"Conservative and utopian ideologues agree that man must understand and control his environment; the questions are how, and for whose benefit. But pop culture defines man as a receiver of stimuli, his environment as sensory patterns to be enjoyed, not interpreted (literature and philosophy are irrelevant) or acted upon (politics is irrelevant). ‘If you want to understand me, look at my surface,’ says Andy Warhol. And ‘I like my paintings because anybody can do them.’ The bureaucrat defends standardization because it makes a complex society manageable. Yet he thinks of himself as an individualist and finds the idea of mass-produced, mechanized art incomprehensible, threatening—or a put-on. The pop artist looks at mass culture naively and sees beauty in its regular patterns; like an anthropologist exhibiting Indian basket-weaving, Warhol shows us our folk art—soup cans. His message—the Emperor has no clothes, but that’s all right, in fact it’s beautiful—takes acceptance of image for essence to its logical extreme."
— Ellen Willis, in “Dylan,” originally published in Cheetah in 1967 and reprinted in a recent anthology of her rock criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, on p. 17. How Blonde on Blonde led her to such a prescient discussion of postmodernism in rock music is anybody’s guess, but she did it and here’s the proof.
