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Popular Music
CHAPTER TWELVE
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Eamonn Carrabine

Elvis Costello once famously insisted that writing about music was like ‘dancing
about architecture’ (Goddard, 2002: 9). His point is that words can never fully cap-
ture the electrifying rush and emotional punch that a great pop song can deliver.
While a common objection among fans, journalists and performers is that attempts
to analyse music often fail to grasp what makes the sound so important in the first
1
place, explaining why popular music can have such a powerful impact in our daily
lives is one of the central tasks of cultural analysis and one that has a rich theoreti-
cal legacy. A core theme in this critical literature on popular music is a tension
between describing the music industry as a constraining, exploitative and manipula-
tive machine while perceiving the audience as active, autonomous and creative in its
use of the texts manufactured by capitalist enterprise. At its extremes this can be
thought of as equating production with domination and consumption with freedom,
which reflects tensions between ‘mass culture’ and ‘postmodern’ discussions of pop-
ular culture more generally and documented elsewhere in this book, but also finds
expression in journalistic accounts of hackneyed struggles between ‘the Man’ and
‘the Kids’.
As we will see, one of the problems with this characterization is the assumption
that the relationships between production and consumption are direct and straight-
forward. They are, of course, neither. The industry does not have the power to con-
trol which music will be made nor determine its popularity, while the audience has
little say in deciding which products will be on display in high street mega-stores. In
this chapter, I discuss the three major approaches to popular music found in cultural
theory and argue that a continuing failure in the literature is to isolate the analysis
of production, text and audience from each other in ways that militate against syn-
thesis and simplify, or simply ignore, questions surrounding power.
First, the critical theory of Theodor Adorno (1991), who maintained that a ‘culture
industry’ produced standardized popular music that deceived listeners through
‘pseudo-individualization’ and manipulated their desires, has left a major legacy in
the field with many studies continuing to examine the organizational dynamics of
the music industry in a political-economic context of profit maximization. Second, the
cultural critic Roland Barthes (1977a) has done much to shift the textual study of

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