Norman Mailer saw the MC5’s revolutionary rock as an electro-mechanical climax of the age

Evidence

The young white singer, his hair in one huge puff ball teased out six to nine inches from his head was taking off on a galactic flight of song, halfway between the space music of Sun Ra and “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” the singer’s head shaking at the climb like the blur of a buzzing fly, his sound an electric caterwauling of power come out of the wall (or the line in the grass, or the wet plates in the batteries) and the singer not bending it but burning it, flashing it, whirling it down some arc of consciousness, the sound screaming up to a climax of vibrations like one rocket blasting out of itself, the force of the noise a vertigo in the cauldrons of inner space—it was the roar of the beast in all nihilism, electric bass and drum driving behind out of their own non-stop to the end of the mind. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1258

Categorization

• XREF: Mailer’s sentence-reading of the MC5 as ‘roar of the beast in all nihilism’ parallels the reader’s interest in how establishment intellectuals processed the counterculture—echoes the machinery of attention the avant-garde harnessed.