Listening for the Secret

With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, this title helps to understand the meaning and creation of the counter-culture community. It examines the wider significance and impact of its politics of improvisation. "Scholars and cerebral Deadheads alike will be delighted by Ulf Olsson’s acid test: he subjects the Grateful Dead to a barrage of Big Ideas and determines that the band passes with its freak flag flying high. A must-read for anyone who wants to better understand the improvisatory possibilities of the countercultural cast of mind."—David Farber, Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas "A splendid account of the music of the Grateful Dead as a form of improvisation that remains both in and out of dominant culture, weathering all politics, all setbacks and defeats, with equal tenacity."—Wai Chee Dimock, Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University, and editor of PMLA Listening for the Secret is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group's music, politics, and performance. With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, the Grateful Dead provides a unique lens through which we can better understand the meaning and creation of the counterculture community. Marshaling the critical and aesthetic theories of Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault and others, Ulf Olsson places the music group within discourses of the political, specifically the band's capacity to create a unique social environment. Analyzing the Grateful Dead's music as well as the forms of subjectivity and practices that the band generated, Olsson examines the wider significance and impact of its politics of improvisation. Ultimately, Listening for the Secret is about how the Grateful Dead Phenomenon was possible in the first place, what its social and aesthetic conditions of possibility were, and its results. This is the first book in a new series, Studies in the Grateful Dead.