the real thing

Pop Music

merseybeatitude — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:31:23 +0000

Pop music, as understood in this dissertation, is a creation of mass production. The context created by the means of its dissemination ensures that its development is predicated, generally and specifically, on the extent and potential of its appeal. What gives it its dynamism is the way in which it is used by its audience, and the manifold ways in which it might be used. On the one hand, this is an example of how capitalism tends towards standardization and cynical exploitation; one Pop music can be sold to many people. On the other hand, mass production of Pop music makes its development unpredictable; there is no ‘true’ interpretation of a mass product, as there is no standard context for its reception. This is what makes Pop music an interesting topic of study. The extension of mass production into the sphere of leisure/‘culture’ is seen as a manifestation of what is, after Marx, referred to as the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘real’ domination of capital. For Jacques Camatte, capital is “in constant movement; it capitalizes everything, assimilates everything and makes it its own substance.” And for Louis Dupre, “the recent extension of the capitalist principle to all spheres of existence has unquestionably been a major factor in the reification of modern culture.” Without necessarily contesting this viewpoint, I would be wary of any attempt to denigrate the potential of human agency. In the last years of his life, Karl Marx plunged himself into anthropological study, the incomplete results of which are to be found in his Ethnological Notebooks. Marx studied the development of distinction and hierarchy, a study legitimated in his eyes by a belief that modern man contained an “archaic communal component.” The intrusion of the objective into the subjective is never total; in a world of struggles, what is liberatory in Pop music might be politicised in opposition to the ideological constructions that mystify it. So by problematising pleasure, capitalism also expands the realm in which its contradictions operate. In the struggle to enjoy ourselves in this world, our Pop practice becomes one more way in which we actively contest the ‘rules’ laid out by capitalist ideology. In the clusters of creative tension that concretise themselves around contradiction, we are given a further glimpse into the transformative potential that resides within us. That Pop music emerged as a distinct subsection of ‘culture’, to be further divided and distinguished, is not a direct consequence of capitalism alone. Distinction and division have ancient roots, from which manifold struggles have grown; these have multiplied themselves across the ages, now resolved, now sharpened, both by a momentum that are their own (i.e. created by the distinction) and also by their shifting context. What is different about the analysis of a capitalist product of recent times (Pop) is that such divisive concepts as ‘high and ‘low’ culture, demonstrably contradict the essence of the product itself. While Pop music might be created by a production process that has evolved in a manner appropriate to the capitalist system, its logic embedded within it rather than external to it, the key to its supersession remains identifiable in the social basis of its production. Because Pop music is dependent upon miscegenation, plagiarism and collective and individual imaginations it threatens to destabilise the ideologies that seek to mystify this reality. Even though it is through the momentum of capitalism’s evolution that the aforementioned concept of ‘high’ culture has been rendered obsolete, it remains useful as justification for and mystification of the ultimate divisions that form the basis of class society, between subject and object, between human beings and what they produce. The philosophical/ideological link between this primary division and the constructed mystification of Pop music lies in dualism; what Marx referred to as “the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism…that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” The commodity system relies upon the equality of things; their reducibility to money, to bought labour. However, the ideology that justifies the tyranny of things over workers cannot acknowledge this principle; it needs to impose a hierarchy upon things as it does upon people. Without challenging the basis of its own existence, it does this through mystifying the production process; through ‘genius’, for example; taking the commodity out of its social base and enshrining it in ideological ‘cultural categories.’ And so ‘defective’ materialism ends in the cul de sac of mysticism. Marx countered this defect (via idealism) by recognising that our relationship to the world is contingent upon our own actions; that we change the world, and our relationship to it, through praxis. In terms of the politicisation of Pop music, this praxis involves the sharpening of contradictions between a one-sided ideology and a multi-faceted production process. In John Berger’s words, “the means of reproduction are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible. But sometimes individuals use them differently.” For example, the process of cross-fertilisation that characterises the history of Pop, and the confusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural boundaries.

Intro: Pop and Authenticity

merseybeatitude — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:31:59 +0000

The difficulty of defining Pop music is acknowledged all the time.[1] If it means ‘popular’ music, then it could be reduced to a label connoting commercial success in the marketplace. This is the likely hazard of studying a commercial form in a consumer society; the record of sales cannot accurately document the nuances of popularity; whether it is based on a localised intensity or a widespread affection, whether it is an expression of revolt or passivity; it reduces everything to a gate-receipt conception. Defining Pop music as popular would preclude the study of Pop music as a form, because formal similarities do not automatically dictate a corresponding reception in the market. It would mean that any study of Pop music would be a study of commercially successful music, would locate the history of the music only at the moment it achieves success, and would neglect the stories of marginalized or unpopular music.

Pop music as a formal definition is also problematic. Establishing an etymological connection between Pop and popular would, in this case, be dependent upon a definition of popular that could not be cast in sales figures alone; it would have to mean ‘of the people’ and not simply consumed by the people. Implying a lack of distinction between production and consumption, a music that is ‘of the people’ suggests a lack of mediation that is anachronistic in capitalist society. If popular music in this sense means persistent archaic forms of music, then it does not take into account the mutability of the people. Music sung in churches, at football matches and on playgrounds is, in the instant, produced and received by the same people. However, such a group of people and the music they produce do not exist in isolation from a heavily mediated society; often they mimic commercial musical products, and there is no sense that engagement in these activities negates the influence of wider social relationships. Defining Pop music as ‘of the people’ implies the freezing of a historical moment in a form of music and a group of people; with a static conceptual framework, analysis is precluded by ideology.

In this thesis I shall treat Pop music as a broadly defined synthesis of these two approaches. By referring in the title to post-war Pop, I have intimated certain assumptions about the post-war world. The first is that its Pop music is geo-specific, in that the peace enjoyed in the post-war period was not a universal experience, but can be regarded as common to the citizens of America and Europe. Within this pacific territory the caveat of division should be added. Post-war Pop music was elaborated in the shadow of the Second World War, but not in the knowledge that an imminent third could be averted. So the second intimation in the phrasing of the title is that Pop music in my thesis will accept a priori a reading of Pop as developing in the American dominated sphere of influence in a bi-polar world. Pop in this thesis can be read as a consequence of and a contributing factor in the development of America as a state of mind as well as a geo-political construction, and also as a rebellious force within it.

Post-war Pop is also readily connected to certain technological and social developments. The former transformed the commercial production of Pop music; post-war Pop is a product of mass production and mass communication. The increasing proximity of dispersed Western peoples to the various products of the culture industry enabled Pop music to develop in a dialogic fashion from New Orleans to New York to Liverpool and to Kingston, taking the most circumlocutory route possible. Post-war social changes include the emergence of youth as a recognised category of development, useful both to self-expression and marketing departments, as the hero of Colin MacInnes’s classic teenage novel put it, “We found that no one couldn’t sit on our faces anymore because we’d loot to spend at last, and our world was to be our world, the one we wanted.”[2] They are also notable for the development of the Civil Rights movement and the growth in the visibility and audibility of black people, which Pop music was both a consequence and an expression of.

So post-war Pop music can be seen as music that is popular, in the sense of commercially viable, within this context; but it also implies a form specific to this context. This form is based upon the evolving dialogue between the displaced music of African slaves and the bastardised music of a migrant Europe within the alien landscape of America. Constantly re-interpreted and re-imagined, this becomes the recognised form of Pop music in my thesis with the recognition of the producers that this was a music that was polyrhythmic, youth-oriented and multi-racial, that it would be easily heard and widely available, and that it could be both threatening and appealing. Post-war Pop does not refer to any music that could feasibly be removed from these circumstances; although popular, for example, the Three Tenors have not made Pop music, but have performed an archaic music in an age of mass production. Nor did Schoenberg make Pop music when he experimented with the twelve-tone scale, for this was a logical extension of archaic tonal music that had not evolved appropriate to a transformed social context; i.e. it was not formally multi-racial, polyrhythmic or youth-oriented.

If post-war Pop can only be defined through reference to its commercialism, its appropriateness to its social positioning, then that is only one side of the dialectical tension that exists within it. The roots of post-war Pop in the polyrhythmic music of Africa give it a pre-capitalist resonance. Paradoxically, it is suited to the dictates of commerce because it is popular, yet it is popular because it hints at more than what the relations of commerce command: “Artistic expression…therefore becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”[3]

This is where the notion of authenticity becomes appropriate to my study. ‘The jargon of authenticity’, as Adorno witheringly dismissed it[4], represents an attempt to articulate what it is about human relations that should not be commercialised or commodified. It is an attempt to give a vocabulary to a notion of human worth that eludes the wage relation. The reason I have chosen to use ‘authenticity’ rather than any other such attempt is because it appears very often in journalistic and academic writings about Pop music. Its repeated sightings often seem to confirm Adorno’s verdict; when it is used, for example, to show an appreciation of a musical form, it becomes a commercial selling point, at the same time fixing that form as an inviolate example of a static authenticity. In protesting that human relations have become relations between things, authenticity becomes a part of those relations.[5]

What I intend to develop in this thesis is an elucidation of the multi-faceted dialectical tension in Pop music that, simply put, exists between the commercial and the rebellious, and the complicated way in which the internal antinomies of authenticity dovetail with this central contradiction. Tied up with these questions is the conflict between being formed by a society and rebelling against it, of being conscious of one’s alienation, and yet reproducing it.

In Part One I will attempt to situate Pop music within the historical and philosophical understanding of culture and mass production, and develop my dialectical reading of authenticity. In Part Two, in the main body of the text, I will attempt to apply these theories to specific examples of Pop music chosen for the breadth of related issues their study suggests. Rock ‘n Roll’s emergence will be analysed for its exposition of race and authenticity, the inter-connectedness of these concepts and the way in which Rock ‘n Roll music destroys and yet preserves them. The folk revival will be examined for its equation of authenticity with political integrity, and the way in which this related, and failed to relate, to the Civil Rights Movement, as well as corresponding to, and constricting individual impulses. Jamaican music will be looked at in the context of its relationship with American music and British youth culture, in doing so I hope to raise questions of authenticity as a more or less spontaneous outgrowth of given circumstances, and as an appropriated formal conservatism. The Beatles will be analysed as representative of how an authentic creativity can be transformed through a relationship with high culture. Finally, Acid House and Britpop will be compared as examples of authenticity defined, respectively, as a temporary experience and as a static form.

By comparing recorded sounds, contemporary commentaries and subsequent histories, I will attempt to draw out the authentic possibilities of Pop music without presenting them as ossified products of the heritage industry. I do not intend to write a defence of Pop music, but in the study of how and why Pop music is created within capitalist social relations, I hope to locate a promise of their transformation.

[1] Chris Cutler, File under Popular (New York, 1993) p.4

[2] Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (New York, 1980) p.12

[3] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London, 1993) p.40

[4] Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London, 1973)

[5] Adorno, Authenticity, p.10