Abstract
Based on interviews with 30 southern rock musicians, a content analysis of their lyrics and web pages, and observations of their performances over a two year period, I analyze the construction of rebel manhood used by a group of under-educated, under-employed, marginalized, white, working-class men to empower their otherwise disempowered selves. My analysis shows how the musicians empower the self by glorifying a lifestyle of “drifting,” which involves traveling from city to city performing and overcoming the challenges of the open road. In their struggle to compete with a culture industry that produces popular music for mass audiences, southern rock musicians construct themselves as authentic and legitimate musical artists who exemplify and express the experience of a poor, rural, white American culture and rebel masculine identity. Southern rockers construct and signify this rebel masculinity using a variety of identity work strategies. They signify the self as both strong and independent through their ability to negotiate rural poverty with their hunting, fishing and faming skills—while at the same time they chastise the middle class virtues of family, education, work and religion as metaphorical prisons to which only the weak succumb. Rebelliousness is exemplified by southern rockers as they embrace and even celebrate the disgrace of rural poverty by revaluing labels used by the larger society to stigmatize the rural poor such as “hillbilly,” “redneck,” and “white trash.” They flaunt whiteness through display of the confederate battle flag. Another identity work strategy engaged by southern rockers to construct the rebel masculine self is through celebrating “sinning,” or drinking alcohol, using drugs, and having casual sex. However, these rebel masculine behaviors can also perpetuate the increasingly marginal status that white, working class men find themselves by reinforcing stereotypes that they are sexist, racist, homophobic, unskilled, uneducated, uncivilized drunks.
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