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123 5 ► A Fraternity of Long-Haired Boys rock and a youth culture of contestation Some days after the coup d’état led by General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966, the rock trio Los Beatniks recorded a simple album with Columbia Broadcasting System (cbs). The leading voice, Moris, composed the lyrics, including those to the song “Rebelde.” “People call me the rebel,” he wrote, “because rebel is my heart / I am free / and they want to make / a slave of tradition / out of me.” As cbs was not interested in promoting their work, Los Beatniks moved ahead and organized a promotional party that ended with all of its members semi-naked at a public fountain in downtown Buenos Aires.Thepressreportedontheevent,thoughnotintheculturesectionbut rather in the police section: the trio went on to spend three days jailed in a police station.¹ This foundational episode outlines the contours of the first decade of Argentina’s rock culture (1966–75). First, it introduces the main actors, who were rockers—poets, musicians, fans—the culture industry, and the state. Second, this episode shows rockers’ most common attitude: an iconoclastic reaction against the rules and perceived authoritarianism of everyday life. Finally, it shows how rock culture was viewed in the public arena, which was as an epitome of cultural, gender, and sexual disorder. Argentina’s rock culture was among the liveliest in Latin America and offers a vantage point for analyzing the dynamics of sociocultural modernization and its discontents. The scholars who have studied Argentina’s rock culture have thus far tried to understand its specifics and have shown that it is hardly definable in solely audible and linguistic terms—even though it is not irrelevant that the local rockers (like their Chilean and Colombian but unlike their Mexican counterparts) produced songs written and performed in Spanish.² As cultural critic Lawrence Grossberg notes for the United States, rock was the basis for a cultural politics that attempted to transcend the limits of everyday life and “articulate a sense of anger, dissatisfaction, occasionally protest.”³ The Argentine rockers appropriated 124 A Fraternity of Long-Haired Boys practices and styles from a transnational repertoire and used them to cope with their everyday lives, which they often viewed as meaningless and dehumanizing . As it happened in other Latin American countries, the Argentine rockers’ rebellion against their everyday life was over-determined by their practical opposition to authoritarianism.⁴ Rock culture sensitized young people, especially young men, to cultural and political authoritarianism , hence crucially contributing to the shaping of a heterogeneous, multilayered, and radicalized youth culture of contestation that was full- fledged in the 1970s. That youth culture of contestation became one of the markers of Argentina ’s history in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Onganía and the military that imposed the so-called Revolución Argentina did so under the premises that the political system could not guarantee the “order” that Argentines needed to develop and, in turn, to prevent the spread of Communism. As a result, they restricted all political activity—from party politics to student activism—at the same time that they tried to infuse a traditionalist moralistic ethos into the citizenry in an effort to forge individuals respectful for social and cultural hierarchies. Although the military tried hard, they could neither pacify the country nor stop the cultural rebellion associated with youth. Young people, in fact, were key protagonists of the concatenated popular revolts that, in May of 1969, marked the political finale of the Onganía regime. Moreover, between 1969 and 1973—when elections were held and Peronism could for the first time in seventeen years freely compete—Argentines lived an intense cycle of political participation pervaded by increasingly radicalized projects. Guerrilla groups represented the most extreme examples of that radicalization, and at least five of them staged actions at a national level promising to move the country toward national and social “liberation.” Those promises seemed closed to fulfillment in 1973 when Héctor Cámpora, with the Peronist ticket, won the elections and set the stage for a short democratic spring, a powerful juncture of political and cultural openness that many young people experienced with passion. That spring lasted a short time, though. Juan Perón led the turn toward the right during his third and final presidency (from October 1973 to his death on July 1, 1974). His government ended with the launching of a political project meant to reconstruct authority at all levels of social life...

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