Listening for the Secret - The Grateful Dead and the Politics of Improvisation

"Scholars and cerebral Deadheads alike will be delighted by Ulf Olsson’s acid test: he subjects the Grateful Dead to a barrage of Big Ideas and determines that the band passes with its freak flag flying high. A must-read for anyone who wants to better understand the improvisatory possibilities of the countercultural cast of mind."—David Farber, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas

"A splendid account of the music of the Grateful Dead as a form of improvisation that remains both in and out of dominant culture, weathering all politics, all setbacks and defeats, with equal tenacity."—Wai Chee Dimock, Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University, and editor of PMLA
 

List of contents

Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Popular Avant-Garde? Renegotiating Tradition
2. Wave That Flag: An Apolitical Band
3. Crashes in Space: Aspects of Improvisation
Coda: Listening for the Secret

Discography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Ulf Olsson is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University.

Summary

With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, this title helps to understand the meaning and creation of the counter-culture community. It examines the wider significance and impact of its politics of improvisation.

Additional text

"...presents a complex but rounded picture of a band that was both deeply traditional yet genuinely avant-garde, fiercely independent yet—at least in its latter years—undeniably mainstream, apolitical yet politically challenging."

Product details

• Authors: Ulf Olsson, Olsson Ulf
• Assisted by: Nicholas Meriwether (Editor), Meriwether Nicholas (Editor)
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2017
• EAN: 9780520286658
• ISBN: 978-0-520-28665-8
• No. of pages: 200
• Series: Studies in the Grateful Dead; Studies in the Grateful Dead
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music; Rock and Roll, Rock, Music, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, MUSIC / History & Criticism, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, HISTORY / Modern / 21st Century, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Rock, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Critical Theory, History of Music, Popular Music, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Composers and songwriters, Music reviews and criticism