The Revolutionary Hype

Music hath alarums to wild the civil breast.

No, that is not quite William Congreve's classic line of the 1690s. It is the Fugs of the 1960s, in their song When the Mode of the Music Changes. And it sounds a theme that is growing louder, if not clearer, throughout contemporary rock: change, wildness, rebellion against civil authority. Social and political revolution, that catchword of radical left rhetoric, is becoming a fashionable topic for more and more rock groups--at least as far as their lyrics go.*

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet . . .

Hey, think the time is right for a palace revolution.

So sing the Rolling Stones in Street Fighting Man, one track of their new album, Beggars Banquet. On a recent Smothers Brothers television show, Singer Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane used a Black Panther salute to climax a performance, in blackface, of Crown of Creation. Even the Lovin' Spoonful, once a gentle, folk-flavored group, have taken up the cry. Their latest album is called Revelation: Revolution '69, and the title song proclaims: "I'm afraid to die but I'm a man inside and I need the revolution."

Musical Guerrillas. The most violent expression of revolutionary rock so far comes from a Detroit quintet called the MC (for Motor City) 5. After months of rumblings about them in the pop underground, they erupted at Manhattan's Fillmore East. Their performance was less revolutionary than revolting. While the band churned out medium-good hard rock, Lead Singer Rob Tyner scattered obscenities, referred to the audience as "fellow animals" and, while singing I Want You Right Now, writhed on the floor in sexual postures. The group also performed John Lee Hooker's Motor City Is Burning, and there was no mistaking the message:

All the cities will burn . . . You are the people who will build up the ashes.

"The MC5 are a free, high-energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves," says their 26-year-FRIEDMAN old manager and mentor, John Sinclair, who also runs the group's hippie-style communal household in Ann Arbor, Mich. Sinclair and the MC5 are self-styled "musical guerrillas," who flaunt their memberships in a minuscule left-wing organization called the White Panther Party (sample plank in its platform: "Total assault on the culture by any means necessary including rock 'n' roll, dope and obscenity in the streets").

Youthful Upheaval. In a sense, all rock is revolutionary. By its very beat and sound, it has always implicitly rejected restraints and celebrated freedom and sexuality. Moreover, both social and political overtones were brought into its lyrics through Bob Dylan's influence in the early '60s, as in The Times They Are A-Changin':

Your sons and your daughters are

beyond your command; Your old road is rapidly aging.

Since then, various groups have carried forward the attack on middle-age values and life styles. The Fugs developed a special brand of buffoonery that included two outrageous onstage stunts now favored by the MC5: removing their clothes and burning the U.S. flag. The Mothers of Invention honed a cutting musical satire ("It's such a drag to have to love a plastic Mom and Dad"). San Francisco's Country Joe and The Fish have focused on the war in Viet Nam as a symptom of national sickness ("Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box").

Today, however, the songs of revolution are more explicit, the four-letter words are more frequent. And it all begins to smack of what publicity men call "the hype." Says Ed Denson, Country Joe's manager: "When these people talk about revolution, they mean protest, but they found that the word revolution shocks. The MC5 are taking a protest one step further to get attention." The MC5 clearly practice much of what they preach, as is shown by their string of arrests on charges of noisemaking, obscenity and possession of marijuana. Just as clearly, even their most aggressive songs are only that--songs, not bricks or guns. It may be that the first victim of their metaphorical revolution will be the overused word revolution itself.

* A notable exception is the Beatles, whose recent Revolution demurred: "When you talk about destruction/ Don't you know that you can count me out."

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