Censorship Now!!. Ian F. Svenonius
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rock’s musical characteristics are not necessarily apparent to the listener. While it had some of the same bourgeois sensibilities as modern “indie” rock, it lacked the willful obscurantism. Indie rock is marked by “slacker” cynicism, aloofness, introversion, and formalism, whereas college rock was still goofy, political, risible, idiotic. There was hope and playfulness in college rock. It was still rooted in the ambition of making a “hit”: popular music for radio play. College rock had to be fun; frat rock (i.e., Swingin’ Medallions, Kingsmen, John Fred & His Playboy Band) and soul revues had long been mainstays of campus life, so college rockers were under pressure to entertain in a visceral way. Therefore, there was often a novelty, populist component to college rock that is missing in today’s opaque, elusive, and willfully obscure “indie” world.
Many college radio stations had powerful bandwidth and far-reaching influence. These stations published their own nationally syndicated newsletter (College Music Journal or CMJ) about college rock trends and happenings. As a result, college rock’s production values (with regard to discernibility, high fidelity, etc.) were configured for perceived “mass” tastes. Still, it was distinct from normal rock in that it was elitist, artier, and pandered to the Anglophilia of its middle-class audience. While college rock was informed by punk, new wave, and other subterranean trends, it was more “M.O.R.,” with a roots element that would have been eschewed by those more radical elements, intent as they were on artifice, newness, aesthetic orthodoxy, and the destruction of tradition. Popular college rock bands included Violent Femmes, Guadalcanal Diary, REM, Love & Rockets, Robyn Hitchcock, Feelies, Shriekback, Fleshtones, Rank and File, Replacements, Hoodoo Gurus, Pixies, Elvis Costello, Haircut 100, Throwing Muses, XTC, the Church, Connells, and Let’s Active. Most groups from Britain or Australia were given sanctuary at the left of the dial as its campus programmers would read the Anglo accent as cultured or educated; “one of us.”
Simultaneous to the college rock phenomenon, the “yuppie” archetype of monied liberal connoisseur had been developed—a foil to lingering postsixties leftist boomers. The yuppie was an adult version of the privileged campus longhair who had outgrown the juvenile provocations and naive politics of his youth and now had a “pragmatic” approach to changing the world. This mostly consisted of buying things that were sensible, bourgeois, and decorous, such as Volvo station wagons and imported Italian olive oil. Their coed activist impulse was channeled in adulthood into improving their “quality of life,” using material things which reflected their values: quality, wholesomeness, worldliness, and decency. French cheese, Scandinavian design, Italian espresso, olde-time American folk traditions, and many of the same sundries that would have been admired by the folk and protest movements centered around sixties college campuses.
The yuppie lifestyle was itself a cousin to the “Back to the Land” movement of the hippies; a protest against the grotesque mechanization of fast-food culture and the pervasive plastic crap of postwar America. But while the hippies’ attempt had been revolutionary, the yuppies’ concerns were merely aesthetic.
Central to the yuppie ideology was mature pragmatism; activism, communes, and protest weren’t pragmatic and carried few palpable dividends. Making lots of money, though, was considered very pragmatic. Political opinions were measured. Shrill voices were a sign of imbalance. Privilege was to be enjoyed, though not too ostentatiously; this was in poor taste. Yuppiedom was heavily rooted in the Protestant aesthetic of moderation and decorum. Liking a sports team was a stand-in for community outreach; wearing a proletarian-style ball cap with the logo of a favorite team showed solidarity with the less fortunate better than any donation ever could.
As yuppie tenets became codified during the eighties, its adherents needed a mouthpiece through which to promulgate their values, spread their seed, communicate to one another, and also define themselves. This would be vital for them if they were to develop their ideologies, as well as to grow and flourish as a people. NPR, a public radio project of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, was chosen as their party organ. Instead of becoming a target and whipping boy for “small government” privatization proponents (as the libraries, public schools, US post office, Amtrak, and NEA famously did), NPR grew muscle through generous donations by well-heeled corporate sponsors (Joan Kroc of McDonald’s donated $250 million, for example) and set to work colonizing station after station at the end of the dial—right where the college stations traditionally hovered.
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