Rock culture: still rocking on after all these years

Rock music widened the cultural field by bringing in a new, popular, musical practice. Over the years, consubstantial links seem to have gradually been forged between the rock counter-culture and the consumer society. However, chinks of transgression have survived: using the codes of mass culture to challenge the very existence of such codes is the latest way rock culture has found to stick two fingers up at the well-oiled machinery of legitimisation and commodification, thereby proving its own dynamism and giving a new lease of life to the subversiveness that was once the hallmark of this particular brand of “popular” culture.
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