Reaganized Rock: The 1983 Beach Boys Ban and the U.S. Culture Wars

ABSTRACT

In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, decided that rock bands would not perform at the Independence Day celebration that year because they would “attract unwanted elements.” With the Beach Boys having played the event in the past, Watt suffered a backlash even from Reagan himself. In this article, I analyze the media discussions on the ideological undercurrents of how rock was defined as an idea by different people involved. I track rock’s transformation from being a target of a culture war, to the terrain for such a struggle, and finally to a tool for demonstrating ideological allegiances.

KEYWORDS:

• Beach Boys
• culture wars
• politics of rock
• Reaganism
• rock and conservatism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my Ph.D. advisors–Benita Heiskanen, Kari Kallioniemi, and Hannu Salmi–for their help in shaping this article and for their advisory work in general. Furthermore, I am grateful to Bruce Johnson for his helpful comments. My thanks also go to my colleagues at the Cultural History Research Group on Popular Culture and Technology and to the research network of the John Morton Center for North American Studies for their input and feedback. I presented an earlier draft of this work at the conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies at the University of Oulu in 2015 and at the EUPOP conference at the University of the Arts London in 2017. I would like to thank all who offered me feedback and suggestions on those occasions. I would also like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Gary Burns, the Editor of this journal, and to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in shaping this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pekka M. Kolehmainen

Pekka M. Kolehmainen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural History at the University of Turku. His Ph.D. dissertation concerns the ways in which rock music was defined and understood in relation to different ideas of “Americanness” within the context of the 1980s and 1990s culture wars in the United States. His broader interests include the cultural processes of conservatism in the Reagan-era United States, audiovisual and digital media cultures, and popular culture studies more generally.