the “King of Rock” was influenced by The Beatles and that person was Elvis Presley(Biography).

“Lesbian feminism highlighted many lesbians’ feeling that an enormous political and social divide existed between their worlds and goals for liberation movements and those of their male counterparts” (Alexander, Gibson, and Meem 74). There was a strong divide between “the bar” and the more political LGBT work being done outside the bar. LGBT activists critiqued those who they believed “wasted time” in the bar scene as being unconcerned about larger political issues. On the other hand, “it was not uncommon for disco queens and bar dykes to see the earnest activists as outsiders and downers” (Alexander, Gibson, and Meem

People in the Brave New World are expected to be promiscuous by having physical relations with as many people as they can. In many ways, Lenina Crowne is conventional and follows the social norm of being “pneumatic”. However, she challenges this idealized norm in her decision to go out with only one person, Henry Foster. Fanny, one of Lenina close friends, reminds her of the social stigma of only dating one man “The D.H.C objects to anything intense or long drawn.

Works of art and literature are never created to only be looked upon by the artist; they are created to propose a plan, or change an opinion, or make a difference. Both in Joan Didion’s essay “Rock of Ages” and Dave Barry’s newspaper column, “Dating Made Easy”, they each use various devices to achieve a specific goal. When Didion first arrives at Alcatraz she lists all the flowers that she sees. She then specifically informs the reader that “candytuft springs … exercise yard”(Didion 205). Didion gives the reader extremely specific details, after having described a broader scene.

The English rock music group known as The Beatles gave the 1960s their musical standard and had a great influence on popular music. They were able to gather together a unique band with few performers, but what made The Beatles standout from other American bands was their style. This style which mixed rock and roll and rhythm in blues and even some Tamla Motown is what had thousands of screaming fans irking to see them perform. The effect The Beatles had on teenagers and even adults is astonishing. Thomas Fitzpatrick says, “..young girls leap to their feet and begin to wave their arms and scream”.

Every Little Thing Before the Beatles achieved the amount of success that they did, many steps were taken down a long and winding road, but they were not walking down that road alone. With a little from their friends, the Beatles went from being a group that performed at clubs to being a group that released music for millions of fans to enjoy. Although The Beatles’ story may be a long, long, long one, like all stories, theirs has a beginning, middle, and an end. As a teenager, John Lennon formed a skiffle group with his school friends called the Quarrymen (Eder). One of the members, Ivan Vaughan, had been a friend of Lennon’s since the two were children, but he had attended a different school than Lennon.

A gang hanger.” The words that Antonia chooses to describe Jazz are clearly depicted by what Antonia expects her to be like, based off of her appearance and reputation around school. ( It is evident that they do not know each other well when Antonia replies to Jazz asking if she’s her peer counselor with “Define ‘peer’.”) In this example, Antonia’s negative conception of Jazz is crystal clear.

Joe Harvard would say that “He believed rock music should make people want to tear shit up.”(23) Sterling Morrison would eventually be one of the most important members of the band; not only because of his musical ability, at various points playing lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass, but because a family connection brought in the fourth and final member of the Velvets Maureen Tucker. Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker’s arrival in the band was perhaps the least likely of all. An entire string of coincidences all conspired to bring her into the band.

The New Romantics was a subculture born out of dissatisfaction with the way ‘punk had become a parody of itself’ (Cole, 2000) that, once adopted by the mainstream, began to alienate ‘many of those who were at first attracted to it’s embracing of difference and individuality’ (Cole, 2000). Where punk had originally been about a very ‘DIY’ ethic and energy, it evolved into something uniform and hyper-masculinised. In doing so, the punk scene became much less of a welcoming space for LGBTQ+ youth, such as George O’Dowd (better known today as cultural icon, Boy George) and the Bromley Contingent (which included Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol) who ‘spent more time hanging out at gay clubs’ (Rimmer, 2003). Consequently, those who didn’t fit

Joshua Zeitz’s history of the flapper reminds us that “The New Woman of the 1920s boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke, and date—to work her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her mother’s generation. […] She flouted Victorian-era conventions and scandalized her parents. In many ways, she controlled her own destiny” (8). Although some twenty years too soon, the image evoked here equally describes Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s

The Beatles is a music band that I grew up listening to. I was really excited to know that the band was an option for this essay. I enjoyed hearing and seeing the Beatles all throughout my life. They were a well known band and very popular in my era. The first and last time I ever saw them live was in Santa Cruz sometime in the ninety’s.

In the reading for today, Friedlander writes about the commercial aspirations of some of the artists associated with the San Francisco psychedelic movement in the 1960s. For example, “Country” Joe McDonald was frustrated by the lack of monetary success his political lyrics earned him, while Creedence Clearwater Revival largely stuck to producing radio-friendly accessible three-minute rock songs that lacked the typical countercultural influence of other bands from the area (pg. 203). Similarly, towards the end of the 1960s, the Grateful Dead began to write shorter, more structured songs more in line with mainstream rock/pop music (pg. 206). The attitudes and activities of these three artists suggest that while the psychedelic movement