Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina witnessed the full development of a phenomenon which has come to be known as rock nacional (‘national rock’). At first sight it might appear no more than a matter of musical consumption, fashioning its participants simply as ‘artists’ on one side and ‘public’ on the other. But it has proved an original form within which the young create and inhabit a space of their own, relatively protected from the assaults of the military dictatorship (which had made them its principal victims), and has come to constitute, with the passing of the years, a counter-culture and a social movement.