Toronto Counterculture Conference: Me, Madison Williams and Angela Davis!

So, there is an amazing event happening in Toronto the first weekend in November.

As part of the 40th Annual Toronto International Festival of Authors, they are having a conference especially dedicated to the 1960's aspects of counterculture.

It's officially called The (re)making of a Movement: New Perspectives on the 1960's Counterculture and I'm presenting at it.  What's more, I'll be presenting a talk about Six Degrees of Monkees and the relationship map I'm creating. <insert fangirl scream of well-earned pride here>

The official description is below. I'm on after Angela Davis. She's a tough act to follow, but I hope to channel all my (nervous) energy into being inspired by her.  Additionally, my talk will be followed by Madison Williams, who will be speaking about HEAD (see below)! 

Very happy to help represent the Monkees and their importance in the counterculture movement of the 1960's!

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Counterculture on the Radio & TV

Nov 2, 2019 | 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | Main Loft

Tammy Rose, MBA, MS, User Experience Research Lead

Six Degrees of Monkees in a Relationship Map of CounterCulture

The Monkees phenomenon involved music & a TV show, and an unusual amount of connections that make it the center of American counterculture. Despite being dismissed as bubblegum, from 1965 to 1968, the brand encompassed a wide variety of non-commercial memes from Vietnam protest references to Frank Zappa to their most infamous masterpiece, the movie HEAD. An extensive relationship map visualizes any and all references to people, works and concepts to the Monkees. Almost anyone working in Hollywood prior to 1980 can be connected to the Monkees by a low number of degrees. Sex, drugs and rock and roll as well as cynicism were regularly snuck into America’s living rooms and fed into the minds of children.

Madison Williams, BA, University of California San Diego

Can You Dig It?: The Monkees, the Alienation Effect, and the "Epic Album" HEAD

Bertolt Brecht describes his interpretation of alienation as hindering the audience from “simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance of rejection of their actions and utterance was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious”. While alienation can be achieved through many modes, Brecht emphasizes that the “radical separation of the elements” of music, words, and production and invocation of the “strange and surprising” are necessary for the audience to be spurred to critical thought, and eventually, political action. The epic theatre techniques used to invoke these reactions have evolved and transformed over the years to be applied to countercultural art beyond stage performance. In 1968, the music group the Monkees embarked on a journey of self-destruction that culminated in the release of their film HEAD. An under-examined performance project originally deemed a failure, HEAD satirizes and critiques the Vietnam War, the Monkees’ teenybopper fans, the film, television, and music industries, and the group’s own commercialization. HEAD’s soundtrack is an album that itself utilizes Brecht’s idea that rather than being drawn into the world of a performance, audience members should be forced to think critically about the enactment of the world before them and use the drama to critique their own societies. Using a close reading (and listening) of the tracks along with archival research, I demonstrate how the HEAD soundtrack functions as a mode of alienating performance and is a key example of the interdisciplinary form “epic album”, achieved through the Monkees’ utilization of the verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect. The Monkees and “album coordinator” Jack Nicholson utilize sound collage, didactic and gestic lyrics, and even the packaging of the album itself to create a feeling of “strangeness” in the listener. By estranging themselves and their listeners from the typical commercial pop album, the Monkees use the HEAD soundtrack as an attempt to destroy their commodified “pre-fab” image and force their audience to think critically about their identities as passive consumers of media.