Page 243 - Cultural Theory

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••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

popular music away from the traditional concerns of musicologists (who tend to
concentrate on evaluating the technical qualities of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic
structures in selected compositions) onto semiotic questions of representation and
meaning, as well as emphasizing the pleasures of the text. Third, Antonio Gramsci’s
(1971) neo-Marxist argument that there is a constant struggle for hegemony, the bat-
tle to win ‘total social authority’ by the ruling classes over subordinate groups, has
influenced much of the scholarship on musical subcultures and fandom by empha-
sizing the ways in which acts of consumption can create oppositional cultures
through challenging the status quo. The key site articulating Gramsci’s position has
been the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham
in the 1970s through its classic work on youth subcultures.
Before the discussion can properly begin, it is important to recognize that most
authors writing in the field tend to distinguish popular music from folk and classical
music as it ‘developed historically in and through the mass media’ (Toynbee, 2000:
xix). While definitional disputes continue to be significant in the literature, not least
since there are conflicting meanings generated by the very notion of ‘popular’, in
this chapter, the term popular music will be used to refer to mass-produced music
with a large audience in mind and includes such genres as dance, hip-hop, pop, as
well as rock, which has tended to receive most sociological attention (the ground-
breaking study is Frith, 1983). Nevertheless, it is this refusal to be defined that helps
to give popular music its cultural vitality.

Production

Adorno and the culture industry

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Theodor Adorno’s uncompromising
thinking on popular music as a product of a monolithic ‘culture industry’. For
instance, it has been argued that ‘Adorno’s is the most systematic and most searing
analysis of mass culture and the most challenging for anyone claiming even a scrap
of value for the products that come churning out of the music industry’ (Frith, 1983:
44). As we have seen in other chapters, Adorno’s ideas on popular music were not
only part of a broader reworking of Marxist philosophy at the University of
Frankfurt, and then in exile following the Nazi seizure of power in the 1930s, but
were also only a minor element in his attempt to develop a general aesthetics of
music (Paddison, 1993).
His early critique ‘On Popular Music’, originally published in 1941, which estab-
lishes these themes, has three main targets. First, he argues the ‘fundamental charac-
teristic of popular music’ is ‘standardization’ (Adorno, 1941: 302). He insists that the
product is standardized from the overall range of songs on offer all the way down to
the specific details of the tunes and he explains that the ‘beginning of the chorus is
replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses’ (ibid.). Moreover, this

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