Page 247 - Cultural Theory

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••• Eamonn Carrabine •••

mass popularity through the notion of a ‘global imaginary’, which has for cultural
producers both aesthetically powerful and socially seductive psychic qualities that
cannot be condensed down to economic forces alone. She explains:

Aesthetically, because of the pleasures and skills involved in ‘hitting upon’
the next transformation of extant mainstream genres. Socially, because of the
pleasures – derived from the phantasy in play – of aligning around a cultural
product a vast, diverse and unknowable international community of connois-
seur-fans: a phantasy of social and cultural power which is at once both utopian
and omnipotent … In short, neglecting these internal yet very real components
of the psychic investment of producers risks reducing cultural production to a
set of banal economistic and institutional forces.

(Born, 1993: 237–8)

These arguments have been developed by David Hesmondhalgh (1999) in his discus-
sion of the difficulties faced by two independent record labels, Creation and One
Little Indian, and their controversial partnerships with major corporations (Sony and
PolyGram) in the 1990s. The two prevailing discourses among fans, musicians and
journalists were that they had ‘sold out’ for financial gain, through abandoning pre-
viously held political and aesthetic convictions of artistic autonomy over commer-
cial exploitation. The second, more generous view was that the two independents
had ‘burnt out’ as it was only a matter of time before the human and financial
resources run out. Instead, he argues the post-punk sensibility has a deep ambiva-
lence over ‘being different but also being popular’ (Hesmondhalgh, 1999: 52). In the
end, it proved to be impossible to reconcile the contradiction:

1990s indie as a whole was marked by nostalgia, political conformity, aesthetic
traditionalism, a notion of personal and professional success indistinguishable
from the aspirational consumerism of much of the rest of British society and a
lack of interest in changing the social relations of production. Whatever the lim-
its and contradictions of late 1980s indie, it at least offered a critique.

(ibid.: 56)

His conclusion confirms what will by now be a familiar theme in the literature –
artistic creativity eventually becomes compromised by corporate control; though
crucially he recognizes that the political-aesthetic consequences were not simply a
result of economic-institutional forces but were powerfully mediated by subjective
drives to make the music matter to a large audience. Nevertheless, it is important to
remember that while the Blur and Oasis playground rivalry revealed much about the
continuing class divide in 1990s Britain, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker actually went on to
define the problem in ‘Common People’ and then later satirize Britpop’s obsession
with youth in ‘Help the Aged’ (Mulholland, 2002: 378).
The most sustained attempt to think through and empirically analyse the
relationships between commerce and creativity lies in Keith Negus’s (1992; 1999)
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