Chapter SEVEN – Broad-Strokes Overview of the Record Business
- Major record companies: Business / Legal Affairs – responsible for the company’s contracts, not only with artists, but with record clubs, foreign licenses, etc… 62
- A Record: “…in virtually every record agreement made since the 1960s, the contractual definition of a record says a record is both an audio-only and an audiovisual device (meaning one with sound and visual images), such as videocassettes and DVDs, which play video as well as audio material. (This is particularly interesting when you remember that audiovisual devices weren’t even invented in the 1960s! Companies anticipated their development, even though no one knew what form they would take.” 66
- “Even more important, the current deals define records to mean any kind of delivery of music for consumer use, whether sound alone or with visuals. This is designed to pick up the Internet and other electronic transmission.” 66
- Masters: two meanings.
o “The original recording made in the studio is called a master, because it is the master (meaning controlling entity) from which all copies are made…When the recording is finished, the master is then edited, mixed, and EQ’d (EQ’s: ‘equalizing’)…The mixed multitrack is then reduced down to a two-track stereophonic master, which is ready for the duplication process. So there are two masters – the original multitrack, and the finished two-track.” 66-7.
o “The word ‘master’ also means a recording of one particular song. Thus, you might say an album has ‘ten masters’ (meaning ten selections) on it.” 67 → Are these masters owned by the record company? Does that mean, then, that the Beatles’ label licensed the use of ‘Revolution’ in Nike’s 1987 advertisement? Or did Nike need both the master and publishing licenses?
- Royalties: Artists get a percentage of money from each record sold. 68
o “The artist royalty is a percentage of the wholesale price. The companies also call this price the published price to dealers (PPD to its friends), or sometimes base price to dealers (BPD).” 69
Chapter THIRTEEN – Advanced Royalty Computations
- “To record companies, everything that isn’t a CD is an electronic transmission, which is the industry term for digital delivery and much, much more…Notice, this also picks up radio, TV, and motion pictures.” 155
- Master licenses: “When masters are licensed out for motion pictures, television shows, and commercials, record companies have historically credited the artist’s account with 50% of the net receipts. Over recent years, a fee for handling master licenses has crept into record agreements. All of the majors have what’s called a special markets division, whose job it is to take existing recordings and figure out ways to squeeze money from them.” 160. → The person / people that own the rights to the master recording isn’t, of course, necessarily the artist. This is true in the case of the Beatles.
Chapter FIFTEEN – Copyright Basics
- Copyright: “The legal definition of a copyright is ‘a limited duration monopoly’. Its purpose (as stated in the U.S. Constitution, no less) is to promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators exclusive rights to their works for a while.” 197
- To be copyrightable, work has to be original and “…of sufficient materiality to constitute a work.” To get a copyright, must make a tangible copy of something. 198
- When you have a copyright, you have the exclusive rights to (198-9):
o Reproduce the work
o Distribute copies of the work
o Perform the work publicly
o Make a derivative work
o Display the work publicly
- Compulsory Licenses: You must issue a license to anybody that wants to use your work, for example, in ‘phonorecords of non-dramatic musical compositions.’ It’s called a compulsory mechanical license. once a work has been released to the public, the publisher of that work is required to license it to anybody else who wants to use it in a record. 201. → doesn’t apply to licensing of music in TV commercials, then. And, as Passman later writes (204), the compulsory license is almost never used.
o “Copyright owners (publishers) would rather give a direct license because they can keep track of it easier.” 204. → So, publishers (or artists, if wrote the song?) own the composition copyright and record labels own the master copyright?
Chapter SIXTEEN – Publishing Companies and Major Income Sources
- Standard story: Writers assign the copyright in their songs to publishers, and publishers take care of the business; they find people to use their songs (unless writer is also the artist?), give them licenses, and make sure writer gets paid. 206
o These rights are known as administration rights (finding users, issuing licenses, collecting money, and paying writer) 206.
- “…A lot of major songwriters keep their own publishing (i.e., they are their own publisher, retaining ownership of their copyrights and perhaps hiring somebody to do the clerical function of administration)…Also, more and more artists are writing their own songs, so there’s no need for a publisher to get songs to them.” 209 → like the Beatles?
- Controlled Composition: A song written, owned, or controlled by the artist (in whole or in part). It is usually defined as “Any song in which the artist has an income or other interest. This means that, even if the artist doesn’t own or control it, it’s a controlled composition if he or she wrote or otherwise gets a piece of its earnings. Sometimes the definition also includes (depending on the record company) compositions owned or controlled by the producer of the recordings.” 215. → Beatles as songwriters.
- Controlled Composition Clause: puts a limit on how much the company has to pay for each controlled composition. 215
Chapter SEVENTEEN – Secondary Publishing Income
- ***Synchronization and Transcription Licenses: A license to use music in ‘timed synchronization’ with visual images. (Includes TV commercials) 231. → Does the publisher always grant these rights? What if songwriter is publisher? Is the license for the master copyright, the composition copyright, both, or neither?
o Fees: all over the board, and vary with the usage and importance of the song….when we get into the realm of commercials, the fees go even higher. 231
o ***For commercials, a song can get anywhere from $75,000 to $500,000 for a one-year national usage in the United States, on television and radio. Really well-known songs in major campaigns can get into the millions, though the typical range for a well-known song is $150,000 to $350,000. These figures get scaled down for regional or local usages, and for periods of less than a year.” 234. → Find out more about synchronization licenses.
Chapter EIGHTEEN – Songwriter Deals
- Standard contracts: Some contracts say the songwriter gets 50% of the publisher’s receipts from ‘mechanical, synchronization, and transcription income,’…250
- “In addition to the writer’s portion, if you ask, most publishers will give you 5% of wholesale for use of your name and likeness in a personality folio…” 254.
- Term songwriter agreements: you agree to give publisher of the songs you write during the term. 256
- Creative control: “At best, you should have the right to approve any usage of your song in commercials and print ads (newspapers, magazines, etc.) (If you have approval of synch licenses, you automatically control TV commercials…) 270
Chapter TWENTY
- Copyright History (p. 290-292)
o Prior to 1978, the U.S. had this bizarre copyright concept, adopted in 1909 and not changed for almost 70 years.
o Copyrights used to last for a period of 28 ears from publication of the work. These copyrights where then renewable for an additional 28 years (total of 56 years).
o In 1992, Congress passed a law stating that the renewal is now automatic, so there’s no loss of copyright if you forget.
o If you wanted to sell the copyright, you could sell the full 56 years, but the number of buyers dropped dramatically.
o Even if you sold the whole 56, there was a way you could get back the second 28 years. If you died, you automatically got back the second 28 years. If the author of the work died before the second 28 years started, then the transfer was nullified and the heirs of the author got to renew the second 28 years for their own benefit. 290-1 → Was this the case when Lennon died?
o For works created after the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Law (January 1, 1978), the duration of any copyright was changed to the life of the author plus 50 years. It also extended the old 56-year terms (for works created before January 1, 1978) by 19 years, for a total of 78 years. → Beatles songs?
• The 1976 Act gave the authors the right to take back these 19 years. The recapture procedure is similar to that for termination rights of newer copyrights. It is done by giving a notice, no less more than 10 years and no more than 2 years, before the beginning of the 19 years. 304.
o In 1998, the congressional folk got together and, in memory of congressmen and croonster Sonny Bono, slapped on another 20 years. That extended the copyright term for pre-’78 songs (if they were still under copyright) to a total of 95 years, and for stuff created after January 1, 1978, to life of the author plus 70 years. 291 → Post-Beatles John Lennon stuff?
o Right of Termination: One of the best goodies that authors got in the 1976 Copyright Law is the right of termination. The termination provisions say that, even if you make a stupid deal, the copyright law will give you a second shot – 35 years later. In other words, 35 years after a transfer, you can get your copyright back. And under the new law, you don’t even have to die. 292
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Barker, H. and Taylor, Y. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (2007).
Introduction
- the aesthetic of the ‘authentic musical experience,’ with its rejection of music that is labeled contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in forming musical tastes and canons. ix
- representational authenticity – when people say a musical performance or recording is authentic. x
- Cultural authenticity – music that reflects a cultural tradition x
- Personal Authenticity – music that reflects the person or people who are making it. x – The Beatles were / are thought to command this…Did the Beatles actually and actively pursue this?
- Authenticity is a complicated notion, an absolute goal that can never be fully reached. X → ‘Nothing is Real, Strawberry Fields Forever’
Chapter THREE – Blues and Autobiographical Songs
- Blues, said to be very personal music. However, blues lends itself very well to first-person narrative that purports to be autobiographical. This narratives were often fictional, too vague to be personal, or concerned an event in which the singer was only a peripheral figure. 106-7. (as related to Beatles’ inspirations)
- “Ballad of John and Yoko”. 123. Signifies a certain degree of personal, autobiographical narrative in Beatles songs
- explosion of singers/songwriters in the 1960s. 129. 1960s, countercultural / youth audience desire for authentic narrative. By writing own songs, Beatles strengthened their association with personal authenticity.
- The autobiographical song is perceived as a window to the singer/songwriters mind. However, “simply revealing oneself in a song, a goal that we now all take for granted, is a rather recent and comparatively artificial development in the history of artificial music. We now think of autobiographic song as a natural form of expression, but as anyone who has ever tried can attest, writing a song based on one’s own life, with a verse and chorus structure, that will appeal to a mass-market audience is no simple manner. It is far easier to sing about almost anything else.” 134
- “Are singers who go to great lengths to construct a song around those aspects of their lives that are already public knowledge being more honest then those who sing about fictional or universal subjects? Or are they self-consciously attempting to control their public personas through song?” 133. Regarding the Ballad of John and Yoko. Do the authors take liberty in assuming Lennon’s intentions?
Chapter FOUR – The Art and Artifice of Elvis Presley (as primary influence of the Beatles)
- Elvis was not the libidinal, crazed equivalent of movie stars – he was a quiet well-mannered Southern boy. 137. Seems uninformed - unless they knew John Lennon personally, this statement is basically heresay.
- RCA executives didn’t want ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to be his first single – but Elvis knew what his audience wanted. He confided to Lloyd Shearer a few months later…”I’ve made a study of Marlon Brando. I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ‘uns, go for us. We’re sullen, we’re brooding, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men…You can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.” 137. He knowingly created an image…viewed himself as an actor, playing a part.
- Elvis re-invents rock and roll. Still imagined to be original, uninhibited, singing from the soul because of his dancing and his bizarre vocals. 140
- It is generally taken for granted that any singer who can convey Elvis’s energy and passion must be singing from the bottom of his heart. 142-3.
- At the heart of Elvis’s vision was his voice, with its inimitable combination of playfulness, arrogance, and desire….This mixture not only precluded any sort of personal authenticity, it seemed to be a reaction against it. In order to make arrogance and desire palatable to American listeners, they could not be genuine…By embellishing country music’s plainspoken style with all sorts of mannerisms, Elvis deliberately moved his music away from the this-is-God’s-truth mode of country delivery and the cult of authenticity that went with it.” 148
- “It only made sense, then, that the songs he and his managers chose rarely, if ever, bore any relationship to the events of his personal life.” 148
- “Rock ‘n’ roll was at its core self-consciously inauthentic music. It spoke of self-invention: If Elvis could reinvent himself, so could others; if he could assume a mask, so could anyone. Its inauthenticity gave it staying power.” 149. Inauthenticity allowed it to succeed?
- “John Lennon credited ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ with igniting his love for the music.” 151.
- Mid-1960s, spectre of authenticity grabbed hold of the reins of this runaway genre, and rock music became what it remains today: a mode of performance characterized by a strong desire to stop acting and get real. 157.
Chapter FIVE – Faking it in the age of singer-songwriters
- Prior to 1960s, record companies created hits by taking a songrwriter’s song and hiring singers….”Even more than Dylan, it was the Beatles who, by writing and performing their own songs, transformed the music industry from one in which the congruence between singer and songwriter was irrelevant to one in which it could not be ignored.” 168 To examine how important issues of authenticity were to conceptions of the Beatles, compare the group with the Monkees.
- “…the sheer scale of their success caused the music business to undergo a paradigm shift. Now every A&R department and label chief was on the hunt for groups who wrote and performed their own songs…” 169 authenticity invoked as a means to build commercial appeal.
- “Paul McCartney was the more polished and emotionally distanced one of the pair. A skilled songwriter, he could imitate and adapt any style he cared to. He varied from the straight rock and roll ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ to a great ballad like ‘Yesterday’…His songs were accomplished from the start, but the extra layer of gloss meant that they revealed less about the writer’s personality than Lennon’s did. And later in their careers it was Lennon’s pursuit of honesty in his songs that established his enduring mystique.” 173.
- Lennon: complex individual – clear even in early songs. Words of his songs can be quite bleak separated from the music. 171. “If I could see you now, I’d try to make you sad somehow” (“I’ll Cry Instead”.). These songs appear more honest than other love songs, because they aren’t all dreamy and nostalgic.
- “Before the scale of their fame became apparent, Lennon and McCartney had anticipated that they might end up as jobbing songwriters. For a while their efforts were almost as focused on producing songs for other artists as on writing for themselves.” 171. How does this impact their perceived personal authenticity?
- Beatles idolized Leiber and Stoller (who had written some of the songs that Elvis performed). 172
- Little Richard – another of Lennon’s heroes.
- “Given the way that Lennon and McCartney had revered these extraordinary songwriting teams, it is ironic that their own extraordinary achievements as songwriting performers helped to shift the focus of creativity away from the songwriter and toward the artist. With the success of the Beatles, it was no longer sufficient for artists to merely interpret a song, now it had to be their own song, their own self-expression, giving the audience a different expectation of the music’s level of intensity and experience…this heightened identification of the singer with the song also changed the kind of song that can succeed.” 172 personal authenticity intersecting with marketable success
- Beatles also influenced by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, both of whom wrote their own songs, as had previous country and blues stars. 173
- As Beatles got more famous, the songs that the Beatles wrote started to change. By 1965, they were looking for ways to take their songwriting into different territories. 175
- “Lennon was by [1965] deeply frustrated with the band’s lovable public image, feeling that people didn’t see the real person behind his persona. He believed that he was not taken seriously, and that his true self was being submerged into the collective identity of the Beatles. The suits and polite bows that Brian Epstein had imposed on the band seemed funny and conformist to him. They grated against his rebelliousness and contrariness, as did Epstein’s natural deference to authority and tradition. Lennon had been struggling to find ways to express himself outside the straitjacket of Beatles songs – his two books of nonsense poetry and drawings (In His Own Wright and A Spaniard in the Works), published in 1964 and 1965 demonstrated his own anarchic side.” 176. Beatles’ image still managed by Epstein, conflicts with personal authenticity. The Beatles as a band, at least in the early years, were not even believed to be authentic by Lennon himself.
- ***“’Norwegian Wood’ was a transitional song for Lennon because for the first time he found a way to write a song directly about himself. The actual lyric is somewhat guarded, partly because he was speaking about a one-night stand and, as a married man, was reluctant to be too confessional. But the song is a recognizable version of Lennon’s real life and has a confessional tone, in spite of its surreal turn. In ‘Norwegian Wood’, we can see the seeds of a more direct approach that led to the styles and attitudes Lennon adopted a few years later.” 177
- ***Still, Lennon’s songs of this period tend to reveal little about his real life. While the odd song like “Help” and “Nowhere Man” did have clear personal relevance, songs like “I Am The Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “She Said She Said,” and “A Day In The Life” relied on tangential imagery that dropped clues and red herrings, but gave little away. 177
- ***”Glass Onion” – Lennon mocks the earnest interpreters who had searched for hidden meanings in Beatles songs.” 177 Does this include my interpretations, then?
- ***”Even ‘All You Need Is Love,” acclaimed as an anthem for the Summer of Love (1967), was more of a verbal game than a political statement, with its clever wordplay and riddle-like verses.” 177. Use of this song in Luvs diaper commercial.
- By the time he wrote “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, it was clear that he was becoming increasingly interested in a more personal kind of songwriting. 178
- Deeply personal songwriting was still relatively rare in the pop music of the 60s. 179.
- “By 1968, John Lennon was starting to chafe at the bounds of his group and to castigate himself for failing to achieve what he now really wanted: genuine self-expression. Over the next few years, as the Beatles began to disintegrate, he began to reappraise the situation.” 180
- McCartney – his songs were more sugar-coated than Lennon’s, less self-expressive. 181. The perception of personal authenticity was applied to the Beatles as a whole, then.
- “[Lennon] had come to be seen as someone with artistic sensibilities who held controversial political and religious views in his own right, rather than being a mere puppet. Now he wanted to live up to the possibilities created by this new improved public image.” 181. What created the change in his public image? What happened that he was first viewed as lovable, and then as revolutionary?
- “In his solo music he increasingly searched for ways to return to the raw roots of rock’n’roll (perhaps forgetting how playful those roots had actually been) and to make personal and political statements. While the surrealism and humor of his mid-period Beatles songs, with their layered production values and instrumentation, had represented a high point of his career, he now looked for ways to cut through the masks and layers of sound to communicate in a simpler, purer way, in order to show his audience his “real self.” 182. Pursued authenticity not just through lyrics, but through sound as well.
- With his first solo releases, in particular the single “Cold Turkey” and the Plastic Ono Band album, Lennon confronted his listeners with a presentation of his self as naked and rubbed raw…Never before had a pop star displayed personal complex written emotions with such intensity. 184
- “A common problem with self-expression and autobiography in songs is that however honest we may be, we tend to project a mixture of the person we are and the person we want to be, or the person we want to be seen as…But when performers come right out and say, ‘This is the kind of person I am, and what do you think of that,’ we react differently: we wonder why they want to make this statement about themselves and what they might be hiding. The very fact that they consciously assert something about themselves makes us treat their statements as deliberate attempts to project a certain persona, and we are led to question whether this is the truth, a self-deception, or a construction intended for public consumption.” 186 suspicion of autobiography
- ***”An indirect man had learned to be direct. And a natural-born individualist was trying to learn how to be (or refuse to be) one of the voices of a generation, no easy task…” 187
- “On the release of the next album, Imagine, Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson saw a problem in Lennon’s modified approach to music, saying, “I fear that John sees himself in the role of the truth-teller, and as such can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth.” 187
o “Gerson was referring to the tracks “Gimme Some Truth,” in which Lennon rails against hypocrites, politicians, and prima donnas in general, and “How Do You Sleep?” in which Lennon issues a series of insults calculated to hurt his erstwhile best friend Paul McCartney. Lennon’s faith in his own honesty encouraged him to revert to his earlier aggression but now with a self-righteous tinge that was uncomfortable to observe.” 187
- ***”Lennon said of his song “Imagine”: “Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugar-coated it is accepted…Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey.” He was justifying the commercial approach of the song’s music and lyrics, claiming that it was just as fundamental as the Plastic Ono Band material beneath its sugar-coating and that rather than ‘selling out,’ he was using the song’s commercial nature to smuggle through his political messages.” 198 Does his willingness to ‘play the game ‘weaken his authenticity (perceived and otherwise) or strengthen it?
- ***Lennon may have been misunderstanding the universal power of his own song. “Imagine” is able to rise about the particular political moment and be applied in different ways because it is abstract and speaks in riddles and questions rather than in bald statements. Can we imagine no possessions? Even when we know that the man who wrote the song had a room full of fur coats?...In this song, Lennon had taken a step away from the extremes of self-expression and hard-line politics and created a fable that could be applied to any listener…In fact, Lennon wasn’t disguising a moment of authenticity and self-expression beneath commercialism – he was taking a healthy step away from authenticity and self-absorption in order to communicate a message while still entertaining us. It is partly for this reason that “Imagine” is still a powerful song and one that will last a long time.” 198. “Imagine no possessions’. This very song was a possession.
Chapter TEN – Moby, the KLF, and the Ongoing Quest for Authenticity
- Moby’s record, “Play” went to number one in many countries, sold ten million copies and three million singles, and propelled Moby to the position of the world’s best-selling dance musician.
- Moby’s tracks, in turn, “…were sold as commercials for a wide range of luxury goods. Producers of commercials recognized that while the music was modern and unobtrusive, it had an emotional effect on the listener, which made it ideal for underpinning the selling moment.” 321-2. How does Beatles music function within this realm of emotion and advertising?
- Moby defended his music’s ubiquity in advertisements on the basis that it is a kind of guerrilla marketing, compensating for his underdog status. If music doesn’t get played on radio, commercials are another way to hear it. 321
- the aesthetic of the ‘authentic musical experience,’ with its rejection of music that is labeled contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in forming musical tastes and canons. ix
- representational authenticity – when people say a musical performance or recording is authentic. x
- Cultural authenticity – music that reflects a cultural tradition x
- Personal Authenticity – music that reflects the person or people who are making it. x – The Beatles were / are thought to command this…Did the Beatles actually and actively pursue this?
- Authenticity is a complicated notion, an absolute goal that can never be fully reached. X → ‘Nothing is Real, Strawberry Fields Forever’
Chapter THREE – Blues and Autobiographical Songs
- Blues, said to be very personal music. However, blues lends itself very well to first-person narrative that purports to be autobiographical. This narratives were often fictional, too vague to be personal, or concerned an event in which the singer was only a peripheral figure. 106-7. (as related to Beatles’ inspirations)
- “Ballad of John and Yoko”. 123. Signifies a certain degree of personal, autobiographical narrative in Beatles songs
- explosion of singers/songwriters in the 1960s. 129. 1960s, countercultural / youth audience desire for authentic narrative. By writing own songs, Beatles strengthened their association with personal authenticity.
- The autobiographical song is perceived as a window to the singer/songwriters mind. However, “simply revealing oneself in a song, a goal that we now all take for granted, is a rather recent and comparatively artificial development in the history of artificial music. We now think of autobiographic song as a natural form of expression, but as anyone who has ever tried can attest, writing a song based on one’s own life, with a verse and chorus structure, that will appeal to a mass-market audience is no simple manner. It is far easier to sing about almost anything else.” 134
- “Are singers who go to great lengths to construct a song around those aspects of their lives that are already public knowledge being more honest then those who sing about fictional or universal subjects? Or are they self-consciously attempting to control their public personas through song?” 133. Regarding the Ballad of John and Yoko. Do the authors take liberty in assuming Lennon’s intentions?
Chapter FOUR – The Art and Artifice of Elvis Presley (as primary influence of the Beatles)
- Elvis was not the libidinal, crazed equivalent of movie stars – he was a quiet well-mannered Southern boy. 137. Seems uninformed - unless they knew John Lennon personally, this statement is basically heresay.
- RCA executives didn’t want ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to be his first single – but Elvis knew what his audience wanted. He confided to Lloyd Shearer a few months later…”I’ve made a study of Marlon Brando. I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ‘uns, go for us. We’re sullen, we’re brooding, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men…You can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.” 137. He knowingly created an image…viewed himself as an actor, playing a part.
- Elvis re-invents rock and roll. Still imagined to be original, uninhibited, singing from the soul because of his dancing and his bizarre vocals. 140
- It is generally taken for granted that any singer who can convey Elvis’s energy and passion must be singing from the bottom of his heart. 142-3.
- At the heart of Elvis’s vision was his voice, with its inimitable combination of playfulness, arrogance, and desire….This mixture not only precluded any sort of personal authenticity, it seemed to be a reaction against it. In order to make arrogance and desire palatable to American listeners, they could not be genuine…By embellishing country music’s plainspoken style with all sorts of mannerisms, Elvis deliberately moved his music away from the this-is-God’s-truth mode of country delivery and the cult of authenticity that went with it.” 148
- “It only made sense, then, that the songs he and his managers chose rarely, if ever, bore any relationship to the events of his personal life.” 148
- “Rock ‘n’ roll was at its core self-consciously inauthentic music. It spoke of self-invention: If Elvis could reinvent himself, so could others; if he could assume a mask, so could anyone. Its inauthenticity gave it staying power.” 149. Inauthenticity allowed it to succeed?
- “John Lennon credited ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ with igniting his love for the music.” 151.
- Mid-1960s, spectre of authenticity grabbed hold of the reins of this runaway genre, and rock music became what it remains today: a mode of performance characterized by a strong desire to stop acting and get real. 157.
Chapter FIVE – Faking it in the age of singer-songwriters
- Prior to 1960s, record companies created hits by taking a songrwriter’s song and hiring singers….”Even more than Dylan, it was the Beatles who, by writing and performing their own songs, transformed the music industry from one in which the congruence between singer and songwriter was irrelevant to one in which it could not be ignored.” 168 To examine how important issues of authenticity were to conceptions of the Beatles, compare the group with the Monkees.
- “…the sheer scale of their success caused the music business to undergo a paradigm shift. Now every A&R department and label chief was on the hunt for groups who wrote and performed their own songs…” 169 authenticity invoked as a means to build commercial appeal.
- “Paul McCartney was the more polished and emotionally distanced one of the pair. A skilled songwriter, he could imitate and adapt any style he cared to. He varied from the straight rock and roll ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ to a great ballad like ‘Yesterday’…His songs were accomplished from the start, but the extra layer of gloss meant that they revealed less about the writer’s personality than Lennon’s did. And later in their careers it was Lennon’s pursuit of honesty in his songs that established his enduring mystique.” 173.
- Lennon: complex individual – clear even in early songs. Words of his songs can be quite bleak separated from the music. 171. “If I could see you now, I’d try to make you sad somehow” (“I’ll Cry Instead”.). These songs appear more honest than other love songs, because they aren’t all dreamy and nostalgic.
- “Before the scale of their fame became apparent, Lennon and McCartney had anticipated that they might end up as jobbing songwriters. For a while their efforts were almost as focused on producing songs for other artists as on writing for themselves.” 171. How does this impact their perceived personal authenticity?
- Beatles idolized Leiber and Stoller (who had written some of the songs that Elvis performed). 172
- Little Richard – another of Lennon’s heroes.
- “Given the way that Lennon and McCartney had revered these extraordinary songwriting teams, it is ironic that their own extraordinary achievements as songwriting performers helped to shift the focus of creativity away from the songwriter and toward the artist. With the success of the Beatles, it was no longer sufficient for artists to merely interpret a song, now it had to be their own song, their own self-expression, giving the audience a different expectation of the music’s level of intensity and experience…this heightened identification of the singer with the song also changed the kind of song that can succeed.” 172 personal authenticity intersecting with marketable success
- Beatles also influenced by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, both of whom wrote their own songs, as had previous country and blues stars. 173
- As Beatles got more famous, the songs that the Beatles wrote started to change. By 1965, they were looking for ways to take their songwriting into different territories. 175
- “Lennon was by [1965] deeply frustrated with the band’s lovable public image, feeling that people didn’t see the real person behind his persona. He believed that he was not taken seriously, and that his true self was being submerged into the collective identity of the Beatles. The suits and polite bows that Brian Epstein had imposed on the band seemed funny and conformist to him. They grated against his rebelliousness and contrariness, as did Epstein’s natural deference to authority and tradition. Lennon had been struggling to find ways to express himself outside the straitjacket of Beatles songs – his two books of nonsense poetry and drawings (In His Own Wright and A Spaniard in the Works), published in 1964 and 1965 demonstrated his own anarchic side.” 176. Beatles’ image still managed by Epstein, conflicts with personal authenticity. The Beatles as a band, at least in the early years, were not even believed to be authentic by Lennon himself.
- ***“’Norwegian Wood’ was a transitional song for Lennon because for the first time he found a way to write a song directly about himself. The actual lyric is somewhat guarded, partly because he was speaking about a one-night stand and, as a married man, was reluctant to be too confessional. But the song is a recognizable version of Lennon’s real life and has a confessional tone, in spite of its surreal turn. In ‘Norwegian Wood’, we can see the seeds of a more direct approach that led to the styles and attitudes Lennon adopted a few years later.” 177
- ***Still, Lennon’s songs of this period tend to reveal little about his real life. While the odd song like “Help” and “Nowhere Man” did have clear personal relevance, songs like “I Am The Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “She Said She Said,” and “A Day In The Life” relied on tangential imagery that dropped clues and red herrings, but gave little away. 177
- ***”Glass Onion” – Lennon mocks the earnest interpreters who had searched for hidden meanings in Beatles songs.” 177 Does this include my interpretations, then?
- ***”Even ‘All You Need Is Love,” acclaimed as an anthem for the Summer of Love (1967), was more of a verbal game than a political statement, with its clever wordplay and riddle-like verses.” 177. Use of this song in Luvs diaper commercial.
- By the time he wrote “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, it was clear that he was becoming increasingly interested in a more personal kind of songwriting. 178
- Deeply personal songwriting was still relatively rare in the pop music of the 60s. 179.
- “By 1968, John Lennon was starting to chafe at the bounds of his group and to castigate himself for failing to achieve what he now really wanted: genuine self-expression. Over the next few years, as the Beatles began to disintegrate, he began to reappraise the situation.” 180
- McCartney – his songs were more sugar-coated than Lennon’s, less self-expressive. 181. The perception of personal authenticity was applied to the Beatles as a whole, then.
- “[Lennon] had come to be seen as someone with artistic sensibilities who held controversial political and religious views in his own right, rather than being a mere puppet. Now he wanted to live up to the possibilities created by this new improved public image.” 181. What created the change in his public image? What happened that he was first viewed as lovable, and then as revolutionary?
- “In his solo music he increasingly searched for ways to return to the raw roots of rock’n’roll (perhaps forgetting how playful those roots had actually been) and to make personal and political statements. While the surrealism and humor of his mid-period Beatles songs, with their layered production values and instrumentation, had represented a high point of his career, he now looked for ways to cut through the masks and layers of sound to communicate in a simpler, purer way, in order to show his audience his “real self.” 182. Pursued authenticity not just through lyrics, but through sound as well.
- With his first solo releases, in particular the single “Cold Turkey” and the Plastic Ono Band album, Lennon confronted his listeners with a presentation of his self as naked and rubbed raw…Never before had a pop star displayed personal complex written emotions with such intensity. 184
- “A common problem with self-expression and autobiography in songs is that however honest we may be, we tend to project a mixture of the person we are and the person we want to be, or the person we want to be seen as…But when performers come right out and say, ‘This is the kind of person I am, and what do you think of that,’ we react differently: we wonder why they want to make this statement about themselves and what they might be hiding. The very fact that they consciously assert something about themselves makes us treat their statements as deliberate attempts to project a certain persona, and we are led to question whether this is the truth, a self-deception, or a construction intended for public consumption.” 186 suspicion of autobiography
- ***”An indirect man had learned to be direct. And a natural-born individualist was trying to learn how to be (or refuse to be) one of the voices of a generation, no easy task…” 187
- “On the release of the next album, Imagine, Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson saw a problem in Lennon’s modified approach to music, saying, “I fear that John sees himself in the role of the truth-teller, and as such can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth.” 187
o “Gerson was referring to the tracks “Gimme Some Truth,” in which Lennon rails against hypocrites, politicians, and prima donnas in general, and “How Do You Sleep?” in which Lennon issues a series of insults calculated to hurt his erstwhile best friend Paul McCartney. Lennon’s faith in his own honesty encouraged him to revert to his earlier aggression but now with a self-righteous tinge that was uncomfortable to observe.” 187
- ***”Lennon said of his song “Imagine”: “Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugar-coated it is accepted…Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey.” He was justifying the commercial approach of the song’s music and lyrics, claiming that it was just as fundamental as the Plastic Ono Band material beneath its sugar-coating and that rather than ‘selling out,’ he was using the song’s commercial nature to smuggle through his political messages.” 198 Does his willingness to ‘play the game ‘weaken his authenticity (perceived and otherwise) or strengthen it?
- ***Lennon may have been misunderstanding the universal power of his own song. “Imagine” is able to rise about the particular political moment and be applied in different ways because it is abstract and speaks in riddles and questions rather than in bald statements. Can we imagine no possessions? Even when we know that the man who wrote the song had a room full of fur coats?...In this song, Lennon had taken a step away from the extremes of self-expression and hard-line politics and created a fable that could be applied to any listener…In fact, Lennon wasn’t disguising a moment of authenticity and self-expression beneath commercialism – he was taking a healthy step away from authenticity and self-absorption in order to communicate a message while still entertaining us. It is partly for this reason that “Imagine” is still a powerful song and one that will last a long time.” 198. “Imagine no possessions’. This very song was a possession.
Chapter TEN – Moby, the KLF, and the Ongoing Quest for Authenticity
- Moby’s record, “Play” went to number one in many countries, sold ten million copies and three million singles, and propelled Moby to the position of the world’s best-selling dance musician.
- Moby’s tracks, in turn, “…were sold as commercials for a wide range of luxury goods. Producers of commercials recognized that while the music was modern and unobtrusive, it had an emotional effect on the listener, which made it ideal for underpinning the selling moment.” 321-2. How does Beatles music function within this realm of emotion and advertising?
- Moby defended his music’s ubiquity in advertisements on the basis that it is a kind of guerrilla marketing, compensating for his underdog status. If music doesn’t get played on radio, commercials are another way to hear it. 321
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
- 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
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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
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
Frank, T. The Conquest of Cool (1997).
Thomas Frank - Conquest of Cool
(golden age, 50s, to creative revolution, 60s)
Chapter ONE
- conservative conceptions of the 60s. 1-4
o 60’s malignancy extending into 80s (think beatles revolution)
- neg imagines in mass culture 4
- counterculture and business 4 – 5
o beatles in nike ad 4
- business 5-9
- counterculture not only in 60s 6
- Arrival of the Beatles, 1964, helped trigger counterculture (they performed in mass culture – contradicting) 8
- Are any representations of counterculture ‘authentic’? How do you separate real counterculture from corporate counterculture? 7, 8
- co-option. Use of counterculture ideology in business. 7 – 9
o whether they deserve vilification or not, they process by which they made rebel subcultures their own is clearly an important element of contemporary life. 9
- many American industries didn’t view counterculture as an enemy, but as an ally in struggle against dead weight procedure and hierarchy. 9
o in late 50s and early 60s, advertising and menswear execs criticized their industries in a similar manner to the countercultural critique of mass society – over organization, lack of creativity 9
o saw countercultural American youth as a way to revitalize business and consumer order (also, desirable market) 9
o American business – in 50s, conformity. In 60s, authenticity. Tricky description. 9
Look at all the lonely people
- standard story of counterculture in 60s begins with reaction against ‘mass society’ 9
o authors cited mass produced goods, prefabricated towns, loss of individuality 10
o The Organization Man (look up in index)
- conformity 10…
- Norman Mailer – solution = the Hipster (essentially description of the counterculture). 12
o Quest for authentic experience 13
- Enthusiasm of ordinary americans for cultural revolution 13
- Beatles – bearers of liberal order were infatuated with the counterculture (esp after 1967. Gave beatles reverence, 13
- Story of counterculture isn’t binary. Not just ‘hip’ as opposite of ‘square’ 15 – theory of co-option. 15, 16
- Counterculture worked revoltion through lifestyle rather than politics 15
- Theodore Roszak – counterculture = solution to meaningless, usurped negatively by business looking to make a buck 14, 16
- Consciousness I, II, III. 14 (and 57, Bernbach)
Hip as Hegemon
- recent writings – signifiers taken by youth culture are produced in mass media, but revolution comes in the way they consume them (production v consumption). 17
- transgression is the key to resistance (violation of norms) 17
- John Fiske – mass-produced culture is both a side of oppression and rebellion 17
- In order for things to be popular, they must skirt the edge of homogeneity 18
- Business, corporate ideology 18
- Advertising – to analyze the machinations of advertising industry is to suggest that public are cultural dupes? 19
- Cant make comparisons of squaer and hip, power-bloc and people, conformity v individualism. 19
- Consumer capitalism didn’t demand conformity – it rejected all traditions and embraced desire 20
- Business Changes in 60s. 20
o Management literature, shows that relationship bw corporations and counterculture not so strange 20, 21
- Frederick Winslow Taylor – time-and-motions studied 20
- Organization Man – may have been astute social criticism, first sparks in cultural uprising that would become the counterculture. It was also a management book, a study of American business and its problems. 21
- Cold war
- Businesses tried to be more creative – management books ¬ The Human Side of Enterprise 22
o Theory X, Theory Y
- Revolution in Industrial Organization 23
o Market segmentation, demographics, targeting products to specific groups rather than everybody 23
- Construction of consumer subjectivity, advertisers attempt to call group identities into existence 24
- Pepsi – ‘cola wars’ – pepsi created and appealed to group identities --- target: YOUTH 24
o Conceptual position of youthfulness became as great an element of the marketing picture as the youth itself 25
- Connection bw management theory and counterculture 26
- Menswear and ad industries reaction to youth culture was more complex then co-option theory. Commonalities of two industries. 27
- 1967 and 1968 (years marked earlier for Beatles influence) signaled a change in the menswear and ad industries – leaning towards counterculture. 27
- space age 28
- “Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context…suggests instead that the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity” 29
- maybe beatles / consumption and capitalism isn’t so strange? 30
Chapter TWO
- Scientific advertising, no creativity, formulas. 38…
- Cold war 47
- Mass audience / groupthought 48, 49
- David Ogilvy – first proponent of science advertising (45-47), then of creative, non-scientific advertising (50)
Chapter THREE
- Nike (beatles) 53
- In 60s, advertising suddenly idealized not the man in plain suits, but the manic ones in offbeat clothing. 54
- Creative revolution 54
- Advertising in 60s acknowledged and sympathized with mass society critique. Admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. Sympathized with ppls fears of conformity and revulsion from artificiality (inauthenticity) and packaged pleasures. Pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Compared new hip consumerism to older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited. 54
- New Madison avenue’s solution to problems of consumer culture was more consuming. like Discover card commercial.
- Bill Bernbach, towering figure of advertising world in 60s. Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB) was ‘unchallenged leader of creative revolution of the 60s.’ changed the culture of advertising. 55…
o First adman to embrace mass society critique (volkswagon campaign), to appeal directly to powerful public fears of conformity, manipulation, fraud, powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. 55
o Invented a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism – perhaps more powerful cultural tendency of the age – to consumerism itself. 55
o Bernbach was enemy of technocracy long before counterculture raised voice of protest 56
o Rationalized creative operation 57
- Creative revolution 59
- Age of ‘groupthink’ (groupthought) began to end in early 60s. 59
- Cars were markers of managerial efficiency in the worst Organization Man way. Volkswagon turned that on its head. 61…
o Most car ads were contemptuous of consumer intelligence, and consumers knew it. In wake of The Hidden Persuaders, The Hucksters, the quiz show scandals, FTC lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers, consumer skepticism toward advertising was at an all time high. Volkswagon took this skepticism into account and made it part of their ad’s discursive apparatus. Spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through the puffery of Madison avenue. 63
- Volkswagon ads were peppered with ‘honest’ humorous admissions about how ugly, bad, small their cars were and acknowledged that it wanted to make money. Not only did it actually speak to consumers as adults instead of babies, it also turned traditional notions and structures of salesmanship around. 63
o Mirrors and appeals to the countercultural animosity towards the traditional and its desire to subvert structure.
- Volkswagon ads showed awareness of and sympathy for mass society critique and actively contributed to the discourse, composing cutting jibes against the chrome-plated monsters from Detroit and proffering up volkswagens as badges of alienation from the ways a society whose most prominent emblmes were the tailfin and the tract home with a two-car garage. 64
- Other attacks by Volkswagen – 64…
- V.Wagen critique extends to other objections 64
- V.Wagen was anti-car – signifier of uprising against cultural establishment. 67
- In 50s, V.Wagen known as nazi product. 67…
- Irony implicit in fact that V.Wagen’s hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass society against which hip had declared itself most vehemently at odds (just like beatles?). co-option theory turned upside down. 68
- V.Wagen ads – form of anti-advertising that worked by distancing a product from consumerism. Introduced America to a new aesthetic of consuming. 68
- What distinguishes the advertising of the creative revolution is that it takes into account – and offers to solve – the problems that consumerism had created. 68
** - hip would become the dynamic principle of the 60s, a cultural perpetual motion machine transforming disgust with consumerism into fuel for the ever-accelerating consumer society** 68 --- beatles
Chapter FOUR
- Howard Gossage, adman, attacked American commercial culture just like Frankfurt School – creative revolution 75, 76
- American advertisers would rank among country’s most visible critics of mass society. This skepticism would be the ideological point where the advertisers of the 60s parted ways from its predecessors. 76
- Jerry Della Femina – memoir, 1969. Describes agencies as places of fear. 78…
o If Della Famina was the bullshit barometer he believed himself to be, by the end of the 60s, the American adman was not a touchy defender of consumer excess, but a jaded scoffer contemptuous of the institutions of consumer society, scornful of the imbecile products by which it worked, and corrosively skeptical of the ways in which the establishment agencies foisted them on the public → like the counterculture. 80
- George Lois, artistic advertisements, hated institutional procedures that made bad advertising 80…
o Until creative revolution, he said, production of American advertising was smothered by rigid, representative codes of dullness-inducing rules. 80
- Defining characteristic of post-Organization white-collar workers is a powerful artistic impulse. 81
- Lois formed own agency with Fred Papert and Julien Koenig (copywriter of v.wagen ads). PKL very successful, specialized in creative outrage, signaled changing dynamics in american admaking. 82 → example of anger towards establishment.
- PKL very successful (first to sell stock publicly). Lois left in 67 to ‘kick the curse of bigness’ and set up another shop. PKL’s success didn’t nec make it an ‘establishment’, but lois said it turned him from an artist into a supervisor. 83
- 60s vision of agency operations: in other businesses, management make the critical decisions. In advertising, the copywriter / art director make the decisions, because the ads are what advertising is all about. 84
- Lois’s new firm – Lois Holland Callaway – anti-organizational extreme. Agency would do important stuff and hire other people to do the rest. 84
o Kept employees to a minimum, thus maximizing creative freedom. Lois argued that openness is a necessary precondition to realizing the central element of his advertising: outrage. 84
*** - In order for an ad to work, Lois argued in 1991, one had to cause outrage. Good advertising, therefore, is synonymous with rebellion, with difference, with the avante garde’s search for the new…[quote] Advertising should stun momentarily…it should seem to be outrageous. In that swift interval between the initial shock and the realization that what you are showing is not as outrageous as it seems, you capture the audience. *** 84-5
- Lois’s techniques necessarily militate against whatever is acceptable at present…the adman must live in perpetual rebellion against whatever is established, accepted, received. 85
- The emersonian adage could be updated to fit the creative revolution: He who would be an adma must be a nonconformist. → like counterculture 85
- Lois’s ads challenged different industries. Herald-Tribune ad was shut down by CBS president, ads for Edwards & Hanly (brokerage firm) was monitored by new york stock exchange (many ads forced to be removed). The new capitalism was beginning to challenge the white pillars of order everywhere. 86
Chapter FIVE
- As creative revolution followed DDBs success, ad industry began to recognize non-conformity as a dynamic element of advertising and of the ‘permanent revolution’ of capitalism itself. 89
- The basic task of advertising, it seemed in the 60s, was not to encourage conformity but a never-ending rebellion against whatever it is that everyone else is doing, a forced and exaggerated individualism. → like counterculture. 90
- Addressing the ‘real’ problems of society and outlining the ‘real’ differences, then, would be the story of advertising in the 1960s. → counterculture desire for authenticity. 90
- Creative revolution, still market-driven 90
- After 15 yeas of predictability and utopian fantasy, American capitalism suddenly developed an enthusiasm for graphic sophistication, for naturalism, for nonconformity, and for willful transgression. 90
- By 1966, the anti-principles of creativity had become rule book stuff in their own right 92
- The primary goal of unleashing all of this creativity was not to overthrow capitalism, or even necessarily to make the workplace happier, but to jump-start the engine of change that drove consumer culture. 94
- Admen should have an automatic distrust of received (traditional?) ideas. → like counterculture. 94
- Willingness to defy convention was good for creative personnel, it made a fine brand-image as well. --- this brand image was often illustrated with icons of youth culture.
- Nonconformity was fast becoming the advertising style of the decade, from the office antics of the now-unleashed creative workers, to the graphic stle they favored, to the new consumer whose image they were crafting. 95
The creative workplace
- as advertising theory changed, agency organization and management did as well. Creative revolution affected not only the way admen thought and the ads they produced, byt also their everyday business practices. Decentralized, nonhierarchical anti-organizations. 95
o rebelled against assembly-line agencies 100
- old-school industries began to draft creative’s to change their luck, but then still applied old-school rules. 103
Chapter SIX
- by 1996, creativity had merged with the counterculture. 105
o advertisings strange and sudden infatuation with countercultural imagery, overnight conversion to rock music 106
- counterculture was an ideal expression of the new vision of consuming that theory-y capitalism, with all its glorious flexibility, instant communication, and rapid obsolescence, was bringing into existence. 106
- youth became dominant industry fantasy.107
- hip people famously hated Madison avenue and the plastic civilization for which it stoof, and yet advertisers could never seem to get enough of their criticism, their music, or the excellent trappings of their liberated ways. 107
- youth culture – size of demographic, economically powerful…not all demographics though. Advertising wanted counterculture youth, not normal youth. 109
- admen in the 1960s loved rock and roll, or at least claimed they did. Musical references. BEATLES. 113
- honesty (authenticity) and sense of humor was required to advertise to youth or young-minded. 117
- Revolution against conformity was most definitely not a revolution against consumerism or the institution of advertising…the counterculture was ultimately just a branch of the same revolution that had swept the critical-creative style to prominence and that many believed was demolishing theory x hierarchy everywhere, from Vietnam to the boardroom. 118
- **Use of Youth culture / youth imagery not entirely new thing in 60s – done since 20s. 118
- youth had a meaning and appeal that extended far beyond the market proper. Think young. 118
- “The counterculture seemed to have it all – the unconnectedness which would allow customers to indulge transitory whims, the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral Puritanism, and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the slow moving, buttoned down conformity of their abstemious ancestors. In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated.” 119
- Beatles – ‘yellow submarine art’ 120
- Countercuture revolutionized America’s consuming ways 122
- ‘American advertising took the side it did during the cultural revolution of the 1960s not simply because it wanted to sell a particular demographic, but because it found great promise in the new values of the counterculture. Conformity, other-direction, contempt for audiences, ad Reevesian repetition were good neither as management styles nor as consuming models, the creative revolutionaries now proclaimed.’ 123
- Consumer cynicism towards mass society. 126
- ‘love power’ 128 (beatles – all you need is love, now used)
Chapter SEVEN
- ads became hip in the 60s. 133
- inflections of non-conformity, artists, mocking consumerism (when consumerism mocked, it was consumerism as understood by the critics of mass society 148)
o weird because advertising is well known as one of the primary engines of conformity. 139
- promse of ‘commercialized hip’ 150
- Ads – feminism 152…
- Pepsi – differentiate from coke. The uncola. We want to be different. 163
Chapter EIGHT
- Cola wars 169
- BEATLES 177 use in Pepsi commercial?
Chapter NINE
- peacock revolution
- new fashion arrive with BEATLES, hippies, and student revolts 187
- BEATLES 190
- 1967, counterculture hit the media as a ‘thing’ 191
Chapter TEN
- revolution probably most overused word in 60s. 208
- by 1967, the rebel had become a paragon of consumer virtue. 209
- By mid-1968, industry ads for products that enabled wearers to signify their defiance of convention, their hostility to rules and tradition were commonplace. 211
Chapter ELEVEN
- figure of the cultural rebel 227
- Even through the ‘revolution’ capitalism remained firmly in the national saddle. 228
- Mark Crispin Miller – televisions pseudo-subversiveness is an essential element of the way it works. Unlike the telescreens in 1984 which demand that people revere authority. Television gains their assent by mocking authority, by leaving only itself. ‘TV would seem to be an essentially iconoclastic medium…and yet it is this inherent subversiveness toward any visible authority that has enabled TV to establish its own total rule – for it is all individuality that TV annihilates, either by not conveying it or by making it look ludicrous.’ And, Miller observes, this strategy has proven particularly lucrative as countercultural participants became prime middle-ages consumers in their own right. 231
- ‘Regardless of its objective ‘content’, and regardless of whether it even exists, rebel youth will always be found to fit the same profile, and will always be understood as an updating of the 1960s original. 234
- The 60s are more than merely the homeland of hip, the are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.
(golden age, 50s, to creative revolution, 60s)
Chapter ONE
- conservative conceptions of the 60s. 1-4
o 60’s malignancy extending into 80s (think beatles revolution)
- neg imagines in mass culture 4
- counterculture and business 4 – 5
o beatles in nike ad 4
- business 5-9
- counterculture not only in 60s 6
- Arrival of the Beatles, 1964, helped trigger counterculture (they performed in mass culture – contradicting) 8
- Are any representations of counterculture ‘authentic’? How do you separate real counterculture from corporate counterculture? 7, 8
- co-option. Use of counterculture ideology in business. 7 – 9
o whether they deserve vilification or not, they process by which they made rebel subcultures their own is clearly an important element of contemporary life. 9
- many American industries didn’t view counterculture as an enemy, but as an ally in struggle against dead weight procedure and hierarchy. 9
o in late 50s and early 60s, advertising and menswear execs criticized their industries in a similar manner to the countercultural critique of mass society – over organization, lack of creativity 9
o saw countercultural American youth as a way to revitalize business and consumer order (also, desirable market) 9
o American business – in 50s, conformity. In 60s, authenticity. Tricky description. 9
Look at all the lonely people
- standard story of counterculture in 60s begins with reaction against ‘mass society’ 9
o authors cited mass produced goods, prefabricated towns, loss of individuality 10
o The Organization Man (look up in index)
- conformity 10…
- Norman Mailer – solution = the Hipster (essentially description of the counterculture). 12
o Quest for authentic experience 13
- Enthusiasm of ordinary americans for cultural revolution 13
- Beatles – bearers of liberal order were infatuated with the counterculture (esp after 1967. Gave beatles reverence, 13
- Story of counterculture isn’t binary. Not just ‘hip’ as opposite of ‘square’ 15 – theory of co-option. 15, 16
- Counterculture worked revoltion through lifestyle rather than politics 15
- Theodore Roszak – counterculture = solution to meaningless, usurped negatively by business looking to make a buck 14, 16
- Consciousness I, II, III. 14 (and 57, Bernbach)
Hip as Hegemon
- recent writings – signifiers taken by youth culture are produced in mass media, but revolution comes in the way they consume them (production v consumption). 17
- transgression is the key to resistance (violation of norms) 17
- John Fiske – mass-produced culture is both a side of oppression and rebellion 17
- In order for things to be popular, they must skirt the edge of homogeneity 18
- Business, corporate ideology 18
- Advertising – to analyze the machinations of advertising industry is to suggest that public are cultural dupes? 19
- Cant make comparisons of squaer and hip, power-bloc and people, conformity v individualism. 19
- Consumer capitalism didn’t demand conformity – it rejected all traditions and embraced desire 20
- Business Changes in 60s. 20
o Management literature, shows that relationship bw corporations and counterculture not so strange 20, 21
- Frederick Winslow Taylor – time-and-motions studied 20
- Organization Man – may have been astute social criticism, first sparks in cultural uprising that would become the counterculture. It was also a management book, a study of American business and its problems. 21
- Cold war
- Businesses tried to be more creative – management books ¬ The Human Side of Enterprise 22
o Theory X, Theory Y
- Revolution in Industrial Organization 23
o Market segmentation, demographics, targeting products to specific groups rather than everybody 23
- Construction of consumer subjectivity, advertisers attempt to call group identities into existence 24
- Pepsi – ‘cola wars’ – pepsi created and appealed to group identities --- target: YOUTH 24
o Conceptual position of youthfulness became as great an element of the marketing picture as the youth itself 25
- Connection bw management theory and counterculture 26
- Menswear and ad industries reaction to youth culture was more complex then co-option theory. Commonalities of two industries. 27
- 1967 and 1968 (years marked earlier for Beatles influence) signaled a change in the menswear and ad industries – leaning towards counterculture. 27
- space age 28
- “Placing the culture of the 1960s in this corporate context…suggests instead that the counterculture may be more accurately understood as a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a colorful installment in the twentieth century drama of consumer subjectivity” 29
- maybe beatles / consumption and capitalism isn’t so strange? 30
Chapter TWO
- Scientific advertising, no creativity, formulas. 38…
- Cold war 47
- Mass audience / groupthought 48, 49
- David Ogilvy – first proponent of science advertising (45-47), then of creative, non-scientific advertising (50)
Chapter THREE
- Nike (beatles) 53
- In 60s, advertising suddenly idealized not the man in plain suits, but the manic ones in offbeat clothing. 54
- Creative revolution 54
- Advertising in 60s acknowledged and sympathized with mass society critique. Admitted that consuming was not the wonder-world it was cracked up to be. Sympathized with ppls fears of conformity and revulsion from artificiality (inauthenticity) and packaged pleasures. Pandered to public distrust of advertising and dislike of admen. Compared new hip consumerism to older capitalist ideology and left the latter permanently discredited. 54
- New Madison avenue’s solution to problems of consumer culture was more consuming. like Discover card commercial.
- Bill Bernbach, towering figure of advertising world in 60s. Doyle Dane Bernbach agency (DDB) was ‘unchallenged leader of creative revolution of the 60s.’ changed the culture of advertising. 55…
o First adman to embrace mass society critique (volkswagon campaign), to appeal directly to powerful public fears of conformity, manipulation, fraud, powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. 55
o Invented a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism – perhaps more powerful cultural tendency of the age – to consumerism itself. 55
o Bernbach was enemy of technocracy long before counterculture raised voice of protest 56
o Rationalized creative operation 57
- Creative revolution 59
- Age of ‘groupthink’ (groupthought) began to end in early 60s. 59
- Cars were markers of managerial efficiency in the worst Organization Man way. Volkswagon turned that on its head. 61…
o Most car ads were contemptuous of consumer intelligence, and consumers knew it. In wake of The Hidden Persuaders, The Hucksters, the quiz show scandals, FTC lawsuits against fraudulent advertisers, consumer skepticism toward advertising was at an all time high. Volkswagon took this skepticism into account and made it part of their ad’s discursive apparatus. Spoke to consumers as canny beings capable of seeing through the puffery of Madison avenue. 63
- Volkswagon ads were peppered with ‘honest’ humorous admissions about how ugly, bad, small their cars were and acknowledged that it wanted to make money. Not only did it actually speak to consumers as adults instead of babies, it also turned traditional notions and structures of salesmanship around. 63
o Mirrors and appeals to the countercultural animosity towards the traditional and its desire to subvert structure.
- Volkswagon ads showed awareness of and sympathy for mass society critique and actively contributed to the discourse, composing cutting jibes against the chrome-plated monsters from Detroit and proffering up volkswagens as badges of alienation from the ways a society whose most prominent emblmes were the tailfin and the tract home with a two-car garage. 64
- Other attacks by Volkswagen – 64…
- V.Wagen critique extends to other objections 64
- V.Wagen was anti-car – signifier of uprising against cultural establishment. 67
- In 50s, V.Wagen known as nazi product. 67…
- Irony implicit in fact that V.Wagen’s hipness was a product of advertising, the institution of mass society against which hip had declared itself most vehemently at odds (just like beatles?). co-option theory turned upside down. 68
- V.Wagen ads – form of anti-advertising that worked by distancing a product from consumerism. Introduced America to a new aesthetic of consuming. 68
- What distinguishes the advertising of the creative revolution is that it takes into account – and offers to solve – the problems that consumerism had created. 68
** - hip would become the dynamic principle of the 60s, a cultural perpetual motion machine transforming disgust with consumerism into fuel for the ever-accelerating consumer society** 68 --- beatles
Chapter FOUR
- Howard Gossage, adman, attacked American commercial culture just like Frankfurt School – creative revolution 75, 76
- American advertisers would rank among country’s most visible critics of mass society. This skepticism would be the ideological point where the advertisers of the 60s parted ways from its predecessors. 76
- Jerry Della Femina – memoir, 1969. Describes agencies as places of fear. 78…
o If Della Famina was the bullshit barometer he believed himself to be, by the end of the 60s, the American adman was not a touchy defender of consumer excess, but a jaded scoffer contemptuous of the institutions of consumer society, scornful of the imbecile products by which it worked, and corrosively skeptical of the ways in which the establishment agencies foisted them on the public → like the counterculture. 80
- George Lois, artistic advertisements, hated institutional procedures that made bad advertising 80…
o Until creative revolution, he said, production of American advertising was smothered by rigid, representative codes of dullness-inducing rules. 80
- Defining characteristic of post-Organization white-collar workers is a powerful artistic impulse. 81
- Lois formed own agency with Fred Papert and Julien Koenig (copywriter of v.wagen ads). PKL very successful, specialized in creative outrage, signaled changing dynamics in american admaking. 82 → example of anger towards establishment.
- PKL very successful (first to sell stock publicly). Lois left in 67 to ‘kick the curse of bigness’ and set up another shop. PKL’s success didn’t nec make it an ‘establishment’, but lois said it turned him from an artist into a supervisor. 83
- 60s vision of agency operations: in other businesses, management make the critical decisions. In advertising, the copywriter / art director make the decisions, because the ads are what advertising is all about. 84
- Lois’s new firm – Lois Holland Callaway – anti-organizational extreme. Agency would do important stuff and hire other people to do the rest. 84
o Kept employees to a minimum, thus maximizing creative freedom. Lois argued that openness is a necessary precondition to realizing the central element of his advertising: outrage. 84
*** - In order for an ad to work, Lois argued in 1991, one had to cause outrage. Good advertising, therefore, is synonymous with rebellion, with difference, with the avante garde’s search for the new…[quote] Advertising should stun momentarily…it should seem to be outrageous. In that swift interval between the initial shock and the realization that what you are showing is not as outrageous as it seems, you capture the audience. *** 84-5
- Lois’s techniques necessarily militate against whatever is acceptable at present…the adman must live in perpetual rebellion against whatever is established, accepted, received. 85
- The emersonian adage could be updated to fit the creative revolution: He who would be an adma must be a nonconformist. → like counterculture 85
- Lois’s ads challenged different industries. Herald-Tribune ad was shut down by CBS president, ads for Edwards & Hanly (brokerage firm) was monitored by new york stock exchange (many ads forced to be removed). The new capitalism was beginning to challenge the white pillars of order everywhere. 86
Chapter FIVE
- As creative revolution followed DDBs success, ad industry began to recognize non-conformity as a dynamic element of advertising and of the ‘permanent revolution’ of capitalism itself. 89
- The basic task of advertising, it seemed in the 60s, was not to encourage conformity but a never-ending rebellion against whatever it is that everyone else is doing, a forced and exaggerated individualism. → like counterculture. 90
- Addressing the ‘real’ problems of society and outlining the ‘real’ differences, then, would be the story of advertising in the 1960s. → counterculture desire for authenticity. 90
- Creative revolution, still market-driven 90
- After 15 yeas of predictability and utopian fantasy, American capitalism suddenly developed an enthusiasm for graphic sophistication, for naturalism, for nonconformity, and for willful transgression. 90
- By 1966, the anti-principles of creativity had become rule book stuff in their own right 92
- The primary goal of unleashing all of this creativity was not to overthrow capitalism, or even necessarily to make the workplace happier, but to jump-start the engine of change that drove consumer culture. 94
- Admen should have an automatic distrust of received (traditional?) ideas. → like counterculture. 94
- Willingness to defy convention was good for creative personnel, it made a fine brand-image as well. --- this brand image was often illustrated with icons of youth culture.
- Nonconformity was fast becoming the advertising style of the decade, from the office antics of the now-unleashed creative workers, to the graphic stle they favored, to the new consumer whose image they were crafting. 95
The creative workplace
- as advertising theory changed, agency organization and management did as well. Creative revolution affected not only the way admen thought and the ads they produced, byt also their everyday business practices. Decentralized, nonhierarchical anti-organizations. 95
o rebelled against assembly-line agencies 100
- old-school industries began to draft creative’s to change their luck, but then still applied old-school rules. 103
Chapter SIX
- by 1996, creativity had merged with the counterculture. 105
o advertisings strange and sudden infatuation with countercultural imagery, overnight conversion to rock music 106
- counterculture was an ideal expression of the new vision of consuming that theory-y capitalism, with all its glorious flexibility, instant communication, and rapid obsolescence, was bringing into existence. 106
- youth became dominant industry fantasy.107
- hip people famously hated Madison avenue and the plastic civilization for which it stoof, and yet advertisers could never seem to get enough of their criticism, their music, or the excellent trappings of their liberated ways. 107
- youth culture – size of demographic, economically powerful…not all demographics though. Advertising wanted counterculture youth, not normal youth. 109
- admen in the 1960s loved rock and roll, or at least claimed they did. Musical references. BEATLES. 113
- honesty (authenticity) and sense of humor was required to advertise to youth or young-minded. 117
- Revolution against conformity was most definitely not a revolution against consumerism or the institution of advertising…the counterculture was ultimately just a branch of the same revolution that had swept the critical-creative style to prominence and that many believed was demolishing theory x hierarchy everywhere, from Vietnam to the boardroom. 118
- **Use of Youth culture / youth imagery not entirely new thing in 60s – done since 20s. 118
- youth had a meaning and appeal that extended far beyond the market proper. Think young. 118
- “The counterculture seemed to have it all – the unconnectedness which would allow customers to indulge transitory whims, the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral Puritanism, and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the slow moving, buttoned down conformity of their abstemious ancestors. In the counterculture, admen believed they had found both a perfect model for consumer subjectivity, intelligent and at war with the conformist past, and a cultural machine for turning disgust with consumerism into the very fuel by which consumerism might be accelerated.” 119
- Beatles – ‘yellow submarine art’ 120
- Countercuture revolutionized America’s consuming ways 122
- ‘American advertising took the side it did during the cultural revolution of the 1960s not simply because it wanted to sell a particular demographic, but because it found great promise in the new values of the counterculture. Conformity, other-direction, contempt for audiences, ad Reevesian repetition were good neither as management styles nor as consuming models, the creative revolutionaries now proclaimed.’ 123
- Consumer cynicism towards mass society. 126
- ‘love power’ 128 (beatles – all you need is love, now used)
Chapter SEVEN
- ads became hip in the 60s. 133
- inflections of non-conformity, artists, mocking consumerism (when consumerism mocked, it was consumerism as understood by the critics of mass society 148)
o weird because advertising is well known as one of the primary engines of conformity. 139
- promse of ‘commercialized hip’ 150
- Ads – feminism 152…
- Pepsi – differentiate from coke. The uncola. We want to be different. 163
Chapter EIGHT
- Cola wars 169
- BEATLES 177 use in Pepsi commercial?
Chapter NINE
- peacock revolution
- new fashion arrive with BEATLES, hippies, and student revolts 187
- BEATLES 190
- 1967, counterculture hit the media as a ‘thing’ 191
Chapter TEN
- revolution probably most overused word in 60s. 208
- by 1967, the rebel had become a paragon of consumer virtue. 209
- By mid-1968, industry ads for products that enabled wearers to signify their defiance of convention, their hostility to rules and tradition were commonplace. 211
Chapter ELEVEN
- figure of the cultural rebel 227
- Even through the ‘revolution’ capitalism remained firmly in the national saddle. 228
- Mark Crispin Miller – televisions pseudo-subversiveness is an essential element of the way it works. Unlike the telescreens in 1984 which demand that people revere authority. Television gains their assent by mocking authority, by leaving only itself. ‘TV would seem to be an essentially iconoclastic medium…and yet it is this inherent subversiveness toward any visible authority that has enabled TV to establish its own total rule – for it is all individuality that TV annihilates, either by not conveying it or by making it look ludicrous.’ And, Miller observes, this strategy has proven particularly lucrative as countercultural participants became prime middle-ages consumers in their own right. 231
- ‘Regardless of its objective ‘content’, and regardless of whether it even exists, rebel youth will always be found to fit the same profile, and will always be understood as an updating of the 1960s original. 234
- The 60s are more than merely the homeland of hip, the are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent.
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