Page 246 - Cultural Theory

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••• Popular Music •••

distributed 70 per cent of the music available since the end of the nineteenth
3
century, while it has more recently been calculated that six major companies have
come to dominate the global music market in the 1990s by controlling the means by
which 80 to 85 per cent of the recordings sold are produced, manufactured and dis-
tributed (Negus, 1996: 51).
Chapple and Garafalo’s (1977: 300) central point is that this concentration of own-
ership among a few major companies has enabled capitalist corporations to ‘colonize
leisure’ and that the music business has become ‘firmly part of the American corporate
structure’. Their conclusion then is that any critical possibilities in popular music are
absorbed and exploited by the corporations. This point is developed in Nelson George’s
(1988) critical discussion of the impact of a white dominated industry on the music
and cultural identities of black performers. He argues that the industry has been
directly responsible for transforming black forms of expression into a commodity and
turning the sounds into bland, predictable, apolitical genres from the late 1960s. Like
Chapple and Garofalo, he argues that forms of music lose their radical edge when they
are co-opted by the music business. He states this unequivocally:

black culture, and especially R and B music, has atrophied. The music is just not
as gutsy or spirited or tuned into the needs of its core audience as it once was.
Compare the early Aretha Franklin to Whitney Houston. Franklin’s music always
relied heavily on the black inner-city experience, and especially on the black
church. When she forgets that, she stumbles. Houston is extremely talented,
but most of her music is ‘color-blind,’ such a product of eighties crossover mar-
keting, that in her commercial triumph is a hollowness of spirit that mocks her
own gospel roots.
(George, 1988: xiv)

This passage clearly illustrates the impact of standardization and ‘integration’ on artistic
creativity and cultural identity – though hip hop would come to define the anger and
disillusionment rendered by economic marginalization and urban apartheid experi-
enced for a generation of black and white youth (Rose, 1994). The alienation at the heart
of America’s race relations is also captured in Naomi Klein’s (2000: 76) discussion of
Tommy Hilfiger’s marketing strategy as it is based on ‘selling white youth on their
fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth’.
Another way of analysing popular music is through looking at the actual produc-
tion processes themselves, and a number of writers point to the complexity and con-
tested nature of cultural production. It is far from the case that music simply turns
up as mass industrial product, rather ‘it is the outcome of intense competition and
struggle between, for example, record companies and musicians, radio stations and
music publishers, disc jockeys and club owners’ (Toynbee, 2000: xvi). One of the
most important discussions of the social production of music is Howard Becker’s
(1963) classic account of the culture of jazz musicians and their desire to be perceived
as artists rather than slaves to commercial imperatives. More recently, Georgina Born
(1993) has attempted to psychoanalytically theorize the subjective drives towards
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