Abstract

As a means of demonstrating rock and roll’s enduring iconicity, the author offers a personal narrative of a relationship he had with a well-known rock group. This narrative is then used as data to locate four sites of rock and roll iconicity: the private, the public, the communal, and the kinetic. A fifth site of iconicity, the nostalgic, is identified as an inevitable outcome of the first four. The author concludes that rock and roll achieves its iconicity in the marketplace by offering a text against which consumers can monitor changes in their own preferences and behaviors.