UCSC’s Grateful Dead Archive hasn’t even opened for business yet and it’s already getting plenty of attention. It will be the focus of a feature article in the March edition of The Atlantic. The article spotlights the academic and scholarly impact that the archive will have on a wide range of disciplines, some of them unexpected. Sure, music historians and ethnomusicologists will be interested, and the Dead were a historical phenomenon—the voice of a generation.
Sociologists and anthropologists may want to analyze the composition of a concert crowd and assess its impact on the American narrative. Literary scholars may even want to analyze the band’s lyrics, from Marxist, feminist, deconstructivist, structuralist, or queer perspective (and feel free to add post- to any of those approaches).
But the article also highlights the importance of the Dead from a 21st century business perspective. “[T]he biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists,” it claims, “who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created ‘customer value,’ promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning …”
In truth, the Grateful Dead archive offers a real insight into America because, as Jerry Garcia once said: “What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.”
Read more at KION.
