Circus, fairground, carousel, carnival imagery is everywhere during the late 1960s: in cover art, song lyrics, band names and song titles, music criticism, names of music venues, festivals, movies, literature. From circus tents to clowns, from jugglers to magicians, from carousels to parades, an entire carnivalesque lexis seems to be at play in what is generally termed “psychedelia.” The current study attempts to read and offer “thick description” (Geertz) of this vocabulary as part of a larger cultural and countercultural imagination, and integrate musical manifestations of the period (popular psychedelia and avant-garde / experimental music) in a semiotic network of metaphoric representation. If language is nothing more than a chain of metaphors (Lakoff), it is nevertheless true that we often take such metaphors as “rock ’n’ roll circus,” “song-carousel,” “riot of sound” for granted, since they are so widespread and culturally shared that an explanation of their meaning may appear pedantic. But what do these word-images actually mean? What is the range of their connotations? What is the relationship between them? Why are they so frequent in the late 1960s? And how are these tropes translated or suggested musically?
One possible answer to the last question involves the broad concept of circularity, emblematic for the psychedelic era: a round melodic motive or harmonic progression, a cyclic phrase articulation, a motoric-recurrent riff, a spiraling or whirling waltz in triple time. This waltzing nature of the music, in particular, is striking, given that the use of triple meters is relatively rare in popular music in general, and very rare in rock music specifically. The waltz becomes thus in psychedelia a characteristic gesture that has cultural resonances and ramifications, and that can emerge in music regardless of the song’s textual content, to suggest both the specific rotation of the carousel (a “carousel-waltz”) and the more general sense of circularity, spinning, spiraling, going “round and round.”
But the carousel-waltz is only one aspect of a broader semiotic vocabulary that I attempt to name here. Jacques Tati ends his Play Time film of 1967 with the image of a busy traffic circle which unequivocally suggests a carousel. In another film of the same year, Week End, Jean-Luc Godard presents the image of a nightmarish traffic jam as a carnivalesque parade. And again in 1967, John Cage makes an explicit connection between circus and collage, by coining the term musicircus. These are just three among many instances discussed in this study in which the sense of playfulness and the sense of confusion do not collide, but rather – playfully – coexist. The one word that seems to embody this reality comes from ancient times, and from Mikhail Bakhtin. The word is carnival, and the carnival’s mode of aesthetic articulation is the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque opens a new door of perception, which will perhaps allow us to re-experience the late 1960s experiment in Tati’s terms, as confusing playtime; and in Robert Venturi’s 1966 terms, as “messy vitality.”