The Rock Music Imagination

The Rock Music Imagination explores creativity in classic rock, its roots in the blues, and its wide cultural impact. The romantic strains of rock imagination are examined in the songs of popular rock bands, the sixties counterculture, science fiction, the rock music novel, and rock’s attention to human rights in the global community.

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The Rock Music Imagination is an exploration of rock artists in their social and artistic contexts, particularly between 1964 and 1980, and of rock music in relation to literature, i.e. creative expression, fantastic imagination, and contemporary fiction about rock. Robert McParland analyzes how rock music touches our imaginative lives by looking at themes that often appear in classic rock music: freedom and liberation, utopia/dystopia, community, rebellion, the outsider, the quest for transcendence, monstrosity, erotic/spiritual love, imaginative vision, and mystery. The Rock Music Imagination examines how the sixties were a pivotal point in rock music history, recognizing the imagination and creativity of blues and jazz artists, folk-rock and hard-rock musicians, female rock musicians, and progressive rock creators. McParland explores blues imagination, countercultural dreams of utopia, rock’s critiques of society and images of dystopia, rock’s inheritance from romanticism, science fiction and mythic imagination in progressive rock, and rock’s global reach and potential to provide hope and humanitarian assistance.