Nicholas Tochka, "Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America" (Oxford UP, 2023)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 14, 2023 · 50m

Progressive and libertarian, anti-Communist and revolutionary, Democratic and Republican, quintessentially American but simultaneously universal. By the late 1980s, rock music had acquired a dizzying array of political labels. These claims about its political significance shared one common thread: that the music could set you free. Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America (Oxford UP, 2023) explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the Fifties, the…