Frith, S. Performing Rights (1996).

Part One
1. Value problem in cultural studies
– value judgment – music, good or bad. (who has the authority to judge)
– low culture, high culture (no diff – 20…)
– cultural capital (9), fans
– mass consumption 12…
– Marxist 13
– Resistance / empowerment through consumption 14
– Popular culture as art 18 (beatles?)
– Resistance – shifts meaning with circumstance. Where do oppositional values come from 20
2. The sociological responses
- to understand value judgment, must look at social context in which they are made 22
- discursive context of value judgments – discursive context of aesthetics of popular music 22
- tension bw judgments of commercial value v musical value 22
- 60s music as art 23
- authorship as authenticity? 24
- what constitutes good sound? 24
- authenticity 25
- to understand what’s at stake in arguments about musical value, we must begin with the discourses which give the value terms their meaning 26
- music heard through three overlapping and contradictory grids mapped by: art discourse, folk discourse, and pop discourse 27
- to hold onto high art as an exclusive property complicated when it was being made and consumed as a commodity in a marketplace. 30
- mass musical culture 30
- effects of mass culture production: concerns of authenticity, high v low culture, mass audience 31
- *mass cultural notion of stardom (beatles?) 31
- commercialization of ‘art’ 32 (as related to music as art in 60s?)
- the rise of mass culture meant new forms of social activity, new ways of using aesthetic experience to define social identity 34
- “art worlds” (becker) “cultural capital” (bourdieu) 36
- Music is valued according to three types of discursive practice:
o Bourgeois world: organizing institution – academy. Truth to self (authenticity) depends on others’ approval until certain level of success (according to prescribed levels). 36-8 (Summary, p. 39)
o Folk Music world – popular culture. No separation of art and life. **appreciation of music tied up with appreciation of its social function.** tied up with notions of authenticity. Problems of authenticity. Anti-consumption? Performing rituals (the club and the festival). 39-41
o Commercial music world: values created and organized around music industry. Sales charts are measure of ‘good’ music. Also organized around certain types of events. Sell ‘fun’. 41-42
- performers can start out as ‘folk’ musicians, get absorbed into ‘pop’ process, and then emerge as ‘artists.’ 42
- if standard line of rock and roll history is that an authentic (that is, folk) sound is continually corrupted by commerce, it could equally well be argued that what the history actually reveals is a commercial musical form continually being recuperated in the name of art and subculture. 42
- art music makers know well enough that their livelihoods depend on a commercial logic 42
- the sociological point is that we’re dealing here with different sorts of music, whether rap or jazz, folk or rock, which are all, in one way or another, handling the issues thrown up by their commodification 45-6
- **musicians are faced with problem of deciding whether their music is good or not. The issues concerned – the position of the artist in the marketplace, the relations of class and community, the tensions between technology and tradition, the shaping of race and nation, the distinction of the public and the private – are not confined to any one social group not any one musical practice**. 46
3. Common sense and the language of criticism
- a measure of popularity is not a measure of value (social value too, music and ID?) 48
- sources of popular criticism – audiences
- ***“pop records too are assess in terms of technique and skill and craft, with reference to things, details, done well. Pop records too are evaluated in terms of expense and spectacle, in terms of what has gone into their production, although of coursein rock, to a greater extent than in film, there is also the counter value of cheapness, the small scale, the ‘independent’, which relates, in turn, to how music is judged as believable, true-to-life, sincere. And music is judged too in terms of its ability to take one out of oneself, to offer intense experiences, an overwhelming mood; and by reference to the range of experiences it offrs, to genre expectations, to cultural hierarchy.*** 51-2
- social circumstances in which people make musical judgments in everyday life. 52
- In music making and music listening practice, three social groups are of particular importance.
o Musician: 1. At core of musicians’ value judgments are the values on which successful performance depends (have to make judgments about what to play, how to play it, who to play it with). 2. Values that emerge from the experience of the performance itself – leads to sense of alienation from audience which becomes a sort of contempt for it. Performance comes to feel like a compromise (what artists think sounds good v. what audience wants to hear). Quick to accuse each other of prostituting self.
• Musicians face similar problems, the sociological question is how diff musical values emerge in their solution. Four problems to consider:
• Learning: distinction between being able to play an instrument and being able to ‘feel’ it emotionally or instinctively. Problem of the voice – singing sign of individuality (can enter rock world by trying to imitate Hendrix, but not seen as appropriate to do it trying to imitate voice of lou reed). Imitation (playing by learning from records – the ‘unschooled’ musician) as source of individuality. 55
• Rehearsing: the moment when learning becomes social.
• Audition: explicit value judgment.
• Creativity: highest goal for musicians is creativity. Since the BEATLES, british rock bands, for example, have been expected to write their own material; in the u.s., cover bands are taken to be, by definition, inferior to their sources. 57
o For most musicians, ‘creativity’ cannot be judged in abstraction; it has to be defined in terms of music’s perceived social and communicative functions. And there is a further complication here. In pop terms, ‘originality’ can be understood both as a kind of free-floating expressive individuality and as a market distinction, a selling point. Popular musicians may, then, be trapped as well as freed by their ‘originality’… 58
o producers: people whose concern it is to turn music and musicians into profitable commodities…people to decide tracks, who signs and grooms groups…(beatles) 59. To begin with, the musicians relationship with a record company in the production of their sound is as much collaborative as combative, and, indeed, at least one aspect of A&R judgment concerns a group’s collaboration potential, its professionalism. Both parties, in other words, expect art and commerce to be intertwined. 60.
- Homology: music has been interpreted as a coded expression of the social aims and values of the people to whom it appeals. *** 62
- Youth music. **If consumers (of all ages) value music for the function that it fills, then that ‘function’ must be defined both socially and psychologically. 63
- The ubiquitous discrepancies between the manner in which musicians conceive music, and that in which listeners experience it are endemic to music culture. Indeed, they define it. 64
- Beatles, p 64
- Suspicion of popularity. Pursuit of popularity and the effects of popularity (value clashes, even death for lennon? Beatles?)
- Standard goals of rock – authenticity – 66
- Music magazines in 60s and early 70s aimed towards consumers who equally (along with critics) defined themselves against the ‘mainstream’ of commercial taste, wherever that might lie. --- resistance 66-7
- Rock criticism is driven by the need to differentiate – music is good because it is different from the run of mainstream pop. 69 (against mainstream).
o ***Familiar Marxist/romantic distinction between serial production, production to commercial order, to meet a market, and artistic creativity, production determined only by individual intention, by formal and technical rules and possibilities. Beatles? 69
- ***authenticity: ‘inauthentic’ is a term that can be applied evaluatively even within genres which are, in production terms, ‘inauthentic’ by definition – fans can distinguish between authentic and inauthentic eurodisco, and what is being described is not how something what actually produced, but a more inchoate feature of the music itself, a perceived quality of sincerity and commitment (beatles.) 71
- what you know of a musician obviously has an effect on how you hear his music? 71
- **taste: the question here concerns the musically appropriate. On one hand, this is a functional question – is music appropriate for this or that. On the other hand, this is an ethical question about the suitability of popular music to deal with certain issues – disease and death, for example – and, in particular, to deal with them in an entertaining way (negative response to rock commentaries on social and political affairs)?? Beatles. 72
4. Genre rules
- labeling lies at the heart of pop value judgments 75
o central to how record company a&r departments work – underlying record company problem, howto turn music into a commodity, is solved in generic terms. *whatever decision is made generically will have a determining influence on everything that happens to the performer or the record thereafter. 76-7
- beatles won grammy for vocal group of the year in 1964. 78
- authenticity 81
- british “student music” genre – beatles, sgt pepper’s lonely heart club band, 86
- “women’s music” defined ideologically, and, more to the point, it is defined against other ways of music making. Category that makes sense as an argument about ‘mainstream music.’ Much like 60s rock, beatles. 87
- authenticity to a certain genre – does this music fit my playlist, my roster, my collection. Does this music understand the genre, is it true to it? Does singer obey the genre’s musicological rules? 89
- ** to have a musical interest, a genre taste, is to engage in the set of relationships which give meaning to that taste. A commitment to a taste community. 89
- (Finnegan) tries to relate the genre ideologies to social characteristics, to class, age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth. Her question becomes: do social identities and needs map onto musical identities and needs? Does a homological approach to musical values make empirical sense? No. Rather than looking for peoples material conditions in their aesthetic and hedonistic activity, we should look at how their particular love and use of music inform their social situations. 89-90
o ** in other words, the use of music can vary as to how important it is in defining ones social identity, how significant it is in determining ones friendships, forming ones sense of self.** 90
- through its generic organization, music offers people, even so-called passive at-home listeners, access to a social world, a part in some sort of social narrative – social pathways. 90
- the pleasures that popular culture offers us, the values it carries have to be related to the stories it tells about us in our genre identities Or, to put this the other way around, genre analysis must be, by aesthetic necessity, narrative analysis. It must refer to an implied community, to an implied romance, to an implied plot...Popular musical pleasures can only be understood as genre pleasures; and genre pleasures can only be understood as socially structured. 90-1
- (Fabbri) Musical genre is a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules, and suggests that these rules can be grouped under five headings. 91
o Semiotic rules: rules of communication, how music works as rhetoric. These rules refer to the way in which ‘meaning’ is conveyed. How is ‘truth’ or ‘sincerity’ indicated musically? Rules here, in other words, concern musical expressivity and emotion – they determine the significance of the lyrics – different genres, for example, having quite different conventions of lyrical realism,,singer/songwriter. 91-2
o Behavioral rules: rock singer is uncomfortable on television, television is too bourgeois. Political singer hardly ever appears on television, and the gestures associated with him are those of the participant in a political meeting. 92 – not the beatles.
o Social and ideological rules: social image of the musician regardless of reality but also refer to the nature of the musical community and its relationship to the wider world. These are the rules concerning the ethnic or gender divisions of labor, for example, and, in general, reflect what the music is meant to stand for as a social force, its account of an ideal world as well as the real one. 93
o Commercial and juridical rules: refer to the means of production of a music genre, to questions of ownership, copyright, financial reward, and so on. They determine how musical events come into being, as well as the relations of music’s to record companies and the recording process, and records to live concerts and the promotions process. 93
o Performance as central to the aesthetics of popular judgment. 94
- summary of all of part one, p. 94-95
Part Two
5. Where do sounds come from?
- take into account the nature of music – minor, major, etc. 104
- music as a communicative activity, questions of interpretation
- film music – music modifies movies. 104…
o Use of beatles music to movies to guide audiences emotions and understanding.
o Use of music – notes, minor, major, to convey whats going to happen. 104…5
o Film music – includes soundtracks of commercials on television…makes it most significant form of contemporary popular music. 110
o Different music with same video clip can change the way audiences interpret said clip. 110-11
- meaning given by mutuality of musical structure and dramatic narrative is most obvious in television commercials. 114
o not just about lyrical content – also musical content. How tone of music works with the narrative (image, copy) of the pictures on the advertisement. 114
- Nicholas Cooke.. argues about commercials generally – ‘music transfers its own attributes to the story line and to the product, it creates coherence, making connections that are not there in the words or pictures; it even engenders meanings of its own. But it does all this, so to speak, silently. Cooke’s point is that music doesn’t simply bring meaning to images from the outside, as it were (through its semantic connotations); music, in its internal organization, acts to interpret what we see; it allows meaning to happen.’ 114
- Semiotic dimensions of film music
o emotional codes – concern the ways in which music is taken to signify feeling. Music that tells the audience how to feel. ..’draws on what is assumed to be the audiences shared understanding of the particular musical devices’ (like use of beatles music to signify revolution, 60s, etc)…118-9
o cultural codes: 119 used to tell us where we are → use beatles song to show you are in 60s, who the characters are, etc…
6. Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body
- classical music – mind. Rock and roll (popular music) – the body. 124
- Rock and roll clothing – to show body. Beatles (tight pants, etc). 124, 5.
- Mind – classical music. Individuality, the self, inner interpretation. Rock and Roll – the body – thrashing about in a crowd, the masses. Rock and roll as anti-individuality. 143
7. Rhythm: Time, Sex, and the Mind
- what music listening means is the experience of inner time. → what makes musical communication possible. 145
- what are the communicative implications of crowd-pleasing? Can music lie? → All communication can be misunderstood and, midunderstanding, in turn, can be manipulated. 147-8.
- The importance of music as offering us an experience of time passing. In the most general terms, music shapes memory, defines nostalgia, programs the way we age (changing and staying the same). 149→ very useful notion in terms of applying music to advertising.
- “Popular music has a special interest in two common forms of time-experience in particular: boredom and fashion. To describe a situation as ‘boring’ is to say that nothing is happening, nothing to engage our attention – time drags. Fashion, by contrast, ‘is the perception of a recurring process in time in which, while newness is seen as being of value, that which is new is constantly being swept away at a dizzying pace and replaced by a different newness.” 157. Just as ‘revolution’ is constantly being swept into the mainstream and replaced by a ‘different’ revolution.
o “Popular music addresses these issues simultaneously [boredom and fashion]. On the one hand, pop songs fill the hole that the bored stare into; fun is the time that one doesn’t notice passing until afterwards. On the other hand, popular music works to stop time, to hold consumption at the moment of desire, before it is regretted. Even as it is enjoyed, though, popular music is confirming the premises on which its pleasures depend – that times chance and nothing happens, that this is a momentary diversion. Pop is nothing if not fashionable…” 157. Pop music as fashionable, holding consumption at moment of desire – perfect for advertising, which does the same thing.
8. Songs as Texts
- “Most contemporary popular music takes the form of a song (even acid house), and most people if asked what a song “means” refer to the words.” 158
- Listening to lyrics of pop songs, we hear three different things at once: words, rhetoric (words being used in a special, musical way, a way which draws attention to features and problems of speech), and voices. 159
- “Until relatively recently, most academic analysts of Anglo-American popular music assumed, like commonsense listeners, that pop’s meaning lay in the lyrics…arguments about pop’s political and social value are still more likely to refer to pop words than pop sounds.” 159
- Study of teenage use of music television, most cited reason for watching a video “in order to find out what the words mean.” 159. → How does this change when images that accompany music become produced not by artists or their representatives, but by a separate, commercial enterprise?
- Words – basis of popular songs’ market punch in Tin Pan Alley. 159
o Pop song had to have a particular sort of use value – had to be adaptable. Pop song formula was an effect of market forces. But also, research has shown that pop songs are result of romantic ideology. Put these two together, and you get formulas of love. 161. → Like Beatles early songs?
- One can make a contrast between standard pop account of love and something else, more real and complex and individuality. American popular songs v. ‘truthfulness’ of the blues. 161. → Lennon’s songs showed angst, weren’t always dreamy. Took this style of writing from his appreciation of the blues?
o “In the Blues, ‘love seldom resembled the ethereal, ideal relationship so often pictured in popular songs. Love was depicted as a fragile, often ambivalent relationship between imperfect beings.’” 162. Realistic statements about love? Did this impact the Beatles’ reception as authentic?
- “It is important to remember that the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ lyrics is, at least in part, arbitrary…even in life…one is more likely to say ‘I love you more than there are stars in the sky’ than ‘there are ambiguities in the way I feel about you.’ The question becomes, in other words, why some sorts of words are heard as real or unreal, and to understand this we have to understand that how words work in song depends not just on what is said, the verbal context, but also on how it is said – on the type of language used and its rhetorical significance; on the kind of voice in which it is spoken.” 164
- “There is no empirical evidence that song words determine or form listeners’ beliefs and values (any more than there is really much evidence that they reflect them). The few sociological investigations of teen-agers’ response to song words show either that they don’t understand them (as American researchers soon found to be the case with 1960s “protest” songs like ‘Eve of Destruction”) or that they ‘don’t really notice them’ (semantically, that is.” 164. (No evidence that Beatles songs reflected youth ideology, or were Beatles songs not actually characterized as real ‘protest songs).
- “…the difficulty we face if, in interpreting how songs ‘mean,’ we attempt to separate the words from their use as speech acts. I would put the argument this way: Song words are not about ideas (“content”) but about their expression.” 164
o Ex: Songs don’t cause people to fall in love, they provide people with the means to articulate the feelings associated with being in love.
- ***”The second indication that songs concern not so much ideas as their expression can be found in the historical fate of ‘protest’ songs. In pop terms, these don’t function to convey ideas or arguments but slogans. And the paradox here is that the political power of a pop song – as a slogan – need not bear any relationship to its intended message at all. Irony, in particular, seems to be a doomed lyrical strategy...[for example] a pre-election Tory party rally joining hands for John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. 165. This is essentially the same thing as using these ‘protest’ songs in advertisements. The slogan, as developed by the ad agency, need not resemble the intended message of the song. Nike’s use of ‘Revolution’, for example.
- “Once we grasp that the issue in lyrical analysis is not words, but words in performance, then various new analytical possibilities open up. Lyrics, that is, are a form of rhetoric or oratory; we have to treat them in terms of the persuasive relationship set up between singer and listener. From this perspective, then, a song doesn’t exist to convey the meaning of the words; rather, the words exist to convey the meaning of the song.” 166.
- Song language used to say something about both the singer and the implied audience…not just words, but also accents situate the singer and listener. 166
o (Trudgill) British pop singers employ different accents when singing from when they are speaking. The reason seems clear: Most genres of 20th-C popular music, in the western world and in some cases beyond, are (Afro-) American in origin. Amerians have dominated the field, and cultural domination leads to imitation: it is appropriate to sound like an American when performing in what is predominantly an American activity; and one attempts to model one’s singing on that of those who do it best and who one admires the most.” 166-7. → If the Beatles sing in an Americanized accent (whether intentionally or not), does this, then, bring up issues of authenticity?
o (Trudgill) From 1964 on, British singers generally began trying less hard to sound like Americans as British pop music acquired a validity of its own. Singers now sought to cross class barriers rather than the Atlantic. 167. Were the Beatles not involved in the Americanized vocals of British pop singers? Did they seek to identify more with working class youth, both British and American? (Were they actually members of working clas youth, and, if not, how does this impact their so-called authenticity?)
- “The most significant political effect of a pop song is not on how people vote or organize, but on how they speak (Beatles, ‘revolution’?)…Lyrics, to put this another way, let us into songs as stories. All songs are implied narratives. They have a central character, the singer; a character with an attitude, in a situation, talking to someone (if only herself).
- British lyrical tradition: character song; use a song to portray a character while simultaneously drawing attention to the art of the portrayal. “The singer is playing a part, and what is involved is neither self-expression (the equation of role and performer, as in the chanson or the blues) nor critical commentary (as in the German theater song) but, rather, an exercise in style, an ironic – or cynical – presentation of character as style.” 171. If Beatles wrote these types of character songs, then, their personal authenticity (as explained by Barker and Taylor) is in question.
- Differences between talking and singing. 171…
o “Singing seems to be self-revealing in a way that talking is not.” P. 172. Only if analyzing differences between talking and singing in terms of everyday people, not rock stars.
- In early rock history, to study elevated use of language in singing was to study poetry, to treat songs as poetry. “[Rock] was perhaps crude and unpoetic in its infancy, but as the 60s progressed, lyrics of increasing sophistication and skill appeared.” 176. High cultural judgment of pop music.
- Frith disagrees with treating lyrics as poetry. Doesn’t believe songs stand up as print texts. “Good song lyrics are not good poems because they don’t need to be.” 181
9. The Voice
- The singer’s voice as a reflection of the singer and his/her personality. The voice as a vehicle for authenticity.
- How we read lyrics is not a completely random or idiosyncratic choice (though it does necessarily, at least partially, depend on interpretation and its personal and cultural influences). The lyricist sets up the situation – through her use of language, her construction of character – in a way that, in part, determines the response we make, the nature of our engagement. But once we say that, we admit that there’s another ‘voice’ here, the voice of the lyricist, the author, putting the words in the “I’s” mouth, putting the protagonists into their lyrical situation.” 184
o Authorial voice can be distinctive
- “What is the relationship between the ‘voice’ we hear in a song and the author or composer of that song?” 185 How does this influence perceived personal authenticity?
- “The upfront star-system means that pop fans are well aware of the ways in which pop performers are inventions…And in pop, biography is used less to explain composition (the writing of the song) than expression (its performance): it is in real, material, singing voices that the ‘real’ person is to be heard, not in scored stylistic or formulaic devices.” 185
- “…as listeners we assume that we can hear someone’s life in their voice – a life that’s there despite and not because of the singer’s craft, a voice that says who they really are, an art that only exist because of what they’ve suffered.” 186. Perhaps a notion underlined by the fact that the beatles not only sang, but wrote their songs.
- We hear the pop voice as personally expressive. 186
- Categories with which to explore the voice. 187
o As a musical instrument: here, singers’ sound is more important than their words, which are either nonsensical or become so through repetitions; and repetition is itself the key to how such voices work, as percussive instruments, marking out the regular time around which the lead singer can be quite irregular in matters of pitch and timing, quite inarticulate in terms of words or utterances.” 187. Effect of microphone. 188.
o As body: The voice is a sound produced physically. This is one reason why the voice seems particularly expressive of the body; it gives the listener access to it without mediation. 191
o As a person: what is the relationship of somebody’s vocal sound and their being? Voices are easy to change, and they change over time. “The voice, in short, may or may not be a key to someone’s identity, but it is certainly a key to the ways in which we change identities, pretend to be something we’re not, deceive people, lie. We use the voice not just to assess a perso, but also, even more systematically, to assess that person’s sincerity: the voice and how it is used (as well as words and how they are used) become a measure of someone’s truthfulness.” 197. Voice as measure of authenticity.
10. Performance
- listening to music is, itself, a performance. 203
- ‘the term ‘performance’ defines a social – or communicative – process. It requires an audience and is dependent, in this sense, on interpretation; it is about meanings.’ 205
- ‘All live performance involves both spontaneous action and the playing of a role.’ 207
o there is not necessarily a distinction between the ‘staged’ and the everyday. 207
- “Just as a singer is both performing the song and performing the performance of the song, so we, as an audience, are listening to both the song and to its performance.” 211
- “…I think it can be argued that the ‘act’ of singing is always contextualized by the ‘act’ of performing.” 211 Performance and authenticity.
- ‘pop singers don’t just express emotion, but also play it.” 212. Performance and authenticity.
- “…they are involved in a process of double enactment: they enact both a star personality (their image) and a song personality, the role that each lyric requires, and the pop star’s art to keep both acts in play at once.’ 212 Star personality
- questions about the sexuality or erotics of performance, and its relation to possession (why do audiences dress up like the stars?), though the issue that most immediately concerns me (one that is raised by performance artists too) is this: what does it mean to make a spectacle of oneself. 212. Stars as the site of desire & stars dressing up as them.
- “Performance involves gestures that are both false (they are only being put on for this occasion) and true (they are appropriate to the emotions being described, expressed, or invoked. Even the most stylized performer, the one with the most obviously formal and artificial gestures, is expressing the self, displaying in public sounds and movements usually thought of as inanimate; what the audience wants to see…” 214
- “…at the core of our understanding of body language must be the knowledge that even the most direct form of human expression – the unmediated articulation of fear, anger, ecstasy, and so on – can always be faked. To call something a language is to say that it can be used for lying, and this is a particularly disturbing aspect of body language because its ‘truth’ is tied into our own unable-to-be-helped response: someone’s ‘appearance’ of laughter or anger is enough to cause our laughter for real.” 217. Brings up issues of perceived authenticity.
- Clothes: as a language and a way of designing a setting. 218-9.
11. Technology and Authority
- In its most basic definition, the technology of music simply refers to the ways in which sounds are produced and reproduced. (226) Three stages:
o Folk stage: music is stored in the body and can only be retrieved through performance.
o Art stage: music is stored in notation and can only be retrieved in performance.
o Pop stage: music is stored mechanically, digitally, electronically. “This transforms the material experience of music: it can now be heard anywhere; it is mobile across previous barriers of time and space; it becomes a commodity, a possession.
- “…listening to recorded music becomes contradictory; it is at once public and private, static and dynamic, an experience of both present and past. In the world of recordings there is a new valorization of “the original.” It is as if the recording of music – its closeup effect – allows us to recreate, with even greater vividness, the ‘art’ and ‘folk’ experiences which the recording process itself destroys.” 2278. Does recording technology destroy authenticity? Artificiality of assembling performers just for a recording session and of the ability to create ‘perfect’ songs out of fragments from different takes?
- “Records made available musical experiences which were unrealizable live.” 228
- Is recording an event (a real or fake live performance) or a work (a score, the piece of music itself) 228
- “On the other hand, it is equally clear to that to record a work is just as much to interpret it as to perform it in any other way.” 229
- Archive recordings: “they reveal in documentary fashion something about their times – how Beethoven was interpreted then – but they are therefore ‘indisputably of and for their time.” 230
- Recordings allowed listeners a chance to more actively participate in the experience of music (could decide what tracks to play, in what order, how loud to make them, etc…). 231
- Folk arguments about technology and the ‘original’ sound are different. “Charles Keil, for example, argues that ‘in class society the media of the dominant class must be utilized for [a vernacular] style to be legitimized.’ In the 1920s, for example, the new media of radio and records seemed to ‘call forth’ new forms of ‘ethnic’ music (his examples are polka and blues), distinct American sounds that ‘could not be created and legitimized without being part of the new mainstream channels of communication.’” 231. Mainstream airplay legitimizes music for the masses.
- Rather than the recording offering a ‘perfect’ experience of music that live music couldn’t offer (art world), Keil suggests that the two offer different pleasures (folk world). 232
- “The basic point here is that in popular music (unlike classical) forms, live and recorded practices are not necessarily seeking to realize the ‘same music’ (even if people’s expectations about what a band can and should do may carry over from one form into the other – one of the great pleasures of a pop concert is hearing the ‘hits: songs with which we have a long a sometimes profound intimacy suddenly sound both just the same and quite different).” 233
- “Recording perfection ceased to refer to a specific performance (a faithful sound) and came to refer, as we’ve seen, to a constructed performance (an ideal sound). The ‘original,’ in short, ceased to be an event and became an idea. 234
- Digital technologies allow people to get at the original piece more, to extract them from the various sounds associated with more primitive recording. 235. Who has the power to decide what the original sounds like? Not the musician or even original studio producer, but rather, a remaaster.
- “Whatever the complications of music’s recording history, we can, I think, reach some general conclusions about its social effects.” 236
o Music is everywhere. No longer needs to be framed by a particular time or space.
o Quantity of music. The same work, the same event, the same performance, is endlessly repeatable, it is never lost. The ‘past’ of music is endless re=experienced in its presence. Simply in its accumulation, music ceases to be special. It can no longer be defined against the everyday as something unusual; music is now the everyday. 236-7.
o Musical experience has been individualized. Music is no longer a necessarily social or collective affair materially (though it may be in the imagination). 237
- *** “Musical taste, in short, is now intimately tied into personal identity; we express ourselves through our deployment of other people’s music. And in this respect, music is more like clothes than any other art form – not just in the sense of the significance of fashion, but also in the sense that the music we ‘wear’ is as much shaped by our own desires, our own purposes, our own bodies, as by intentions or bodies or desires of the people who first made it.” 237. Music and personal identity, we wear our music.
- Technology has also transformed the sound of live musical performance as well as audiences’ sense of themselves in that sound. 238
- Electrical amplification “…is integral to the cultural and social growth of Rock. It changed not only the sound of the instruments, but also the scale of the live event which contained them, thereby determining the nature of the audience experience.” 239
- [Brophy] traces the role of the live rock recording in training consumers ‘how to become listeners and how to recognize themselves in the recordings…” 239
- “From the listener’s perspective, technology has clearly affected not just where and when and how we listen to music, but also what we hear…in popular musical terms, this has meant, in particular, concentration on the ‘personal’ touches of specific performers: music is heard in new ways as expressive of personality. Star quality in music, as we’ve seen, is thus a perception of intimacy.” 240. The impact on recording on nature of perceived / sought after authenticity.
- “Making music has always involved not just the planning of notes on paper, but also the realization of those notes as sounds in particular settings…Music thus has a new effect on space. The recording studio…was a new musical location, and the record listener was given a new musical place: we’re now somehow (thanks to the use of reverb, delay, and all the other engineering tricks) in the music, not constrained by the concert hall model of listening at it. Whatever the familiar ideology of “active” (concert) listening and “passive” (home) listening, acoustically it is, in fact, as record listeners that we seem to be musical participants.” 242
- “We certainly do now hear music as a fragmented and unstable object…All music is more often heard now in fragments than completely; we hear slices of Beatles songs…” 242. In television advertisements, for example.
o “Technology, Kramer concludes, “has liberated listeners from the completeness of musical form.”
o “Hence the rise in the 1980s of popular music made up of fragments, of samples: “Such quoting establishes a connection that builds up authenticity, a kind of italicizing that identifies the author, by means of authorship, as it undoes it.” 243
- “…the question of musical author. What’s startling here is that just as it seems that a ‘self’ can no longer possibly be expressed in the ever more socially and technically complex processes of pop production, s artistic authority is rediscovered – in the person of the producer, the engineer, the image maker, the deejay. We’re not only desperate but still successful in finding voices in the machine – hence, for example, the academic idolization of Madonna.” 244.
- “…the question of the musical object. There’s no doubt here that the fetishization of the recording has meant the demystification of the work. Even in classical music, the accumulation of versions (now available, thanks to CD, for continuous historical comparison) has let to what I’ll call interpretive relativism: everyone can hear that readings of scores change, that the ‘ideal’ performance is variable (old recordings are odd or incomplete or just plain ‘wrong’ in the same way as old readings of literature or art). Our sense of the ‘timelessness’ of great music has thus become the belief (eagerly fostered by the music industry) that it must be continuously updated.” 244. Touches on the notion of cover versions.

Part Three
12. The meaning of music
- “To grasp the meaning of a piece of music is to hear something not simply present to the each. It is to understand a musical culture, to have ‘a scheme of interpretation.’ For sounds to be music we need to know how to hear them; we need ‘knowledge not just of musical forms but also of rules of behavior in musical settings.” 249
- “The ‘meaning’ of music described, in short, not just an interpretive but social process: musical meaning is not inherent (however ‘ambiguously’) in the text. As Lucy Green persuasively argues, ‘Both experience of the music and the music’s meanings themselves change completely in relation to the style-competence of the [listener], and to the social situation in which they occur…music can never be played or heard outside a situation, and every situation will affect the music’s meaning.” 250. Musical meaning is in a constant flux of change.
- “If the standard sociological position is that (real) social processes determine what music means, now the suggestion is that a musical experience ‘means’ by defining (imagined) social processes.” 250
- “Social orthodoxy, following Bourdieu, is that “aesthetic” listening is itself a socially determined process, describes a particular sort of listening behavior in a particular sort of listening situation, means the right set of listeners pursuing the right sort of listening aims.” 251
- “This is the sociological paradox: musical experience is socially produced as something special; the importance of music is therefore taken to be that its meaning is not socially produced, is somehow ‘in the music.’ Pop fans too have an aesthetic mode of listening. Pop fans too believe that music derives its value ‘from its inner and private soul.’ 252. Musical meaning as socially produced.
- “Music turns out to be, after all, an imitative art: performance is an imitation of a score.” 259
- “…the suggestion is that musical experience is profound but vague – we have the feeling but not its occasion: in Adam mith’s terms, music doesn’t make us sad but makes us feel sadness.” 262
- “…to suggest not that music somehow expresses the shape of feelings, but, rather, that in describing musical experiences we are obliged to apply adjectives, and that we therefore attach feeling words conventionally and arbitrarily to what is, in fact, a purely aural experience.” 262
- *** “…what interests me here is another point – not music’s possible meaninglessness, but people’s continued attempts to make it meaningful: to name their feelings, supply the adjectives.” 262 Is music meaningless on its own? Does all meaning come from its interpretation?
- “To ascribe meaning to a musical work is to provide a certain sort of description.” 263
- “Music does not have a content – it cant be translated – but this does not mean that it is not ‘an object of understanding.’ Or, to put it another way, the gap in music between the nature of the experience (sounds) and the terms of its interpretation (adjectives) may be more obvious than in any other art form, but this does not mean that the pleasure of music doesn’t lie in the ways in which we can – and must – fill the gap.” 264-5.
13. Towards a popular Aesthetic
- “The academic study of popular music has been limited by the assumption that the sounds somehow reflect or represent ‘a people.’ The analytic problem has been to trace the connections back, from the work (the score, the song, the beat) to the social groups who make and use it. What’s at issue is homology, some sort of structural relationship between material and cultural forms. From this perspective musical meaning is socially constructed; our musical pleasures are defined by our social circumstances…The problem of the homological argument, as van Leeuwen himself notes, is that ‘music not only represents social relations, it also and simultaneously enacts them’; and too often attempts to relate musical forms to social words, processes ignore the ways in which music is itself a social process. In other words, in examining the aesthetics of popular music we need to reverse the usual academic argument: the question is not how a piece of music, a text, ‘reflects’ popular values, but how – in permanence – it produces them.” 270. Beatles music not only reflects certain values, it also produces them.
- “…identity comes from the outside, not the inside; it is something we put or try on, not something we reveal or discover. As Jonathan Ree puts it, ‘The problem of personal identity, one may say, arises from play-acting and the adoption of artificial voices; the origins of distinct personalities, in acts of presentation and impersonation. And Ree goes on to argue that personal identity is therefore ‘the accomplishment of a storyteller, rather than the attribute of a character…The concept of narrative, in other words, is not so much a justification of the idea of personal identity, s an elucidation of its structure as an inescapable piece of make-believe.” 273.
- “Identities are, then, inevitably constrained by imaginative forms – “structured by conventions of narrative to which the world never quite manages to conform.” 273-4
- “We all grow up with something, but we can choose just about anything by way of expressive culture.” 274.
- “Music constructs our sense of identity through the experiences it offers of the body, time, and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives. Such a fusion of imaginative fantasy and bodily practice marks as well as the integration of aesthetics and ethics.” 275
- “Identity is necessarily a matter of ritual: it describes one’s place in a dramatized pattern of relationships – one can never really express oneself ‘automonously.’ Self-identity is cultural identity; claims to individual difference depend on audience appreciation on shared performing and narrative rules. Such rules are organized generically: different musical genres offer different narrative solutions to the recurring pop tensions between authenticity and artifice, sentimentality and realism, the spiritual and the sensual, the serious and the fun. Different musical genres articulate differently the central values of the pop aesthetic – spectacle and emotion, presence and absence, belonging and difference.” 275-6. If self-identity is cultural identity, then the beatles were very much a part of each individual fan.
- “For the best part of this century, pop music has been an important way in which we have learned to understand ourselves as historical, ethnic, class-bound, gendered, national subjects. This has had conservative effects (primarily through nostalgia) as well as liberating ones. What music does (all music) is put into play a sense of identity that may or may not fir the way we are placed by other social forces. Music certainly puts us in our place, butit can also suggest that our social circumstances are not immutable (and that other people - performers, fans – share our dissatisfaction). Music is not in itself revolutionary or reactionary. It is a source of strong feelings which, because they are also socially coded, can come up against common sense. It may be that, in the end, I want to value most highly that music, popular and serious, which has some sort of disruptive cultural effect, but my argument is that music only does this through the impact on individuals, and that this impact is obdurately social.” 277