’Counterculture’ emerged as a term in the late 1960s and has been re-deployed in more recent decades in relation to other forms of cultural and socio-political phenomena. This volume provides an essential new academic scrutiny of the concept of ’counterculture’ and a critical examination of the period and its heritage.

Introduction; Countercultures and Popular Music; Reappraising ‘Counterculture'; I: Theorising Countercultures; 1: Break on Through: The Counterculture and the Climax of American Modernism; 2: The Banality of Degradation: Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and the Trash Aesthetic; 3: Were British Subcultures the Beginning of Multitude?; II: Utopias, Dystopias and the Apocalyptic; 4: The Rock Counterculture from Modernist Utopianism to the Development of an Alternative Music Scene; 5: ‘Helter Skelter' and Sixties Revisionism; 6: Apocalyptic Music: Reflections on Countercultural Christian Influence; 7: Nobody's Army: Contradictory Cultural Rhetoric in Woodstock and Gimme Shelter; III: Sonic Anarchy and Freaks; 8: The Long Freak Out: Unfinished Music and Countercultural Madness in Avant-Garde Rock of the 1960s and 1970s; 9: The Grateful Dead and Friedrich Nietzsche: Transformation in Music and Consciousness; 10: Scream from the Heart: Yoko Ono's Rock and Roll Revolution; 11: From Countercultures to Suburban Cultures: Frank Zappa after 1968; IV: Countercultural Scenes – Music and Place; 12: Countercultural Space Does Not Persist: Christiania and the Role of Music; 13: A Border-Crossing Soundscape of Pop: The Auditory Traces of Subcultural Practices in 1960s Berlin; 14: Music and Countercultures in Italy: The Neapolitan Scene