Public revolutionaries, private conservatives: rock performances of leftist political thought

Abstract In the 1990s, a protest rock movement developed on the American continent within informational capitalism, the democratisation of information and communication technologies, and the development of transnational social movements that fought against global powers. To complement the interpretations that understand this type of musical practice as a cultural aspect of social movements, or as commodities that obey the imperatives of the market, I use Auslander’s concept of performance to analyse how these protest rock groups deploy political ideologies linked to international leftist struggles, in the space and time of concerts and other types of mediations. Through an interpretive analysis, I identify some spatial, gestural, corporeal, and sound elements used to act out leftist political ideologies.