Bennett, A. Culture and Everyday Life (2005).

Chapter FIVE: Fashion
- Of the many commodities and leisure resources through which individuals in contemporary society construct and play out identities in the course of their everyday life’s, fashion plays a central role. 95 → Fans copying beatles haircuts, shoes, fashion *****progression of Beatles’ looks*****
- Fashion embodies a range of symbolic values which are collectively understood within and across different social groups. 95
- Some argue that fashion affords for the construction of individual ‘personalised’ identities. Others argue another way of understanding fashion is as a means of forging new forms of ‘collective’ identity…individuals create new cultural alliances based around reflexively articulated lifestyle preferences.→ like beatles fashion. 95
- “Fashion and visual appearance ply a considerable part in informing notions of community” 96
- “Fashion provides one of the most ready means through which individuals can make expressive visual statements about their identities. 96
- [Entwistle] – tension between clothes as revealing and clothes as concealing of identity has been noted by theorists of fashion for a number of years. 96
- “Fashion , then, serves as a potent visual symbol in society, one which individuals use in an attempt both to assert their individuality and, at the same time, to align themselves with particular social groupings. As such, fashion is a form of social power.” 99
- Simmel suggests that, through buying and wearing fashionable clothes, individuals both signal their awareness of social rends, and concomitant notions of collective acceptability, while simultaneously creating an individual identity through which to distinguish themselves from the urban mass. 99
- Fashion and power
- Fashion and youth
o ***”Following the 2nd world war, the combined effect of technological advances, increased affluence and demographic changes resulted in youth becoming a highly lucrative target for consumer industries whose mass production of fashion items and other consumer goods led to the formation of a series of style-based youth cultures, particularly in the case of working class youth who were among the most affluent consumers of the post-war period.” 101
o ***Early work on post-war style-based youth cultures argued that items of fashion were being symbolically transformed by working class youth and used in strategies of resistance…Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham” 101 → like beatles? Teddy boy?
o Collective appropriation of selected items in fashion by young working class subcultures related to their need to retain a sense of community which, according to Phil Cohen, was being threatened by post-war re-housing programmes that broke up traditional working class communities. 101
o teddy boy 102
- Secondhand and Retro-fashions
o Bohemian look → later beatles? 112
• Careful selection of clothing that doesn’t conform to the mass-produced appearance of contemporary fashion items.
• As Elizabeth Wilson notes, the appearance of bohemians in western society coincided with the industrial revolution, the bohemian style of dress symbolizing a form of resistance to industrialization and the rationalized process of mass production to which it gave rise. According to Wilson, “Bohemians used dress to signify inner authenticity and theatrical display simultaneously. To be a bohemian was to find an aesthetic expression for a sincerely felt alienation from the world of industrial capitalism.” 112 → according to Wilson, these qualities found in hippie counterculture of 1960s…collective desire to break with mainstream conventions and to create an alternative image based around a look that is out of step with late modern consumerist fashion sensibilities. 112

Chapter SIX: Music
- “music informs everyday life at a number of levels, ‘participation’ in music being effected as much through consumption practices as through active involvement in process of production. “ 117
- music and style – fashion. As related to beatles. 117
- “…visually distinctive styles through which young fans have both shown their attachment to a particular music and marked themselves out from the wider society. 117
- music and the everyday
- development of personal stereo during early 80s facilitated new way of consuming music
- technology led to significant re-ordering of the artist/audience divisions in music performance context → audience / performers interchangeable 118
- **”The pervasive use of music in advertising and the growth of the retro market over the last 20 years has also seen a broadening of the relationship between music and lifestyle. Like fashion, music is now effectively used to articulate an increasingly diverse series of lifestyles within contemporary society.” 118
- music and self-recognition (frith) 118
- “…individuals symbolically engage with the everyday, the conventions of play, pleasure and protest associated with collective participation in music, facilitating a symbolic negotiation of everyday life in contemporary social settings. “ 118
- an understanding of music requires asking what it gives to its fans, how it empowers them and how they empower it. (Grossberg, youth culture and rock music). 118
- use of music by audiences to make sense of their everyday lives. 118
- “Music is a device or resource to which people turn in order to regulate themselves as aesthetic agents, as feeling, thinking and acting beings in their day-to-day lives (DeNora). 119
- scene 119
- community
o a means of addressing the way in which locally produced music’s become a means through which individuals identify with a particular city, town or region and their place within it – music as a representational resource, a means by which communities are able to identify themselves and present this identity
o significance of community as a symbolic construct, that is, as a means through which indivudlais who lack the commonality of shared local experience attempt to cast music itself as a ‘way of life’ and basis for community. – significance attached to rock music by the hippie counter-culture of the late 1960s. “As Frith observes, ‘community’became something that was created by the music, that described the musical experience. This was the ideology that became central to rock.’ 121
- subculture
o youth culture, collective appropriation and use of music (punks, teddy boys, mods).
- music and youth
o During 1950s, youth became an obvious target for emergent post-second world war leisure industries.
o Through youth appropriation of music, young people acquired new sensibilities. Music, and the related ‘accessories’ of youth, became part of a lifestyle project, a means of articulating a series of identity statements designed to mark off youth from the parent culture. 122
o Relationship between rock and roll and its young audience was further enhanced by image and demeanour of rock and roll performers themselves. Post-war idols such as elvis and the BEATLES were both the same age and from the same socio-economic backgrounds as the young fans who bought their records and attended their concerts. Thus, these artists were readily adopted as role models by young audiences. The apparent ‘naturalness’ of the association was further accentuated by their representation in the media. 122-3
o New cultural territories for young people in context of everyday life – territories that became crucial sites for formulation of collective ‘youth’ identities through which youth could symbolically negotiate their disempowered status in society. 123
o ‘’interplay between popular music and cultural sensibilities of youth intensified during the 60s and 70s when rock music became more overtly political.”
o **”The hippie movement of the late 1960s attempted to harness the cultural power of music as a means of changing the world order, rejecting the technocratic tendencies of capitalistic society and opting instead for an alternative lifestyle based around rural communal living and experimentation with Eastern religion and mind altering drugs, notably LSD. Indeed, the collective investment made in the power of music as a means for social change was perhaps more prominent in the late 1960s than in any other era of post-war popular music before or since.” 123
o (Eyerman and Janison) “Movement ideas, images, and feelings were more disseminated in and through popular music and, at the same time, the movements of the time influences developments, in both form and content, in popular music.” 123
o Punk scene in Britain, late 70s / heavy metal. 124
o **”For over half a century, then, music has been a key resource for successive generations of young people, facilitating the articulation of a form of everyday politics. Given youth’s disempowered status, music and attendant stylistic resources have functioned as one of the few accessible means of articulating an oppositional stance and establishing an alternative cultural space. Moreover, while many instances of youth resistance are short-lived, with even radical forms of music such as punk and grunge ultimately being appropriated by the mainstream music industry, the role of music as a ‘voice’ for outh has proved to be one of the continual development and change. In every generation, emergent styles of music have reflected at some level the socio-economic circumstances of youth.” 125 → summary so far.
- Music and ethnic identity
o (Stokes) “the key function of music lies in its ability to readily articulate a collective sense of cultural identity. 125
o music performs an important bridging function, symbolically connecting diaspora populations. 125 → does it perform the same function for ideologically linked people around the world?
- Music and pub culture
o Venues for folk clubs – Casbah?
o 1950s/60s, folk revival. In early stages of its development, the british folk club scene attempted to ‘reinvent’ a folk music tradition, which necessarily involved a nostalgic and romanticized view of the past. At the heart of this attempt was an ideology of organic and authentic narrative borrowed from the American folk revival. Stressed authenticity rather than the artifice of commercially produced pop music. 128 → what the beatles grew up with?
o Pub – key venues for celebrations of local identities, which are articulated through performance of local bands. 129
- Music and Urban Soundscapes (music as a part of the wider urban experience – heard on the street, shopping centers, public transport terminals, restaurants, etc). 131
o Technology has also played part in informing the way that music is experienced in everyday contexts. 131
• Personal stereo, 1980s, merged space of the individual listener with public spaces.
- *** Music and Advertising *** 133
o A further way in which music enters the vocabulary of the everyday.
o Music used in advertising as a selling point since early 70s. Mostly classical), range of products. 133
o MTV in 1981, tie ins between music and advertising became more seductive, with whole range of youth lifestyle products being packaged in commercials designed to fit seamlessly within MTVs 24-hour music programming. 133
o Chart songs in advertisements – use of music in advertising can ‘make’ a singer. 134
o “Even ‘serious’ pop artists such as Madonna have apparently suffered no loss of artistic integrity through their music being featured in advertisements.” 134
o Moby, ‘play’. – Issues like the beatles, questions of authenticity.
o **”In the media-saturated context of late modernity, individuals are more apt to apply their own meanings to images, to construct their own relationship between the sign and signified. This has led to a new way of advertising products which centers around the creative juxtaposition of images and sounds… 134
• “now, they say less about the product directly, and are even more concerned with parodying advertising itself and by citing other adverts, by using references drawn from popular culture and by self-consciously making clear their status as advertisements.”
o ***”One notable exception to this trend in advertising is the use of ‘classic’ rock and pop hits from the 1950s to the 1970s in stylish advertisements for products aimed at affluent baby boomers. As Frith observes, ‘What is striking about…advertisers’ use of music is that the tracks they choose are those that were, as hits, the most ‘meaningful’, in terms of youth culture, soul, emotion, or ‘art’. Most agencies don’t use rock songs simply as a lazy way of reaching the ‘popular’ audience; tracks are selected for what they stand for.”***
o ***old rock values (frith), brash individualism and youthful rebellion as memories and longings that can only be reached by spending money on other goods. 135*** → Not just about trying to instill revolution, for example, in new youth, but about creating nostalgia for original baby boomers. In other words, youth-centric ads that use Beatles music (Nike, Revolution) aren’t necessarily just geared towards youthful athletes, but also to original babyboomers through a sense of nostalgia. Also impacts their present-day identities (read on).

- Music and Generation
o ***”At the level of the everyday, it is clear that this circulation of images and references from the 1960s contributes not only to a feeling of nostalgia among members of the baby boomer generation but also plays a significant part in how they construct their present-day identities. 135
• (Ross) “An entire generation is caught up in the fantasy that they are themselves still youthful, or at least more culturally radical, in ways once equated with youth, than the youth of today… 135
o Baby boomers indulge in an over-romanticisation of the 1960s as a golden age of youth culture, which is then used as a means of accessing and evaluating the rebelliousness and ‘authenticity; of contemporary youth cultures. In the sphere of popular journalism, this has resulted in a number of searing attacks on contemporary youth who are accused of being passive and disaffected. 135
o Music can also bond generations 136