Power Chords and Politics: Guitar Distortion as a Topic in American Rock

Abstract

Guitar distortion has been a foundational sound of rock & roll since its beginnings in the 1950s United States. That sound has carried multiple meanings for different groups of people within American society, simultaneously representing freedom, rebellion, progress, anger, degeneracy, and even violence. In this dissertation, I trace the semiotic history of guitar distortion through a series of case studies in which the meaning of the music was contested and brought groups of people into conflict. Studies of semiotics in music have primarily concentrated on firmly knowable and clear examples. Guitar distortion and studies in popular music, however, give insight into the workings of symbols in the often-messy real world.

In five chapters I cover the key moments of change in the meaning of distortion. I start by outlining the importance and relevance of semiotics and topic theory, also giving background on the history of popular music analysis and exploring the philosophical definitions of violence, power, and noise. Chapter two begins with the invention and popularization of distortion in early rock and roll, demonstrating how violence was encoded in its meaning both by the technological nature of its creation, but also by social forces of youthful rebellion and racism. The third chapter uses the Parents’ Music Resource Center’s movement to regulate the music industry in the 1980s to examine the link between sound and lyrics and how sonic morality is contested in the political sphere. Through investigating the history of distortion in a variety of punk and metal subgenres in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the fourth chapter explores the dissolution of a symbol, as distortion becomes so widespread in popular music that it begins to lose its historical meaning. The final case study re-examines the creation of a new meaning for distortion by analyzing contemporary rock’s tendency to refer to its own nostalgic past in the music of Greta Van Fleet.