This dissertation examines the uses of rock as a political concept in U.S. media debates during the 1980s and 1990s. It argues that rock’s meaning was politically malleable: each writer redefined it and embedded it with additional meanings about U.S. society, culture, politics, and history. My research explores rock’s connectivity with the ideological construction of “Americanness” through the larger thematic of freedom. The intersections between rock, freedom, and “Americanness” are being examined through three larger topics: individualism, rebellion, and consumerism. My dissertation asks: 1) in what ways was rock connected to each of these themes, 2) how was this connection used to delineate the larger relationship between the theme and the ideological construction of “Americanness”, and 3) how were these created connections mobilized and utilized in the larger cultural conflicts of the era. Through these questions, I trace rock’s weaponization in the U.S. culture wars, in which different parts of the ideological spectrum created vastly divergent views about the cultural meaning of “Americanness” as a form of imagined community.

By examining the multiplicity and ambiguity of the meanings attached to the rock concept, my dissertation explores the general principles underlying the culture wars as a phenomenon. In my research, the culture wars are delineated as a process of ideological activity through which political actors forged antagonistic relationships between cultural phenomena, societal movements, and historical processes. Therefore, my dissertation explicates the networking of ideology through the culture wars, using the example of rock music. The materials in my study consist of politically charged U.S. print media from different sides of the ideological spectrum. I explore both materials explicitly focused on rock and those where rock had a functional/instrumental role, used by writers as a basis for having larger discussions about cultural phenomena. My research demonstrates that rock was a potent cultural symbol in the 1980s and 1990s United States, capable of facilitating diverse debates about the ideological core tenets of “Americanness.” Rock’s decade-spanning history and its many musical iterations gave it elasticity, allowing it to be conceptually tied to a great number of relevant political debates of the era.

My research participates in discussions about the influence of popular culture to political thinking, the ideological trajectories of the United States in the late twentieth century, the anatomy of cultural conflicts and their usage, as well as the intellectual history of U.S. conservatism and the cultural networking of ideology.