Page 250 - Cultural Theory

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••• Popular Music •••

collective action is taken further in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993a; 1996) sociology of
artistic production where more structural concepts (like ‘fields’, ‘positions’ and ‘habitus’)
are introduced to grasp ‘the whole set of relationships … between the artist and other
artists, and beyond them, the whole set of agents engaged in the production of the
work, or, at least, of the social value of the work (critics, gallery directors, patrons,
etc.)’ (Bourdieu, 1993b: 97, emphasis in original).
These are important arguments and I now turn to how they have been taken up in
studies of popular music. In Toynbee’s (2000) account of musical creativity, he begins
by warmly endorsing Barthes’s critique as the author cult can be found across music
publishing: from breathless biographies through to heavier treatments of the life and
work of established performers and greats from the past. As he puts it:

The ‘Author-God’ characterized by Barthes is a real social institution, and one
which needs to be attacked not just in high art, but also in those areas of pop-
ular music which have imported it. I am thinking mainly of jazz and rock where
the author cult has been renewed with a vengeance. Many of those biographies …
fall into the trap of hearing music as an expression of the soul or psyche of
the complex/sensitive/tortured/heroic artist. Moreover this is almost invariably
a great man approach which celebrates masculine energy and drive, and con-
flates these qualities with creativity.
(ibid.: emphasis in original)

Instead he characterizes popular musicians as mediators who exchange sounds,
styles and forms. They do not generate music from within. Rather their materials
are located outside in the ‘field of the social’ (ibid.: xv). I will return to the gender-
ing of meaning below for I now turn to another area in which Barthes has been
influential.
Barthes’s (1977b) essay, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ is generally regarded as the work
that laid the ground for a textual study of pop music. Traditionally, musicology has
rested on examining the internal coherence of compositions in terms of rhythm, har-
mony and melody and has generally ignored pop music. In this essay he complains
that music critics are obsessed with adjectives. This ‘intimidation of detail’ actually
serves to prevent an adequate understanding of the text. In order to grasp the mean-
ing of a musical experience he argues that we ought to dispense with trying to cap-
ture the minutiae but instead respond directly to its ‘surface’ – the ‘grain’ of the voice
as expressed in the ‘materiality of the body’ (ibid.: 294–5). In his view, some singers
are able to produce the pleasures of jouissance in the audience. As Brian Longhurst
(1995: 173) explains, this is a difficult term to translate from French, but it can be
contrasted with plaisir. Plaisir refers to structured feelings and pleasures, where jouis-
sance is like the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm. To put it simply, Barthes’s over-
all argument is that we enjoy some singers because of the physical pleasures they
provoke.
The implications of this view are captured in the following passage, which, while
discussing rock, can be extended to other genres:

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