Page 123 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Music 107

with protest marches and Molotov cocktails. Pop music ’ s aspirations are
often directed toward producing interpersonal enjoyment rather than
political awareness, and our interactions with music are in many cases
extensions of our leisure time interactions with other human beings, some-
thing we may think of as separate from political and public affairs. This
should not diminish music ’ s relevance as a subject of critical refl ection, for
music ’ s ubiquity in the most intimate aspects of our personal lives height-
ens its power to mold us as both private individuals and public citizens.
Our attitudes toward major social issues are conditioned by the emotional
reactions we have to encounter in our everyday lives, and very few of those
encounters occur without music. Put another way, the personal is political.
Ask yourself: in the fi rst decade of the twenty - fi rst century, who has more
direct impact on the way an average American teenager constructs her
ideas about what it means to be a “ good ” or “ attractive ” girl – Hillary
Clinton or Britney Spears? Whose attitudes do most adolescent males
adopt when faced with bewildering encounters with a member of the
opposite sex – Pope Benedict XVI or Kanye West? Whose poetry has cap-
tured the imagination of more young people – John Ashbery or Tupac
Shakur? Common sense tells us that popular music has a role in shaping
the worldviews of young people which eclipses that of traditional authority

figures. Our subjective conceptions of self - worth, sexual difference, social
justice, and artistic merit have a direct effect on how we ’ ll vote, how we ’ ll

raise our children, what we ’ ll buy, and what we will fight and perhaps even
die for.
Moreover, music foregrounds pleasure and the pleasurable experience
of one ’ s body in motion on a dance floor. Perhaps for this reason it has

often been attacked by moral monitors who feel that pleasure should be
policed and that bodily experiences should be restrained because they are
connected to sexuality, which of course itself, from a conservative perspec-
tive, should be controlled as much as possible. One of funnier moments in
the fi lm The Full Monty depicts a Black man standing in line at an employ-
ment agency idly and un - self - consciously moving his body rhythmically to
the music of a dance number he is practicing that is running through his
mind. He is breaking the conventions of how one is normally supposed to
stand in line – rigidly, motionless, and without joy or other affect. He is
joyfully waiting rather than waiting. Much of our experience in a disci-
plined society that assigns proper places to certain activities and forbids
them in others is limited and limiting. We unconsciously play by rules of
motion and bodily experience that channel and determine what we can or