This essay investigates the development of rock and roll as a youth subculture and the process by which this subculture is incorporated and "excorporated." In particular, I discuss Elvis Presley and the Sex Pistols as the two most significant instances of the emergence of rock and roll as youth rebellion and working class counterculture. While Elvis became a symbol of the emerging youth subculture, Johnny Rotten (the lead singer of the Sex Pistols) presented himself as the antithesis of everything that rock and roll had become, negative rather than affirmative, anti-hero rather than hero. In both instances, however, I also discuss how the dominant culture contained or eliminated the perceived threat. The most efficient means of containing the threat posed by rock and roll is the market itself; the music industry markets anti-establishment rebellion as countercultural cool, and in the process turns countercultural heroes into mainstream commodities. Kurt Cobain of the alternative rock group Nirvana appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a tee shirt that says "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" is emblematic of the kind of anti-establishment rebellion that is marketed by the music industry of the U.S. as alternative and radical; countercultural cool has become the essence of corporate America, which markets style as revolution and consumption as liberation, and musicians like Cobain who envision rock and roll as rebellion or liberation are left with nothing but such self-consciously ironic gestures. Lawrence Grossberg argues that rock and roll is characterized by "a constant play of incorporation and excorporation," a process that constantly "[reproduces] the boundary between youth culture and the dominant culture." The process of excorporation can be seen in the emergence of female punk groups like Sleater-Kinney and "Chosun punk" groups like No Brain, and I discuss how these groups appropriate punk in new and different contexts, thus asserting their outsider status and the possibility of rebellion.
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