The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class 9781501345364, 9781501345395, 9781501345388

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class Edited by Ian Peddie

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Ian Peddie and contributors, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Pallab Seth / Getty images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peddie, Ian, editor. Title: The Bloomsbury handbook of popular music and social class / edited by Ian Peddie. Description: [1.] | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Bloomsbury handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Using a variety of musical genres, this collection addresses the intersections, conflicts, agreements, and anomalies central to popular music and social class”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019030259 (print) | LCCN 2019030260 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501345364 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501345371 (epub) | ISBN 9781501345388 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music–Social aspects. | Social classes. Classification: LCC ML3918.P67 B56 2020 (print) | LCC ML3918.P67 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/8424–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030259 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030260 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4536-4 PB: 978-1-5013-9343-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4538-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4537-1 Series: Bloomsbury Handbooks Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Take physick, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may’st shake the superflux of them, And show the heavens more just.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Contents

List of Illustrations  x Notes on Contributors  xi Acknowledgments  xvii

Introduction  Ian Peddie  1

Part I  Methodologies 1 Being In-Between: Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste  Morten Michelsen  13 2 The Impact of Social Class on Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain, c. 1955–1975  Gillian A. M. Mitchell  35 3 Social Class and the Negotiation of Selling Out in a Southern California Indie Rock Scene  Timothy D. Taylor  59 4 It’s Up to You: Class, Status, and Punk Politics in Rock against Racism  Rebecca Binns  77 5 Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Popular Music Education: A Matter of Class  Alison Butler and Ruth Wright 97 6 “Every Noise at Once”: Online Music Discovery Maps and Cosmopolitan Subjectivities  Matthew Ord  117 7 Art at the Cutting Edge: Class, Cultures, and Globalization in African World Music  Mark LeVine  135

viii

Contents

8 Songs of the Outcast: Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC  Hon-Lun Yang  161

Part II  Theoretical Approaches 9 Gaahl—Monster or Postmodern Prometheus? Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal  Stan Hawkins and Nina Nielsen  185 10 Women’s Music, #20GAYTEEN, and Lesbian Hip-Hop: Shifting Voices of Class, Race, and Sexuality in WSW’s Popular Musics  Kirsten Zemke  205 11 “I Dream It, I Work Hard”: Race, Class, and Labor in US Popular Music  Rachel Rubin and James Smethurst  231 12 Class, Religion, and Music: Concepts and Questions  Sean McCloud  251 13 Hard Hats and Hoodies: The Songs of Two Working-Class British Protest Singers  Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power  273 14 Brothers in Rock: Argentine and British Rock Music during the Malvinas/Falklands War  Mara Favoretto  291 15 “Dances for the Masses”: Revolution, Class, Proletarian Music, and Dance in Cold War Ukraine  Sergei I. Zhuk  313

Part III  Genres 16 LeRoi Jones, Jazz, and the Resonance of Class  Bruce Barnhart  335 17 The Blues and the Development of the African American Working Class before World War II  Roberta Freund Schwartz  353

Contents

18 “Lord Have Mercy on the Working Man”: Country Music, Respect(ability), and Social Class  Travis D. Stimeling 369 19 The Long March to the Top of the Social Ladder: NeoFolk Music in Socialist Yugoslavia and Post-Socialist Serbia  Irena Šentevska  387 20 From Consent to Resistance: Punk Rock and Social Class  Cyrus Shahan  409 21 The Bourgeois Blues? Rock Music and Class  Chris McDonald  427 22 Sufferers in Babylon: A Rastafarian Perspective on Class and Race in Reggae  Martin A. M. Gansinger  443 23 “Bring It on Home”: Constructions of Social Class in Rhythm and Blues and Soul Music, 1949–1980  David M. Jones  465 24 The Routes of Hip-Hop in Cape Town: Collective Performance Practices and the Embodied Sociality of the Ghetto  Sudiipta Shamalii Dowsett  485 25 Electronic Popular Music as Site and Sign of Social Class: A Multidimensional Analysis  William Echard  507 26 Class Divisions and the Overlaps of Taste in New Digital Popular Music Formats in China  Lijuan Qian  525 27 Music Maketh Man: Meritocracy in Kingsman: The Secret Service  Miguel Mera  543 Index 564

ix

Illustrations

Figures   9.1

Gaahl, with monstrous intent  195

27.1  Frost on Sunday, “The Class Sketch” with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett, c. 1970  548 27.2 Eggy’s transformation from “chav” to chap. Screen captures from Kingsman: The a and b Secret Service (2014)  553 27.3

“Bonkers” edited for car-chase sequence  554

27.4

“Bonkers” syncopated bass line  555

27.5

“Slave to Love” vocal costuming  558

Tables 27.1

Registrar General’s Class Schema, c. 1970  549

27.2

NS-SEC Class Schema  549

27.3

The Great British Class Survey, Seven-Class Schema and Definitions  550

Contributors

Ian Peddie teaches English and Cultural Studies at Sul Ross State University, Texas, USA. Much of his work is concerned with class, forms of inequality, social exclusion, and human rights, and he has edited a number of books and written numerous essays on these subjects, notably Popular Music and Human Rights (2 Vols, 2011), and Music and Social Protest (2012). His BBC documentary, Gunning for Education, was broadcast in 2016. Bruce Barnhart is an Associate Professor of American literature and culture at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests focus on rhythm and temporality, music and literature, jazz and reggae, and critical race studies. He is the author of Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture (2013), and is currently working on his second book, Trading on Racial Futures: Financial Speculation, the American Novel, and the Construction of a Usable Future (forthcoming). His work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, and Novel. Rebecca Binns has recently completed a PhD on the artist Gee Vaucher, best known for her work with anarcho-punk band and collective Crass. She is currently working on a research project on Rock against Racism, papers for Contemporary British History and as a guest editor for Punk and Post Punk. Her recent published work includes a book chapter for Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976 (co-written with Dr Russell Bestley, 2018) and an essay for the exhibition catalog Gee Vaucher: Introspective (2016). She is currently developing her research on Gee Vaucher into a book. Alison Butler is a PhD candidate in Music Education at Western University, Canada. Her research interests focus on social justice in school music education, popular music education and music talent reality television. Her doctoral thesis uses Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and illusio to examine perceptions of success in English secondary music education. Other forthcoming publications include articles about music talent reality television’s relationship to school music education, and gender in popular music education. Alison has taught primary and secondary music in a variety of schools across England, and she currently teaches part-time at an independent school. Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist based in the University of Limerick, Ireland, where she co-founded and co-directs the Popular Music, Popular Culture research cluster that has an associated book series Popular Musics Matter with Rowman & Littlefield. Recent publications

xii

Contributors

include the co-edited volume Songs of Social Protest: Critical Perspectives (2018) and a special edition of the Canadian journal MUSICultures, on the topic of “Singers and Songs of Social Protest” (2018). Aileen is a principal investigator in a European-funded research project “FestiVersities: European music festivals, public spaces and cultural diversity” (2019–2022), and she is currently completing a monograph on Irish-American music. Sudiipta Shamalii Dowsett is an Adjunct Associate Lecturer at the National Institute for Experimental Arts in the Art & Design Faculty at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She completed her PhD in anthropology with her study, Revolutionary but Gangsta: Hip Hop in Khayelitsha, South Africa in 2017. Her PhD thesis is a phenomenological ethnography of hip-hop in an isiXhosa-speaking township of Cape Town. Her research interests include decolonial research methods; phenomenology; social justice; folklore, storytelling and narrative; experimentation with tradition; music therapy; identity, space, and place. William Echard is Professor of Music at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His research interests focus on theories of signification and critical theory of Anglo-American popular music from the 1960s to the present. He is the author of Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy (2005) and Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory (2017). Mara Favoretto is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She specializes in contemporary popular culture and popular music lyrics’ response as counter discourse in cultural crisis. She is the sole author of three monographs: Luis Alberto Spinetta: mito y mitología (2017), Charly en el país de las alegorías (2014, currently on its 5th edition); and Alegoría e ironía bajo censura en la Argentina del Proceso (2010). Her publications include journal articles and book chapters on the intersections of power, politics and popular music, mainly in Argentina. Martin A. M. Gansinger is Assistant Professor at Girne American University, Cyprus. His research interests focus on black popular music and extemporaneous communication. He has published on theoretical aspects of collective improvisation in Free Jazz as well as on the influence of black Muslim movements and Rastafarian philosophy on hip-hop and Reggae. His most recent works on the matter are Radical Religious Thought in Black Popular Music. Five Percenters and Bobo Shanti in Rap and Reggae (2017) and From Radicals to Cultural Icons: The Consensual Absorption of Controversial Bobo Shanti Ideology by Contemporary Rasta-artists (forthcoming). Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo and University of Kristiansand, Norway. He is author of Settling the Pop Score (2002), The British Pop Dandy (2009), Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (with Sarah Niblock, 2011), and Queerness in Pop (2016). His edited volumes include Music, Space & Place (2004), Essays on Sound & Vision (2007), Pop Music & Easy Listening (2011), Critical Musicological Reflections

Contributors

(2012) and The Routledge Research Companion for Popular Music and Gender (2017). He was series editor for Routledge’s Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series from 2010 to 2018. David M. Jones is a Professor of English and former administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA. His research interests include the legacy of the Black Arts Movement in the USA, American literature of the 1950s, and popular culture studies, especially the history of rock and roll music and the global impact of McDonaldization. Dr. Jones is also a professional musician who has released six CD-length recordings of original music. Dr. Jones’s current entrepreneurial project, Davey J’s Garage, serves as a film-screening room and livemusic venue, and is located in a converted tire factory in downtown Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Mark LeVine is Professor of Middle Eastern and African Histories and Cultures at UC Irvine, USA, where he specializes in critical theory, performance studies, cultural and social history. His books include Heavy Metal Islam, Vols 1 and 2 (forthcoming), Why They Don’t Hate Us, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, and the forthcoming The Arab Uprisings at 10. Sean McCloud is Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies Faculty Affiliate at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. He teaches, publishes, and researches in the fields of American religions, religion and culture, and social theory. His publications include Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955– 1993 (2004), Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (2007), American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (2015), and a co-edited volume, Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics (2009). Chris McDonald is Associate Professor of Music at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His research interests include popular music and class, music and the middlebrow, and Atlantic Canadian traditional music. He is the author of Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (2009). Miguel Mera is Professor of Music and Associate Dean (Research and Enterprise) in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at City, University of London, UK. He is a composer of music for the moving image and a musicologist. His film and television music has been broadcast around the world. Miguel is the author of European Film Music (2006), Mychael Danna’s The Ice Storm: A Film Score Guide (2007), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound (2017). Morten Michelsen is popular music scholar and Professor of Music at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include popular music and mediation, music radio and sound studies, historical radio studies, questions of taste and music criticism, and popular music historiography. Between 2013 and 2018 he led the research project A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark (www.Ramund.ikk.ku.dk) and contributed to other large projects concerned with radio. Among his recent publications on sound, music, and radio are three

xiii

xiv

Contributors

anthologies on music radio, including Tunes for All? (2018) on Danish music radio and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (2019) on international music radio. Gillian A. M. Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews, UK. She specializes in the socio-cultural history of popular music in Britain and North America from the 1950s to the 1970s. Her most recent books are Adult Responses to Popular Music and Intergenerational Relations in Britain, c.1955–1975 (2019) and The British National Daily Press and Popular Music, c.1956–1975 (2019). Nina Nielsen is a PhD Research Fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music in the Department of Composition, Music Theory and Music Technology. Her research interests include music and identity, music in media, and the social and historical relevance of black metal music in Norway. She is also a journalist and musician. Matthew Ord is Teaching Fellow at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, UK. His research focuses on the uses of sound technologies in folk and popular music, and he has published articles on the role of recording in articulating class, national and countercultural identities. His PhD thesis, “Sound Recording in the British Post-war Folk Revival: Ideology, Discourse and Practice” (2017), combined multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic research to explore the relationship between recording practice and countercultural ideologies in British folk music. Martin Power is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His research interests focus on inequality and social exclusion, popular music and popular culture, and social protest and activism. His recent publications include the edited collection Heart and Soul: Critical Essays on Joy Division (2018), and journal articles Fake news? A critical analysis of the “Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All” campaign in Ireland (2019) and Transcending the Moment: Ideology and Billy Bragg (2019). Lijuan Qian is a CAROLINE scheme Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Music at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research focuses on popular music studies, audience research, and applied ethnomusicology. She has published on Chinese music and Chinese TV talent shows, including the book A Tolerant Mainstream: Pop Song in China in the 1980s (Kuanrongde zhuliu: Zhongguo bashiniandaide liuxing gequ, 2016). Rachel Rubin is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA, where she specializes in cultural and literary history, working-class studies, and the politics of popular culture. Her books include Creative Activism: Conversations on Music, Film, Literature and Other Radical Arts (2018), Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee (2018), and Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (2012). Her current research project explores Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University as a nexus of interaction among the United States, the Soviet Union, and what were then known as “third world” countries in Africa, Asia, and Central America.

Contributors

Roberta Freund Schwartz is an Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Kansas, USA. Her areas of specialization include the music of the Spanish Renaissance and African American popular music. She has produced articles and papers on various Renaissance, rock, and blues topics for national and international forums, and she is a contributor to many rock history textbooks. Her monograph, How Britain Got the Blues (2007) won the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence for Best History in Recorded Blues, Soul, or R&B. She is currently working on a book about “city” blues of the 1930s. Irena Šentevska received her PhD from the department of arts and media theory of the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. She lectured in interdisciplinary doctoral studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade and was a guest lecturer at various university departments from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Graz and Zürich. Her articles are being published by leading academic publishers in Europe and the United States. Her first book, The Swinging 90s: Theatre and the Social Reality of Serbia in 29 Pictures, was released in 2016. She is currently working on her upcoming book Singing Belgrade: Urban Transformations, Identity Construction and Music Videos. Cyrus M. Shahan is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Ball State University, USA. He is author of Punk Rock and German Crisis: Adaptation and Resistance after 1977 (2013), co-editor of Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk (2016), and author of articles on the intersections of terrorism and technology, violence and aesthetics, punk rock and gender, and Alexander Kluge and Peter Sloterdijk. James Smethurst is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. His primary research areas are African American literature, culture, and intellectual history with a particular emphasis on black cultural and political radicalism. He is the author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011), and the forthcoming Brick Songs: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Black Vanguard. Travis D. Stimeling is Associate Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University, USA. He is the author or editor of several books, most recently Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia: Profiles and Reflections (2018). Timothy D. Taylor is a Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, USA. He writes on a variety of musical subjects related to capitalism and economic issues more broadly, globalization, technology, and consumer culture. He is the author of numerous articles and books, most recently Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (2016), and Music in the World: Selected Essays (2017).

xv

xvi

Contributors

Ruth Wright is Professor of Music Education in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University in Canada, where she has also served as Chair of Music Education and Assistant Dean of Research. Her 2010 book Sociology and Music Education (Ashgate Press) is a frequently used textbook in courses exploring this field. Ruth was engaged in music education in the UK for twenty years. She has been a secondary-school music teacher and a lecturer in music education. Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang is Professor of Music at Hong Kong Baptist University, co-editor of China and the West: Music, Representation, and Reception (2017), and lead author of Networking the Russian Diaspora: Russian Musicians and Musical Activities in Interwar Shanghai (in-press). Her writings appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (2018), Composing for the State (2016), Music and Protest in 1968 (2013), Music and Politics (2013), Journal of Musicological Research (2019), Journal of the American Liszt Society (2018), Twentieth-Century Music (2018), Twentieth-Century China (2012), International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (2011), and Asian Music (2010). Kirsten Zemke is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in the School of Social Sciences (Te Puna Mārama) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Their research interests focus on hip-hop, queer theory and Pacifica popular musics in Aotearoa. They have published recently on gay men in hip-hop, queer resonances in Beyoncé, and the Auckland Pasifika vogue scene. Sergei I. Zhuk is Professor of History at Ball State University, Indiana, USA. A former Soviet expert in US history, he moved to the United States in 1997, and defended his American PhD dissertation about imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. His recent publications include Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (2018), Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People’s Diplomacy in the Cold War (2017), and Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (2010).

Acknowledgments

Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Amy Martin at Bloomsbury have been patient and kind. My thanks also go to Professor Laura Payne and Professor and Dean Jay Downing, whose support has been invaluable. Matthew Berkshier, Hannah Zly, and especially my research assistant Michelle Ramos, at Sul Ross, have proven industrious and diligent in ways too numerous to mention. I am grateful, too, to my fellow contributors.

Introduction Ian Peddie

This collection was conceived as a critical examination of class and popular music, not in terms of static, immutable, fixed collectives; rather, the goal has been to ensure that class, in the various guises it is presented here, is as fluid and elusive as the music it shapes and defines and through which it is expressed. In securing a range of approaches to class, from more traditional treatments to more contemporary expressions, the collection approaches class in ways that are able to incorporate the fact that class is always reflective of the social conditions under which it is produced and consumed alongside some of the more recent developments in social theory. Class—how we think of it, how it shapes us, and the visions of society it affords us—is subject to constant change. If, for example, the adversarial vision of society presented by Marx is, for theorists at least, difficult to maintain today, social and political changes over the last few decades have confirmed that societies are as divided as ever along social lines. And if, then, consequently, social analysis, with class in all its guises as the guiding light, is arguably more important than ever, it is the means through which class is lived and expressed where subtle, yet powerful changes have occurred. The impetus bringing class once more to the center of social arguments is not difficult to discern. Anywhere one cares to look there exists, for example, the rise of particularly contentious kinds of political movements, lived experiences of inequality, limited possibilities for social advancement, and a general sense of social unfairness that has its roots in perceptions of inequality and injustice. Various types of exclusion, from housing to education, from punitive narratives that imply the criminalization of poverty to those that assert that the poor are guilty of moral dereliction—all of which blight our modern world—have inevitably led to forms of resistance, many of which, wittingly or not, have class as a basis for some form of unifying experience. How that sense of class is musically read, interpreted, advanced, or contested is at the heart of this book. We proceed, then, from the axiom that culture, like class, has always been fundamental to the historical process. And artists, like almost every member of modern society, lay claim to social identities that are part of the myriad of class relationships that are shaped and conditioned by race, gender, economics, morals, hierarchy, power, politics and every other means through which the production of the self is achieved. As the breadth of these

2

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

categories imply, and, paradoxically, perhaps, in acknowledgment of the influence of Marxian notions of the means of production, the volume is conscious that contemporary class analysis is more complex than Marx’s assertion that analysis of three main classes held the key to understanding historical processes. For all that, and important though Marx is, if some of the more primordial class analysis has now been superseded by more subtle representations of hierarchy and dominance, of subjugation and oppression, we have yet to reach the point where we can announce “class dismissed.” There is, I think, much work to be done, for example, on the moral aspects of class, for just as class is not simply an economic and cultural issue it strikes me that the moral ramifications of class—and of its analysis—are fundamental to the way class functions. Forms of dominance, whether overt or the kind Bourdieu has in mind when he refers to symbolic or “soft forms of domination,” are as much about the exercising of moral power as they are about the immediacy of subjugation, hierarchy, or status. The social theorist Andrew Sayer (2005: 19) suggests that the experience of class involves unequal recognition or misrecognition—the former being essential to child development—and recognition; that is, validation for who we are and what we are, is fundamental to the development of the person. Class as the production of the self is an intriguing concept. Compiling this collection has only confirmed Raymond Williams’s contention that “class is an obviously difficult word” (1976: 51). Definitions of what class is—and is not— have consumed entire volumes, and the fact that class is, and will continue to be, an elusive and complex term should not dissuade us from addressing what is a fundamental part of our world. How, then, can we think of class? At one level, class is material, and it certainly can be dependent upon occupation, income, and money. Such concerns, largely economic, suggest a traditionally Marxist approach, with two classes locked in conflict and revolution an inevitability. Like so many theories and approaches, however, it is aspects of the whole that capture our interest. From the perspective of Marx’s remarkable ideas, and while the idea of material conditions as a basis for class holds considerable appeal, there is little debate that whatever class is it is more than what we produce and consume. Subsequent visions of the social structure that saw class as a multi-layered system extended and deepened Marx’s analysis. Not only did Max Weber (1864–1920) acknowledge the presence of a middle class, for example, but his ideas of class concerned its manifestation as variations of wealth, power, and prestige. Both of these approaches, which, to one degree or another, are forerunners of so many of the ensuing theories of class developed in the light of work by Marx and Weber, are plausible and convincing. Both saw class as a site of conflict and contestation, and the adversarial core of social differences that Marx and Weber analyzed also implied the kind of identity of interests, self-discovery, and self-realization that is crucial to class. Hence class, what constitutes it, how is it lived and realized, and how it is analyzed and critiqued, is as much about one’s behavior, attitude, associations, and forms of representation as it is about income, wealth, occupation, and politics. Rethinking class after Marx and Weber involved acknowledgment that the unifying experience of shared labor, the awakening of class consciousness, and the hitherto dominance of material conditions were not the sum of class identity, just as they were not

Introduction

the sole equations through which the ramifications of class activity could be assessed. Those permutations of class that followed earlier class analysis have tended to shift the focus away solely from the means of production. E. P. Thompson’s groundbreaking The Making of the English Working Class (1963) saw class in terms of process and relationship. Here classes were viewed as groups or collectives who shared interests, goals, traditions, and value systems. Consequently, class consciousness, which was an important concept to Thompson, was realized through the articulation of shared experiences and interests. For studies that focus on the working class, as Thompson’s work does, theories that attribute a unifying experience are compelling and particularly useful. Yet in “The Making of a Ruling Class” (1993), one of his last essays, Thompson suggested that “class was perhaps overworked in the 1960s and 1970s, and it had become merely boring” (380). While Thompson’s meaning here is unclear, it is tempting to see this pronouncement as indicative of the need for changes in class analysis. Thompson never lived to see (he died in 1993) some of the more intriguing evolutions of class analysis now under consideration. For undoubtedly, in the late-twentieth and early-twentyfirst centuries, class and analytical approaches to it have become increasingly complex and, arguably, more sophisticated than ever. There is wide agreement, for example, that working-class identity and group affiliation, not least the perception of class actors, resists easy categorization in ways and to degrees that hitherto have not, perhaps, been examined—especially in ways in which they are currently under consideration. In fact, a number of studies that found that “class imagery was often incoherent, contradictory and fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain” also concluded that “there was no tidy relationship between class structure and position and cultural beliefs and practices” (Devine and Savage 2005: 7). If these findings return us to Raymond Williams’s assertion as to the difficulty of the concept of class, then they also provide a way forward: the complexities of class, it was later argued, particularly how it was experienced and articulated, owed as much to culture as it did to economics. From this perspective, class consciousness lost much of its analytical primacy as ideas associated with perception—especially one’s relationship with others as a performative and shifting set of representations—were as contingent upon context as they were on ideas of stratification. The central figure here is the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), whose work has exerted significant influence on class analysis. Bourdieu saw the idea of capital not as exclusively materialistic; rather, capital has social, cultural, and symbolic roles, he forcefully argued, and it plays an important part in social relations. These distinctions Bourdieu saw realized through the concept of taste, which is an important site where aspects of dominance and subordination are often secured. Taken in their entirety, Bourdieu’s analysis of variations of capital became a key conduit through which forms of inequality were examined. At work in such debates are the means through which class is produced, or how consumers function in relation to the “products on which they confer their different identities” (Bourdieu 1984: 94). Class consciousness, Bourdieu intimated, was a highly problematic concept because “the social world doesn’t work in terms of consciousness; it works in terms of practices, mechanisms, and so forth” (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992: 113).

3

4

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Here was the impetus for a new way of thinking about class, and Bourdieu supplemented these ideas with his concept of “habitus.” In asserting the primacy of this idea and its ramifications, Bourdieu compounded his dismissal of one of the hitherto key tenets of class analysis in that habitus at one level appears something of an antithesis to class conscious; as “the internalized form of class condition and of the conditioning it entails” (1984: 95), habitus operates at something of a subconscious level. In terms of popular music, it is worth adding, Bourdieu had little to say save the fact that music is an important barometer of taste. Yet the relevance of his work to popular music exists not as a grand meta-narrative that can explain the history and direction of music practices. Rather, the symbolic practices Bourdieu notes as central to investigations of class have fostered analysis that examine non-material, symbolic, bodily arguments of class. In this context, Beverley Skeggs’s contention that the “de-materialization of commercial production” has given rise to “the predominance of symbolic exchange in post-industrialization” (2004: 47), opens up new avenues of analysis. Skeggs’s emphasis on how class is “made through cultural values premised on morality, embodied in personhood and realized (or not) as property value in symbolic systems of exchange” (2005: 969) nudges the idea of class representation away from more traditional economic and stratification models and towards forms of moral representation, ideas of cultural capital based upon claims to entitlement, and claims to cultural capital—and its rewards or associated punishments—that are increasingly individualized and constructed around ideas of worth that structure our approaches to belonging. What all this amounts to is that class analysis has evolved in new and exciting ways. The social visions of the past, which are themselves accounts with much to say about who we are and what we have become, are being supplemented with exciting new research that enables us to examine social divisions that have changed inexorably since the days of Marx and Weber. Popular music is a medium that allows us to think critically about our world and about ourselves in ways that enrich our understanding of social divisions. This ambitious text was conceived of in terms of three complimentary sections. First, a series of methodologies designed to examine class in terms of its relationship to representational categories that cut across genre and theoretical boundaries. Section two is an attempt to address popular music and class in relation to some of the wider societal concerns that fashion ideas of self and subjectivity. Section three offers a collection of essays that examine class in relation to some of the more prominent genres of popular music.

Part I: Methodologies The volume begins with Morten Michelsen’s essay on taste, which examines the development of taste through the genres of light music, easy listening, and rock. Rather than superseding one another, these genres, Michelsen argues, have created an expanding middlebrow universe, creating an “in-betweeness that became a place unto itself.” In Chapter Two, Gillian Mitchell uses parental responses in Britain to examine the consumption and reception of music from the rise of Skiffle to the mid-1970s. In so doing, Mitchell suggests that

Introduction

parental responses were relatively fluid across classes. In fact, because parents recognized the extent to which popular music could enhance the development of their children, and rather than opposing popular music as some kind of corrupting influence, parents were often as open to its cultural and educational possibilities as were their children. Timothy Taylor’s examination of class and music production centers on an ethnographic study of indie musicians in Southern California. Taylor finds that it is those below middle-class status who, in a curious echo of Bourdieu’s “economic world reversed” idea, where artists “disdain economic success in order to appear to be aloof from the quotidian,” embrace the DIY attitude to music production over attempts to professionalize and monetize their work. In Chapter Four, Rebecca Binns’s investigation into class and status in the Rock against Racism movement contends that RAR was consistent with broad socialist goals that sought to align various subcultures all of whom shared political positions hostile to the rise of neo-liberalism. Such aims, Binns argues, ultimately fell victim to a growing rejection of overarching political narratives in favor of more “grassroots and spontaneous” forms of opposition. In Chapter Five, Alison Butler and Ruth Wright examine the teaching of music and how contemporary pedagogical approaches continue to assert the domination of Western Art music almost to the exclusion of other genres and approaches. Not surprisingly, this stubbornly popular pedagogy results in the reinforcement of established hierarchies, and “outdated and hegemonic music assumptions” ensure the reproduction of existing class privileges. The authors offer some useful proposals of how to counter this approach and, encouragingly, how a more socially inclusive pedagogy would challenge entrenched privilege. Matthew Ord’s conclusion, in Chapter Six, that streaming music challenges hitherto accepted relationships between listener and genre raises the specter of the latter as being the marker through which ideas of freedom of movement between musical worlds are intimated. Nonetheless, distinction and inequalities of access tend to dampen notions of freedom or travel, Ord finds, both of which are implicit in the idea that consumers have access to any genre of music. Here streaming, rather than offering the promise of sonic transcendence, actually appears to confirm “our sense of ourselves as classed subjects,” especially in terms of our connections to globalized consumption and to listening practices which are themselves subject to ethics, distinction, and hierarchy. Using case studies of the music and social conditions of production found in Morocco, Egypt, and Nigeria, Mark Le Vine mounts a spirited defense of World Music, suggesting that while the phrase harbors marketing potential it also has value as a teaching term and as a hybrid form of music that generates “an affective aesthetic force.” Le Vine examines the social conditions pursuant to the music scenes of the countries he considers and how production, distribution, and consumption of music have engineered new styles of music, none of which can be understood without recourse to class. In Chapter Eight, Hon-Lun Yang’s examination of class and censorship in China reveals the extent to which banning songs can alter their perceived class position. Yang considers the implications of censorship by way of examples drawn from three distinct periods in the development of China and concludes that the censorship-inspired discourses that emerge as certain songs are banned constitutes forms of resistance, which, of course, runs contrary to governmental ideological aims. In censoring music, Yang argues, what results is the “song of the outcast,” a type of

5

6

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

music often regarded as socially and politically authentic and genuine; in a society where censorship is a real concern, audiences also conceive of such songs as the bearers of truth.

Part II: Theoretical Approaches In Chapter Nine, Stan Hawkins and Nina Nielsen consider masculinity and class through the prism of Norwegian Black Metal artist Gaahl. Gaahl, whose performances the authors see as examples of a “socializing agent for illuminating class, politics, and gender constructs in an ever-evolving Norwegian setting,” raises significant questions concerning musical agency and class. Regarding the former, Gaahl’s performances are transgressive, cultivating, as he does, a kind of fantastical, monstrous masculinity that invites consideration of the role of the iconoclasm in society. In terms of class, however, and in a country that is often regarded as having relatively little class antagonism, Gaahl represents a skepticism of authority while his indifference suggests the cultivation of the identity of the Other as a form of opposition. Kirsten Zemke’s study of three musical movements pertaining to queer women uses sexuality and class to examine how alliances and identities shift over time. What emerges in the largely hip-hop discourses that Zemke examines is a challenge to capitalism itself, especially through the forms of representation women choose, many of which indirectly take exception to established ideas about identity and sexual politics. As Zemke’s essay establishes, popular music functions as a leading means of contesting categories of subordination. In Chapter Eleven, James Smethurst and Rachel Rubin consider how songs about labor form a platform through which the interdependence of race/nation/ethnicity and class are illuminated. In doing so, the authors delve into how musicians represent their ideas about class, including discussions of how non-white is often presented as a mark of labor which leads to questions of who, in fact, can perform “working class”—and how. In Chapter Twelve, Sean McCloud considers how music, class, and religion interact. Using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus as a guide, McCloud asks how different religious groups are classed and how music styles affects the various resulting representations. Whether music is disruptive of religious thought or whether it is a conservative force is a leading question: if Jesus saves, as the author wonders, can, then, music save? And to what extent does music move one to consider one’s material conditions? Billy Bragg and Lady Sovereign, two British artists, form the locus of Aileen Dillane and Martin Power’s study of what protest music can tell us about prevailing class systems. Reading Bragg as a somewhat traditional troubadour and Sovereign as a recent development of changing class systems, the authors argue that Bragg’s work is a catalog of opposition to neo-liberalism while Sovereign is presented as a strong advocate against the demonization of working-class youth. This approach is framed by the authors’ confirmation of the importance of music in articulating the varieties of working-class experience. One of the defining moments of my youth, the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict between Britain and Argentina, forms the basis of Chapter Fourteen, in which Mara Favoretto examines

Introduction

musical responses to the conflict. Favoretto explores Argentina’s attempt to co-opt music into the war effort, especially in terms of the curious decision of the government to censor songs sung in English. Hence Rock Nacional was an attempt by the Galtieri regime to create a new national identity—and music was a central feature of this attempt at social and political engineering. Yet despite frequent admonitions to support the war, Argentine musicians, like their British counterparts, spoke out against what was a conflict, the author notes, that was fought largely by the working class. How musicians opposed the war, what such oppositions entailed, as well as their repercussions, enables us to understand how attempts to manage the conflict were undercut by the power of popular music. Sergei Zhuk’s remarkable ventures into the KGB archives in Dnipropetrovsk continue to produce valuable work. Thus in Chapter Fifteen, Zhuk considers how the adoration of Western music by young people in the Soviet Union gave rise to the “disco effect,” where AngloAmerican bands superseded the “proletarian music” promulgated by the increasingly anxious Soviet authorities. Not surprisingly in the face of the arrival of Western music, Communist education, hitherto reinforced via the dancefloor, began to break down and mobile discos and rock events were there to fill the space. In these heady days, corruption was rife, and many of those disco entrepreneurs who were involved in these developing music scenes at the time became politically powerful after the demise of the Komsomol. All this was played out, of course, against a backdrop of the fall of an empire.

Part III: Genres In Chapter Sixteen, Bruce Barnhart attempts to come to terms with sonic representations of class. Using LeRoi Jones’s Blues People (1963) and theorist Fred Moten’s concept of proletarianization as his guides, Barnhart attempts to discern whether we can detect “class content” in the formal and stylistic elements of Jazz, particularly in terms of Miles Davis’s 1954 masterpiece “Walkin’.” Using that piece, in its relationship to Jazz and society, the author ponders the transformative possibilities of music, not least in its connections to class, and finds that Davis’s music “serves as a frame in which anti-middle-class attitudes can be articulated.” Chapter Seventeen sees Roberta Freund Schwartz contending that the Blues is as much an urban phenomenon as it is the province of rural culture. Here the author sees the Blues as fundamentally working class, particularly in terms of its use as a means of resistance to the dictates of a growing black bourgeoisie—which arguably emerged as a result of white demands for assimilationist approaches. Intraracial tensions, along with urban experiences fueled by black migration to large cities, encouraged musical assertions of community, which were invariably forms of working-class expressions indicative of the culture that African Americans lived, just as they were comments on the confinement in the south whence many of the new urban dwellers had come. Ultimately, Schwartz argues, the Blues is a flexible medium able to simultaneously express forms of resistance and old south community just as it became the communal voice of a new, urban, working-class black community.

7

8

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

In challenging received opinion about the relatively rigid class structures imagined in country music, Travis Stimeling employs the idea of respectability, which is important to country music and to the working class, and suggests that the implications of the phrase actually function as a tool of “dehumanization and marginalization.” Given the strong heteronormative assumptions that underlie country music, Stimeling is at pains to emphasize a more nuanced understanding of the genre, one that is able to accommodate the changing nature of class markers as well as the fluidity of contemporary sexual identities. Irena Šentevska’s chapter examines the geopolitical and cultural wars that erupted as Yugsoslavia split into separate, sovereign states. The fulcrum of Šentevska’s analysis is the contestation of meaning and ideology around folk music, especially the so-called newly composed folk music. These struggles, ostensibly internecine though with patent nationalist ramifications, mirror the collapse of Yugoslavia into post-socialist transitional states, whose identity and character form an important though contested part of the developing states. Šentevska suggests that struggles around the culture of folk actually influenced the protracted conflicts of the 1990s, and that folk, in its various guises was adapted and co-opted to serve multiple, often conflicting ends. New forms of folk, shaped by genres as diverse as hip-hop, dance, and electronic music, emerge as examples of the process of modernization these changing states are currently undergoing. In Chapter Twenty, Cyrus Shahan yokes together British Cultural Studies and German Critical Theory to examine some of punk’s most notorious and important moments and symbols. Concepts such as authenticity and sonic interpretations of class engagement, as well as the deployment of the Nazi swastika and moments such as the appearance of the Sex Pistols on early night-time television in Britain, in their own ways all serve the punk drive to illuminate the politics of disempowerment—which, also, can be read through the sonic and sartorial choices punks themselves made. Chris McDonald’s examination of the history of literature surrounding rock music in Chapter Twenty-One suggest that it is invariably framed in bourgeois terms, that the established narrative of rock and roll’s rise parallels the sociological theory of working-class advancement. Delving into the construction of rock and roll as indicative of fairly typical bourgeois trends leads McDonald to suggest that such a perception diminishes the distance between working and middle classes, thus blurring hierarchy and implying, as did the penetration of rock into the middle classes, a homogenization of tastes. Yet in its production, reception, and audience, as McDonald points out, rock music was always more nuanced in its representations of class, especially in the UK; in the USA, however, rock was too often contextualized in terms of post-war embourgeoisement and rock musicians afforded a level of status not granted to musicians of other genres. Martin A. M. Gansinger’s study of Reggae and class employs Rastafarianism as a key ingredient of both concepts. Gansinger contends that Rastafarianism offers a “spiritually-based consciousness” that lends itself to an egalitarian-driven social consciousness. Reggae’s strong social, political, and culture capital as a philosophy of liberation owes much to Rastafarianism, which, for all its contradictions, embodied in categories such as the “righteous” and the “wicked,” as well as its segregationalist and patriarchal past, offers a means through which the music advances a socially transformative spirituality that may play a part in the rediscovery of a truly social consciousness. The importance of R&B and Soul as barometers of

Introduction

African American social identities is explored in Chapter Twenty-Three. Here David M. Jones tackles the difficult problem of how questions of authenticity advance or hinder black social coherence, and to what extent these concerns illuminate social and aesthetic predilections among the African American community. Jones employs Beverley Skeggs’s compelling idea that representations of race and class “move between different circuits of distribution” to evoke the idea of community cultural wealth, a concept that the author argues is central to the appeal of R&B and Soul, just as it is fundamental to expressions of class. Sudiipta Shamalii Dowsett’s analysis of hip-hop in Cape Town’s working-class areas contends that the popularity of the genre owes much to the “embodied sociality of the ghetto.” Employing Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Dowsett advances the idea of an embodied concept of the street, where a collective black working-class aesthetic fosters a sense of group identity contingent upon habitualized actions that are common to hip-hop culture and to the working class. Hip-hop, Dowsett argues, is passed on from body to body as a collective social experience defined by common performance practices that also have their roots in working-class culture. In Chapter Twenty-Five, William Echard’s discussion of the broad and extremely varied genre of electronic music suggests that Bourdieu’s theory of habitus as “embodied dispositions,” which functions on various levels, parallels the indirect and complex relationship between class and electronic music. Expressions of class, the author contends, are often sublimated through other forms of capital, such as intellectual and technical ability. Echard also sees electronic music, and particularly industrial music, as a synecdoche that foregrounds forms of distribution, which he acknowledges are themselves closely linked to class. In its variety of subtleties and its esoteric representations of class, electronic music provides fertile ground for analysis of the many facets of class, and Echard suggests areas worthy of further investigation. The final two chapters of the collection are concerned with music and the screen, small and large respectively. Lijuan Qian’s work on talent shows illuminates the extent to which these forms of entertainment reflect the social class identities and related musical tastes of viewers across China. Using original data, and focusing on representative samples of white-collar and working-class subjects, Qian finds a number of similarities in terms of how different classes access and react to the various talent shows. First, the important Chinese trope of transcending one’s class, through education and skill emerges in the hopes and desires of talent show contestants. Here, as Qian points out, the idea that one might affect change through success in a talent show has echoes of a working-class perception of democracy that is attached to participation in these shows through the belief that voting offers, in one way or another, a voice. Notwithstanding this largely unattainable dream of democratic participation and meritocratic success, which forms a framework for this chapter, Qian suggests that in terms of taste, access, downloading and discussing these talent shows, there is little difference between middle and working classes, both of whom show great enthusiasm in seeking out the “same commercialized cultural products.” In Chapter Twenty-Seven, Miguel Mera’s essay raises interesting considerations in terms of how film music narratives can influence how viewers perceive class. Using Kingsman: The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughn’s 2015 spy comedy as the basis for his examination of the idea of meritocracy, Mera shows how Brian Ferry’s “Slave to Love” and Dizzee Rascal’s “Bonkers” in their respective ways articulate

9

10

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

and complicate questions of social mobility. In so doing, Mera suggests that we should consider music as more than a cultural marker of taste, that it is able to deepen nuanced understanding of class, and that music is a medium of expression that is perceptively wary of ideas of meritocracy.

Works Cited Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. and T. Eagleton (1992), “Doxa and Common Life,” New Left Review, 191 (1): 111–21. Devine, F. and M. Savage (2005), “The Cultural Turn, Sociology and Class Analysis,” in F.  Devine and M. Savage (eds), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities, and Lifestyle, 1–22, New York: Palgrave. Sayer, A. (2005), The Moral Significance of Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skeggs, B. (2005), “The Re-branding of Class: Propertizing Culture,” in F. Devine and M.Savage (eds), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities, and Lifestyle, 46–68, New York: Palgrave. Skeggs, B. (2005), “The Making of Class and Gender through Visualizing Moral Subject Formation,” Sociology 39 (5), 965–82. Thompson, E. P. (1963), The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage. Thompson, E. P. (1993), “The Making of a Ruling Class,” Dissent, Summer, 1993, 377–82. Williams, R. (1976), Keywords, New York: Oxford University Press.

Part I Methodologies

1 Being In-Between: Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste Morten Michelsen

It will be my object, however, to avoid these two extremes [the highbrow of Edith Sitwell and the lowbrow of red-nosed comedians], to steer a middle course and try to provide something that shall be acceptable to the normal mediumbrowed Englishman (like myself). And, since I am only human …, it is quite natural for me to feel that the perfect programme must be one which consists almost exclusively of my own works. I shall enjoy it, anyhow, and after all, I take it, this is the most important thing. Graham 1927: 493 Concert Sideboards: The score for good taste. This catalog of the Grundig stereo sideboards is a delight to the eye for everyone who appreciates beauty and good taste. Here, you will find concert sideboards in the noblest wood and in masterful processing: you may purchase boards in designs stretching from classical baroque to modern lines. They are the epitome of the world-famous Grundig sound. The evolution of the “guten Tones” [good sound/nice manners] is so closely related to the Grundig brand that the buying public rightly expects listening to something special. Grundig Revue 1959: 26, translated by the author To state it crudely: the intellectual, well-educated middle-class, the high school and university students, have “nicked” rock music from the broader youth groups. … When the Beatles and the other Liverpool groups broke through, they became the music of the teenyboppers, these small, screaming girls in their sweaters and skirts in 65 and 66. Then the long-haired and well-educated middle-class youth began to take over. The music became still more artistically aware and then came the American groups. Nielsen 1970: 283, translated by the author

These three quotes from quite different places, periods, and contexts each articulate an aspect of the relations between popular music and class, in this case the middle classes. The first, a British broadcaster’s written presentation of his program, sets up the wellknown contrast between the working class and the educated classes using the lingo of the time, that of lowbrows and highbrows. He places himself and his audience in-between the two, thus making the binary opposition more complex. The second quote, nearly

14

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

thirty years later, demonstrates Europe’s largest radio manufacturer, the German company Grundig, aligning their product with the middle classes when relating their high-end music sideboards to good taste, nice manners, and high-quality sound. The third quote, by an early Danish rock critic, returns to class antagonisms when describing how middle-class youth had stolen the music from broader youth groups; that is, from youth with workingclass backgrounds. By highlighting the intellectual turn of late 1960s rock, his remarks also diagnose the emerging split between pop and rock. The quotes indicate three chronologically different musico-cultural situations of the middle classes which, following Pierre Bourdieu, together with the lower- and the upperclass constellations, constitute social space ([1979] 1984: 242, 244), while their respective, class-related tastes might be conceived of as a field of culture. The three classes are separate in many ways, but also deeply interrelated. Their relations are dominated by the discursively active antithesis between the upper classes and the working classes (the high/low) while the middle classes, the “middle region of social space,” is a “site of relative uncertainty and indeterminacy between the two poles of the social classes” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984: 243). In the following, I would like to sketch out the musico-cultural positions of this inbetween region and how such tastes have changed from the advent of early, sound-based mass media via the material advent of high-fidelity equipment to the advent of rock, that is, during a period from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. These changes constitute a movement from an in-between taste defined in negative terms as neither high nor low, but nevertheless dominated by them, towards an in-between taste defined in positive terms as a cultural space unto itself and mainly related to the middle classes—although still related to the high and the low classes. It is a movement from the socio-cultural tensions of not being able to live up to the standards of the cultural “powers that be” towards specific middle-class or middlebrow standards founded on classbased appropriations of values from many walks of life (a self-sufficient, but still tense, taste stating that “we are good enough”). Middlebrow tastes moved from being placed as a “middle,” without having the qualities of a center, towards becoming a center (if not the center), which is very much like the expansion and consolidation of the middle classes during the same period. During that journey, the ever-present and perhaps defining tensions of middlebrow tastes changed from a relatively simple tension between good (high) and bad (low), which ideally strived towards cultural uplift, and moved towards a much more complex set of tensions between fun and seriousness, heteronomy and autonomy, commercialism and authenticity. I use Bourdieu as a frame of reference because his magnum opus on distinction is still the most thorough theorization of taste as a social phenomenon. It is based on extensive empirical research, but I am mainly interested in his analysis of how taste works in forming and being formed by social hierarchies as concrete expressions of general class structures. Even though he claims music is the best indicator of taste (“Nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class’, nothing more infallibly qualifies, than tastes in music” ([1979] 1984: 18)), it is not central to his discussions. Many sociologists have followed in his footsteps and produced comprehensive research reports in critical dialogue with his theoretical and methodological insights. Some of these carry full chapters on music; for example two large-scale empirical

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

projects led by Tony Bennett on musical tastes in Australia and the UK (Bennett et al. 1999: 170–201; Bennet et al. 2009: 75–93), and a mainly theoretical study (Stewart 2014). German scholars have produced full books on musical taste in continuation of Bourdieu’s analyses (Berli 2014; Parzer 2011). They are part of the broad field of musicology and popular music studies, where also English-language researchers have debated Bourdieu’s work quite extensively in the last two decades; for example Georgina Born’s, Tia DeNora’s, and Antoine Hennion’s critiques (see Prior 2013 for a brief presentation of their “postBourdieusian turn” focusing on micro-sociological approaches and the materialities of music) or Nick Prior himself (2011; 2013) and Will Atkinson (2011) for arguments for Bourdieu’s continued relevance. Another reason for using Bourdieu’s work as a frame for this essay is that its three cases are historical, just as Bourdieu’s empirical material (French culture in the 1960s) is. Bourdieu’s depiction of a rigid hierarchical culture corresponds grosso modo to Western European and North American musical cultures from the 1920s to the 1970s—though much more so in the early years than in the later. Of course, basic changes happened in that fifty-year period, but, as I argue, the general notion of a cultural hierarchy remained stable (as also Bennett, Berli, and Parzer argue based on their post-2000 research). Nevertheless, some of the criticisms leveled at Bourdieu need to be taken into account, first and foremost those pointing to the sometimes rigid structural domination of agents. I will briefly refer to Antoine Hennion’s work to sketch out why it is necessary also to account for personal agency (for “tasting”). Cultural hierarchies in democratic times have never been completely dominant as competing factions have negotiated their influence under widely different circumstances and as individuals have sometimes made choices entirely on their own terms without any regard whatsoever for cultural hierarchies. I will depict these negotiations and their circumstances in the cases dealing with three institutions’ contributions to the construction of middlebrow tastes. But before we reach that point, a few words on the middle classes, on taste, and on middlebrow will be necessary.

Popular Music and the Middle Classes Middle class is an almost hopelessly broad concept, not least because it has changed considerably over time. Scholars from divergent backgrounds have defined it differently, and there are divergent opinions as to who is included and who is not. Nevertheless, it is a term that makes sense as it is used by historians, sociologists, and musicologists in order to point to the many social and cultural positions, practices, and hierarchies located between the upper and the lower classes. Historically, and in most definitions, the middle classes have been thought of in negative terms; for example as consisting of all those belonging neither to the working class nor the nobility. In most cases, the middle classes were a very diverse and ever-changing group stretching from small business owners to heads of large mercantile organizations and civil servants of most ranks, and since World War I onwards, the number of members have increased enormously as

15

16

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

employees with technical educations like engineers and science-based professions joined (McKibbin 1998: 44–50). Writing about the British middle classes, historian Simon Gunn has pointed out that in the nineteenth century the concept of class was quite broad and its discursive elements became a driving force in developing an integrated, elaborate cultural classification system and thus a cultural hierarchy. By the same process, notions of not a, but the middle classes appeared. A broad array of tastes, educations, and occupations were ascribed to these classes, often construed as the lower, middle, and upper-middle class and classified as such according to cultural and social characteristics (Gunn 2005: 52–53). In such ways, a middle social stratum had already been firmly established for decades, maybe even a century, when civil society reappeared after World War I. But what class meant then had changed: “It was only in the twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War, that ‘class’ came regularly to be defined in sociological terms of income, expenditure and, above all, occupation” (Gunn 2005: 54). Important to the following is Gunn’s observation that the middle classes were placed somewhere in between in a social hierarchy glancing upwards at wealth, power, and privilege, and looking down at poverty, marginality, and dependency: [T]he “middle-class” in England can be seen as a pre-eminently historical category, the result of accumulated “middles” or spaces between—between aristocracy and working-class, land and labour, highbrow and lowbrow, provincial marginality and metropolitan power—the balance of which has altered over time. (Gunn 2005: 62)

Demonstrating culture in one way or another was essential, and music was to become an important mark of one’s “culture,” both when playing in one’s own home and when attending public concerts. In his study of the musical life of the middle classes in three European cities before the mid-nineteenth century, William Weber points to the development of taste-based hierarchies within this middle-class framework, organized along the notions of a general taste (what is accessible to most) in contrast to musical idealism (for example a morally based stand against mixed programming) and a popular music in contrast to classical music (Weber [1975] 2004: xxi–xxiv). In particular, the repertoire that related to the general taste might be associated with middlebrow aesthetics ([1975] 2004: xxxiv). Such musico-cultural hierarchies became more important in the decades around 1900, as demonstrated by Lawrence Levine in his Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). He has portrayed how the dichotomy between high and low became basic to North American musical culture through a process of sacralization of the arts and a general deprecation of popular music. The forming of professional symphony orchestras in many US cities and the disciplining of the concert hall audiences were elements in this process. Derek Scott has noticed a similar tendency in Europe in his account of the developments in popular music in the nineteenth century. To Scott the processes of commercialization or commodification were probably the most important to the “rupture between art and entertainment” (Scott 2008: 87). Twentieth-century popular music emerged from the first wave of musical commercialization, which was spear-headed by the musical-instrument and music-printing

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

industries. The music played from the sheets was a wide variety of arrangements of opera and operetta highlights, parlor music, sentimental songs, and waltzes, gallops, polkas and other dance music. The commercialization also indicates that music was becoming a mass cultural phenomenon. “The Maiden’s Prayer” (1852), for example, was published by hundreds of publishers and sold in millions (Wicke 1998: 28) and Caruso’s recordings for the Victor company also sold in millions (Gronow and Saunio 1998: 17–18). One reason for this early industrialization of music was the continually growing middle classes. They were not rich, but they earned enough to buy first pianos and sheet music, then gramophones and records, and in the 1920s a radio. The ever growing middle classes had still more money and still more spare time, leaving room for all kinds of music consumption and education in the twentieth century.

Taste and Tasting “Taste classifies the classifier.” This famous Bourdieu dictum ([1979] 1984: 6) indicates that pointing to what you like or do not like is not an innocent business. Proposing a judgment of taste indicates not only what you think of something, but also what you think of yourself, and it might suggest to others what they ought to think of you. The dictum also indicates that judgments or classifications are inherently social acts, statements and sentiments addressed to someone other than yourself. To Bourdieu, taste is concerned with distinction, with the basic production of meaning, “it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions” (175). In such processes of classification, indications of social class positions inevitably manifest themselves, and classifying thus becomes a “symbolic expression of class position” (175). At an individual level, “taste is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others” (56). One’s taste is part of one’s habitus, thus influencing, though not necessarily determining, who one is and how one lives. A hierarchical class perspective is vital to Bourdieu. In his analysis of French 1960s culture he discerns between three main classes, each consisting of several class factions based on employment. Although background, education, and employment are important indicators of class affiliation, there are many overlaps between the classes, also because agents may move between them. Each of the three main classes has corresponding tastes. The upper classes will normally demonstrate a “legitimate taste” based on an aesthetic disposition of disinterestedness towards established works of art while the middle classes demonstrate a middlebrow (le goût “moyen”) taste focusing on “the minor works of the major arts” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984: 16). The lower/working classes demonstrate a popular taste that focuses on the morality and functions of aesthetic objects (41–42). Within this system, where legitimate taste is dominating, each taste may be quite extensively varied. Legitimate taste includes both bourgeois (conservative) and intellectual (avant-garde) tastes, where the former is considered the

17

18

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

dominant faction of the dominant class (292–94). This structuring, which is also related to the distribution of economic and cultural capital, can be found in middle-brow tastes as well (342), and age serves as a basis for yet another division in this class (the declining petite bourgeoisie and the new petite bourgeoisie, 346–65). Based on his extensive empirical studies, Bourdieu detected a correspondence between specific classes and specific taste palettes. Despite the actual complexity demonstrated in his discussions of overlapping class factions, he used musical examples to demonstrate the elementary difference between the three tastes: The Well-Tempered Clavier (legitimate taste), Rhapsody in Blue (middlebrow taste), and The Blue Danube (popular taste). Such strict divisions were challenged by American sociologists Richard Peterson and Albert Simkus (1992, see also Peterson 1992) when they introduced the concepts of cultural univores and omnivores. Based on the US 1982 national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, they found that the elite did not just keep to their “own” taste but had an open mind for musical genres typically related to middle or lowbrow tastes. Four years later, Peterson together with Roger Kern (1996) confirmed the findings by analyzing the 1992 US survey. In this article, they also theorized the concept of the omnivore as a disposition for being open to appreciating everything, but on one’s own aesthetic terms. It is not a doing away with distinctions but rather a shift of focus from what one likes to the ways one likes it, in general a “shift from the elitist exclusive snob to the elitist inclusive omnivore” (Peterson and Kern 1996: 905). The opposite, the univores, tend to like only one or a few genres, even though the two researchers detect an opening here as well towards other genres (Petersen and Kern 1996: 904). This less restricted conception of the workings of taste hierarchies has become very influential as well, not least because it helped explain some of the changes brought about by postmodernism and the diminished hegemony implicit in cultural hierarchies without sacrificing the relations between taste and class. Large-scale surveys combined with advanced sociological theorization have made both Bourdieu and Peterson essential to discussions of taste. After the millennium, yet another French sociologist, Antoine Hennion, who has been active in France (and primarily in French) since the late 1980s, has become established in the English-speaking world as a major contributor to questions of taste, but this time in a decidedly micro-sociological perspective and with quite different aims. He admits that critical sociology has given us important results, but at the same time he delivers a massive critique of especially Bourdieu’s conception of agents as basically passive and tastes as mere ideological constructs and social games (Hennion 2005: 132–33). Explaining the difference, Hennion contrasts passivism and cultural practice: “Tasting does not mean signing one’s social identity, labeling oneself as fitting into a particular role, observing a rite, or passively reading the properties ‘contained’ in a product as best one can. It is a performance: it acts, engages, transforms, and is felt” (2005: 135). Tasting is an activity: “… to taste is to make feel, and to make oneself feel, and also, by the sensations of the body, exactly like the climber, to feel oneself doing” (Hennion 2007: 101, original italics). Such performances are part of a pragmatics of taste; that is, the study of how actual genres, musical objects, and listeners continuously produce each other in still more differentiated elaborations (2005: 134). The

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

act of tasting is not only an activity, it is also reflexive because tasting is something one does deliberately and as an accomplishment; it is the development of a sensitivity which is “corporeal, framed, collective, equipped, depending on places, moments and devices, [and] which simultaneously produces the competencies of a music lover and a repertoire of objects” (2010: 25). One might conceive of tasting as taking place within this complex network of relations whose constellations at a specific time decide what kind of activity the actual tasting is. Hennion refers to the relations as attachments, a term borrowed from Latour (see, for example, Latour 1999) and used as one way of overcoming binary thinking in, say, subjects and objects. The multiple attachments are involved in tasting processes, and the attachments produce and then mediate meanings in still new ways, and they are determining and determined (Hennion 2010: 32). He mentions four elements or categories of attachments (without granting them exclusivity) that contribute to the configuring of the space of taste: “the community of amateurs, the devices and conditions of tasting, the body that experiences, and the tasted object” (Hennion 2005: 137). Despite the wish to transcend a dualistic thinking, the terms subject and object are still used to name the basic combination in tasting: a music lover and a musical object or work. And it is indeed a main point of Hennion’s micro-sociology to rehabilitate the status of actual persons caring deeply for music in general as well as the actual pieces of music. The music lovers (sometimes translated as amateurs) interviewed for his various research projects have extremely different approaches to music stretching from the avid record collectors and their intercourse with their collections (including listening practices), through to choir singing, and to listening while traveling and while relaxing (Hennion 2010: 28–32). It is important to remember that such widely divergent practices concerning tastes are an integral part of middle-class musical practices and of the milieus of Bourdieusian analysis. Tasting music is much more than marking social relations. It is a deeply personal activity in which subject and objects enter into intimate relations that make music matter. Even though I mainly comment on general developments in the following, it is important to remember that such developments are based on actual music lovers’ tasting activities.

Middlebrows and Music Genres While the terms lowbrow and highbrow appeared in the late 1880s and early 1900s respectively (Levine 1988: 221–22), the term middlebrow was coined in the 1920s (OED). Inspired by phrenology, the three terms came to roughly correspond to the tripartite structuring of social classes and referred to the tastes of said classes. Middlebrow then, was the naming of the in-between socio-cultural activities and tastes of the middle-classes, especially the lower ones. This relation is inspired by British historian Ross McKibbin who used middlebrow to designate the middle classes’ cultural practices in his analysis of class and culture from 1918 to 1951 (1998). The actual notion of middlebrow was

19

20

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

developed in the UK and US in relation to literary culture. Literary scholars Brown and Grover identify the term in this way: The term “middlebrow” itself, first used in the 1920s, is the product of powerful anxieties about cultural authority and processes of cultural transmission. It is a nexus for prejudice towards the lower middle-classes, the feminine and domestic, and towards narrative modes regarded as outdated. (2012: 1)

Each part of the homology between the tripartite structures of class and culture could be subdivided by using lower or upper in combination with class or brow. Such structural homologies should not be accepted at face value while the many actual correspondences (and non-correspondences) between class and brow should. Here I apply the perspective that various educational and occupational groups constitute a complex, social hierarchy and that the values associated with musical genres constitute a corresponding hierarchy. The two may be mapped onto each other in contingent ways so that, say, less prestigious social groups may be associated with less prestigious music. Actual correspondences are pointed out by, say, contemporary commentators categorizing others and by writers of readers’ letters in cultural magazines categorizing themselves (cf. Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 207). Such overarching structurations of culture work as imaginaries. They are more like hegemonic constructs appearing in debates rather than as summations of actual practices. They regulate to some extent, but the boundaries they imply are often transgressed—by musicians, by fans, etc. As Chowrimootoo phrases it: “The notion [of the great divide] may not have been true but it was real, insofar as it defined how writers, critics, and audiences understood contemporary cultural battle lines” (2018: 8). Middlebrows were a subset of the middle classes and the term itself refers to the subset’s cultural practices taking place somewhere in between the low and the high. The practices and values are developed in the continuing tensions between high and low in negotiations, appropriations, and abjections—that is, in continuous readjustments of the cultural hierarchies of high and low. The 1930s British phrase “battle of the brows,” which is also the title of Brown’s and Grover’s book, indicates that such negotiations and abjections were not of a civil kind (see for example Virginia Woolf ’s famously scathing attack on middlebrows ([1941] 2012)). I have chosen this term instead of middle class in order to make less automatic the relations between classes and musical genres. Middlebrow is probably the most condescending among the terms referring to some kind of cultural middle because it highlights the middle as neither the high nor the low—it is bland. I have chosen to use the term precisely because of its precarious status, because it reminds the writer and the reader of the cultural struggles and the disdain involved in this musical in-between offered to members of the middle classes, including its place in a hierarchy of tastes. The “battle of the brows” went on far beyond the 1930s. An early clash took place in October 1932 on the BBC National Programme with broadcast statements on highbrows and lowbrows respectively (Priestley 1932; Nicholson 1932). But after the war the term became popular in the US as Harper’s ran a piece on the three brows (Lynes 1949), which was referenced with examples in Life magazine (“High-Brow …” 1949). Cultural critic Dwight MacDonald often abused middlebrows in the late 1950s and early 1960s; for example, he

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

did so in the essays collected in Against the American Grain (1962). After the mid-1960s the term became less used in English-language cultural debates, while Bourdieu published Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie in 1965. In scholarship from the last three decades, middlebrow has turned up as the concept of choice in historical studies of this cultural in-between. Joan S. Rubin (1992) did pioneering work by drawing attention to and analyzing US middlebrow, literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Several have followed in her footsteps, using the middlebrow angle to study reading cultures from a gender perspective, and Brown and Grover’s edited collection of essays (2012) is among the latest applying a broad historical and generic perspective. Several historians have contributed decisively to the musico-cultural analysis of brows. Weber ([1975] 2004), Levine (1988), and McKibbin (1998, especially on middlebrow musical repertoire: 386–418) have already been mentioned, as have media historians Scannel and Cardiff (1991: 205–23). In musicology Carl Dahlhaus published on Trivialmusik and Mittlere Musik (1967, 1972), and Swedish Olle Edström has expanded on the concept of Middle Music (1992). In popular music studies, Canadian Keir Keightley has published extensively on post-World War-II middlebrow music (for example 1996, 2001, 2008). Fellow Canadian Christopher McDonald has done so as well in his book on Rush (Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle-class: Dreaming in Middletown, 2009), and recently Christopher Chowrimootoo has been a central advocate for middlebrow music studies as the title of his book, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (2018) demonstrates. He (and others) include most of the non-avant-garde twentieth-century classical music under the middlebrow label, and a 2017 conference, Music and the Middlebrow held at the University of Notre Dame’s London Global Gateway, demonstrated the very wide generic and cultural ramifications by including most social classes and most genres within pop, jazz and classical. In this chapter, the genres referred to as middlebrow would primarily encompass light music related to European continental dance and parlor music; US-inspired dance music related to ragtime, sweet dance music, swing, and sentimental songs. The balance between these traditions and indeed national appropriations of them change according to place and time. The dance craze of the interbellum years supported a slow change from old to modern dance music, from continental to US, from the lilt of the waltz to straight time and syncopations. None of these traditions disappeared after the war, but they were exceeded by easy listening (Keightley 2008), a “modernization” of the pre-war traditions. And following Keightley, I would like to suggest that rock in the second half of the 1960s took over this position as the middlebrow music of the times. This means that the music related to middlebrow musical culture is extremely broad and diverse in this context. Something is still excluded, though: towards the high is still the music of the classical concerts and the avant-garde traditions, and towards the low: the European schlagers and the semi- or nonprofessional music of the cheap beer places, the streets, and the backyards. And needless to say, the borders between the brows were crossed all the time in many different ways. And maybe most distinctly, commercial teen music became anathema to all “good” music from the 1950s onwards, and paradoxically this music helped keep the middlebrow in place in-between.

21

22

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

1930s Radio: Defining Middlebrow Musical Tastes Between the two world wars radio became the musical medium par excellence. Never had so much music been available to so many listeners. In the 1920s, in most countries around the world, private or public broadcasting corporations and relay infrastructures appeared. In some countries lawmakers preferred to involve the state in such corporations while others chose to let commercial agents establish a private radio sector. Only when actual broadcasting began did the stations begin to develop ideas about content and what could be considered radiogenic ways of broadcasting. From the early years music took up 50 percent or more on most of the larger stations (Michelsen 2017), and as most broadcasting schedules by the 1930s went from early morning to night, a lot of music was needed to fill airtime. In one way, it was easy to use music because one just asked a band to play. In another, it was quite complicated as the repertoire needed to be varied. Together with public service practices of entertaining and educating most social groups, the demand for variation made the musical palette quite broad as most genres apart from the lowest and the most foreign could actually be heard on the radio. Exactly how they were mixed depended on local and national preferences, but the general picture in Europe was that light music, parlor music, and modern dance music became the bread and butter of music radio programming (taking up between 50 and 90 percent of the music programming in the 1930s), while older art music, which was the pride and joy of the music departments, was played less often (Michelsen 2017). The art music broadcasts contributed to the cultural legitimation of the new medium, while the other genres made radio useful to most social groups including the growing middle classes in one way or another. Simon Frith has described British 1930s middle-class, radio-mediated culture thus: The BBC was central to … the creation of mass, British, middle-brow culture. … Light entertainment, in particular, was defined in terms—balance, access, community—that cannot be separated from an account of the audience gathered round an essentially middleclass hearth. Balanced entertainment thus meant not pluralism, numerous different sorts of humor and music, but relaxation, programmes guaranteed soothing (“wholesome”) by their exclusion of all excesses. (Frith [1983] 1988: 41, original italics)

While Frith’s description of the bland programming policy is accurate, such programming was nevertheless surrounded and interspersed with other music programs offering a certain amount of pluralism. This becomes apparent when studying the entire range of music programs which included art music, jazz, and traditional music on a daily or weekly basis. Only within the many light music broadcasts would it be hard to detect any large amount of variation. Art music and jazz broadcasts contributed to the ideals of middlebrow tastes as expressions of highbrow tastes, while light music, etc., constituted the actual realization of such tastes, the un-defined in-between. The values attached to each of these tastes reveal themselves in the much publicized, full classical concerts played by the radio symphony orchestras. Such broadcasts got all the official attention in radio press releases and in radio

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

magazines. They hovered over the other music programs as radio’s musical raison d’etre. At the other extreme it is hard to identify what low music actually was. It was seldom talked or written about. Instruments like accordions and mandolins, which were often associated with the working classes and the rowdy beer hives (Müller 2001), could be heard in sanitized versions playing the light music repertoire. Traditional music, which could be considered low but not working class, gained admission either in more or less doctored versions or by being relegated to specialist programmes where they could be presented either by collectors of traditional music or as something exotic from the national past (Larsen 2018: 298–302). In the 1930s, jazz became a regular part of programming as well, among other things via a specialist program strategy (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 191). To the BBC and other national broadcasters, jazz was music for an acquired taste and thus broadcast at late hours. All these programming practices can be seen as the articulation of a middlebrow taste and a middle-class musical culture, that is, a relatively broad taste moving between high ideals and everyday practices, between educational and entertainment sentiments. As radio technology in the years around 1930 became domesticated, that is, as it changed from being a technologically defined gadget to being a piece of furniture in the living room, the actual content became more important. Entering the living room, musical entertainment and education became a much more intimate affair. It was no longer necessary to go to concerts, theatres, or lectures and mingle with other people. Instead, a much more direct relation between the music or the lecture on music and the self emerged. A relation that offered input to listener’s identity work as a private person without the interception of his or her social peers. And as most of radio’s address in musical terms was popular music (light music and modern dance music) and art music (and written discourse focused on art music), the identificatory markers pointed towards middlebrow values. By entering the intimate sphere, the “moral dilemma” of entertainment versus education made itself present in this sphere as well, not so much in the actual broadcasts, but in discourse on the broadcasts via the general debate in radio magazines, newspapers, political meetings, and in listeners’ organizations. Radio also offered various listening strategies. One could listen intensely to the pieces of music or entire preferred genres or one could use the flow of music emanating from the speaker as background for household chores and other activities. Radio gave the listener control over music, but it also influenced the listener either by its sheer quantity or by its nearness and promise of intensity (Michelsen 2018). An example would be crooning techniques, which, although loathed by most radio producers, slowly gained access to the air waves and stressed intimacy and intensity. By juxtaposing various genres, say, jazz and light music, radio stressed both the similarities (both were broadcast-worthy) and the differences (the dance moves) between them. This made musical taste hierarchies more obvious than earlier on, when access to the music of other social groups was limited (Scannell and Cardiff 1991: 13–15, 181–2). Music radio became a new and effective way of representing and internalizing class-based social differences in sound and repertoire, and just as existing hierarchies influenced programming, programming influenced the articulation of class. In this way, radio reinforced national audiences and even the public in general as class-based, but it was still left to the individual listeners as tasters to accept its offers of cultural and class-based identification.

23

24

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

1950s Hi-Fi: Hard and Easy Listening Radio was widespread by the 1930s, and its role as a technological gadget became less important. Radio became domesticated as the actual programming and the receiver design came to occupy the middlebrow mind. New models with better reception qualities came on the market, but it was only after the war that listening technologies, including radio, flourished and made a quite complex interaction with sound reproduction technologies possible. In the 1950s, high fidelity (hi-fi) became a catchword, and the more expensive gramophones, radio receivers, amplifiers, speakers, as well as new tape recorders were developed in accordance with the rather abstract ideal of hi-fi. This coincided with new record formats, 33-rpm LPs and 45-rpm singles, and new ways of packaging (record covers). In the late 1950s (North America) and the early 1960s (Western Europe), stereo became an integrated characteristic of the high-end hi-fi products. The fidelity in question is the fidelity towards the original, in this case live musical performances. The equipment is supposed to be transparent, to reproduce the sound of the live performance as accurately as possible. At the same time, the hi-fi magazines, when reviewing new equipment, stressed how gramophones, speakers, etc., influenced the sound. In this way the hi-fi ideal became paradoxical: the hi-fi equipment should and should not be heard. The ideology of fidelity to the original, which probably has its roots in autonomy aesthetics, was attached to aspects of technology and perhaps also to one of the middleclass heroes of the twentieth century: the engineer, who straddled the gap between science (by training) and commerce (by occupation). Also, price and design made hi-fi equipment tempting to middle-class families. In some ways it could take the place of the piano by becoming a status symbol in terms of demonstrating the family’s financial capabilities and its level of cultural refinement. The refinement consisted both of a demonstration of interest in music through ownership of such equipment and through the actual records in the collection. Hi-fi implied a somewhat different disciplining of the listener, both with regard to what was listened for and the way one did it. The early amateur radio pioneers were happy if they could hear radio signals at all. As broadcast radio became commonplace, the ideal listener constructed by, among others, the national broadcasting corporations and the editors of radio magazines, was inspired by the (ideal) live concert listener, that is, concentrated listening sitting in a comfortable chair and maybe studying a score at the same time. This position did not change basically for hi-fi connoisseurs, although they were placed in a specific spot in the equilateral triangle of stereo—often in an armchair, presumably as one’s body needed to be comfortable in order to focus on one’s mental activities. People would (again, ideally) listen “technologically” to the equipment in order to notice how it influenced the sound and “musically” to the actual music being performed. Studying Swedish hi-fi magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s, Alf Björnberg points out that learning how to listen to electronically mediated sound in the right way was deemed necessary within the hi-fi discourse—an “ear training.” Listeners needed to be

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

able to make distinctions with regard to sound quality and the extent of fidelity, in what was a rather normative system ruled by adjectives like “correct,” “true,” “natural,” and “complete” (Björnberg 2009: 91–2). As the discourse developed through the 1960s, the heavily regimented hi-fi discourse became less severe, and listening became acknowledged as a sometimes paradoxical practice drawing upon objective ideals related to technology and subjective ideals based on experiences with music (Björnberg 2009: 101). In this way, thanks to the practices and discourses surrounding what was to become “the stereo,” the middle classes developed new ways of listening to music, where questions of (the quality of) technological mediation became an integrated part of older ways of listening—it might be viewed as a middlebrow listening strategy. As Björnberg (2009: 93–94) and Keightley (1996) point out, hi-fi was heavily gendered in a male direction. Hi-fi discourse accentuated the technological aspects, and the steel front designs of the multi-component stereo systems often suggested associations with the space industry. Studying Grundig’s catalogs from the 1950s, the drawings and photos depict both males and females. In such sales materials, women are somewhat more nuanced than in the materials analyzed by Björnberg and Keightley. In the 1956 Grundig Hi-Fi WunschklangSerie catalog, for example, women and men are depicted in roughly equal numbers and in similar social settings. The women are still objects of male gazes (either in the pictures or via the photographer), but the front cover of this catalog shows a solitary woman sitting in a chair in a nice living room listening to the radio and using a remote control (FernDirigent). It is a woman having agency in relation to her listening situation and to the equipment. In a Grundig promotion clip for a remote control from 1957 the middle-class husband is still the master of technology and the wife the admirer in a lightly amorous narrative supported by music from the radio (Der Fern-Dirigent, 1957). Looking at other sales materials from that decade the couple or the family seem to be the normal visual depiction, and solitary women occur when equipment and technology are combined in situations of concentrated listening or reverie—and sometimes she is holding a record in her hands. Having bought expensive equipment, one needed music in order to enjoy it. The new record formats offered that, even though they soon came to symbolize a gap between “good” music and teenage “noise.” In addition, albums and the cover pictures and texts could function as instructions on how to live a middle-class life musically, as can be seen in album titles like An Exciting Evening at Home and The Perfect Background Music for your Home Movies (Borgerson and Schroeder 2018: 25, 48). The LPs could, of course, carry classical recordings, but in his article “Music for Middle Brows” (2008) Keightley argues that after the war, easy listening turned into the dominating genre within the mainstream and remained so until the mid-1960s. He even suggests using “easy listening” as a term for the entire period (2008: 311). The music press and other media also used terms like “middle of the road,” “the music between,” “hi-fi music,” “adult disks,” “adult music,” “good music,” and “pop-standard” (2008: 322). Easy Listening was a music based on pre-war sweet dance music, swing music, and crooning techniques. Standards of the 1930s served as the core repertoire, thus providing easy listening with a historical dimension. Stylistically, easy listening was distinct from light music, and it was less focused on its relations to the art

25

26

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

music sphere than to rock and roll and other teen music. Band leaders like Guy Lombardo and singers like Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra were among the most popular artists in the field. Keightley sums it up like this: We can now read easy listening as itself symptomatic of a postwar moment of transition in the construction of hierarchies of taste: a “leveled-down” semiclassical music merges with “elevated” forms of sweet dance-band music and pop vocals to create a new kind of middlebrow musical culture, one that ultimately gains coherence and seeks respectability more through its contrasts with a “lower” teen music than through its appropriations of highbrow culture. (2008: 330)

The actual position in-between was not new, but the position had become consolidated in a different way by being debated to a greater extent: in this changing discourse critics and others developed a sense of history for this middlebrow position by referencing 1930s standards and a sense of quality by defining teen music as its low other. In fact, in this discourse the low other is much more present than in the 1930s. This contributed the positive definition of easy listening as its specific qualities emerged. Also, the material qualities related to the genre—the album format in contrast to teen singles and complex and expensive equipment in contrast to portable gramophones and radios—helped influence the perception of this middle as something elevated in relation to the low rather than being something leveled down in relation to the high. As a modern, middlebrow culture, popular music became respectable as something in itself.

1960s Rock Criticism: Middlebrow Authenticated? During the 1960s, the middle classes continued their growth and cultural and social consolidation; the United States at a faster pace than Western Europe. Suburbs grew rapidly, as did income, and in some countries, wives entered the job market. Education from kindergarten to university exploded, and some youths entered their own cultural space by taking their parents’ musical low other and developing it hoping to turn it into legitimate culture. Borrowing from jazz’s experience with legitimization processes, the new generations speeded up their process and made rock at least semi-legitimate in remarkably few years. As rock slowly became rock from the mid-1960s onwards, its musicians became incredibly inventive in their own right while also borrowing in creative ways from almost any genre known to man at that time. By 1969, for example, Lilian Roxon in her Rock Encyclopedia recorded an unusual amount of subgenres (Roxon 1969). Such eclectic practices demonstrated musicians’ curiosity and wide (if not always deep) knowledge of other music, be it Karlheinz Stockhausen, Robert Johnson, or Ravi Shankar. Such activities gained the respect of some of the more open-minded, modern composers, and when Miles Davis and others began to fuse jazz and rock, the otherwise closed borders between the two began to disintegrate.

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

Closely following all these activities and reporting on them almost in real time, the quickly developing rock criticism tried to explain what it was all about to their generational and cultural peers as well as to anybody else interested. Like middlebrow radio broadcasters, the new critics managed to define a unique point of balance between entertainment and education, between commerce and art, as they established an aesthetics for a music that mattered. In Lindberg et al. (2005), this development is analyzed as the emergence of a cultural field of rock criticism in its own right articulating an “intermediary aesthetics” (338). This term covers the continuous tensions between the field’s autonomous and commercial poles, between mundanity and transcendence, or put differently, between rock as serious music and rock as fun (or even rock as pop). And just as easy listening advocates had used teen music as the low other in their legitimation strategies, rock critics positioned rock by antagonizing it towards first and foremost teen pop, but also against the easy listening of their parents. When writing, critics took inspiration from all over the place. The new journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson became a major source of inspiration to many. Such positionings of the writerly subject within the text and the sometimes rambling prose which was a result of it was deeply meaningful, and a critic like Lester Bangs sometimes managed to produce wildly subjective, funny, sad, verbose, and virtuosic pieces, which—together with his early death—made him probably the most legendary rock critic ever. A more academic approach was popular as well. The “objective” criticism of jazz and the analytic way of thinking (the criticism of the Anglo-American academy) intermingled in the work of Greil Marcus. Common to all was that it must not become too serious; a certain lightness, for example by using humor, was needed. Texts needed to be entertaining, and in this way they avoided being mistaken for high cultural criticism. Lindberg et al. characterize the general style of the earlier critics’ texts as that of heteroglossia: a “carnival of words” and a “carnival of events” (2005: 243). In such ways rock criticism stayed within the orbit of middlebrow cultural practices along with rock itself. Both critics and musicians could play with references to high or low culture but they wittingly remained in-between. New Englander and former Brandeis University student Jon Landau (1947–) became one of the formative US rock critics as contributor to Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, The (Boston) Phoenix, and The Real Paper and as review editor at Rolling Stone from late 1970 to 1975, when he became Bruce Springsteen’s manager (Lindberg et al. 2005: 141). He was clearly aware that the music and its critics were moving into middle-class culture. Echoing the Nielsen epigram at the beginning of this essay, Landau states: “Of the two [rock and roll and rock], rock is a music of far greater surface seriousness and lyric complexity. It is the product of a more self-aware and self-conscious group of musicians. It is far more a middle-class music than the lower-class one that was its predecessor” (1972a: 21). Rock turned into a “new culture” (24) with its surface seriousness and self-consciousness and with its embrace of the middle-class star system (210). The almost explosive development of rock criticism in the US became part of this by demonstrating “literacy, the first sign of civilization” (25). This ambiguous position is mirrored in his essay on his college years, “The Baptism of Brandeis U.” (Landau 1972b). Here he accounts for Brandeis University which

27

28

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

was founded after the Second World War in continuation of a humanistic, educational tradition expounded by European Jews, among them Herbert Marcuse and Leo Bronstein. During the late 1960s, this tradition was abandoned to make space for a modern sort of professional training. In the context of Landau’s book, his account of academe’s movement from intellectuals to professionals works as a parable for music’s move from amateurism and naivety to professionalism and self-awareness. Rock came to inhabit the in-between, but on other premises, as the many middle-class college graduates among the first generation of US rock critics attest to. Despite moments of self-doubt they helped define the promise of rock. In Landau’s case the promise of insight was via rock as “body music”: “Rock and roll has to be body music, before it can be head music, or it will wind up being neither. Rock and roll may be the new music but rock musicians are not the new prophets” (1972a: 134). This was originally stated in a 1968 Rolling Stone piece on rock and art, where he renounced the idea of rock as art in a traditional sense—as up there with Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc. Instead, he contributed to the articulation of rock’s history, which in itself was a legitimating move and also served as background for an alternative idea of rock as art where he combined rock with an authenticity of expression. To Landau, rock was at its best when the musicians created and expressed “a personal, almost private, universe” (15). On Blue (1971), Joni Mitchell realized this ideal, and the review ended with a brief, full sentence: “It is art” (104). Toying with the question of whether rock was art and how rock could be authentic, rock critics and musicians strengthened the position in-between that they had taken upon themselves to occupy. Authenticity soon became a major trope in the intermediary aesthetics of rock. Discussions of what or who was authentic was equally important to discussions about what authenticity actually meant. Definitions only seldom surfaced, but it is possible to group the many ideas concerning authenticity by the mid-1970s into at least six categories (all of which, of course, overlap): [I]n rock discourse we are actually dealing with a number of quite differing ideas of “authenticity,” including “folk authenticity,” “authenticity as self-expression,” “authenticity as negation,” “authentic inauthenticity,” “body authenticity,” and “authenticity as transcendence of the everyday.” The list could probably be extended. (Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010: 476)

In all of this, the question of the by-now-traditional middlebrow tensions or anxieties concerning the quality of its aesthetic judgments still loomed, and it became coupled with the negation of easy listening and low teen pop. But grounded in a middle-class habitus and educational capital earned through university studies, several youth groups managed to establish a verbal discourse addressing these tensions and negations and turn them into explicit and positive valorizations in judgments concerning whether the music was “real,” “genuine,” “sincere,” or “true.” Authenticity has been a central theme in popular music debates ever since, even though questions of authenticity nowadays are mainly discussed in relation to the subject doing the authentification rather than the object being authenticated. In such ways, rock reproduced once again what seems to be a basic twentieth-century taste

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

structure: a cultural hierarchy, using arguments based on canon formation, a well-defined history, and recurring topics of discussion. Rock remained in-between despite attempts by, say, progressive rock musicians to reach towards the high by emulating older art music styles. What makes rock interesting in this context is that it articulated its position more clearly and convincingly than any other earlier in-between, middle-class-related music cultures—and to some extent on its own terms.

Conclusion: Middlebrow Culture as a Place in Itself As demonstrated by the three quotations at the beginning of this essay, the musically in-between has changed from being just enjoyment (Graham), to der gute Ton (good sound and nice manners, Grundig) and on to artistically aware rock music (Nielsen). As mentioned, Keightley (2008) has argued for a growing independence of a field of culture in-between high and low after World War II, because highbrow culture came to exert less dominance than before the war. Consequently, middlebrow culture could tone down its conception of itself as a sort of low other to highbrow culture. Keightley’s argument for such a reinterpretation of middlebrow as something understood in positive terms instead of negative terms rests on his analysis of easy listening as the mainstream of popular music in the two decades following World War II, where he demonstrates a new kind of respectability surrounding this cultural in-between: A different approach to the middlebrow reads it as emblematic of a new kind of respect for popular taste, even as a celebration of the aesthetics of a huge portion of the population. This inclusive, populist version of middlebrow can help us understand the strange history of the rise and fall of the easy listening era. (2008: 330)

This is indeed an important turning point, and I would like to add to Keightley’s analysis that many of the conditions for what happened after the war were established when radio came about. For a time, radio made musics into music; that is, radio gathered together many different musical cultures and established national musical cultures in much more inclusive ways than national music cultures of the nineteenth century. It reined in most kinds of music under the sun. The close juxtaposition and ordering of very different musics within one music—the “one” that was broadcast on a daily basis—made the cultural hierarchies stand out more clearly than ever as they were communicated to most social strata of society. In this process, 1930s radio helped define and locate the middlebrow right in one’s own living room, and the listener knew that s/he probably did not quite live up to the expectations of the institution (or “society” or even the actual equipment) concerning what to listen to, for how long to listen, or the way to listen. Listeners were almost supposed to feel guilty. That highbrow music got all the attention while middlebrow music was the music actually played indicates a de facto acceptance of middlebrow culture. It was, after all, all right to be entertaining and to be entertained and to forget about educational matters

29

30

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

for a while. This wealth of light music, which helped to articulate a middlebrow musical identity or taste, was an important premise for the postwar developments described by Keightley. After the war, this in-between area slowly became more respected. Its bearers became more affluent and began to insist on their own tastes, at first hesitantly as they discovered that they had a voice as in-betweens. Early reviews of easy listening confim this growing confidence. Another way of gaining this voice (for men) was through the acquisition of equipment for playing music. Technology became either an end in itself or a road to appreciating the sound of music on somewhat different terms compared to the composer lingo of highbrow culture. The lingo of stereo culture and record collecting became a distinctly different way of talking about music compared to the lingo of musical form and Italian words for musical expression. It did not take over from highbrow, but it became an alternative way to talk—it delivered music to language which is the first step in establishing mastery and control over cultural objects and practices. Middlebrow focus shifted somewhat from the high other (and thus feelings of inferiority) towards the low other (and thus feelings of superiority). A new sense of class-related self-confidence appeared, not least because the music and its accoutrements evidenced economic and social success. Around 1970, rock musicians and critics could very well be described as “new intellectuals” in Bourdieu’s sense. Their habitus was not marked by a thorough university training, but by interest in the new arts (jazz, film, comic strips) (Bourdieu [1979] 1984: 370–71). It was indeed a field where battles based on the same basic rules are fought but without professing to high cultural standards, staying in-between, but at the same time disrupting middlebrow culture’s “balanced entertainment” (Frith [1983] 1988: 41) by insisting on debating the new aesthetics and using controversy as a strategy to raise new issues. Critics and musicians brought forth an intermediary aesthetics of rock understood as an aesthetics thriving on tensions rather than trying unsuccessfully to avoid them as previous generations had. This changes what middlebrow is about: from an unreflexive culture bent on establishing the cultural symbols of social security, as in the Frith quote, to a reflexive middlebrow with fewer unfulfilled cultural and social ambitions. The middle classes had arrived! This chapter has described a historical development in three stages. Such a narrative is only partly true because the main repertoires mentioned—light music, easy listening, and rock—have not replaced each other. Rather, each one has been added to the previous one in an expanding middlebrow universe and the corresponding middle classes, and around 1970 they spoke to different middlebrow age groups. Rock did not define easy listening and light music as low others, but rather as old others or un-hip others, and even easy listening maestros like André Kostelanetz came to record Beatles songs. Also, the two met in the charts and on non-format radio. The in-between became a place unto itself, and gained (some of) its own criteria, among other things that being popular and having success economically was actually something good. To be able to entertain and to deliver what the audience expected became a mark of excellence as well. And as it could distance itself from a low other and could refer to its historical dimension, a middle-class musical culture to itself appeared.

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

Discography International Pop Orchestra (1962), An Exciting Evening at Home, Cameo. The Metro Strings (1964), The Perfect Background Music for your Home Movies, MGM. Mitchell, J. (1971), Blue, Reprise.

Works Cited Atkinson, W. (2011), “The Context and Genesis of Musical Tastes: Omnivorousness Debunked, Bourdieu Buttressed,” Poetics 39: 169–86. Bennett, T., M. Emmison, and J. Frow. (1999), Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, T., M. Savage, E. Silva, A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal, and D. Wright. (2009), Culture, Class, Distinction, London: Routledge. Berli, O. (2014), Grenzenlos guter Geschmack, Die feinen Unterschiede des Musikhörens, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Björnberg, A. (2009), “Att lära sig lyssna till det fulländade ljudet,” in O. Edström (ed.), Säg det om toner … och därtill i ord, 79–112, Stockholm: Carlssons Bokförlag. Borgerson, J. and J. Schroeder. (2018), Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1965), Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris: Minuit. Bourdieu, P. ([1979] 1984), Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brown, E. and M. Grover. (2012), Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chowrimootoo, C. (2018), Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide, Oakland: University of California Press. Dahlhaus, C. (1967), “Vorwort” and “Trivialmusik und ästhetisches Urteil,” in C. Dahlhaus (ed.), Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19). Jahrhunderts, 7–11 and 13–28, Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag. Dahlhaus, C. (1972), “Über die ‘mittlere Musik’ des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in H. de la MotteHaber (ed.), Das Triviale in Literatur, Musik und bildender Kunst, 131–47, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Der Fern-Dirigent (1957) [commercial clip], Germany: Insel Film, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jr4CSZRVuuo (accessed January 13, 2019). Edström, O. (1992), “The Place and Value of Middle Music,” Svensk Tidskrift för Musikforskning, 1: 7–60. Frith, S. ([1983] 1988), “The Pleasures of the Hearth: The Making of BBC Light Entertainment,” in S. Frith (ed.), Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop, 24–44, Cambridge: Polity. Graham, H. (1927), “My Programme” [program description], The Radio Times (Southern edition), March 4, 493, https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/d3176f43f1c54fedb38a482f7047bdde (accessed January 5, 2019).

31

32

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Gronow, P. and I. Saunio (1998), An International History of the Recording Industry, London: Cassell. Grundig Hi-Fi Wunschklang-Serie [catalog] (1956), http://www.hifi-archiv.info/grundig.html (accessed January 26, 2019). Grundig Revue. Herbst 1959 [catalog] (1959), http://www.hifi-archiv.info/grundig.html (accessed January 26, 2019). Gunn, S. (2005), “Translating Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and the English Middle-class in Historical Perspective,” The British Journal of Sociology 56 (1): 49–64. Hennion, A. (2005), “Pragmatics of Taste,” in M. D. Jacobs and N. W. Hanrahan (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, 131–44, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hennion, A. (2007), “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural Sociology 1 (1): 97–114. Hennion, A. (2010), “Loving Music: From a Sociology of Mediation to a Pragmatics of Taste,” Comunicar 34/xvii: 25–33. “High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow,” Life, April 11, 1949, 99–101. Available online at Google Books. Keightley, K. (1996), “‘Turn it Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59,” Popular Music 15 (2): 149–77. Keightley, K. (2001), “You Keep Coming Back Like a Song: Adult Audiences, Taste Panics, and the Idea of the Standard,” Popular Music Studies 13: 7–40. Keightley, K. (2008), “Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966,” American Music 26 (3): 309–35. Landau, J. (1972a), It’s Too Late To Stop Now: A Rock and Roll Journal, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. Landau, J. (1972b), “The Baptism of Brandeis U,” in J. Landau (ed.), It’s Too Late To Stop Now: A Rock and Roll Journal, 185–205, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books. Larsen, C. R. (2018), “Radio, Music and the Provinces: The Danish State Broadcasting Corporation’s Creation of Musical Provinces,” in M. Michelsen, M. Krogh, S. K. Nielsen and I. Have (eds.), Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, 283–308, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Latour, B. (1999), “Factures/Fractures: From the Concept of the Network to the Concept of the Attachment,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36: 20–31. Levine, L. W. (1988), Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lindberg, U., G. Gudmundsson, M. Michelsen and H. Weisethaunet (2005), Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers, New York: Lang. Lynes, R. (1949), “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s, February 1949: 19–28. MacDonald, D. (1962), Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture, New York: Random House. McDonald, C. (2009), Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle-class: Dreaming in Middletown, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McKibbin, R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michelsen, M. (2017), “Comparing Play Lists: Popular Music on European Interbellum Radio” [Paper given at the 19th IASPM conference, Popular Music Studies Today, Kassel, June 2017].

Popular Music and Middlebrow Taste

Michelsen, M. (2018), “Negotiating Musical Hierarchies: Music Programming and Genre on Interbellum Danish Radio,” in M. Michelsen, M. Krogh, S. K. Nielsen and I. Have (eds.), Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio, 309–44, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Müller, M. (2001), “Die Mandoline und die dänische Arbeiterbewegung,” Musica Instrumentalis 3: 13–23. Nicholson, H. (1932), “To an Unnamed Listener – II (to a Low-Brow),” The Radio Times (Southern edition), October 21, 1932, https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/ 486820f509b34c90a9f5b70f4316eec2 (accessed January 5, 2019). Nielsen, H-J. (1970), “I anledning af en skilsmisse,” Information, July 28, 1969. Reprinted in L. Bengtson (ed.), Der gror aldrig mos på en rullesten, 282–85, Copenhagen: Borgen. Parzer, M. (2011), Der gute Musikgeschmack. Zur sozialen Praxis ästhetischer Bewertungen in der Popularkultur, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang. Peterson, R. A. (1992), “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21: 243–58. Peterson, R. A. and A. Simkus (1992), “How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups,” in M. Lamont and M. Fournier (eds.), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, 152–86, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Peterson, R. A. and R. M. Kern. (1996), “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61 (5): 900–7. Priestley, J. B. (1932), “To an Unnamed Listener – I (to a Highbrow),” The Radio Times (Southern edition) October 9, 30, https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/e53a19413911489489 6e3448038b0140 (accessed January 5, 2019). Prior, N. (2011), “Critique and Renewal in the Sociology of Music: Bourdieu and Beyond,” Cultural Sociology 5 (1): 121–38. Prior, N. (2013), “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music Consumption: A Critical Assessment of Recent Developments,” Sociology Compass 7 (3): 181–93. Roxon, L. (1969), Rock Encyclopedia, New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Rubin, J. S. (1992), The Making of Middlebrow Culture, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Scannell, P. and D. Cardiff (1991), A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume One 1922–1939: Serving the Nation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Scott, D. (2008), Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, S. (2014), A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value, Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan. Weber, W. ([1975] 2004), Music and the Middle-class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna between 1830 and 1848, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Weisethaunet, H. and U. Lindberg (2010), “Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real,” Popular Music and Society 33 (4): 465–85. Wicke, P. (1998), Von Mozart zu Madonna: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik, Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag. Woolf, V. ([1941] 2012), “Middlebrow,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays, https:// ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter22.html (accessed February 13, 2019).

33

2 The Impact of Social Class on Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain, c. 1955–1975 Gillian A. M. Mitchell

Introduction This essay explores the impact of social class on the response of parents to the styles of music—from skiffle and rock and roll to “beat” and progressive rock—which were popular with British youth from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Although the essay focuses predominantly upon adults from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, there is some consideration of upper classes. Scholars have acknowledged that the responses of adults to such music were considerably more diverse than traditional, stereotype-ridden accounts of “generational divides” have suggested. Objections frequently arose and undoubtedly music created familial conflicts. Nevertheless, evidence of neutral or overtly supportive parental reactions to popular music is discernible. This essay further scrutinizes such multifarious responses by assessing whether, and how, class affiliation shaped parental attitudes towards popular music. Initially at least, popular music was perceived to have disproportionately strong associations with working-class youth culture. The reported responses of upper-class adults were mixed, while middle-class commentators frequently seemed wary of, and even hostile towards, the genre. Did it thus follow that working-class parents were ultimately more permissive in their attitudes towards their children’s musical choices than their middle-class or upper-class counterparts? The chapter also considers evolutions in classbased parental responses to popular music during this period—a period that witnessed both considerable social fluctuations and developments within popular music itself. The essay utilizes various first-person accounts alongside contemporary social surveys, many of which were deeply preoccupied with concerns of class, generation, and affluence. Oral accounts confirm that individual experiences were highly divergent and that every family possessed its own particular characteristics. The essay therefore suggests patterns but resists excessive generalization; family units frequently betrayed reactions that

36

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

confounded class-based or cultural preconceptions. There are also inevitable limitations of scope—English sources and white males are predominant. There is, however, considerable potential for further exploration of the themes covered here. The essay also explores the recollections of various musicians who subsequently attained international fame. Such sources, often biased or heavily “myth[ologized],” are certainly not unproblematic for scholars (Fairley 2008: 513). It is also, frequently, difficult to articulate precisely the class backgrounds of many such musicians. Pop groups, particularly those from industrial urban areas, were often designated “workingclass” by the media, and, indeed, many musicians increasingly identified with this label, perceiving it to denote a certain valuable “authenticity” (Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 4–5). Such a sentiment was partially engendered by the development of a working-class “mystique,” a phenomenon within which groups such as The Beatles were instrumental. Nevertheless, commentators disagree on the class affiliations of The Beatles (Laing 2011: 14–15); likewise, Pete Townshend of The Who acknowledged that, despite perceptions, his background had not “really [been] working-class at all” (Dent-Robinson 2015). Similarly, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, often designated middle class, considered himself, as the son of a “bourgeois” father and a working-class mother, “somewhere in between” these strata (Miles 1982: 9). While Brian May of Queen, the son of an electronic draughtsman, further complicated straightforward assumptions by declaring that “[his] parents thought [they] were middle class,” despite being “very poor” (Edemariam 2012). It is also relatively difficult to locate well-known musicians who belonged indisputably to the “upper class”; despite having attended the elite Charterhouse School, Peter Gabriel of Genesis identified himself as middle class (Pond 1987)—although he and May would probably have interpreted this label quite differently. One must be wary of accepting automatically the presumptions that commentators have made about musicians and class, many of which fail to account for familial or local peculiarities. In many ways, individuals like these embodied the notoriously “slippery” (Laing 2011: 14) nature of class identity during this period. Defining the various classes presents notable challenges, particularly because this era witnessed considerable, if often ambiguous, social fluidity. Youngsters like The Beatles or May, and the music that they embraced so eagerly, played critical roles in shaping and were greatly affected by such complexities of identity; it is thus important to explore the nature of class dynamics in post-war Britain, and the ways in which popular music was influenced by, and also influenced, such dynamics.

Youth, Class, and Adult Responses to Popular Music The concept of “youth” became central to the intensive discussions of class identity which occurred during the post-war period. By the late 1950s, with austerity finally ended, employment opportunities abounding, and many industries booming, Britons reportedly had “never had it so good.” One consequence of such affluence was the development of

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

a vivid youth culture as British teenagers began increasingly to emulate American youth and cultivate ostensibly unique tastes. While such phenomena were not unprecedented, undoubtedly the purchasing-power of youngsters increased amid post-war prosperity. Not only did young people in their teens and early twenties seem markedly wealthier, but they also increasingly purchased items designed specifically for them—periodicals, clothing, and, significantly, records (Abrams 1961: 5). Nothing appeared to symbolize the “new” youth culture more potently than the music styles—from rock and roll to skiffle and “beat group”—which seemed to be exclusively theirs. Various commentators suggested, in fact, that this vibrant youth culture overtly challenged the traditional British class structure— embodying a “movement towards classlessness,” wherein “lower-class and middle-class youth c[a]me together on a unigenerational basis” (Downes 1966: 130). Such claims formed part of a wider belief that prosperity, alongside increasing meritocratic dynamics, afforded opportunities of betterment to more people than ever before, thereby eroding traditional class-based identities. The working classes—a diverse group encompassing industrial workers of various skilllevels, alongside such disparate individuals as “bin men, train drivers and small craftsmen” (Sandbrook 2005: 34–5)—were often considered to benefit disproportionately from such prosperity. The impact of social changes upon the status and self-perceptions of this group (which comprised around two-thirds of the population) became increasingly fascinating to social surveyors (Lawrence 2013b: 215–16). Quality of life improved for many, as access to hitherto exclusive commodities—particularly cars, televisions and homes—increasingly traversed class boundaries (Sandbrook 2005: 108–10). During the early 1960s, observing higher wages and plentiful employment among industrial workers, commentators such as Ferdynand Zweig heralded the “embourgeoisement” of the “affluent” working class, as it “move[d] towards new middle-class values,” eschewing traditional socio-political affiliations and solidarity in favor of increasing “individual[ism]” and family-oriented “home-cent[er] edness” (1961: ix, 20–1, 138, 209). Surveyors pondered the long-term effects of this apparent transformation upon British society and politics (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite 2018: 15). The promises of a more “middle-class” identity were extended to working-class people in other respects. The tripartite system instituted by the 1944 Education Act ostensibly provided pertinent free secondary schooling for all children, regardless of aptitude or class. Those who succeeded in the “eleven-plus” examination entered academically oriented grammar schools, while those who did not attain pass-marks attended “secondary moderns,” designed to provide practical education befitting the less-skilled future workforce (Kynaston 2009: 113). While the third type of institution, the industrially focused technical school, proved less influential, the grammar schools hoped to offer “a promised land” of educational, and social, advancement to significant minorities of bright working-class pupils (Todd 2014: 227)—among which were numbered various future musicians, including Paul McCartney and George Harrison of The Beatles, and Roger Daltrey of The Who. Ambitious working-class youngsters also frequently benefited from the expansion of “professional, technical and managerial” work (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite 2018: 35–6) accompanying Britain’s post-war industrial boom, eventually becoming, via earnings and

37

38

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

lifestyle, part of a dynamic middle class. For some scholars, this era witnessed the “triumph” of this sector as it increased in size and influence (Harrison 2011b: 141). Again, Sandbrook observes “[middle] classes rather than one united class” (2005: 35–6)—professionals occupied the upper echelons, whilst clerks, secretaries, and supervisors formed an expansive, yet “vague,” lower-middle class. In between were numerous individuals, some of whom had acquired their social standing more recently than others. Nevertheless, despite the often meticulously “hierarchical” character of the middle class, its fluidity and “evangel[ical]” abilities to recruit “from below” seemed to enhance its primacy (Harrison 2011a: 199–200). The increasing prevalence of so-called “middle-class values” was pivotal to this apparent triumph. The alleged “embourgeoisement” of workers was part of this victory, of course; nevertheless, “middle-class values” were both amorphous and varied. Stereotypically, such values traditionally entailed an obsession with “respectability,” “good” cultural tastes, and a certain disdain for “the lower orders.” However, the emergence of new post-war technologies injected a progressivism into the middle-class mentality, allowing it to “move away from the [traditional] snobbish, gentlemanly motif … through appealing to technique, skill, and expertise” (Savage 2010: 216). Such meritocratic modernity ultimately furthered its normalization, whilst widening possibilities for suitably qualified individuals to join its ranks (Savage 2010: 216, 225–6). While the middle class increasingly recruited “from below,” the various ranks of the hitherto powerful upper class, and even the monarchy, saw value in absorbing certain conventions of middling society as hereditary privileges were increasingly challenged by meritocratic principles. Such developments allowed for greater cross-class interaction whilst increasing the fluidity of higher-class boundaries—with the dividing-lines between the upper-middle and upper class particularly ill-defined (Harrison 2011a: 183). Elites could no longer presume that their power was irrevocable and, by this time, the “upper classes” comprised “a loose and very permeable elite” (Harrison 2011a: 195). Thus, affluence, technological development, and educational opportunity seemed to blur social boundaries and to draw more Britons towards the middle; those who viewed such mobility optimistically heralded the demise of traditional hierarchies. Youth and its music, which apparently “knew no class divisions” (James 2006: 446), seemed a particularly potent and liberated harbinger of this revolution. In reality, class identities did not erode quite so straightforwardly; contradictions and inequities remained pervasive. The attitudes of certain authorities towards youth-oriented music highlighted such confused perceptions pointedly. Despite the proclamations of “classless” youth culture, most studies of contemporary youth ultimately focused on working-class youngsters—particularly “unmarried working-class male[s] between 15 and 25” (Downes 1966: 129). Working youths appeared to benefit disproportionately from the vibrant job market and increased leisure opportunities, although the singular contribution of girls to teenage culture was widely acknowledged. These youngsters frequently seemed to assert an identity that differed from that of their parents, although such stridency was considered problematic if carried too far. Worries concerning delinquent working-class youth punctuated this period, manifesting particularly intensely in anxieties surrounding “subcultures” such as Teddy Boys or Mods and Rockers (Fyvel 1961; Cohen 1972).

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

Reactions of education authorities and establishment figures towards youth-oriented music were, similarly, somewhat ambivalent and frequently negative. Again, many styles were strongly associated with working-class youngsters, starting with rock and roll itself. Such associations did not lead to uniformly condemnatory attitudes; the working-class roots of Britain’s earliest rock and rollers, including Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, and, notably, Tommy Steele, became an intrinsic and positive (albeit somewhat stereotypical) aspect of their public images. Steele retained his Cockney demeanor, and even as his fame increased commentators observed his attachment to his family and community (Mitchell 2011). Nevertheless, most British adults first became aware of rock and roll via disapproving reports of “Teddy Boy riots” during cinema screenings of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock in 1956 (Rock Around the Clock). Among those raising concerns were high-ranking socio-political elites such as Robert Boothby, Jeremy Thorpe, and the Bishop of Woolwich (Frame 2007: 190–3). While anxieties about rock and roll eroded relatively quickly in Britain, the music was seldom considered to possess artistic merit. Accordingly, it became part of established discourses concerning the dangerous influences of “mass culture” upon working-class people—ideas reflected in the writings of Richard Hoggart ([1957] 1977: 246–50), or Zweig, who criticized the “cultural horizons” of his “affluent workers” (1961: 103). Appraisals of rock and roll occasionally appeared sympathetic (“Five Rs” 1957: 5) but most ultimately perceived the genre as faddishly ephemeral. Such residual snobbery and occasional suspicion towards rock and roll certainly reflected the fact that, despite the proclamations of worker “embourgeoisement,” inequities and antagonisms persisted during this period. The suggestion that affluence gave workingclass people “middle-class” identities certainly proved misguided. The meanings of the “working-class” label for those who identified with it varied considerably, and when questioned about class, workers—such as the Vauxhall workers of Luton, interviewed by John Goldthorpe, and the Tyneside shipyard workers surveyed by Richard Brown, during the 1960s—often provided responses which appeared contradictory and “vague” (Savage 2010: 219–20; Lawrence 2013a: 282–3). Both groups knew of the opportunities that postwar affluence could afford their families, and Goldthorpe’s sample displayed many of the characteristics of Zweig’s home-centered, apolitical, “affluent workers” (Harrison 2011a: 210). However, such developments neither connoted a wholesale renunciation of class affiliation nor generated an automatic affinity with “middle-class” status. Most Tyneside workers ultimately self-identified as working class (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite 2018: 18) while Savage demonstrates that the “middle-class” designation ultimately meant little to Goldthorpe’s Luton interviewees (2010: 220–1). This was not a group that these workers could define easily within their own workplace experiences; nor did they seem consciously to aspire to middle-class status. Those who considered industrial workers the prime beneficiaries of “affluence” were guilty of oversimplification. The post-war boom manifested unevenly throughout Britain (Todd 2014: 199–200). The pressures of providing for the family also forced many workers into accepting longer shifts. As Goldthorpe observed, the apparent “home-cent[er]edness” of post-war working-class culture was often as much a consequence of exhaustion caused by overwork and a resulting disinclination to socialize as it was a voluntary domestication

39

40

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

(Devine 1992: 136). Like their parents, working-class youngsters were neither universally well-off nor did they enjoy limitless employment opportunities (Osgerby 1998: 25–6). Those who remained at school were seldom prosperous (Young and Willmott [1957] 1992: 176–7) while many young wage-earners still handed their pay-packets to their parents whilst living at home (Carter 1962: 278–9). While some working class youngsters benefited from the post-war educational reforms, most evidence suggests that “the odds [of grammar school entry] were balanced in favo[r] of the child of ambitious middle-class parents” (James 2006: 512). Most working-class children attended secondary moderns. While the vilification of these schools was often unfair (Carter 2016), the reality for many pupils was a swift termination of education and entry to unskilled occupations. Many former “sec mod” pupils, including Harry Webb (Cliff Richard), struggled to overcome their sense of failure (Turner 2005: 50–1). Similarly, working-class grammar school pupils often felt “acutely aware of their social background” (Todd 2014: 228) and left school rapidly. Both George Harrison and Roger Daltrey, for example, felt quite uncomfortable in their school environment. By the 1960s, many politicians endorsed comprehensive education as a fairer alternative to selectivity (Sandbrook 2006: 332–5). Those children of the upper class who attended private schools, meanwhile, remained relatively sheltered from such uncertainties; the perceived decline in elite power during this period was not absolute, and, paradoxically, by the late 1970s, “old money” had begun to re-establish its socio-cultural primacy and “self-confidence” (Harrison 2011b: 136–7). The elitism and fear that often underpinned public responses to popular music styles such as rock and roll were thus mirrored by the persistence of class-based inequities in the wider society—inequities that continued to disproportionately blight the lives of working-class people and to which young people were by no means immune. Just as inequality clearly prevailed in the lives of the post-war working class, so too did the image of a dynamic, technocratic middle class obscure realities of a sector awash with contradictions and anxieties (Sutcliffe-Braithwaite 2018: 37, 46)—anxieties that often affected attitudes towards popular music. “Middle class” clearly remained an amorphous category, and despite its “triumphant” expansion there were some among its ranks who felt insecure amid the increasingly intense fascination with working-class culture that emerged in this period (Kynaston 2015: 551; James 2006: 446). Whether this paradoxical impulse was prompted by quasi-romanticized fears of a vanishing world or whether it merely served as proof that class distinctions were not as moribund as some believed, it proved very potent throughout this era. Such interest was manifested in the myriad social surveys conducted during this period, in the writings of working-class authors such as Shelagh Delaney and Alan Sillitoe, and, of course, in the feting of the working-class artistes of 1950s and “swinging” 1960s Britain. Musicians such as Tommy Steele and The Beatles became vivid symbols of such cultural celebrations. However, the middle classes did not inspire similar scrutiny, and their cultural outlook, far from commanding widespread respect, was frequently viewed as provincially narrow-minded, “mediocr[e],” and unattractively “tame” (Deverson and Lindsay, 1975: 9). Such disdain frequently provoked defensive reactions. Some sought to uphold “traditional” values—a sensibility typified by Mary Whitehouse

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

and the Nationwide Festival of Light (whose moralizing campaigns frequently targeted popular music), or by middle-class anxieties surrounding educational reform (Harrison 2011b: 142–3; King and Nugent 1979). Scornful responses to working-class culture also still arose during this period (Sandbrook 2005: 36)—and the fearful hostility with which rock and roll was greeted in some quarters undoubtedly typified such a reaction. However, other more liberal, expansive middle-class individuals consciously attempted to discard any residual elitism, cultivating an “omnivorous” cultural outlook, which would only increase as the century progressed (Bennett et al., 2009: 177–94) and aiming to share in the working-class cultural expressions that commanded such attention. Once again, popular music frequently proved a strong catalyst for such cultural leveling. The rise of The Beatles undoubtedly broadened the social appeal of popular music. So pervasive was “Beatlemania” that even “supposedly stuffy” elements within society acknowledged its potency (Sandbrook 2006: 112). Furthermore, as Sandbrook notes, those successful popular musicians “who bought country houses and lived like eighteenth-century lords of the manor” flagrantly challenged traditional hierarchies (2010: 33–4). Established elites could not afford to ignore such subversions of the status quo and popular musicians frequently inspired (or demonstrated) the acquisition, among middle-class and even upper-class people, of “supposedly working-class accents … recreations, and attitudes” during this period (Harrison 2011b: 145). Indeed, the hostility reportedly expressed by such elites as Boothby or Thorpe was not necessarily representative of upper-class attitudes towards popular music, which were, at times, remarkably fluid. Upper-class influences on the earlier jazz scene were observed by George Melly (1989: 22), and young socialites frequently featured in early media coverage of rock and roll, readily displaying enthusiasm for the genre in the ballrooms of Mayfair and Chelsea (Tanfield 1957: n.p.). Although the motives of the press in presenting such stories were somewhat ambiguous, as respect for upper-class people was increasingly undercut by the questioning of hierarchies, the coverage certainly offered a curious counterpoint to the “cinema riots” stories, and perhaps even bespoke a certain self-assured acceptance of modern trends which apparently eluded some middle-class elements. Even the Queen reportedly enjoyed the music, and her sister, Princess Margaret, was frequently depicted as an avid pop fan (“Princess Margaret” 1957: 1). Elite acceptance of such artistes as The Beatles seemed to demonstrate the remarkable adaptability and magnetism of particular strands of working-class culture, a phenomenon within which popular music played an intrinsic role. Ironically, although perhaps somewhat predictably, hierarchical attitudes—as displayed particularly by the middle classes, whose views on popular culture were clearly often ambivalent—still manifested themselves within popular music activities during this period. For those who decried the vulgar and delinquent connotations of rock and roll, both the folk-blues derived skiffle, which attained a “cross-class appeal” (Gildart 2013: 38), and “trad jazz” often seemed more musically respectable. Furthermore, it is often argued that by the late 1960s, as rock music grew increasingly intellectualized and diverse, a middle-class youth audience for the genre became more firmly established (Macan 1997: 151–2). The emergence of progressive rock also provided a creative outlet for middle-to-upper-class

41

42

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

youngsters. While comparatively few early 1960s “beat groups” boasted markedly privileged backgrounds (Maconie 2015), members of bands such as Pink Floyd and Genesis were upper-middle-class (if not indisputably upper-class) products of the British public school system. Distinctive musical hierarchies apparently emerged by the early 1970s, with bettereducated, higher-class youngsters gravitating towards adventurous progressive bands such as Genesis or Yes, and working-class teens allegedly preferring the dance-friendly “pop” singles of bands such as Slade or Mud (Sandbrook 2010: 35; Frith 1983: 205–9). Surveys conducted during the early 1970s demonstrated that, despite the considerable changes occurring during this period, perceptions that Britain was embroiled in “class struggle” persisted (Wybrow 1989: 100); amid the recessions and industrial disputes of the 1970s, “[o]ld resentments resurfaced” (James 2006: 455) as affluence waned. Such “class struggles” also emerged within music, as revivals of 1950s-style rock and roll and, subsequently, punk rock, expressed dissatisfaction with a rock establishment that seemed increasingly abstruse and elitist (Gildart 2013: 176; Naylor 2008). There is no doubt that presumptions concerning the class-based appeal of particular genres contain various generalizations. Preferences could often be highly individualistic and eclectic. A 1972 New Society article on young working-class Londoners highlighted their diverse musical tastes. Although these young people loved to dance to records, they also “listen[ed]” carefully; the author described one young laborer, and his sister, who religiously watched both BBC-TV’s chart-focused Top of the Pops and the more arcane, rockoriented The Old Grey Whistle Test (White 1972: 460–1). Similarly, a 1973 survey observed that chart pop was not enjoyed exclusively by working-class teens, noting that “middleclass pupils [were, in fact,] more familiar with the best-selling records of the moment” than their working-class counterparts (Murdock and Phelps 1973: 85). Music mattered to young people, regardless of class, to differing degrees and in different ways; in fact, some of the working-class school-leavers interviewed by Michael Carter in Sheffield during the early 1960s argued that youthful adulation of popular musicians had been “grossly exaggerated” (1962: 306). Understanding youngsters’ musical tastes necessitates an acknowledgement of such differing individual experiences, which were not necessarily straightforwardly linked to class background. Indeed, class identity was deeply ambiguous throughout this period, and the highly varied, often paradoxical, responses to the various forms of music popular with youngsters at this time clearly confirms this. Such variations could also be discerned in the reactions of parents to the music, irrespective of social background.

Class Affiliation and Parental Attitudes to Popular Music Just as youthful passion for popular genres has often been misrepresented, so too has the assumption that adults uniformly failed to appreciate them clearly proven excessively sweeping. While many authorities and adults did express concern about the morality and caliber of modern styles, negative reactions in Britain never acquired the vehemence that

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

they appeared to exhibit in America (Bradley 1992: 89). Recent scholarship has observed that certain institutions, including the churches and Variety theatres, largely overcame their scruples concerning popular music in their efforts to relate meaningfully to youth. However, it was within the family that some of the most strikingly supportive responses to popular music were exhibited (Mitchell 2019). Such support was not universal, but the extent to which parental reactions were shaped in any meaningful or consistent way by class affiliation merits closer exploration. Perceptions of the relatively strong associations between working-class youth and popular music were clearly sometimes overstated; however, they remained widespread and were not groundless. Furthermore, Selina Todd and Hilary Young have compellingly argued that post-war working-class parents, far from condemning their children’s distinctive leisure activities, were frequently highly supportive, desiring that they experience a more fulfilling youth than they had known (2012: 451–67). Could it, therefore, be argued that working-class parents proved more receptive to popular music than their middle-class or upper-class counterparts? Did the conflicted and contradictory cultural attitudes that the middle classes frequently exhibited strongly during this period—partially expansive, and partially entrenched in residual elitism—affect their responses to the music? And how far was parental approval of popular music, irrespective of class, able to extend? While, for many young people, interest in pop principally constituted a leisure pursuit, others strove to build a career in popular music—a move which was fraught with insecurity. The extent to which adults of all class backgrounds were able, in this period of alleged mobility and meritocracy, to subvert their own hopes for their children in order to accept such ventures is explored later in this essay. Where they existed, positive parental responses to popular music were undoubtedly symptomatic of broader, cross-class changes in family dynamics. Frank Musgrove observed, in the early 1960s, that “[t]he [traditional] instrumental purposes of home [were now] overshadowed by the expressive,” with the “individuality” of children increasingly celebrated (1966: 101). The ideal of “the parent as a friendly confidant rather than a distant upholder and sometimes enforcer of fixed laws” (James 2006: 541) undoubtedly intensified during this era; parenting styles founded upon love had been observed within middleclass families for some time, and such “middle-class family values” were also, gradually, manifesting among upper-class people (Harrison 2011a: 182). However, comparable shifts in working-class family attitudes became particularly interesting to commentators (Harrison 2011a: 210). The quasi-stereotypical, warm-hearted working-class “mum” was not wholly a post-war sociological revelation, but the fact that working-class couples were forming more “companionate” unions, and that fathers, especially, were taking greater interest in children’s lives, appeared to represent more recent developments (King 2015). Naturally, not all family experiences conformed to such trends, and plentiful evidence of traditional, even brutal, parenting methods could still be found (Kynaston 2009: 589–98). Nevertheless, by the 1960s, greater affection and emotional cohesion became apparent within families at different social levels. Fueling such closeness was a strengthening of the home as a focus for leisure and relaxation, particularly among working-class and middle-class families. Home ownership

43

44

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

increasingly became an inter-class phenomenon during this era (Langhamer 2005; Lawrence 2013b: 275–6). Such trends were not universal, of course, but for many of those who acquired either their own homes, or council houses on purpose-built estates, a comfortable domesticity was attainable. Command of one’s own domestic space also encouraged the further development of home-centric leisure. Although Goldthorpe’s surveys challenged the notion that workers remained at home by choice, gardening, “do-it-yourself,” camping, and caravanning certainly increased in popularity for both classes, facilitating meaningful family leisure and apparently confirming the pervasiveness of the “home-cent[er]edness” ideal (Sampson 1971: 425–7; Pahl and Pahl 1971: 241). Although teenagers generally preferred to socialize with peers outside the home (Musgrove 1966: 103), the increasing centrality of the domestic sphere allowed for some cultivation of mutual interests between parents and children (Carter 1962: 307). However, as more parents acknowledged the therapeutic value of leisure, they increasingly accepted that children’s interests—even when different from their own—should be nurtured (Zweig 1961: 21–5). As Todd and Young demonstrate, many working-class parents willingly helped to fund their children’s activities. Mothers often seemed particularly supportive (Todd and Young 2012: 458), but surveys acknowledged significant paternal interest in pursuits that were particularly associated with youth culture; for example, one Luton worker noted that, twice in one week, he had “played [the] guitar with [his] elder son” (Goldthorpe et al., 1971: 100). There is no doubt that gradual accommodation of children’s musical interests did occur within family homes in this period as a crucial facet of this leisure-oriented culture. The media reflected such developments; periodicals, from the predominantly working-class Daily Mirror to the comparatively middle-class Observer, advised on the best music for teenage parties, and on suitable equipment for “the boys who skiffle and rock [and] roll” (Owen and Norwak 1963: 97–9; Settle 1957: 7). Naturally, not all families welcomed popular music at home. Some oral testimonies, such as those gathered for the BBC’s Millennium Memory Bank archive (held at the British Library), recall ambivalent reactions to popbased leisure activities, such as the organization of youth club dances, or to vibrant rock and roll music aired on shared equipment (Noble 1999; Tobin 1999). At times, negative reactions seemed particularly pronounced when popular music was showcased within spatially restrictive working-class homes (Danes 1998). Surveying youngsters in 1973, Graham Murdock and Guy Phelps noted that working-class teenagers, boasting greater familiarity with “street culture,” and often less burdened by homework commitments, frequently chose to explore their musical interests outside the home, alongside friends. Middle-class children, however, often had readier access to their own radios than did working-class teens, and thus seemed better able to indulge their musical interests at home (1973: 84–5; 109). In some cases, comfortable middle-class homes ostensibly proved more accommodating towards popular music activities. Nevertheless, considerable inter-class parental toleration, if not acceptance, of popular music did develop. Perceptions of its inherent harmlessness were both confirmed and enhanced by the increase of the pre-teenage pop audience during the early-1960s (“Beatles” 1964: 7; Dunn 1963: 29). As the market for pop-themed toys developed, many

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

children—including aspiring performers such as drummer John Bonham and guitarist Pete Townshend—recalled older relatives acquiring basic musical accoutrements for them (Yorke 1995: 7; Grundy and Tobler 1983b). Pop records were also willingly gifted to children. Punk musician Al Hillier, who grew up on a North London council estate, recalled his mother enthusiastically “drag[ging] [him] down” to purchase the latest Beatles record (Robb and Craske 2006: 10). Vocalist Robert Plant came from an ostensibly middleclass family that valued educational attainment; nevertheless, his parents initially accepted his musical interests, and bought him a record by blues artiste Sonny Boy Williamson as a reward for doing well at school (The First Time 2017). Despite such enthusiasm, any “longterm planning” for a musical career remained difficult (Wyman and Coleman 1990: 78). “I didn’t dream they were serious. I thought it was all just for fun,” recalled one woman of the “lovely but … loud” performances that her son staged, alongside a young Mick Jagger, outside their home (Dalton and Farren 1985: 9). At least while broadly supportive parents assumed the transience of such interests, they willingly indulged their children’s endeavors, just as they frequently indulged them in other ways. Nevertheless, even when children intensified their commitment to learning instruments, parents continued to assist them. Guitars and drums, “rock-style,” were not integrated into school curricula; aspiring musicians, thus, had to devise their own pedagogical techniques, either working alone, or within peer groups (O’Shea 2012: 201–2). Such initiative did not go unrecognized by parents—although, even for comfortable middle-class families, and notwithstanding the benefits of hire purchase or relatively healthy wage-packets, a quality guitar or drum-kit remained a considered purchase (Laing 2011: 11). School-age youngsters could not always presume upon parental generosity. Attempting to master such instruments also generated conflicts, with novice drummers, particularly, “test[ing] … even motherly love” (Thompson 2008: 234). Again, such tensions were often felt keenly in urban working-class communities, where housing was terraced or cramped. Amateur drummers from Liverpool interviewed by the BBC in 1963 recounted angry protests from parents and neighbors lodging complaints with their local councils (Mersey Sound). Nevertheless, some parents endeavored to assist children financially in their quest for better instruments. Jagger’s schoolteacher father recalled helping to finance the musical instruments for one of his son’s boyhood groups (Dalton and Farren 1985: 9). George Harrison’s family was less prosperous, yet the guitarist’s mother donated her earnings to help finance his first guitar, and to trade it in, subsequently, for a superior model once his commitment was evident (Davies 2009: 124). Parental support could sometimes take inventive forms, particularly when money was limited. Brian May knew that his parents lacked the finances to purchase a proper electric guitar. However, he and his father, who, despite the family’s apparent poverty, perhaps embodied the “technocratic” middle class as analyzed by Savage, overcame such obstacles by constructing their own bespoke instrument (Grundy and Tobler 1983a). Evidence of upper-class parental attitudes towards music-related pursuits is somewhat patchier, but although certain activities were undoubtedly frowned upon by some—the Daily Mail reported that several of the prestigious ballrooms which had showcased rock and roll later ceased such ventures following protests from older clients (Tanfield

45

46

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

1956: n.p.)—a certain toleration did emerge at times. Mike Rutherford of Genesis, son of a distinguished naval captain, hailed from a privileged background and attended Charterhouse School. Although his father was scarcely enthusiastic about his guitarplaying, he encouraged him nonetheless, since he considered “learning in any form … worthwhile” (Rutherford 2014: 23). The stronger support shown by Rutherford’s mother, however, contrasted markedly with the more condemnatory attitude exhibited by his schoolmaster (Rutherford 2014: 30). For some who matured within the boarding-school setting, separated from their families, music became a vital means of escaping the quintessentially “English” rigors of such an education. Writer Richard Williams felt that his discovery of blues singer Muddy Waters in 1961 rendered culturally irrelevant the “blazers and house ties” and “all the prescribed texts” of his private education (2000: 4). Nevertheless, these institutions ultimately contributed significantly to the progressive music scene in Britain. For certain individuals, such as Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who attended boarding-school from the age of five, the independence that such an environment fostered seemed to inspire a similarly autonomous approach to musical activity (David Gilmour 2016). Macan (1997: 148–151) also notes that progressive rock developed in a manner that allowed practitioners to explore contemporary genres whilst retaining influences from the traditional classical and church music styles to which they had been exposed during their formative years. Within such a world there appeared, for some, to be a certain musical intersectionality; this seemed to dilute some of the intergenerational tensions surrounding popular music which were apparent further down the social ladder. Clearly some parents, regardless of class background, were sufficiently convinced by their children’s new interests to support them considerably, and often quite creatively. The long-term implications of such interests were evidently not anticipated by parents—yet, clearly the need “for fun” and for rewarding pastimes was something with which many parents could identify. Furthermore, there were diverse ways of engaging with pop during this period. Learning an instrument became paramount for many, but others primarily enjoyed the music as an accompaniment to dancing or socializing—activities that could, in themselves, provide considerable satisfaction (Todd and Young 2012: 458). Regardless of the extent of such engagement, however, in an era during which the value of “fulfil[ling]” leisure time was widely recognized (Todd 2014: 240), it appears that some parents readily encouraged the diverse musical activities of their children.

Pop as Music? Parents, Class, and Musical Outlook Many parents, especially those of working-class backgrounds, appeared conscious and accepting of generational differences whilst encouraging their children to embrace such musical ventures. Urging children to “have a go” (Todd 2014: 243) often entailed an altruistic recognition that, although such pursuits had been unavailable to their generation, modern

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

youngsters ought to take advantage of every opportunity for happiness (Carter 1962: 280–1). Nevertheless, it is worth questioning the assumption that generational barriers precluded parental involvement in such music and whether class affected such apparent obstacles. By the 1960s, the music industry perceived generational taste-differences and many adults felt tentative about expressing excessive enthusiasm for their children’s music (Owen and Norwak 1963: 126). However, to suggest that popular music during this era was tolerated but ultimately disliked by most parents is to ignore important continuities and developments of culture and taste from the pre-war to the post-war periods; some of these were affected by class considerations but others traversed class boundaries. Despite its youth orientation, post-war popular music was tangibly influenced by, and clearly built upon, certain pre-war developments. Such continuities arguably widened the possibilities for cross-generational sharing or overlapping of musical tastes. Love of dancing to rhythmic music was certainly a quality that parents of all backgrounds had bequeathed to post-war teens. Enthusiasm for ballroom dancing had peaked during the inter-war and wartime periods, “appeal[ing] to people of all classes” (Nott 2015: 56). The later 1940s had also witnessed further evolutions in social dancing, as developments in jazz styles inspired the exuberant jitterbug and jive (Nott 2015: 153–9). Appealing predominantly to youngsters, these were patently forerunners of rock and roll. During the 1956 “riots,” reporters frequently observed the jive-style dancing which eager youngsters performed in cinema aisles. While some perceived such behavior as delinquent, others reminded detractors that these youngsters were merely imitating what they had done some decades previously. Certainly, the oft-expressed view that rock and roll represented a latter-day “Charleston” or “Lambeth Walk” was sometimes articulated to denounce rock’s derivative character. However, both popular and serious newspapers printed testimonies from adults of various class backgrounds that deployed such arguments as evidence of the “harmlessness” of rock and roll (“Rocked ’em” 1956: 14; “Rock & Roll Not Feared” 1956: 7; “Nothing Wrong” 1956: 4). For such individuals, rock and roll seemed merely the latest manifestation of a well-established love-affair between British youngsters and expressive dancing. Recognition of such continuities increased possibilities for appreciation of rock and roll—an appreciation which, again, parents of different classes often willingly acknowledged publicly (“Mailbag” 1956; “This Crazy Summer” 1956). Although many youngsters developed autonomous social lives, it remained commonplace for teens to attend social events alongside family members. Such occasions also promoted inter-generational musical sharing; acknowledging their diverse audiences, organizers of such events consciously showcased contemporary music alongside older genres. This eclectic approach was frequently adopted by organizations that boasted a predominantly working-class clientèle. For example, pianists skilled in improvisation would lead diverse sing-songs in pubs and house-parties, combining traditional musichall staples and older popular numbers with the latest hits; Pat Danes (1998), for example, recalled her mother’s versatile musicianship at the parties held at her home in southeast London. Scholars have highlighted the abilities of working-men’s clubs to cater to wideranging family audiences, with singers skillfully performing a crafted “blend of musical forms” (Finnegan 1989: 222) to enhance inter-generational appreciation (Cherrington

47

48

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

2012: 78–81). Naturally, mere exposure to popular styles did not automatically increase their acceptability among older patrons; Tom Jones, who began his singing career at a working-men’s club in Pontypridd, South Wales, recalled his more beat-driven numbers displeasing senior members who were “notorious for showing their dislike of the unfamiliar.” Aiming to accommodate them, Jones added ballads to his repertoire— although, ultimately, “they came round” to his rock-oriented material (Cherrington 2012:  79). One must avoid presenting a romanticized image of working-class communality. Nevertheless, many future performers recalled the influence of such organizations upon their own careers; musicians from Paul Weller of The Jam to Noddy Holder of Slade gained formative performance experiences at working-men’s clubs (Cherrington 2012: 78), while the bonhomie of working-class celebrations later inspired performers such as Chas Hodges, or Ray Davies of the Kinks (Laing 2018; Kitts 2008: 5). The BBC also increasingly endeavored to present contemporary pop within a “family entertainment” framework, thereby increasing parental familiarity with the music. Although often criticized for an elitist outlook on popular music, the post-war BBC, conscious of competition from “pirate” stations, increasingly tried to cater to diverse tastes. Such “accommodation,” in fact, predated this period (LeMahieu 1998: 285). This broad-based approach was epitomized both by the output of Radio 1, established in 1967, which developed a wide-ranging, inter-class and inter-generational, audience via the contrasting styles of its disc-jockeys (“The Disc Jockeys” 1970), and by Top of the Pops, which, despite the serious scandals with which it has recently become associated, was nevertheless fondly remembered as essential family viewing during this period. By the 1970s, the program had devised an effective balance between traditional variety-style entertainment (via dance troupes and older performers) and the presentation of youthfocused content; many youngsters reported watching the program with their parents, rather than with friends (Murdock and Phelps 1973: 77). One such individual, the Welsh singer Nicky Wire, retrospectively associated the program with a close-knit working-class family culture (Top of the Pops 2015). While inter-generational disputes about the relative merits of performers frequently emerged, and although some adults evidently preferred more “middle-of-the-road” performers (Mitchell 2019: 55), familiarity with contemporary pop apparently engendered greater enthusiasm among some parents. Murdock and Phelps observed apparent overlaps in potential “approval” of such pop stars as Stevie Wonder, Elvis Presley and Tom Jones between “lower working-class” teenagers and their parents (1973: 115), while Wire’s mother had evidently particularly enjoyed the performances of the teen idol David Essex (Top of the Pops 2015). It is, however, important to consider whether such inter-generational sharing emerged disproportionately in working-class settings. The stereotype of the middle classes as upholding traditional notions of “good” culture and suspicious of anything “lowbrow” remained evident during this period. Suburban middle-class parents interviewed in 1975 certainly wished their children to experience creative fulfillment but principally via traditional pursuits such as ballet or classical music (Deverson and Lindsay 1975: 116–19). Furthermore, as Murdock and Phelps (1973: 109–10) observed, many of those middleclass youngsters who engaged extensively with “underground” music ultimately did so as a

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

means of expressing disenchantment with, or rebellion against, their surroundings. Those who became intensely involved with such music also frequently embraced other facets of its associated “scene” (Frith 1983: 212)—such as drug consumption, promiscuity, and the “drop-out” lifestyle. Such activities distressed many middle-class parents, as their children often seemed more susceptible to such extreme rebellions, and as the “underground” appeared disproportionately middle class in its composition (Sigal 1968: 553; Murdock and Phelps 1973: 100). It is worth considering whether the conservative strands of middleclass culture, coupled with the more radical sounds and associations of the performers enjoyed by their children, served to inhibit parental acceptance of the music. A 1969 BBC survey certainly demonstrated that music designated as particularly experimental in style proved incomprehensible to most adults irrespective of class (Music on Radios 1 and 2 1969: 2). On other occasions, tastes among middle-class adults proved more eclectic than they first appeared. An earlier BBC survey observed that, while class and age played a significant role in shaping musical preferences—young working-class people were, apparently, the ultimate audience for pop while older, better-educated middle/uppermiddle-class listeners dominated the more highbrow classical music market—this did not prevent individuals from cultivating diverse musical tastes. Many (predominantly uppermiddle/middle class) discerning classical music listeners also expressed enjoyment of more popular music programs (including Pick of the Pops), demonstrating to the investigators that individual tastes could often be highly catholic in nature (Music 1963: 6–7, 16). Scholars have shown that inter-war Britain witnessed the development of “a common musical culture” founded upon “popular music and dance,” which was shared by “all social classes” (McKibbin 1998: 390–1). Such sharing did not level tastes altogether but did provide classes with “mutual frame[s] of reference” (LeMahieu 1998: 232). The BBC surveys showed that such overlaps did not vanish post-war; although taste hierarchies persisted, and while the market for the latest styles was determined by age as much as by class, preferences among many middle-class adults remained relatively diverse. Lighter fare, such as the multifarious popular styles showcased by such programs as Family Favourites, was often welcome when the mode of listening was enthusiastic, yet ultimately part of everyday activity (Music 1963: 16–17). Such attitudes allowed different generations and classes to enjoy broadly similar programming at different points in their daily routines. Nevertheless, by the early 1970s, there were indications of the greater openness that many middle-class people would espouse by the millennium. The socio-cultural impact of popular music was increasingly acknowledged within the arts columns of newspapers like The Times and The Guardian; arguably, such coverage enhanced the familiarity of the music among middle-class adults. However, children often proved the most persuasive musical “ambassadors” within such families. One of the early calls for serious recognition of The Beatles’ music came from William Mann, music critic of The Times; while his earnest reviews caused amusement, Mann later acknowledged that his positivity had been inspired by the intense enthusiasm of his four “Beatle-maniac” daughters (Greville 1963: 4). Similarly, the mother of the “solidly middle-class” guitarist Jimmy Page (HunterTilney 2015) declared that it had been via exposure to the music of her son that she and her husband had developed a sincere appreciation for “so-called heavy rock music”

49

50

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

(Yorke 1995: 29). Some middle-class parents even expressed sympathy for the lifestyle experimentation that often accompanied “underground” tastes. A 1975 study featured an interview with the mother of a creative young woman whose cultural interests had led her into drug experimentation. While desperately worried, the mother had ultimately striven to understand her behavior, believing that such toleration had helped her, eventually, to renounce drugs. Her ultimate statement of support for rock festivals “as a very good leisure thing for young people nowadays” (Rapoport and Rapoport 1975: 47–57) hinted at a new sort of liberal middle-class parental mentality, which would undoubtedly intensify in subsequent decades. By the late 1970s, a new generation of middle-class parents, who were sufficiently young to have enjoyed popular music during their own adolescence, paved the way for greater inter-generational musical appreciation, and—as Veenstra (2015) demonstrated in his analysis of tastes in Canada, a study that found resonance in Britain (Gray 2015)—fueled the growing “omnivorousness” of middle-class culture. Such diverse tastes would, according to Stuart Maconie (2015), eventually develop among upper-class elements—to the extent that, by the twenty-first century, the pop industry had undergone a “curious gentrification,” becoming increasingly dominated by privatelyeducated middle-to-upper-class individuals, as working-class involvement in the arts appeared to decline. Such reversals were undoubtedly becoming gradually discernible during the 1970s. Parents with deep-seated, diverse musical interests often exhibited an individualistic appreciation for popular styles that defied, and even rendered irrelevant, both class and generational boundaries. George Harrison’s mother, for example, was described by her son as a great lover of music (Scorsese 2011), able to appreciate the diverse musical styles embraced by The Beatles. Amanda Allsop, daughter of the late critic and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop (of upper-middle-class background), remembered her father’s great enthusiasm for the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan—an enthusiasm which she felt surpassed even her own at times; while Allsop did not endorse all pop, he appreciated music that seemed original and distinctive (Allsop 1974, xvi, 30–1). Dynamics between aspiring performers and parents who were professional musicians also frequently defied conventional notions of generational or class-based taste. Pete Townshend’s father, a saxophonist, not only advised his son during his musical career, but also seemed to accept that rock music would eventually supersede the big-band styles upon which he had built his career (Thompson 2008: 223). Similarly unconventional interactions developed between singer-songwriter Elvis Costello and his father, Ross McManus, who rose from humble origins to become a singer with the Joe Loss Orchestra (a dance-band famed for its interpretations of contemporary chart-hits). The latest popular songs became equally familiar to father and son (In the Mood 2013). Parents with classical music backgrounds might, at times, have been more inclined to frown on their children’s musical ventures, but the pop world during this time is replete with examples of classically trained parents (particularly mothers) who positively influenced their children’s activities—such influences affected the lives of such middle/upper-middle-class performers as Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel of Genesis, although the example of the successful 1970s pop outfit Lieutenant Pigeon, which included the sexagenarian piano-teacher mother of

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

the group’s guitarist, remains particularly striking (The One Show 2011). Such youngsters apparently valued parental expertise; generations related to one another on musical terms, rather than in a manner which was predicated upon age-related or class-based perspectives.

Pop Versus Education: Testing Parental Limits Clearly, considerable toleration for popular music was expressed by parents at all social levels; not only did they frequently accept the musical interests of their children, but such tolerance also frequently engendered appreciation of the music itself. For many youngsters, music principally served social ends, seldom developing into a “serious pursuit of celebrity” (Todd 2014: 243–4). However, when children’s musical interests began to jeopardize parental hopes and aspirations, the limits of acceptance could be tested. Although a career in pop remained an untried path, the success of bands like The Beatles undoubtedly inspired more musicians to try turning professional. Nevertheless, although the numbers of full-time popular musicians undoubtedly increased at this time, the music business remained unpredictable. In 1964, the Daily Mirror highlighted the plight of young musical hopefuls who had renounced “steady jobs for the glamour of going professional,” only to encounter miserable failure (“Joining a Beat Group” 1964: 18). Several aspiring musicians, perhaps particularly those from working-class backgrounds, remembered incurring their parents’ displeasure as they eschewed regular employment in pursuit of music. Frank Lea recalled his parents’ great alarm when his elder brother Jim joined Wolverhampton group The N’Betweens in 1966; “when you left school you had to have a job.” In Jim’s case, however, the world beyond school held considerable promise; the sixteen year-old appeared poised to attend Art College and to develop his skills as a classically trained musician (Kemp 2013). Jim Lea later recalled his mother’s particularly considerable disappointment in his decision (Slade Papers 1972), although ultimately his unorthodox career move paid dividends (after eventually changing their name to Slade, the group dominated the charts throughout the early 1970s). Parental anxieties often intensified when children appeared to compromise educational potential. Despite its shortcomings, the tripartite system prevailed in many places throughout this period, and belief in the superiority of grammar schools persisted, particularly among middle-class parents. However, although some working-class parents expressed ambivalence about educational attainment, many still hoped for their children to excel (Zweig 1961: 21–2; Harrington 1964: 8–10). Parents of both classes, thus, frequently worried whenever music threatened educational progress. The tolerant attitudes of Robert Plant’s parents reportedly altered as his musical interests superseded his grammar school work; the resultant division between parents and son was slow to heal (Yorke 1995: 18–19). Similarly, George Harrison’s father had reportedly been “very upset” when his son’s musical activities began to compromise both his fortunes at the selective Liverpool Institute and his future career prospects (Davies 2009: 139).

51

52

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Yet there was evidence during this period that, just as parents strove to provide children with emotional fulfillment, so too did they recognize that driving oneself up the educational ladder, or slavishly working for the sake of stability, did not necessarily bring such fulfillment. One study of middle-class managers and their wives observed that, while children’s educational progress remained an all-consuming concern, and although the interviewees worked intensively to maintain comfortable lifestyles, they were not driven to succeed at all costs. “[C]ontented domesticity” remained a pervasive ideal, and one woman reported that the family had deliberately moved closer to a new comprehensive school to avoid the “heart-break” of the eleven-plus (Pahl and Pahl 1971: 63–5; 237–41). Sociologist Derek M. Toomey similarly noted that, while “home-cent[er]ed” working-class parents were frequently ambitious for their sons’ education, ultimately they prioritized “concern for [their] happiness,” deeming “freedom of choice,” and “interests [and] aptitudes,” more important than “status mobility” (1969: 315). Such affirming attitudes were not always mirrored in the school environment, which many pupils reportedly found stifling and demoralizing (Musgrove 1966: 127; 138–9). Schools seldom officially endorsed popular music and several future performers, including Harrison and Page, found their schools unsupportive of their activities (Kendall 1981: 11). For both guitarists, however, parental support ultimately provided vital alternatives to the school environment. While Harrison’s father may have lamented his son’s educational shortcomings, his mother appreciated his ambitions and never “discourage[d]” him (Davies 2009: 124–5). Indeed, some parents— like those of Paul Weller, another early school-leaver—seemed able to recognize that music provided a fulfillment that school and work summarily failed to offer. Weller felt that they perceived his musical ventures as “a form of escape” (Weller 2015: 17). It is important not to overstate such permissive attitudes—the examples provided here were, perhaps, particularly exceptional. Nevertheless, many parents—including those of Jim Lea and Robert Plant—eventually accepted the unconventional career-paths chosen by their children. The extent to which such anxieties manifested in upper-class parents is undoubtedly harder to measure, owing to more fragmented evidence and to the peculiar situations of those who grew up away from home, with private schools in loco parentis. Some of the social or educational concerns expressed by working-class or middle-class parents were largely irrelevant to upper-class families. Nevertheless, parents from this cohort still held very high expectations for their children and anxieties could emerge when children forsook familial traditions to pursue musical ambitions. Mike Rutherford, for example, presumed that his father had expected him to “start … [his] own naval career” in due course (2014: 14). As Rutherford developed into a somewhat rebellious teenager, he moved further away from parental expectations. Rutherford was, thus, astounded that his father did not intervene when he renounced plans to attend university in order to concentrate on music. The guitarist later rationalized this by suggesting that the “shock” engendered in his parents’ generation by the trauma of war enabled his own generation to “g[e]t away” with more outlandish behaviour. Nevertheless, that a man of his father’s standing could “actively support” his musical pursuits—which he himself acknowledged were, initially, remarkably

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

precarious—Rutherford still could not “quite understand” (2014: 67–8). Clearly, parental love could defy even the most powerful social expectations.

Conclusion As demonstrated by outraged responses to punk rock in the later 1970s, popular music did not lose its ability to cause consternation among parents. The conservative middleclass backlash against punk, which perceived the genre as aggressively working class, demonstrated that cultural “omnivorousness” was not universal, while, for those workingclass youngsters who enjoyed punk, the music frequently bespoke protest against the “frustrations” of post-affluent Britain, as class struggles continued to manifest themselves (Gildart 2013: 174–93). The coincidence of evolutions in youth-oriented popular music and class identity from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s—phenomena that were frequently perceived as symbols of a more hopeful, fluid society—afforded parents some opportunity to accept, and even to appreciate, the sounds enjoyed by their children. This approval was neither universal nor irrevocable, and while sometimes it manifested itself more compellingly within working-class communities, in partial consequence of the ambitions and hopes that postwar conditions had engendered in some such individuals, there was no straightforward class-based division in responses; shifts in attitudes among middle-class and upper-class adults also occurred. Much clearly depended on the manner in which children consumed their music, and on the extent to which musical pursuits affected other activities and expectations. The musical interests of parents also shaped their reactions. Class-based concerns undoubtedly intersected with other factors in informing parental responses; some of these, such as gender, ethnicity, and region, merit further exploration. However, amid an era that increasingly prized individuality—whether manifested by one’s leisure time, one’s identity or one’s ambivalence regarding traditional social groupings— many parents apparently recognized the powerful, diverse ways in which popular music reflected and enhanced the uniqueness of their own, cherished children and exhibited a similar individuality in the manner in which they responded to the music.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank colleagues and family members for their support during the preparation of this essay, and to express particular gratitude to Dr. Ian Peddie, Dave Kemp, Kate O’Brien of the BBC Written Archives, and the staff of the University of St Andrews Library. The author’s original background research on adult responses to popular music and inter-generational relations was partially funded by Small Grants from the Carnegie Trust and the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust.

53

54

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Works Cited Abrams, M. (1961), Teenage Consumer Spending in 1959 Part II: Middle Class and Working Class Girls and Boys, London: Press Exchange Ltd. Allsop, K. (1974), Letters to his Daughter, ed. A. Allsop, London: Hamish Hamilton. “Beatles are ‘Just Cuddlesome’” (1964), The Times, May 28: 7. Bennett, T., M. Savage, E. Silva, A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal and D. Wright (2009), Culture, Class, Distinction, London: Routledge. Bradley, D. (1992), Understanding Rock ‘n’ Roll: Popular Music in Britain, 1955–1964, Buckingham: Open University Press. Carter, L. (2016), “‘Experimental’ Secondary Modern Education in Britain, 1948–1958,” Cultural and Social History 13(1): 23–41. Carter, M. P. (1962), Home, School and Work: A Study of the Education and Employment of Young People in Britain, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Cherrington, R. (2012), Not Just Beer and Bingo! A Social History of Working Men’s Clubs, Bloomington: AuthorHouse. Cohen, S. (1972), Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, London: McGibbon and Kee. Dalton, D. and M. Farren (eds) (1985), The Rolling Stones in Their Own Words, London: Omnibus Press. Danes, Pat, interviewed by Simon Evans, 1998, Millennium Memory Bank, British Library Catalogue Reference C900/07518, ©BBC. David Gilmour: Wider Horizons (2016), [TV program] BBC2, March 22. https:// learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0B7286C4 (accessed December 12, 2018). Davies, H. (2009), The Beatles, London: Ebury Press. Dent-Robinson, N. (2015), “Pete Townshend,” Penny Black Music, October 23. http://www. pennyblackmusic.co.uk/magsitepages/Article/8089/Pete-Townshend (accessed November 22, 2018). Deverson, J. and K. Lindsay (1975), Voices from the Middle Class: A Study of Families in Two London Suburbs, London: Hutchinson. Devine, F. (1992), Affluent Workers Revisited: Privatism and the Working Class, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The Disc Jockeys (1970), [TV program] BBC2, February 11. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=L6tBzY8EHgk Downes, D. M. (1966), The Delinquent Solution: A Study in Subcultural Theory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dunn, C. P. (1963), “The Roots of Beatlemania: Two Worlds of Music - 2,” The Guardian, November 10: 29. Edemariam, A. (2012), “Brian May: Me and My Animal Passions,” The Guardian, September 29. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/sep/29/brian-may-me-and-animalpassions (accessed November 22, 2018). Fairley, J. (2008), “Reviewed Works,” Popular Music 27 (3): 510–14. Finnegan, R. (1989), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

The First Time with Robert Plant (2017), [Radio program] BBC 6 Music, December 3. https:// learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/10328C91 (accessed November 22, 2018). “Five Rs at This School” (1957), Daily Mail, January 28: 5. Frame, P. (2007), The Restless Generation: How Rock Music Changed the Face of 1950s Britain, London: Rogan House. Frith, S. (1983), Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock, London: Constable. Fyvel, T. R. (1961), The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State, London: Chatto & Windus. Gildart, K. (2013), Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1955–1976, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldthorpe, J. H., D. Lockwood, F. Bechofer and J. Platt (1971), The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, R. (2015), “Do You Love Reggae and Hate Easy Listening? You Must Be Upper Class,” Daily Mail, June 4. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3110716/Do-lovereggae-hate-easy-listening-UPPER-CLASS-music-taste-reveals-social-status.html (accessed December 18, 2018). Greville, C. (1963), “The Beatles Are Fab, Says ‘The Times’ Music Man,” Daily Mail, December 28: 4. Grundy, S. and J. Tobler (1983a), “Brian May,” https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/brian-may (accessed November 22, 2018). Grundy, S. and J. Tobler (1983b), “Pete Townshend.” https://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/pete-townshend-3; (accessed November 22, 2018). Harrington, M. (1964), “Parents’ Hopes and Children’s Success,” New Society, November 26: 8–10. Harrison, B. (2011a), Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, B. (2011b), Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoggart, R. ([1957] 1977), The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, With Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Hunter-Tilney, L. (2015), “Interview – Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page,” The Financial Times, July 31. https://www.ft.com/content/41ae8268-356d-11e5-b05b-b01debd57852 (accessed January 21, 2019). In the Mood - Joe Loss with Michael Freedland (2013), [Radio program], BBC Radio 2, July 2. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0576414C (accessed December 19, 2018). James, L. (2006), The Middle Class: A History, London: Little, Brown.“Joining a Beat Group ‘Is a Danger” (1964), Daily Mirror, January 11: 18. Kemp, D. (2013), Frank Lea Interview, July 8. http://frankleainterview.weebly.com/ (accessed November 22, 2018). Kendall, P. (ed.) (1981), Led Zeppelin In Their Own Words, London: Omnibus Press. King, L. (2015), Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, R. and N. Nugent (eds) (1979), Respectable Rebels: Middle Class Campaigns in Britain in the 1970s, London: Hodder & Stoughton.

55

56

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Kitts, T. M. (2008), Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, New York: Routledge. Kynaston, D. (2009), Family Britain, 1951–1957, London: Bloomsbury. Kynaston, D. (2015), Modernity Britain: 1957–62, London: Bloomsbury. Laing, D. (2011), “Six Boys, Six Beatles: The Formative Years, 1950–1962,” in K. Womack (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Beatles, 9–32, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laing, D. (2018) “Chas Hodges: Obituary,” The Guardian, September 23. https://www. theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/23/chas-hodges-obituary (accessed November 22, 2018). Langhamer, C. (2005), “The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2): 341–62. Lawrence, J. (2013a), “‘Class,’ ‘Affluence’, and the Study of Everyday Life in Britain, c.1930– 1964,” Cultural and Social History 10 (2): 273–99. Lawrence, J. (2013b), “Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in Early 1960s England,” History Workshop Journal 77: 215–39. Macan, E. (1997), Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, New York: Oxford University Press. Maconie, S. (2015), “The Privileged Are Taking Over the Arts: Without the Grit, Pop Culture is Doomed,” New Statesman, February 4. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/01/ privileged-are-taking-over-arts-without-grit-pop-culture-doomed (accessed December 19, 2018). LeMahieu, D. L. (1998), A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind Between the Wars, Oxford: Clarendon Press. “Mailbag” (1956), Daily Mail, October 9: 6. McKibbin, R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melly, G. (1989), Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mersey Sound (1963), [TV program], BBC Television, October 9. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=rjj6DgkmRUg See also https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ 3e5458924e244324848eb20580c63dc3 (accessed November 4, 2018) Miles, B. (ed.) (1982), Mick Jagger in His Own Words, London: Omnibus Press. Mitchell, G. A. M. (2011), “A Very ‘British’ Introduction to Rock ‘n’ Roll: Tommy Steele and the Advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Britain, 1956–1960,” Contemporary British History 25 (2): 205–25. Mitchell, G. A. M. (2019), Adult Responses to Popular Music and Intergenerational Relations in Britain, c.1955–1975, London: Anthem Press. Murdock, G. and G. Phelps (1973), Mass Media and the Secondary School, London: Macmillan. Musgrove, F. (1966), The Family, Education and Society, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Music: A Study of the Musical Tastes, Interests and Behaviour of the Adult Population (1963) BBC Written Archives Centre, LR/63/358. Music on Radios 1 and 2 (1969), BBC Written Archives Centre, LR/69/1094. Naylor, T. (2008), “An Upper-Class Hero is Something to Be,” The Guardian, January 9. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2008/jan/09/anupperclassheroissomethi (accessed November 22, 2018) Noble, D., interviewed by Lorna Baker, 1999, Millennium Memory Bank, British Library Catalogue Reference C900/00625, ©BBC. “‘Nothing Wrong’ with Rock ‘n’ Roll” (1956), Manchester Guardian, December 7: 4.

Parental Responses to Popular Music in Britain

Nott, J. (2015), Going to the Palais, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Shea, H. (2012), “‘Get Back To Where You Once Belonged!’ The Positive Creative Impact of a Refresher Course for ‘Baby-Boomer’ Rock Musicians,” Popular Music 31 (2): 199–215. The One Show (2011), [TV program] BBC1, September 23. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ ondemand/index.php/prog/01FCE11D (accessed November 12, 2018). Osgerby, B. (1998), Youth in Britain Since 1945, Oxford: Blackwell. Owen, M. and M. Norwak (eds) (1963), The Daily Mirror A-Z Party Book, London: Daily Mirror Publications. Pahl, J. M. and R. E. Pahl (1971), Managers and their Wives: A Study of Career and Family Relationships in the Middle Class, London: Allen Lane. Pond, S. (1987), “Peter Gabriel Hits the Big Time,” Rolling Stone, January 29. https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-news/peter-gabriel-hits-the-big-time-106473/ (accessed January 1, 2019). “Princess Margaret ‘Rocks’ in Cinema” (1957), Daily Mail, February 15: 1. Rapoport, R. and R. N. Rapoport (1975), Leisure and the Family Life Cycle, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robb, J. and O. Craske (eds) (2006), Punk Rock: An Oral History, London: Ebury Press. Rock Around the Clock (1956), [film] Dir. Fred F. Sears, USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation. “Rock & Roll” Not Feared” (1956), Daily Telegraph, September 20: 7. “Rocked ’em in ’38” (1956), Daily Mirror, September 17: 14. Rutherford, M. (2014), The Living Years, London: Constable. Sampson, A. (1971), The New Anatomy of Britain, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Sandbrook, D. (2005). Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, London: Abacus. Sandbrook, D. (2006), White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, London: Abacus. Sandbrook, D. (2010), State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974, London: Penguin. Savage, M. (2010), Identities and Social Change in Britain Since 1940: The Politics of Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scorsese, M., Dir. (2011), George Harrison: Living in the Material World, [film], USA: Grove Street Productions. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/021FD2C1 (accessed November 22, 2018). Settle, A. (1957), “From Diamonds to Skiffle-Boards,” The Observer, December 15: 7. Sigal, C. (1968), “144 Piccadilly,” New Society, October 9: 551–3. The Slade Papers (June–July, 1972). http://www.sladeinengland.co.uk/Slade%20Papers/1972/ Slade_Papers_jun_jul72.htm (accessed November 22, 2018). Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F. (2018), Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanfield, P. (1956), “Now No Rock ‘n’ Roll for Royalty”, Daily Mail, November 1: n.p. Tanfield’s Diary (1957), Daily Mail, January 1: n.p. “This Crazy Summer’s Weirdest Craze” (1956), Daily Express, September 12: 5. Thompson, G. (2008), Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tobin, M., interviewed by Andrew Vincent, 1999, Millennium Memory Bank, British Library Catalogue Reference C900/00574 ©BBC.

57

58

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Todd, S. and H. Young (2012), “Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-War Britain,” Cultural and Social History 9 (3): 451–67. Todd, S. (2014), The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, London: John Murray. Toomey, D. M. (1969), “Home-Centred Working Class Parents’ Attitudes Towards Their Sons’ Education and Careers,” Sociology, 3 (3): 299–320. Top of the Pops: The Story of 1977 (2015) [TV program] BBC/Yesterday, August 22. https:// learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/02351280 (accessed December 19, 2018). Turner, S. (2005), Cliff Richard: The Biography, Oxford: Lion Hudson. Veenstra, G. (2015), “Class Position and Musical Tastes,” Canadian Review of Sociology 52 (2): 134–59. Weller, P. (2015), “Going Underground,” Sunday Times Magazine, June 14: 12–17. White, D. (1972), “The Young Workers,” New Society, June 1 1972: 457–61. Williams, R. (2000), Long Distance Call: Writings on Music, London: Aurum Press. Wiseman-Trowse, N. (2008), Performing Class in British Popular Music, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wybrow, R. J. (1989), Britain Speaks Out, 1937–87: A Social History as Seen Through the Gallup Data, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wyman, B. with R. Coleman (1990), Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, London: Viking. Yorke, R. (1995), Led Zeppelin: From Early Days to Page and Plant, London: Virgin Books. Young, M. and P. Willmott ([1957] 1992), Family and Kinship in East London, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zweig, F. (1961), The Worker in an Affluent Society: Family Life and Industry, London: Heinemann.

3 Social Class and the Negotiation of Selling Out in a Southern California Indie Rock Scene Timothy D. Taylor

This chapter is based on an ethnography of a scene within the overall indie rock scene in Southern California. There are two loci for this study: the east side of Los Angeles, mainly a neighborhood called Echo Park, home to many bands, record labels, and other music workers, and, thirty miles southeast, Burger Records, which I have written about before (in Taylor 2016b). Burger Records is something of a phenomenon in the indie music world in the US (see, for example, Ratlif 2014) in its focus on the production of cassettes, a format that the label played an important role in reviving. One of my observations of the label’s principals was that they, like most of their musicians, possessed modest amounts of educational capital and came from the lower-middle class or working class. One could argue that Burger Records’ incredible output (over 1,200 releases since 2007, mostly cassettes, https://burgerrecords.myfreesites.net/bands) was a kind of Bourdieusian battle in the field of cultural production of indie rock—people with less volumes of educational and economic capital fighting against those with more in the east side of Los Angeles part of the field—but at the time of that study, as today, the battles weren’t particularly about aesthetic issues. Differences were more about how to negotiate the DIY (do it yourself)/“fuck the man” position, which is central to indie scenes. These differences were played out in ideas about professionalization—how much to adapt oneself to the exigencies of the music industry, putting out a recording as a career strategy as opposed to simply releasing one in order to do so. These, in other words, were battle lines more determined by social class and economic capital than anything else. This is not to say that one’s class positionality has no effect on aesthetics, but that the contestations in this scene were less about those issues (though some of my interlocutors did make some aesthetic judgments, which I will discuss). This chapter examines the class dynamics of this field, focusing on a segment in east Los Angeles that was populated mainly by middle-class musicians who hope to make a career at music, contrasting it with the more working-class/lower-middle-class

60

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

portion in Orange County who don’t harbor the same professional ambitions.1 (As I write, more and more people are moving out of Echo Park as rents rise, but I will continue to write in the ethnographic present to describe the scene as I knew it when I conducted most of my ethnographic research a few years ago.) The main argument is that, in this broader Southern California scene, differences emerge between middle-class musicians and those further down the economic ladder. Contrary to expectations, it is the middle-class musicians who are trying to make a living at music who are most willing to compromise the DIY/“fuck the man” ideology; those who hold with this position the most strongly are the musicians with less economic and educational capital (and some middle-class musicians who don’t make commercially viable music, though I encountered few of these and they do not figure into this study). Battles in fields are not always aesthetic, or even obviously about money (discursivized as questions of selling out or not); they can be about other things such as the scale and scope of labels. Such positions have economic origins, too, but are disguised or filtered through participants’ class positionalities.

Social Class and Positions in the Southern California Indie Rock Field of Cultural Production Virtually everybody I talked to in this scene belongs to the millennial generation (born in about early 1981 through about 1996), though there were a few éminences grises who were seen as important community members and, in some cases, tastemakers. In many respects, the millennials show the same attitudes one has historically found in some educated, middle-class youth: they rebel against conformity and many mass-produced goods, including music. But their rebellion isn’t total. They are far from the Generation X grunge culture of the 1990s, for example, which espoused ideals that one seldom hears today: don’t sign to a major label, don’t allow your music to be used for commercial purposes, don’t make an MTV video. The precarization of the once (seemingly) safe middle classes seems to have affected their attitudes. And the music industry wasn’t what it was in the 1990s, either, the result of the decline of sales of recordings and the rise of streaming services such as Spotify that currently generate very little revenue for the vast majority of musicians. It is much more difficult to create revenue through sales of recordings than it was at the height of the grunge era in the 1990s, or the punk era before that. Scene participants’ class positionality is revealed in part by their attitudes toward money, which is expressed in a number of ways—in terms of scene members’ aspirations, their adherence (or degree of) to the doctrine of what Pierre Bourdieu famously called “the economic world reversed” (1993), and, related to this, their willingness to professionalize, by which I mean, engage in those activities that will help build a career. Professionalization is the set of practices where musicians mainly negotiate their positions, so I will leave consideration of it for the next section.

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

Social Class In this scene, I have found a fairly typical class division between the people deemed to be the most creative (musicians), all of whom hail from the middle class and who attended a prestigious university, either the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, a nominally publicly funded university) or the University of Southern California (USC, privately funded). Those who work in more managerial positions tend to have attended less elite colleges or universities, if they possessed any higher education at all.2 Greg Katz, musician, indie label owner, and music industry worker by day acknowledged that growing up middle class afforded him the opportunity to learn to play music: “There was an indie rock scene in Irvine where I grew up, it’s a pretty affluent city, everybody’s got a garage, everyone’s parents can afford music lessons, so as a result there’s a lot of garage bands,” and, he says, the city of Irvine and Orange County send a lot of musicians to Los Angeles (Katz 2014). One person, who didn’t want to be named but who was one of the most astute observers of the scene as someone who works in a managerial capacity and who lives in Echo Park told me in 2014, “I think as the people who move to Echo Park are of a generation where maybe their parents are paying their bills, and since it’s more expensive to live there, it becomes this working class versus entitled millennials situation.” Rents are rising in Echo Park and some people are moving out as a result, even though most people grew up in fairly comfortable circumstances. The unnamed manager told me that, even if they’re finding rents increasingly difficult to pay, the people they know in the scene were pretty coddled Gen Yers and Millennials whose parents afforded us the opportunity to quote unquote struggle. But are we really struggling? No. We live in a world of $6 coffees, and beer and wine bars, that’s not struggling. So, is it the most rogue, community? By no means. Is there heart and soul there? Definitely, but I think people have to strip away the pretension of it and enjoy it, because we’re not really struggling that much. If I see another $10 craft beer place open up down the street—and I love craft beer, I really do … but let’s not pretend that it’s anything different than what it really is. (interview 2014)

Getting an education helps the musicians from being taken advantage of by predatory labels or others. Michael Fiore, of the band Criminal Hygiene, spoke of his experience as a Music Industry major at USC: “I know a lot of bands who can’t really look at their own contracts or release their own music. I think a lot of my knowledge about that stuff came from going to school and being educated about it. I mean you can learn a lot of stuff on your own on the internet now, but there’s a difference” (Fiore 2014). In general, virtually everyone I dealt with in the scene who was a musician or label owner (and some people are both) comes from a middle-class background and possesses fairly high amounts of educational capital. This contrasts with the part of the scene about thirty miles southeast in Fullerton, California, home of Burger Records, whose proprietors and many musicians are further down the class ladder, as I have discussed elsewhere (Taylor 2016b). Almost everybody I studied in that scene had no college education and those who

61

62

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

did had received it from a regional school. I also argued that their allegiance to seemingly obsolete technologies was less driven by a sense of retro hipness than a kind of defiant attitude about their class positionality: they didn’t grow up with the latest technologies, and their adoption in adulthood of obsolete technologies such as cassette tape players and VHS video players was a way of thumbing their fingers at middle-class technological acquisitiveness and dependence.

Taste The two corners of the scene are reasonably close together aesthetically. In both, most people were making music that was commercially viable. But, the main, perhaps the only, position-taking is to declare yourself to have eclectic and broad tastes. Label owners said that their only criterion for signing a band was that they had to like the music, it had to be good, which is an understandable position to take as it leaves them free to release whatever music they might like. Taste is only partly subjective, as we know from Bourdieu, but whatever subjectivity that is present in people’s taste does not seem to have been mainly driven by people’s class positionality (in terms of forms of capital) but a position taken (partly) against the mainstream music industry, as well as a desire to sound supportive and welcoming to other musicians in the scene, even if people’s private thoughts and behavior might reveal something less community-oriented. While what we also know from Bourdieu—that nothing classifies one’s taste like music (1984: 18)—taste is less revealing in this scene. Everyone I spoke to is united in declaring that they have broad and eclectic tastes and were seldom judgmental about music genres or others in the scene. Label owners simply wanted to release music they thought was good, and they all defined “good” very broadly and subjectively: it is whatever they like and spans many genres and styles. Sean Bohrman of Burger Records told me, I grew up around music, my dad has been in rock ‘n’ roll bands since I was born, so I just grew up around it. I know what I like, and it’s not just rock music, I love rap music, and electronic music, and ambient music—we’re into all sorts of stuff, not just rock. It just turns out most of our friends make rock music, so that’s what we do. (Bohrman 2012)

Lee Rickard, Bohrman’s partner, said much the same thing about eclecticism: Well, that’s the beauty of Burger, you know what I mean? There’s gourmet burgers, there’s fast food burgers, there’s all kinds of burgers. We’re equal Burger opportunists, you know? We like all kinds of music. We’re music lovers, we can’t just like pop and nothing else. We love pop, we love classical, we love rock, we love funk, we love soul, we love garage, we love dirty stuff and weird stuff, anything in-between. (Rickard 2012)

Kat Bee said that when she looks for a band for her feminist label Summer Bummer, the music takes priority over everything else, even her feminist orientation. I have to like the music first, that’s the first and most important thing. And people have asked me that. I got a really snotty email once and I was really impressed with how I responded to

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

it, because I didn’t go apeshit on them. Someone had written something like, “Our band has guys and girls, if you signed our band, would you kick all the guys out of the band?” And I said, “No man, feminism is for everybody, there’s guys in bands on my label too. Have a nice day!” So, yes, a lot of people have assumed that that’s the first criterion or that it’s even really a criterion at all, and my attitude is that I just have to really like the music, and then I have to like the people making the music. I do seek out bands that I think are the type of band that is overlooked, and that just happens to be bands that are all-female or female-fronted, or who is tackling really raw political issues, stuff that people wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole basically, and that’s just coincidence, that just happens to be the kind of music those kinds of people are making, and it just happens to be those are the bands that I like. I’m really open to everything, I just have to like it first and foremost. (Bee 2014)

Dean Spunt, owner of the label Post Present Medium, also professed to have broad and eclectic tastes, though said that he wouldn’t put out anything that sounds “too commercial.” I like all sorts of music. For the integrity of the label, and my own tastes, I wouldn’t put out anything that sounds too commercial. I’ve put out bands that are super hardcore, dance music, electronic, rock ‘n’ roll. There’s not really a sound to PPM and I think that’s what keeps it underground and doesn’t really make it a thing. A lot of labels I followed when I was younger had a particular sound, it seemed to me, but I’m just interested in friends, and people I think sound cool. If you’re really interested in following the label, then I think your tastes are very diversified, and I feel like we’re kind of helping facilitate that a bit. The connecting thread is that they’re all artists who are all relevant, and they are all artists who are really DIY-based, really doing their thing, not really concerned with the get-rich-quick scheme of popular music by pandering to these internet blogs. I’m not really interested in that. So, it’s not really a sound, it’s just more of an aesthetic. (Spunt 2012)

Label owners also talk about how their motivation to start a label was based on some great music they heard that wasn’t being recorded or wasn’t getting recognized, including their own music. They see it as their mission to release what they think is good music, music that isn’t recognized by the mainstream music industry.

The Economic World Reversed All of these musicians and label owners also espouse a version of the ideology famously labeled by Bourdieu as “the economic world reversed” (1993), the attitude taken by artists in restricted fields of cultural production who disdain economic success in order to appear to be aloof from the quotidian—especially anything to do with money—and endeavor to conform to whatever counts as aesthetic purity in their particular field. The dominant ideology in this scene is common to indie music scenes around the world, derived from punk rock, an ideology of DIY combined with what was usually referred to as a “fuck the man” attitude, antipathy toward commercial culture and major corporations in general. Management of one’s conception of the economic world reversed is caught up in questions of professionalization, which I will discuss later.

63

64

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

The economic world reversed doctrine was most fraught around questions of whether or not to sell out (to the mainstream music industry), or to what degree. Many musicians articulated a discourse of not wanting to sell out, and their positions are largely tied to their class positionality. It was the musicians further down the class ladder who stuck by the position of not selling out the most strongly. Burger artists wielded a discourse of remaining free to do what they wanted if they were outside of the control of a bigger label. A musician who is in a band with a sibling told me that they didn’t know much about the mainstream music industry, but were very enthusiastic about Burger Records, which they think does a lot to promote its musicians. When I asked if they would like to sign a contract with a bigger label, they said they wouldn’t want to adhere to whatever limitations they might put on the band with respect to the songs they could play at shows, saying, “I like to express myself, and make new songs, I don’t like to be chained down” (interview, 2012). They said that they have a day job and that they like Burger because they don’t have to pay for their recordings. (Burger’s arrangement at the time was that if they decided to release an artist’s music, they would make 300 cassettes, give fifty to the artist, and sell the other 250 through their retail store and online and at shows; if the band wanted more, they could simply ask.) Although this musician sells the tapes sometimes for $5, we’re doing all right, you know. But most of the time we have the habit of giving a lot of tapes out for free because we’re nice guys. If people are really that interested in hearing our music, I don’t want to make them pay, because I think, “Aww, you really want this. If you’ll listen to it, I’ll give it to you for free.” That’s how I feel about it sometimes. But every once in a while, we get a lot of people who think, “You know what, I don’t want this for free, I want to buy it, it’s worth buying,” which is awesome. (interview 2012)

The way this musician talks about making music and listening to music is in terms of total freedom—they and their sibling just do what sounds cool to them. They allow themselves to be eclectic. There is no talk of craft or appealing to an audience. Burger co-founder Sean Bohrman told me how much he values his label’s autonomy. Being in complete control, not having investors—there are record labels that are owned by other record labels that are owned by other record labels—everybody is owned by six record labels. But I feel like we’re ahead of the game by just not being beholden to any genre, anyone, or anything. I hate money, it’s the root of all evil, it really is. We’re releasing three– four things a week, and this week we’re releasing six tapes. I don’t think about it. I order it, and I think positively that it’s going to work out, and it does. If it doesn’t, I just hustle, we have a sale. Everything will work out somehow, there’s always a solution to everything, I feel. (Bohrman 2012).

In the Echo Park scene, the economic world reversed doctrine is no less present as a discourse. For some, adhering strongly to the position of not selling out could be a way of continuing music as an avocation, not doing the hard work (touring, promotion, social media, glad-handing) that needs to be done in order to try to raise your profile and make more money, as the unnamed manager pointed out. There is such a romanticism attached to being an artist. And, “I live in this world where it’s all musicians and writers and all that stuff and I’m never gonna sell out.” Well, then, why

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

are you doing it? What does success look like to you? What does music look like to you in five years? Because otherwise you’re going wake up and you’re going to be thirty-five, and you’re going to wonder, “What am I doing with my life?” (interview, 2014)

This person also thinks that the DIY/“fuck the man”/“I’m going to be pure” attitude is a way of burying one’s head in the sand, not realizing just how much the scene is actually entangled with, and indebted to, corporations and mainstream commercial culture. According to them, the scene isn’t as purely anti-commercial as most people thinks it is. The community aspect of it can be a great thing and really help everybody, or it can be more like, “I really love your band, but I can’t take your picture, because you’re not stylish enough for me to sell a freelance photo to Refinery 29 [“the leading global media company focused on young women,” according to their website, https://corporate.r29.com/#home-statement] and get the photo credit.” And people don’t talk about that, but it all fits into this music community.

They continued, I just got a Free People catalogue, and Free People is owned by Urban Outfitters which also owns Anthropologie, a huge multibillion-dollar conservative company. They did an Instagram campaign for their new catalogue that features LA east side photographers and models and musicians. One of them is the girl from the band Io Echo. She had a publicist negotiate that for her. Io Echo is on IAMSOUND, which is owned by World’s End management, and the girl that owns IAMSOUND [Niki Roberton] with Paul Tao—her dad—owned World’s End Management [a music management company], and she’s married to the guy who was in Superhumanoids who is on Innovative Leisure, which is huge but is technically an indie label, but they do really well. And her husband also owns Hit City Records, which is also owned by a music writer.

Their point is that while some people in the scene might like to think it is fairly selfcontained and purely anti-commercial, commercial interests nonetheless pervade the scene and are completely intertwined with what local people are doing. Because of this web of relationships in and out of the corporate world, they believe that musicians really need to know how the business works, how much the seemingly independent scene is caught up in mainstream commercial culture, so that as a musician or band you can make smarter career decisions, decide where you might want to compromise and where you might not: “I would never chastise anyone for selling out,” they said, “because I think sometimes selling out is just being smart. Anyone can define what they consider to be selling out, but I think the minute we remove the negative connotation of selling out, that’s when the art can really thrive, and that’s when the community can really bolster itself.” They also wonder what it means to sell out in today’s music business, where there is less money, less opportunity for radio airplay, and less of a chance of making it big. I think that sometimes there’s a fear of quote unquote, selling out, but what is selling out really in this day and age? Because it’s not what it was, the budget’s not the same—there’s no money. And when you do have your bands that are unnamed get signed to these indie imprints at these major labels, they’re barely given enough time to learn how to stand up on their own two feet before they get dropped. But, also, they’ve been coddled while they’re

65

66

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

there, so what’s left for them? That’s my biggest question, what is left for them? And if there’s no one there helping them to the next step—“Maybe you should collaborate with this person,” or, “Hey, you might not like big pop music, but write a goddamn pop song and get paid and let that pay your bills so that you can afford to go make $40 a day touring.”

With the decline in record sales, virtually all musicians have had to try to find other ways of making a living, or at least, making some money. An important revenue stream that has emerged is the licensing of music for use in film and television, even in mainstream vehicles (i.e., not part of the indie world). Nima Kazerouni of the band So Many Wizards announced at a show in a Converse store in Santa Monica that the band had a placement in a television show and urged everybody to tune in. He told me afterwards, “We just got a track on this new show New Girl, which could mean millions of people hearing this song that was on the first album, a song that really means a lot to me. It’s going to be heard. I think the whole song is going to get played in that episode, which is amazing.” When I asked how this happened, he said that the band has a licensing company that promotes their music for use in advertising, broadcasting, and film, and they have a friend who is a music supervisor on the program. “But,” he said, “for that to happen everything has to come together in one place. I guess it did this one time, and hopefully it will open up more opportunities. It came at a really opportune time, to leverage it. You’ve got to leverage everything.” (So Many Wizards 2014). Licensing seems to be a way to place your music in a vehicle that might be thought of as cool enough to justify leaving “the economic world reversed” position behind. It is the members of the middle class who are culturally authorized to be creative and to make a career of it, and it is the middle class who has the family support and capital to be able to be (temporarily) precarious. My ethnography shows that it was the members of the middle class who were more willing to professionalize, to do things that might be construed as selling out. But all this is in the hopes that they will be able to make a career at music. It was the middle-class musicians, especially those who were trying to make a living at music, who were more willing to negotiate ideology of the economic world reversed, though many musicians had different ideas about what constituted selling out or doing something that contradicted the economic world reversed. Most of the middle-class musicians seem to be happy to make some money and accept corporate largesse in certain forms, perhaps, especially, licensing, but sometimes stay away from big paydays, which can frustrate those who manage or represent them. The unnamed manager told me, I hear horror stories, especially because I’m friends in the brand and licensing space, stories like, “Yeah, this band passed on a $90,000 placement for a car commercial.” And I said, “That’s probably more money than you signed for a shitty indie label.” My attitude is, take it, take it, because—no offense to the band—you’re not going to be around in five years. Take the ninety grand, there’s no sell-out aspect of taking ninety grand, you get to be in a car commercial that will be on YouTube forever, that’s way cooler in my mind. There’s way more longevity and stability in that than being on the most obscure indie label and having Pitchfork [an influential music website] write one line about you. That is smart business to me, that is taking care of yourself. (interview 2014)

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

Aspirations Burger Records and its musicians tended to articulate a different position vis-à-vis the economic world reversed. Given the size of the label, I am sure there are musicians on it who would adopt a discourse similar to what I have just recounted. Burger Records, as a label begun by people with less educational and economic capital, seems less concerned with making money, even making a living, either for its principals or the musicians (the principals for years plowed everything back into the company rather than take a profit). They also didn’t want to have much to do with money. There were no contracts when I first interviewed Bohrman and Rickard in 2012 (there are now), and no money changed hands once they acquired an artist for the label. Bohrman’s mission, as I reported in Music and Capitalism (Taylor 2016b), is more about spreading indie music than helping a band develop. While not explicitly articulated, I think that, both in their attitude toward technology and their overall label philosophy, Bohrman and Rickard are quietly thumbing their noses at middle-class technological acquisitiveness as well as professionalization. Their main mission is simply to get their musician’s music out there, music they have chosen to release on Burger; it is a matter of, as Stuart Hall once said in another context, of bringing themselves into representation (1997: 35). Bohrman told me, The tapes are so easy to distribute, so easy to make, and so cheap to make in quantity, that we’re able to put out tons of different bands from all over the world. I wanted to put out the best band in every city across the world, ’cause if you do that, you’re dropping fifty tapes in that city, and they go to fifty people in that city, and it keeps growing, we sell them. And that’s what we did to begin with, we just put out different bands from different parts of the world and started spreading and spreading and growing and growing. It’s like dropping bombs or planting seeds, it just grows and grows, and that was a conscious decision on our part. (Bohrman 2012)

This is far from the realpolitik attitude of the more middle-class musicians and label owners, who are willing to compromise—sometimes, in some ways, depending on the band and the situation—on the doctrine of the economic world reversed because, as they all told, they didn’t want to be rock stars, they didn’t want to make a lot of money, they just wanted to be able to make a living at music. There was the occasional fear articulated that a deal with big money would mean giving up artistic freedom, but mainly, the discourse was simply about being able to make a living. The way these musicians hoped to do this further evinces an ethos of the economic world reversed. There were things that many weren’t willing to do, such as signing with a major label, which they viewed as a move that would curtail their artistic freedom; many didn’t want to do the glad-handing necessary with radio and other industry personnel in order to get their music known (one criticized the practice of buying plays of his music on the radio); they don’t want to purposely write songs that might get it licensed for television, advertising, or film use (one of the main ways that musicians can make money these days in an era of negligible sales of recordings). Some people I spoke to have day jobs, some don’t; some have menial day

67

68

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

jobs, some have more meaningful ones. But unlike Bourdieu’s bohemians, these people are not wholly in the economic world reversed: they want success, however modest. Greg Katz told me, Most musicians have the same attitude I have with my label: I want it to be successful enough that it can keep going, I don’t want to be so fuck-you rich that I live on [Michael Jackson’s] Neverland Ranch, especially if it comes to compromises that are meaningful; most musicians don’t really care for that. (Katz 2014)

Nima Kazerouni of So Many Wizards similarly said that he wasn’t interested in making a lot of money. No, no, I think just finding and working with people who are like-minded and respect what you do and believe in what you do, that’s what we want. And if we’re able to make money along the way, that’s the dream. We’ve been really fortunate to find people that have been really into what we do, and I guess we’ll see where it goes from there. Again, it would be nice to just play music, I can’t stress that enough, I’d love to stress that more than anything. That’s all I like to do. I’d like to make a living doing it. (So Many Wizards 2014)

Most musicians play in more than one band, both to make more money, but also so not all of their eggs are in one basket—they increase their chances of success. But even then, the hope is simply to make a living at music. Kazerouni said, Actually, we get paid for shows, though not enough to pay rent. That’s why you have to join four more bands, Eric [addressing his bandmate Eric Felix]. Just two more, then you’ll catch up to the rest of us. But, yeah, I think there’s a world where you can find that, you just have to be more creative about it. But also like if you want to make a living, you have to go on tour, you have to really rearrange your life to suit that goal. And if it’s not like that then you have to put in the work to do that. It’s a lot of work, it’s twenty-four hours a day, really. (So Many Wizards 2014)

Bandmate Martin Tomemitsu chimed in at this point: “But it’s creative, and you have your own standards and you don’t have a boss telling you how it should be exactly, you can trust your instincts” (So Many Wizards 2014). Matt Draper, photographer and chronicler of the scene confirmed the impression that most people were not interested in making a lot of money. “I don’t meet a lot of people in the scene that want money of great quantity, they want enough to survive and to do their thing and maybe go to Whole Foods and buy groceries or something. They’re not greedy, they’re not greedy people.” Draper realized that this was a change from the past, when rock musicians routinely proclaimed that they were going to be the biggest star in the world (Draper 2015). I don’t think that these comments about making a living were disingenuous, or merely further evidence of the ideology of the economic world reversed. Mainly, I think they are the result of an increasingly precariatized middle class, whose members have scaled back their hopes and aspirations. Fame and fortune might have been a dream for rock musicians a generation ago, but in today’s economy, and today’s music industry, the dream is simply to be able to make a living making music, which, as everyone acknowledged, takes a lot of work.3

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

Much of this work takes the form of touring. Greg Katz told me that tours matter, for it is an important way that bands disseminate their music: For the good of the label and the good of the artist, the currently signed artists and the artists that will sell in the future, I want the records to sell, I want them to make money. It’s not about me becoming [legendary record label guru and starmaker] Clive Davis, it’s really about funding the next release. When I can write a check to a band because the record is profitable, that’s the best, so I want the records to be successful straight up. (Katz 2014)

Middle-class musicians offered criticism of Burger and Lolipop Records, the biggest of the tiny indie labels in the Echo Park scene for releasing so many recordings without trying to help their bands move to the next level of professionalization. Burger and Lolipop, which co-release many recordings, are such behemoths in the scene that they are viewed by the middle-class, east-side musicians as too big, as though they were like the major corporate labels: they dominate the scene and become the “structure” to which their scene is supposed to be the “anti-structure” (Turner 1969; Taylor 2016a). Lolipop founder Wyatt Blair counts Bohrman and Rickard at Burger as his mentors (Tavana 2015), and their label seems to have influenced greatly Blair’s and Lolipop’s philosophy of putting out as much as possible. Blair said, Anything we can do to help, you know? Put music out, help tours for bands and shows in the area. We put out anything we love and want to support. We record a lot of bands that just want to record stuff—not even stuff for the label. Anyone can record at Lolipop. And really when I started Lolipop, it wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. That wasn’t my intention really. (Weirdo 2016)

Some middle-class musicians critiqued Burger and Lolipop both on aesthetic and nonaesthetic grounds. Greg Katz told me, I think Burger is an amazing thing, but they also, like any label with a big pull, exert their own gravity on what people do creatively. The fact that there are so many bands that sound generically like Burger bands and that it’s spawned mini labels that just put out music that sounds like Burger music but is not on Burger—I don’t know if that’s good creatively for the creative culture in California or the LA area, to have a whole bunch of people flocking to three-chord psychedelic garage rock. I buy tons of releases from Burger, but it has its center of gravity, and kids who are talented and creative end up doing stuff that sounds like Burger in hopes that they can put out a Burger tape, which does really nothing for them other than it’s a fun thing. Not to knock a fun thing, but the artists that I work with, I want them to have careers, I want them to make their music professionally forever—I don’t want it to be professionalized, I just want them to be selfsustaining as artists. (Katz 2014)

Michael Fiore of the band Criminal Hygiene agreed, saying that Burger and Lolipop have almost become the mainstream against which indie rock musicians construct themselves. There are people like Kat Bee [a small label owner] and then there’s the Burgers and the Lolipops that kind of dominate everyone and if you’re not aligned with one of them, you’re kind of looked at like, “Oh, who the hell are you?” It’s funny it was a reaction to that

69

70

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Hollywood ideal—“Who the hell are you?” And now I feel like they are like that in the underground world—they are Hollywood now. (Fiore 2014)

The Echo Park labels (with the possible exception of Lolipop, which was not part of my study) are more middle-class boutiques, reflecting the tastes of the individual owners (no matter how eclectic and expansive). While it may seem that Burger Records’ and Lolipop’s massive output is driven by dreams of profit, they are not (see Blanton 2018).

Professionalization Musicians who aspire to make a living at music need to professionalize, to learn how to play the game. A recurring theme in the interviews concerns this question, which for my interlocutors signifies both a commitment to music-making, but also a commitment to learning the music business, and doing everything it takes to make it, which is more than a full-time job. By “professionalization” I mean to refer to a complex set of practices and position-takings that characterize this scene as people scramble to try to make a living at music. What sorts of things are people willing to do to try to make money? But I also mean to refer to the term in a more Bourdieusian sense: how do people learn the culture of a particular field, and how do they act once they are in it? Professionalization for musicians can mean negotiating or even abandoning the economic world reversed position. Those in more managerial positions—people with less, or less prestigious, educational capital—like Larry Little and the unnamed manager, as well as some label owners, expressed frustration with some of their musicians, musicians who would not be working with such professionals if they didn’t want to professionalize. Larry Little, a veteran manager of bands, told me, That’s the thing, trying to get everybody to realize that if you want to be like, “Fuck the man,” DIY—you can, there are examples. But a lot of those examples are smoke and mirrors. There is very strategic thinking behind it. Very few of those guys are really saying, “Fuck it all.” It’s actually orchestrated, and it’s calculated. But getting young musicians to understand that at all is really something. You can’t say, “I don’t want to play the radio game, I don’t want to shake hands, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that, every time.” (Little 2014)

Little talked about how bands have to try to walk the line between being true to their indie principles, but “feeding the beast” of the music industry enough so that the musicians can try to make a living. He wants to build a band for the long term, not just a short-term profit. If you have a career artist, it can be harder because you are trying to convince people that your guy is quality and that the sound is going to be around for a while, and they just want instant results. So, you have to feed the beast enough for them to feel like there is momentum and excitement about your artist but not enough to where they just want to sell you down the river as fast as possible, because they will. I’ve had presidents of labels screaming at me for turning things down because they are thinking about their quarterly numbers and their market share, and I get it, but not everybody wants to be on the Now 45 CD next to all the people that are on that. (Little 2014)4

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

Building a Band The process of developing or “building” a band that label owners and managers discussed is the means by which musicians are professionalized, introduced to the ways of the music industry, a dual process of introducing the band and its individual members to the indie rock field and teaching them how to be capitalist workers in the music industry (see Taylor n.d. on the latter point). According to label owner Greg Katz, musicians don’t always know what they possess. It’s hard as an artist to know when you have that thing, so a lot of times I find myself in the position with bands that I’m trying to sign of explaining that they have something special, something that is going to resonate with people. Because when you talk to a nineteen-yearold or a twenty-two-year-old, they’ll say, “Yeah, I’ve always been playing music in my garage, and no one’s ever listened to it.” “Okay, but now you’ve figured it out, you’ve cracked the code musically, so now it’s about finding the audience for it, and you have to do that yourself, that’s the only way.” The music industry’s always been the wild, wild west, especially now. If you build up an audience yourself, people will come from all over trying to get you, but if you’re waiting for someone else to build it up for you, you’re going to keep waiting. (Katz 2014)

Larry Little (Little 2014) told me, “This to me is my favorite thing, the act of discovery and really just building an artist from scratch, taking some talent and crafting a plan and a vision. Once it happens it’s fun”. This is how he describes the process: You take inventory of what you have. Try to figure out if there are any skeletons in the closet. You’ve got to get to know them a little bit. Then, it’s about really honing the music. Honing the live show is massively important. Especially it’s the difference between pop and rock, rock’s not in fashion, unless you’re Foo Fighters or somebody really big, but it’s not in style, so it takes a band longer to cross over into what would be considered successful. Overhead is bigger. There’s just a lot more to it than putting some things together and having a song take off. But it’s really honing that image and the vision, finding the right partners and building a team. (Little 2014)

Little says that it’s important to analyze the band’s sound, ascertain who their musical heroes are, and learning what sorts of careers other hands have had that the developing band would like to emulate. Then, he said, it’s like reverse engineering, there are hundreds and thousands of agents out there, but there’s probably only five that would actually work your band the way you want them to. So, it’s really peeling it back and thinking about what level you want to go to, people you want to play with, and asking who has a roster that could help you on your way up. There are bigger bands that can take you on the road, so there’s a lot of strategy to a lot of the selections like business manager to tour manager to your lawyer to booking agent, publicist, and once you sort of have even a partial team that’s strong it starts to attract the missing elements. (Little 2014)

“Building” a band thus means trying to bring musicians into the field both musically, but also in terms of all of the things that being in a band needs to do to try to generate an audience and sell recordings.

71

72

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Hustling While it’s label owners and managers and publicists and still others who participate in building a band, the musicians have their role to play as well: they have to hustle, they have to do everything they can to devote themselves to making music and making careers. Greg Katz criticized a local band for doing menial work instead of working in the music industry: “I’ve tried to sign them before, but they haven’t toured before until the beginning of the year. I was saying things ‘I want to sign you guys, but you have to tour.’” But they’re doing menial jobs, even though at least one member has a degree from a prestigious university. “What are you paying your dues to here?,” Katz wondered, arguing that they were paying their dues to a dull service industry. “That’s not what you care about, you make this music that has like so much heart, and it’s really good, it’s really well put together. Fucking get into a van and pay your dues to the music industry, so you can be a part of it,” instead of doing menial work. “So, they’ve been on tour a lot this year, I don’t know if it was what I told them or somebody else told them,” or they just got tired of doing boring jobs. “But,” he said, that kind of stuff is important, to invest in yourself. What is here waiting for you? Why not just take a risk on doing it that way instead of taking a risk working at some shitty office or temping or filing. There’s nobody who looks back and says, “I really regret that two months spent on the road seeing the country and being in different places and playing music.” (Katz 2014)

The unnamed manager said much the same thing, criticizing those bands that aren’t doing everything they can advance their careers. When do you make the decision to step outside of your local scene? A scene like this can be very limiting, and it’s hard to cut through the bullshit of it, and the blog space, and think about what it really means to be an artist. I think the most important thing I would tell anyone who’s in the music community in Echo Park to always be ready for your next move. I wouldn’t say leave music, because you’re an artist and a creative and that’s what you’re meant to be, but it doesn’t last forever. Fifteen minutes is so much shorter than it used to be, and if you really want to sustain yourself in the community and in the music industry, write with other people, collaborate with other people, produce, then maybe you should go to school, maybe get a job that’s in music but that’s not always playing with a band. (interview 2014)

They think that musicians need to think seriously about where they expend their energies. Musicians derive energy from the Echo Park scene, but as many people told me, it’s important for bands to tour, not just as a means of getting their music out, but of becoming more professional. As I always say to artists, “You need to get on the road and get out of Echo Park and realize that there’s a whole other world that’s outside of that. You need to have the feeling of playing to no one, you’ve got to go and play to no one and know what that is like but still put on

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

your best show and have the most fun. And then you can come back and enjoy where you’re from and revel in it.” I think you come back, and you appreciate it more, and that’s one of the things I always say to any friend in the music industry, whether they are a client, or just someone that I am a fan of. (interview 2014)

Those middle-class creative people who want to make a career are frustrated with those whom they think aren’t serious. Michael Fiore of Criminal Hygiene discussed Burger Records’ output and said, I understand the concept of helping everyone get a cassette out but at the end of the day, I always wonder if those bands are trying to make a career out of it or just trying to put out a cassette on Burger. It’s like their life goal is Burger put out our cassette. And they just added another fish to the pond. (Fiore 2014)

And the east side Los Angeles pond is currently overflowing with musicians.

Conclusion While the DIY/“fuck the man” attitude is strong enough in this scene to unite most musicians and label owners aesthetically and discursively for the most part, there are nonetheless non-aesthetic positions in this scene that correlate clearly with people’s amounts of educational, economic, and other forms of capital and thus their class positionalities. It may appear to be counterintuitive that those who profess to adhere most strongly to the ideology of “the economic world reversed” are those further down the class ladder. This, I am arguing, is a result of their position-taking with respect to the question of professionalization and making a living at music, which they tend to abjure. It would be a much greater risk for them, without the safety net that comes from having middle-class parents who can bail them out. Even though it was the middle classes that invented the idea of the economic world reversed in the realm of high art, the staunchest guardians of that doctrine, at least in the Southern California indie rock music scene, are those below the middle class who tend to avoid doing all the things they would need to do professionalize while they profess to enjoy the freedom to make the music they want.

Acknowledgments Deepest and sincerest thanks go to Shelina Brown, who not only transcribed the interviews drawn on here (and many others) but who served as my guide to this scene, as well as an interlocutor. I would also like to thank all of my interviewees, who were consistently gracious and generous with their time. As always, I would like to thank Sherry B. Ortner.

73

74

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Notes 1 2 3 4

For more on the Los Angeles and Orange County scenes, see Brown (2018b) and Taylor (2016b). I found much the same pattern in my study of the advertising industry (Taylor 2012): composers possessed more educational capital than people in managerial positions. On this point, see also Anderson (2013); Baym (2018); and Taylor (2016b, n.d). Little tells me that these Now 45 CDs are “like dinosaurs.” Today, he says, the only sales that matter are ticket sales. And, everyone is trying to get on a Spotify playlist (personal communication, May 23, 2019).

Works Cited Unpublished Materials Bee, K. (2014), interview by author, Echo Park, Los Angeles, August 24. Bohrman, S. (2012), interview by author, Fullerton, CA, July 23. Brown, S. (2018a), interview by author, Echo Park, Los Angeles, September 3. Brown, S. (2018b), “Yoko Ono’s Experimental Vocality as Matrixial Borderspace: Theorizing Yoko Ono’s Extended Vocal Technique and her Contributions to the Development of Underground and Popular Vocal Repertoires, 1968-Present,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Draper, M. (2015), interview by author, Highland Park, Los Angeles, October 19. Fiore, M. (2014), interview by author, Silver Lake, Los Angeles, September 5. Katz, G. (2014), interview by author, Echo Park, Los Angeles, September 1. Little, L. (2014), interview by author, Larchmont, Los Angeles, November 4. Pulcini, V. (2014), interview by author, Los Angeles, September 18. Rickard, L. (2012), interview by author, Fullerton, CA, August 1. So Many Wizards (Nima Kazerouni, Eric Felix, Martin Tomemitsu) (2014), interview by author, Santa Monica, CA, November 20. Spunt, D. (2012), interview by author, Los Angeles, November 11.

Books and Articles Anderson, T. J. (2013), Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy: Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry, London: Routledge. Baym, N. K. (2018), Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection, New York: New York University Press. Blanton, R. (2018), “Behind the Scenes at Burger Records with Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard,” Quip, February 23. http://www.quipmag.com/behind-the-scenes-of-burgerrecords-with-sean-bohrman-and-lee-rickard/ (accessed June 21, 2019).

Selling Out in the California Indie Scene

Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson, New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, S. (1997), “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. A. D. King, 19–39, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999), “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13 (1): 34–61. Ratlif, B. (2014), “Garage Rock’s Latest Nerve Center; Burger Records Develops Bands and More,” New York Times, May 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/arts/music/burgerrecords-develops-bands-and-more.html (accessed June 21, 2019). Tavana, A. (2015), “Lolipop Records Is Building a Garage-Rock Empire in Echo Park,” LA Weekly, January 7. https://www.laweekly.com/music/lolipop-records-is-building-a-garagerock-empire-in-echo-park-5323899 (accessed June 21, 2019). Taylor, T. D. (2012), The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, T. D. (2016a), “The Hip, the Cool, and the Edgy, or the Dominant Cultural Logic of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale 22: 105–24. Taylor, T. D. (2016b), Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, T. D. (forthcoming), “Maintenance and Destruction of an East Side Los Angeles Indie Rock Scene,” in The Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology, ed. A. Morcom and T. D.  Taylor, New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, V. (1969), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago: Aldine. Weirdo, B. (2016), “All About the Love: 5 Minutes with Wyatt Blair of Lolipop Records,” Weirdo Music Forever, September 17. https://www.weirdomusicforever.com/weird-newsand-interviews/2016/9/17/5-minutes-with-wyatt-blair (accessed 21 June, 2019).

75

4 It’s Up to You: Class, Status, and Punk Politics in Rock against Racism Rebecca Binns

Punks and Teds and Natty Dreads, smash the Front and join the Reds! Attila the Stockbroker, qtd in Huddle and Saunders 2016: 25 This essay explores questions of autonomy, class, and status in connection with Rock Against Racism (RAR: 1976–82), the political organizations behind it, primarily the AntiNazi League (1977) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and the bands and subcultures they interacted with. RAR was formed ostensibly to oppose racism within the music industry and to combat the rising tide of racist violence and intimidation by the National Front (NF). Its purpose was also to confront racism in the mainstream media and to protest against racist members of the political and judicial establishment. Its formation by SWP members including Paul Holborow and Roger Huddle in 1976 was prompted by white rock star Eric Clapton airing inflammatory racist views while ripping off “black” music (Widgery 1986: 42–3). Clapton’s racism and hypocrisy were seen as symptomatic of a wider problem that was endemic in contemporary rock music. The political bodies behind RAR also had a less overt remit to align youth culture with left-wing politics, in an attempt to maximize their cultural influence. While RAR was formed in 1976, it emerged as a viable organization following the formation of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in 1977 by some SWP members, with the support of trade unions, the Indian Workers Association, and several Labour Party members and MPs. The ANL also garnered the support of feminist and gay liberation movements (Widgery 1986: 51) that were subject to attack from the NF. The political intentions of RAR were driven by concepts, which were generally Marxist in orientation, of class and race as intertwined subjectivities based on economic oppression within a materialist critique of capitalism. From its inception, RAR intended to unite audiences against racism through orchestrating a series of “carnivals,” featuring a range of reggae and punk bands throughout Britain. This started with two in London in 1978, including a high-profile event at Victoria

78

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Park (Hackney) that drew 80,000 people. Both events were preceded by marches. In 1979, RAR organized the Militant Entertainment Tour that covered twenty-two locations in England, Wales and Scotland, with a finale at Alexandra Palace (North London). RAR also organized two concerts at the Rainbow Theatre (North London) as benefits, prompted by the death of schoolteacher Blair Peach, after he was allegedly hit on the head with an unauthorized weapon used by a member of the Special Patrol Group at a demonstration against the National Front in Southall (April 23, 1979). The last RAR Carnival was held in Leeds in 1981. RAR constituted a left-wing movement and music scene that was independent from dominant political discourse and the mainstream music business. RAR adopted the rhetoric of punk, notably through their punk-fanzine-style paper, Temporary Hoarding (from 1977) and aligned it with their socialist orientation and anti-racist agenda. RAR’s mainstream impact at the time, itself aided by a left-leaning music press, facilitated an influential narrative that punk was politically left-wing and progressive, despite this not reflecting the multifarious and often contradictory nature of the social milieu and the bands that helped to define it. This narrative has been accentuated in recent years with the proliferation of material on RAR, often created from the perspective of its protagonists (Huddle and Saunders 2016; Rachel 2016; Shelton 2015) that coincided with the phenomenon of Punk London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture (2016), which historicized and institutionalized punk, emphasizing its genesis as a London-centric phenomenon centred on the Kings Road circa 1976–77. This chapter takes a grounded theory approach in using the lived experience of scene participants, often conveyed through fanzines, as the empirical basis for generating understanding.1 It explores the dialectic between the audiences and bands through analysis of the music and extensive fanzine research, and then interrogates this in the context of the organization of RAR, drawing out the tensions inherent to this relationship. In this respect, it problematizes both RAR’s treatment of class and race as all-determining, and its attempts to reconcile the theoretical basis for its political intentions with the situation on the ground. In particular, this raises questions of agency in relation to the bands and subcultures that RAR interacted with. Discursive practice is also used, in the Foucauldian sense, to interrogate primary sources and uncover the power dynamics embedded in the language. This is achieved through analysis of the music produced by the bands, the language deployed by participants and language used by RAR to win over and exert influence within this youthful demographic. In this respect, RAR constructed and consolidated their own power in relation to these groups through the appropriation of the language of punk and, in the process, set discursive terms that were more narrowly defined than those that had previously existed in the subcultures with which they interacted. RAR essentially drew on the social status of the bands and audiences to increase its own viability as a social force. However, while these questions of power are worth investigation, rather than a one-sided transfer from the music scene to RAR through discursive practice, the process had mutual outcomes for the various parties: namely the music scene, RAR and the politicos.

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

The Politics of Punk (1976–79) Punk’s incarnation in Britain during the years following 1976 was anarchistic and multifarious. As it moved beyond its art-school inspired incarnation with the Sex Pistols and the Bromley Contingent, who congregated around McLaren and Westwood’s shop SEX on the Kings Road (London), it was taken up by young people around the country who wanted to reject dominant political and social mores as well as all external authority. Through the lyrics of its music and its fanzine discourse, punk culture defined itself as being created by and for “the kids,” with working-class or underprivileged identification integral to this. This egalitarian tone was reflected in founder of pioneering punk fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, Mark Perry’s (1976: 2) exhortation in Issue five “All you kids. Don’t be satisfied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines … flood the market with punk writing,” and was reiterated in the torrent of fanzines that followed. The rhetoric in punk rejected capitalist consumer culture, while it simultaneously disavowed the leftleaning idealism and progressive politics that was associated with the counterculture of the 1960s–70s. However, by the very act of disavowing the counterculture through its attack on the complacency of ageing hippies, punk arguably continued the radical lineage of this earlier era. Despite punk being anarchistic, often negating politics of left or right orientation, early on certain bands, notably The Clash and other members of the punk scene who would later become associated with RAR, attempted to steer punk towards fulfilling a progressive social purpose. Many of those involved in the Cultural Marxism of the 1970s, including RAR politicos, were formerly involved with the counterculture and/or New Left politics of the 1960s. In what has become known as The Cultural Turn, the concerns of left-wing individuals and groups moved beyond traditional Marxist concepts of class and economics to use culture as a means through which to focus their struggle. Despite their commitment to dissolving social hierarchies, these milieus were notably elite compared to the punk scene of the late 1970s. Many of the protagonists of the underground press of the late 1960s for instance were well-connected (often Oxbridge) graduates and successful professionals.2 Their ventures were intermittently backed by wealthy financiers and supported by celebrities, such as Paul McCartney, who bankrolled underground press publications such as International Times and countercultural venues including Art Lab, Indica and UFO (Fountain 1988: 52–98). Key figures from this earlier era brought the idealism associated with the counterculture to bear in the more factional and turbulent political environment of the 1970s. The politicos behind RAR were often older, more experienced, well-educated and had access to an extensive support network. They were attempting to align a younger, more anarchistic generation of punks to the left-wing, progressive narrative that they inherited from the 1960s. RAR and SWP insider David Widgery (1986: 50) described RAR founder Holborow as combining “… the Charterhouse air of clipped command with the concern for accuracy of an artillery officer.” Widgery’s uncle was Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales (1971–1980), during which he presided over the Tribunal on the events of

79

80

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Bloody Sunday. While his uncle was an arch member of the establishment, Widgery himself attended grammar rather than public school. He was practiced in allying politics with culture through his background writing for underground press publication Oz in the late 1960s. He wrote sophisticated political content for International Socialism and New Statesman, but was more concerned with revolutionary struggle in people’s lives than abstract Marxist theorizing (Callinicos, qtd in Huddle and Saunders 2016: 36). Rather than the impenetrable, highbrow language of the Marxist ideologues in the SWP (not all of who supported RAR), Temporary Hoarding adopted relatively simplistic arguments and an egalitarian tone, to resonate with that used in punk fanzines by far younger, often uneducated and/or working-class young punks. Whereas young punks used slang and vernacular words and phrases that conveyed shared meaning within a specific demographic, RAR adopted this language, introduced new ideologically driven discursive boundaries, and brought this discourse into a new context where it became more aligned with mainstream values. Younger RAR activists such as Temporary Hoarding designer Ruth Gregory shared the organization’s political orientation, while being more attuned to contemporary music subgenres such as punk. Lucy Toothpaste had already initiated a steer for punk in this direction through her feminist punk fanzine Jolt, which she founded in 1977. In Jolt 3, Holiday Bumper Issue (Toothpaste 1977) she encouraged punks to take a stand against the NF marching in what became known retrospectively as The Battle of Lewisham, writing, “Important message: If you are reading this before Aug 13, the National Front are marching through Lewisham on Sat 13 and I think it would be great if hordes of punks went to the counter demonstration to smash the idea that punk has anything to do with fascism once and for all …” (Toothpaste 1977: 5). Toothpaste edited and wrote for Temporary Hoarding which was produced by the ANL and had strong ties with the SWP. Temporary Hoarding reflected RAR’s aim to provide a platform for bands, such as The Clash and Sham 69, who declared an anti-racist stance. This occurred in the context of heightened racism at a time when nation and class identity and cohesion were becoming destabilized. The 1970s saw a surge in support for the NF in terms of its membership, which reached around 15,000 by the mid-point of the decade (Worley and Copsey 2016: 29). At general elections, the NF vote increased from 11,449 (June 18, 1970) to 75,875 (February 28, 1974) and 113,844 (October 10, 1974). However, it is worth mentioning that in 1974 the NF fielded twice the number of candidates in October as in February. The increase in votes was not reflected in any gains in seats, and in fact the NF’s strategy at this time was more concerned with publicity and controversy than making political inroads. The party also reported gains in percentages of the poll in the May 1974 London Council elections and in local elections around the country, notably in Leicester where they beat the Conservative and Liberal candidates, receiving 23 percent of the poll in 1975. During the ensuing years their support and electoral gains fluctuated, but they succeeded in their primary purpose of maintaining their profile and gaining coverage for their ideology in the mainstream media. Their avowed intention to gain 500,000 votes at the next election, following their success in 1974, was widely reported in the press, and increased the perceived urgency in tackling them, despite there being little evidence that

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

they would achieve this from election results alone (Fielding 2016: 26–8). The “battle for the streets” also formed a central plank of the NF’s strategy (Worley and Copsey 2016: 31). This involved racially motivated violence and intimidation, and contributed to thirty-one black people in Britain being murdered in racist attacks between 1976 and 1981 (Widgery 1986: 17). The response of the SWP was to use direct confrontation in contrast to the tactics of the Labour and Communist Parties. During the Battle of Lewisham, for example (the location deliberately chosen because of its racial diversity), the SWP played a key organizational role in facing down the NF (Widgery 1986: 44). The intention of RAR and Temporary Hoarding to attract a youthful, punk demographic was an attempt to undermine the far right’s recruitment of dissatisfied, white youths to its cause. It is a testament to their success that at a court hearing in 1982 (he was being sued for libel by the co-founder of the ANL, Peter Hain, for his claims about that organization) key NF figure Martin Webster admitted that the ANL played a central part in the defeat of the organization by the end of the 1970s (Hain 2007). Temporary Hoarding provides a snapshot of the politically factional environment of the UK in the late 1970s. It included articles on sexism, class discrimination and racism, as well as interviews with bands and reviews of RAR concerts and marches. Its Marxist political leanings are clear through coverage of political situations including Northern Ireland, which it positioned as a legacy of British imperialism. Temporary Hoarding utilized the monochrome, rough ‘n’ ready aesthetic of punk fanzines that was often driven by a necessity for cheapness and the amateurism of the creators. It also employed a similar voice to the fanzine authors, to appeal to a dissatisfied youth market. This punk aesthetic and rhetoric was fused with a format, style and content that evoked the underground press publications of the 1960s, and underneath the seemingly cut ‘n’ paste aesthetic can be seen relatively sophisticated collages of monochrome photos and text. It was highly successful, with a readership of 12,000 by 1979 (Widgery 1986: 62). RAR was accused by the far right of infecting the nation’s youth with left-wing ideology (Worley and Copsey 2016: 27). In response, and despite some misgivings, the NF and British Movement (BM) decided to target working-class, youth subcultures including skinhead and punk. This was aided by the establishment of the Young National Front and the associated paper, Bulldog (1977). The fanzine format was also utilized in a short-lived far-right zine, Punk Front (1978) that was created in Leeds. Copying RAR, a group of NF supporters called Punk Front assembled bands together to play events entitled Rock Against Communism (the first of which took place in 1979). Very few bands aligned themselves with RAC and the concerts were largely lacklustre events, with none of the impetus of RAR. The far right also formed a deliberate strategy to infiltrate and break up events organized by left-wing groups and bodies, including RAR (Bulldog No. 18 1980: 3, referred to in Worley and Copsey 2016: 38). But the authoritarianism at the core of organizations such as the NF was at odds with the nature of subcultures, which members often perceived as degenerate and on a continuum with the moral decline brought about by the liberalism of the 1960s–1970s. Toothpaste (1979b: 4), for instance, highlighted the NF’s intention, conveyed through the far-right magazine Spearhead in 1969, to make Britain respectable again by getting rid of popular music and recreational drug use as well as homosexuals,

81

82

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

ethnic minorities, and anti-racists. In framing its efforts in this way, the NF masked its more extreme allegiance to Nazi ideology (Worley and Copsey 2016: 29). They instead appealed to ideals such as patriotism to stir up anti-immigrant feeling in the areas most affected by poverty and immigration, such as the East End of London. Meanwhile, RAR appealed to the inclination of the vast majority of young people in subcultures to be antiracist, while aligning these relatively unpolitical or anti-political spheres with their leftwing, progressive narrative. As such, this period saw the far right and the far left vying to manipulate the nation’s youth and co-opt their language for political ends. Widgery goes so far as to observe, “The music came first and was more exciting. It provided the creative energy and the focus in what became the battle for the soul of young working-class England” (1986: 43).

Music Scene Responses to RAR RAR’s political agenda gained the support of trendy, left-leaning music publications such as NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker. In the scene itself, many bands, predominantly punk, reggae and 2 Tone, signed up to the anti-racist cause and performed at RAR. That said, the acceptance of RAR and its ideals was not as unilateral as this might suggest, and there was an ongoing debate, reflected in the punk fanzines, between bands who wanted to be free from politicization and those who used their platform as performers to take a stance on issues such as racism. Perhaps admirably, RAR allowed its aims and ideals to be contested in its own publication, Temporary Hoarding, by publishing critical letters as well as comments in interviews they conducted. However at times the questions pushed interviewees to conform to the wider narrative of RAR. In one interview, folkpunk pioneer Patrick Fitzgerald’s comment that he was influenced by Bowie at the age of fourteen is met with a response that appears a tad hyperbolic: “RAR alarm bells and sirens start going for us as soon as Bowie’s name is mentioned.” This is with reference to Bowie’s earlier “flirtation” with fascism on which Fitzgerald (1978) observes, “I think that statement by Bowie was just clumsy. It was a pretty flippant remark and he retracted it later. Still it was pretty irresponsible I suppose.” Along similar lines, Adam Kidron (1978) gives a favourable review of Sham 69’s performance at a RAR gig, but then criticizes its founder and singer, Jimmy Pursey, for not doing more to tackle BM and NF supporters in the audience. Such instances show how the discursive practice of RAR reproduced the language of punk outside of its original environment with an intention to influence the originating demographic. This intention was facilitated through the oppositional language of punk, as resistance to oppression or exploitation by capitalist or any other external body had been integral to the discourse of punk since its beginnings. A similar attitude was also prevalent within the reggae scene, where there was a clear affiliation (of varying degrees) with Rastafarianism, which expressed an attempt on behalf of an underclass in Jamaica to reclaim African identity from British imperialism. Reggae music in Britain during 1970s affirmed a positive sense of black identity in the face of what

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

was experienced to be a hostile environment. Added to this was the expression of social and economic disenfranchisement, expressed by RAR affiliates Misty in Roots and Aswad in songs—“Ghetto of the City” (1979) and “African Children” (1981), respectively—that provided a parallel with the experience of white working-class youth. Both reggae and punk were appealing in terms of what the politicos behind RAR saw as potential for collective resistance based on class and race oppression. They were well aware of punk’s potential to be multifarious and contradictory politically, as well as symbolically through, for instance the adoption of the swastika by Siouxsie Sioux and the disfigured Union Jack that featured in Jamie Reid’s iconic design for Sex Pistols 7 “Anarchy in the UK” (1976). RAR’s attempt to harness punk was a blatant (and successful) attempt to steer it leftwards, to wrestle control away from the far right, who were increasingly making their presence felt within youth culture (Widgery 1986: 61). RAR’s perceived lack of transparency over their affiliation with the SWP made some people skeptical, and claims continue to be reiterated that RAR was just a “front” for the SWP (Trotwatch 2009). Some uncertainty from Temporary Hoarding’s readers was evident at the time, for instance in this letter, … Ok. So, we know you’re “Socialist”? But how far does it go? How tied up with the SWP are you? I aint Right and I aint Left. I’m me and I am what Izam. RAR is the best (and only really) “organisation” that successfully joins music and politics (a union which I reckon is going to become increasingly dominant). So you’re the only ones to side with. Please don’t let me down, state your position concerning the SWP. Honesty is strength. (Chesham City Rocker, Bucks 1978)

The paper responded by declaring its independence: “Yes, there are SWPers active in RAR. No, SWP/any other political group do not control RAR” (RAR 1978). As well as being integral to its formation, SWP members were certainly influencing RAR, by devising influential slogans and visuals for posters, badges, and other agitprop and by providing facilities, such as the SWP print shop (East End Offset), which RAR used to produce Temporary Hoarding. However, RAR was an open movement, which drew in a wide range people and organizations outside the SWP throughout its lifespan. By the time of the first RAR gig (1978), as well as musicians and artists, there were Labour and Liberal Party activists, leftleaning Christians, and members of other far-left groups such as the International Marxist Group (IMG), the Maoists and the Communist Party involved with the organization. RAR also received funding from trade unions, support from prominent individuals in politics and showbusiness, and worked with a range of organizations, united through their shared intention to fight fascism. Therefore, while the considerable influence of the SWP within RAR explains the skepticism from those who wanted to remain independent from political groups, claims that the SWP was the sole and secret controller of RAR and Temporary Hoarding seem far-fetched. While some questioning or skepticism was evident at the time, the majority of bands and audiences who interacted with RAR saw it in a positive light. The Mekons and Gang of Four, for example, (who were both part of a punk, anti-fascist scene in Leeds) were on-board with the intentions of RAR. Members of the reggae band Misty in Roots were

83

84

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

closely involved with the organization, while Selwyn Brown of Steel Pulse describes a great camaraderie among those involved and racial divisions being broken down through black and white musicians sharing the stage at gigs (Brown qtd in Huddle and Saunders 2016: 33). Jerry Dammers attributes RAR as the inspiration for him to form the 2 Tone Records label and band, The Specials, with the intention of uniting audiences against racism (Dammers qtd in Huddle and Saunders 2016: 56–48). Punks also often attest to having becoming politicized through their experience of attending RAR concerts. As such, performers and audience members often appreciated RAR’s ethos, perceiving it to be compatible with punk. In interview, Patrick Fitzgerald, pointed to the political validity of RAR: A lot of people think it’s bad because it’s politically orientated. I dunno what the political implications of anything are. I just think that anything that opposes the NF is good. I THINK RAR SHOULD JUST OPPOSE THE BRITISH WAY OF LIFE. It’s PATHETIC. A lot of bands if there wasn’t RAR wouldn’t have the chance to say anything much. Record labels would hold them back.” (Fitzgerald 1978)

Despite attempts by RAR to steer the narrative, their willingness to publish criticism of themselves within the pages of Temporary Hoarding shows them to be far removed from either an oppressive political body or a music industry PR machine. On interviewing Jimmy Pursey (Sham 69) on behalf of RAR, Misty (from Misty in Roots) succinctly summarizes RAR’s significance in this area: That’s one of the ways RAR has helped a bit. Just so that there are people around who aren’t like the rest of the business. The music press but who are really into the music. Cos the worst thing for musicians is the isolation from what’s going on around you. That’s one of the functions of management. They make sure you don’t speak to other artists or people. It’s in their interests to do so. It’s killed a lot of artists, but it’s not inevitable … not if there’s something like RAR. (Misty 1978)

Punk Identity and Class RAR became a recognizable force towards the end of punk’s first wave (1978) when there was a split in the scene, which was simultaneously becoming more extreme and polarized. As a reaction to the commercialization of punk, several strands emerged, including Oi, anarcho-punk and then 2 Tone, all of which stressed authenticity and grassroots identification through the discourse of the participants and the bands’ lyrics. As such, the language used within these social milieus was very much anti-status, instead emphasizing a collectively construed identity based on values that diverged from dominant society. In the case of Oi and 2 Tone specifically, as well as punk more widely, class identification as a means of empowerment was a central component of this. Of course the reality was more complex, with high-profile bands such as The Clash deliberately cultivating an image of authenticity through their lyrics and music graphics featuring scenes of urban and social deprivation (see the lyrics and back cover of their

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

inaugural 7-inch “White Riot,” the front and rear covers of their 7-inch “Remote Control/ London’s Burning live,” and the front and rear covers of their debut LP, The Clash, all 1977). This branding was at odds with their mainstream success and the art-school background of the members. Joe Strummer became notorious for his public-school upbringing as the son of a diplomat, which he described in very negative terms, but which is nonetheless at complete odds with the image they present, especially in their first two albums. Even The Specials, who were perceived as more in synch with their audiences, in no small part due to the lyrics of their songs focusing on the frustrations and violence faced by workingclass kids in urban environments, had middle-class members, including Jerry Dammers (Jeremy David Hounsell Dammers), whose father became the Dean of Bristol Cathedral (1973–87), and Horace Panter (Sir Horace Gentleman) who attended grammar school and was at art school with Dammers. Neville Staple describes being brought into the band on account of his street credibility. He notes that “The experience of playing at gigs like the Steel Pulse concert in Birmingham had probably taught our leader [Dammers] that The Specials needed more rude-boy authenticity. In other words, another black person would help—especially one that could toast and make his presence felt.” (Staple 2010: 120). Dammers’s intention in featuring a racially mixed lineup combining the influences of ska, reggae and rocksteady with punk was as political in its aim to overcome racial segregation as it was musical. The permeation of more extreme politics into youth culture during the 1970s arose alongside the breakdown in political consensus in mainstream society. In this context, the sense of a coherent class identity was under threat, even before the advent of Thatcherism. The punk bands attest to this crisis in class identity through lyrics that disavow traditional work in favor of freedom and meaning, forming a continuum with the ideals of the 1960s counterculture, albeit expressed in a more aggressive idiom. This was aligned with the impact on male identity as women entered the workplace (redefining the role of wife and mother) and more and more marriages ended in divorce. It was also reiterated in the declining relevance of social structures, such as organized religion, among the young. While the trade unions were strong throughout the 1970s, they diverged from their traditional role through their militancy and direct-action tactics. In place of class-based politics were single issues, including women’s and gay liberation, and environmentalism. For the politicos in the SWP and ANL, the success of the workers’ struggles of the early 1970s had ebbed and mainstream politics were now embodied in a Labour government that failed to inspire. Unlike many left-wing and communist organizations, the SWP had rejected the authoritarian government of command economies such as Russia as a betrayal of socialism and was open to the idea of political change via culture. At this juncture it was beneficial to the SWP, who had a remit of revolutionary socialism, to be aligned with subcultures of disaffiliated youth to extend its more political ambitions. Bands often had mixed motives for their involvement with RAR, and varied levels of affiliation with their politics. Some bands therefore adopted the discourse of RAR and the ANL to establish their political credentials, and by extension status. The success of the Victoria Park concerts in 1978, for example, prompted a host of bands that had no interest in RAR before to jump on the bandwagon. RAR audiences, particularly as the organization

85

86

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

became a dominant social force, were drawn from a wider pool within society. The status of RAR as a significant organization therefore attracted a larger, but also arguably more passive, audience. In this sense, the meaning of punk rhetoric and visual language was transcribed from its original context, where it provided agency to its participants, and was used by an organization seeking to impact on wider society.

Priorities of Race and Gender Within the Functioning of RAR While RAR was seemingly anti-status in breaking down barriers of class, race and gender, how it played out in reality was more complex. Temporary Hoarding featured articles on female oppression, exploitation and misogyny. Lucy Toothpaste in particular brought issues of this nature to the fore through her incisive, in-depth features that covered a range of subjects, for instance, women’s rights under Thatcher (1979a: 8–9), the link between the repression of sexuality and fascism based on Wilhelm Reich’s influential book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism from 1933 (1979b: 4–6), and through her critical questioning of interviewees, for instance Adam Ant on issues of sexual stereotypes (1978: 16–17). This, along with the number of women involved in the organization and the strong female performers they featured, contrasts markedly with their male-dominated predecessors in the underground press (see Fountain 1988: 42–54 for a description of the roles assigned to women in this field during the late 1960s). However, RAR itself was at times seen to perpetuate the sexism endemic in the music industry. A letter to Temporary Hoarding, with reference to a RAR benefit concert that featured the band Fabulous Poodles, who dedicated a song, “Convent Schoolgirls,” about a pervert who preys on schoolgirls, to “all you male chauvinists (joke?)” was clear in its criticism. The letter stated: What we learnt is that a concert cannot claim to be a “political” concert just by hanging a banner over the stage … Sexism is racism against women, as one man there said and it works more oppressively against women than against men (a fact quite obviously upheld by the incidents of that Sat night. (de Lyon, Fagan, Greenberg, Heathfield, Keep, Mc Diarmid, May and Murray 1978)

The band’s response to audience criticism was to accuse them of an inability to take a joke, to state, “You’re too narrow baby” and to call them “Mary Whitehouses.” RAR replied: We hope that all the bands who do gigs for RAR will take note of this letter. RAR is very sorry that the Fabulous Poodles’ set was so offensive to women. It is not enough to make a stand against one form of repression—the exploitation of blacks—if they are going to contribute to another—the degradation of women. If anyone wonders why RAR doesn’t simply ban all bands which are in the slightest bit sexist, the answer is 1) we would hardly have a band left on our books! 2) We hope that bands who don’t normally have their sexist material challenged at ordinary gigs, will benefit from doing a RAR gig and being confronted with feminist opposition. They deserve all they get! (RAR 1978)

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

While RAR supported feminism in principle, how this played out in practice was questioned by women in the organization. In fact, sexism within the male-dominated music scene of RAR was to inspire the formation of Rock against Sexism (RAS) and its associated zine, Drastic Measures (1978), by several RAR members, including Toothpaste. However, RAS was in turn accused of being aligned with the patriarchal organization of RAR. An interview with members of the feminist punk band, The Raincoats in Brass Lip (Gina, Paloma, Vicky 1979: 6) for instance, criticized RAS for being run along undemocratic and bureaucratic lines that were aligned with RAR and for prioritizing the masculine genre of rock through its use in their title when women played more prominent roles in other music genres.

The White Politics of RAR RAR’s championing of anti-racism was also criticized for being conducted in an overwhelmingly white environment. While the bands varyingly featured black and white performers, the audiences were often overwhelmingly white. Neville Staple recalls facing resentment from his black friends for performing with white band members: “Blood clot how comes you jumping up and down with the white punk bwoys?” adding, “They couldn’t figure out why I was spending more and more time with this group—even if I was just roadying—instead of toasting or playing reggae” (Staple 2010: 108). The much-vaunted punk-reggae crossover was therefore not as seamless as it has sometimes been portrayed. The achievement of RAR seems to have been more to stem the rise of the NF and align left-wing politics with youth culture, rather than to unite different races in their audiences, although this would undoubtedly have been a welcome outcome. It is, however, worth noting that RAR’s last carnival, held in Leeds in July 1981, which featured The Specials, Aswad, Au Pairs, and Misty in Roots, apparently attracted a more racially mixed audience (Widgery 1986: 110). RAR has also been accused of excluding Asian communities, who often bore the brunt of racist attacks from the NF, but who had very little involvement with the bands or subcultures RAR championed. Sabin (1999: 204) for instance argues that the punk scene marginalized Asian youth as they were perceived as less hip than Afro-Caribbean youth. In the late 1970s, the Bhangra music genre was yet to become an influence on popular culture (Goodyer 2003: 51), and the higher status awarded to Afro-Caribbean as opposed to Asian music culture was due to the former’s youth subcultural scene being more developed, in particular through reggae. A popular cultural bridge had been formed between AfroCaribbean “rude boys” and white, working-class skinheads through ska music in Britain during the 1960s. Punk’s adoption of reggae during the late 1970s, notably by bands such as The Clash and The Slits, brought new cultural crossovers. Such connections had not been made between the white British and Asian communities at that point. This lack of representation within the subcultures themselves was also reflected at RAR events, with punk band Alien Kulture ploughing a lonely furrow as representatives of the Asian community.

87

88

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Despite this lack of representation, RAR, along with the SWP and ANL, did actively engage with Asian communities, forging links with the Indian Workers’ Association and the Southall Youth Movement. It also worked with the People Unite Movement that encompassed a range of activists including young Asian women (Goodyer 2003: 51). Asian communities had relatively strong political representational bodies that the ANL and RAR worked with, in contrast to the situation within West Indian communities. The influence of the Asian community on RAR can also be seen in more tangential ways. For example, Phil Allsopp (a teacher who joined the SWP in 1981) describes how his opposition to attempts by fascists to divide the working class coalesced around his experience of living among the Punjabi Sikh community in Leamington Spa (Allsopp, qtd in Huddle and Saunders 2016: 23), where RAR played an active role via the Indian Workers’ Association. Despite RAR’s eagerness to engage with Asian community groups where there were mutual goals to be attained, it remains true that certain music subgenres, often defined along lines of race and class, were prioritized over others. Frith and Street (1992, referred to in Goodyer 2003: 50) argue that the ideological hierarchy constructed by RAR based on arbitrarily assigned notions of authenticity, determined by the “proletarian authority” of its performers excluded Asian cultural preoccupations. However, Goodyer (2003: 52) makes the point (based on Widgery’s writing in his publication) that it was the political potential rather than the authenticity of subgenres that made them appealing to RAR. Added to this would be the importance of galvanizing music that had an ethos of independence from the mainstream. As such RAR had little interest in mainstream pop that was perceived to be compliant with the overarching capitalist system and its values. It is worth stressing the commitment to a fairer society that existed at the core of RAR and the organizations it was affiliated with, a commitment that was shared to a greater or lesser extent by the bands. However, punk was a lot more diverse than portrayed by RAR, as were the motivations of the bands themselves for being involved. While RAR rallied many scene participants to its anti-racist and left-wing cause, this masked the distrust of politics and all external authority that was integral to punk, particularly in its anarchopunk and Oi incarnations.

Criticism of RAR: Oi and Anarcho-Punk For the subculture of Oi, which fused punk with skinhead, class identification provided the main factor for coherence in the face of hierarchical society. Oi rejected mainstream politics and the media, on the basis that their middle-class composition meant they misunderstood, misconstrued and stigmatized the scene due to class prejudice (see The Story of Oi, A View from the Dead End of the Street, 1981, for an insider account of this movement by punk poet Gary Johnson). While most of the bands were explicitly antiracist, and some were socialist in orientation, the subculture overall became tainted by the racist affiliation of some bands and audience members (Worley and Copsey 2016: 39).

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

In the preceding years, the attitude of punks towards RAR had been largely supportive, if a little questioning, as evidenced by interviews with bands and letters published in fanzines, including Temporary Hoarding. Oi forerunners Sham 69, for instance, became involved with RAR, which led to NF and BM skinheads targeting and disrupting their gigs. Singer Jimmy Pursey frequently took such audience members to task and became embroiled in wrangles and fights. In an interview in Temporary Hoarding, Pursey articulated his reason for supporting RAR as, “Anything’s good that brings people together right?” (Pursey 1978), while showing some reservations about politics more widely. He stated his support for RAR due to it being a democratic body, but questioned interviewer Misty’s assertion that fascists should not be granted freedom of speech due to their violent intentions, positing that intolerance of other people’s ideas was how dictatorships began. As RAR achieved a greater impact in mainstream society, the organization was subject to more criticism if not outright hostility from certain subsectors of punk for what was perceived to be their co-option of music scenes. In an interview in Oi fanzine, Rising Free, the socialist, anti-fascist Oi band The Angelic Upstarts expressed their antipathy towards the SWP and RAR. Singer Mensi (1980) said, “The Anti-Nazi thing is a load of toss!” “You wouldn’t do RAR again?” Mensi replied, “I mean what’s the use of playing Alexandra Palace in front of 4,000 people when 3,900 of them are white? And another thing, niggers are more racist than white people are.” “But, do the National Front skinheads try to influence you?” Mensi, “They try, but I haven’t met any bright ones.” Mensi concluded that most of the NF weren’t really racist, but were just following a fashion. The Upstarts here resisted any political interpretation of the way they saw the issue of racism in Britain, using terms like “nigger” that—especially viewed through a contemporary lens—superficially align them with the far right. However, The Angelic Upstarts’ anti-fascist stance is widely documented, and evidenced through the lyrics of their songs, for example, “All you kids, black and white/Together we are dynamite” (Kids on the Street, 1981). The hostility of the Upstarts towards RAR came following the organization’s dismissive review of their performance at a RAR gig, where they were subtly criticized for not being on-board enough. RAR gave a more glowing review of the support act, whom they described as more committed. “The Edinburgh band METROPACK provided support. They are a band right behind RAR who have done slides and posters for the gigs and did an excellent set” (RAR 1979: 27). Particularly vocal criticism of RAR came from anarcho-punks, who formed a sizeable strand of punk subculture that sprung up in the wake of influential forerunners Crass (1977–84) and a host of bands who were often released on Crass’s own independent record label Crass Records, the Corpus Christi label they helped to set up, and/or a range of other independent, anarcho-punk record labels that they varyingly supported.3 The instrumental role played by drummer Penny Rimbaud, who co-founded the band with Steve Ignorant, both in nurturing the scene and disseminating his distinct point of view via Crass’s music, numerous interviews and extended tracts published in fanzines, went some way to establishing an anarchistic philosophy that permeated this milieu. The powerful designs of Crass member Gee Vaucher, which accompanied Crass record releases, also played a pivotal role in cultivating an anarcho-punk aesthetic that encapsulated the underlying ideals and

89

90

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

perspective of this band and collective. Anarcho punk also brought a set of single-issues to the fore, notably animal rights (Flux of Pink Indians and Conflict) and feminism (Poison Girls, Crass and Rubella Ballet). Other overriding concerns of this scene were centered on anti-authoritarianism, critiquing what were perceived to be instruments of “the system,” including education, the nuclear family, organized religion and the military. Crass’s essentially anarchist and pacifist view that all politics of either left or right persuasions was inherently flawed and prone to violence through seeking power was articulated in their music, most clearly in their track “Bloody Revolutions” (1980). That was also the theme of a track directed specifically against RAR, “White Punks on Hope” (1979). Rimbaud often expressed his vehement objection to RAR and the SWP via anarcho-punk fanzines. Following a Crass gig in which militant anti-fascists attacked skinheads in the audience regardless of their political affiliation,4 Rimbaud wrote a polemical piece in the anarchist punk fanzine, Toxic Graffiti, Now RAR are moving in for the kill. They are recommending the ‘vetting’ of audiences at gigs, claiming the right to throw out those that don’t conform to their idea of how it ought to be, attempting to predetermine the political atmosphere in which gigs take place and advocating a ban on views with which they don’t agree … so much for anti-fascism … Is a Marxist murder any better than a Nazi one? If RAR feel they have a right to express their political views they must allow others to express theirs. ‘Pogo on a Nazi’ was/is the blatant call to violence, at the first anti-Nazi carnival the organizers instructed the rallying masses on how to deal with a Nazi ‘Smash ’em into the ground’ Creative thinking from the great liberators? (Rimbaud 1979: 7–8)

This article was followed by comment on page eight from contributor “MDV” on behalf of the fanzine, who explained that his earlier support of RAR had morphed into a belief that RAR was polarizing and divisive. Jake from The Heretics similarly pronounced, “We’re anti-Nazi, but we’re also anti anti-Nazi,” (Jake 1979: 10); while Colin from Epileptics noted, “We said in an interview with Bad News fanzine that we’d have nothing to do with Rock Against Racism and things got really heavy coz people think if you don’t like them you must be a Nazi. RAR is just trendy” (Colin 1979: 15). Along similar lines, Stringey from Eratics derided the SWP, referring to them as “middle-class wankers” (Stringey 1979: 15). This digging-in among anarcho-punks against what they perceived to be co-option by the left, also occurred at a time, late 1979, when the battle with the NF had extended to a particularly brutal one involving the police and State, and the issue of racism was becoming weighty for all concerned. There was widespread testimony about the complicity of the police with the NF, and of their persecution and concerted violence towards leftwing groups and minorities during this period. This all culminated in the death of teacher Blair Peach at an anti-NF protest in Southall on April 23, 1979. Peach was allegedly dealt a fatal blow by an unauthorized weapon used by the Special Patrol Group. For coverage of the protest in Southall and death of Blair Peach see an article by David Widgery, writing as Andy Zerox (1979: 4–5). While no police officer has ever been charged, an internal police inquiry that was not officially released for thirty years concluded the likelihood was he was killed by an unidentifiable police officer (Lewis 2010).

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

The same protest saw Clarence Baker, of reggae band Misty in Roots and a RAR committee member, come close to death, spending a week in a coma with a fractured skull, amidst wider reports of extreme police brutality. An article in the tenth issue of Temporary Hoarding (1979: 3), “So long as you stay indoors & don’t cause any trouble, you have nothing to fear from the police,” used the quote from Metropolitan Police Commissioner David McNee, as its headline and highlighted police and legal injustice faced by a catalogue of individuals. While the deployment of confrontational and direct-action tactics by the SWP towards the NF is acknowledged, for example in Widgery’s book (1986: 44), the deployment of serious violence was rare. This is in stark contrast to the level of violence and murder perpetrated by the far right, who also differed from the left-wing anti-fascist groups on the basis of the intrinsic violence of an ideology based on hatred of the Other. In this context, the accusations of violence from Crass seem disproportionate. But there is some validity to their depiction of the oppressiveness of an ideological organization that required a level of conformity that was not intrinsic to the subcultures RAR interacted with. Ironically, Crass in turn became subject to these kinds of criticisms as the 1980s progressed. Like RAR, they were criticized for being ideologically driven and controlling by some of their collaborators (Lance 1983: 32; Wilson 2017: 22). Crass was also portrayed in certain circles as middle-class cop outs, avoiding “real” street battles in the cities in favor of their rural retreat, Dial House (Essex), which Rimbaud founded as a bohemian living environment in 1967. This accusation was primarily espoused by music journalist, Gary Bushell, writing in Sounds who championed Oi music at that time on the basis of its supposed working-class authenticity. Crass, who had an ongoing spat with Bushell, articulated their response in their songs, “Hurry up Garry (the Parson’s Farted)” and “The Greatest Working-class Rip Off.” Crass (whose members came from a whole range of differing class backgrounds) and anarcho-punk generally, eschewed class as the primary factor in generating collectively construed identity as well as political affiliations of left or right. In both cases this was related to a wider anarchistic philosophy that sought to break down societal constructs.

Conclusion During punk’s first wave (1976–78), with some notable exceptions, punk bands were generally on board to a greater or lesser extent with the aims and intentions of RAR. However, other than the avowedly left-wing bands, punks had often questioned the motivations of RAR and were not always comfortable with the coercive element of its make-up, perceiving it to be top-down or status driven, as opposed to grassroots-inspired. However, the opposite was also seen by a host of participants who saw RAR as sharing the participatory ethos of subcultures through their avowed independence from the commercial music industry and mainstream politics. Certainly RAR achieved a broad consensus across youth culture for its aim to fight the incursion of racists into their vicinities and combat violence on the streets. Despite some cynicism expressed in fanzines at the time, and in retrospective writing about the organization, RAR was not disingenuous in this aim. Widgery (1986: 51)

91

92

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

is unequivocal in admitting that this aim was intrinsic to a wider concept of revolutionary socialism that found radical potential in subcultures. In this respect, the politicos behind RAR sought to align subcultures including punk with their wider political aims and ideals. While there was inevitably an element of co-option to this, this needs to be understood in the wider socio-political context of the time that featured intense violence from the far right and the perceived collaboration of the police. The cultural influence of the SWP peaked through its involvement with the ANL and RAR. In the run-up to the election of 1979, however, Margaret Thatcher appealed successfully to National Front supporters, notably in her speech on ITV series, World in Action, January 30, 1978, in which she referred to British people feeling “rather swamped” by other cultures. This targeted approach led to the NF losing support on two fronts, with the Conservative party taking voters on the one hand, and the ANL in particular discrediting it from the left. As a result, both the ANL and RAR lost their purpose following the 1979 election, and both were slowly wound down over the following years, arguing that their fight now lay with Thatcherism. While Thatcher co-opting the NF may have been the most significant reason for its loss of popularity, RAR’s creation of a cultural front against racism and the support given by political organizations including the SWP to fighting this issue meant it had been confronted head on. The anti-racist cause fitted with the wider political aims of the organizations behind RAR. But rather than constituting a top-down political process, RAR took on a life of its own, involving a multitude of participants of varied social backgrounds, who were united by a common cause and worked with a participatory ethos. As a result, RAR offered a valid and far more appealing form of politics, and many young people including punks were politicized in a positive sense through this process. The extent to which RAR achieved mainstream status meant it had a huge influence, with a notable political dimension. As well as making anti-racism high profile, RAR had a profound effect on the cause of gay liberation. Tom Robinson, for instance, who previously played to very small cult audiences, got mainstream gig bookings after his association with RAR. It also proved a successful vehicle for female performers such as Siouxsie Sioux. As such, individuals and bands often achieved status in a mainstream context through their association with RAR. In this respect, rather than this process constituting a oneway transfer of status from the music scenes to RAR, it was largely open and democratic, involving mutual benefits for the various parties involved. These outcomes were largely progressive, contributing towards a more open society in terms of attitudes towards race, gender and sexual orientation. The election of the Thatcher government occurred at a time when punk had developed from its early incarnation through which politics was negated, at least symbolically, into a series of often-conflicting grassroots strands, all of which stressed notions of authenticity, albeit from widely differing perspectives. Oi and anarcho-punk were also reacting against what was perceived to be punk’s commercialization following its first wave in 1976–78. In the context of the social forces at work following the 1979 election, this can be seen as a last attempt by these subcultures to assert their collective identity in the face of a neoliberal assault. The more underground nature of various punk milieus post-1979

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

can also be seen as a more decisive reaction against the hegemonic cultural sphere that accompanied the new economic era. Anarcho-punk provided one forum where a vitriolic rhetoric pitted against Thatcher and globalized capitalism was manifest, as well as a loss of faith in progressive narratives. During the early 1980s, criticism of RAR and left-wing politics more widely became hostile within these underground music scenes. Whereas both major political parties during the post-war decades had been potentially open to change initiated through political protest, government during the 1980s became closed to such influences. Rather than seeking to affect change to mainstream society, as had been the case with RAR, sectors of the music scene became actively hostile to government itself. While the music scene overall became commercialized, punk largely rejected overarching political narratives. This can be seen varyingly as an expression of futility in the face of an oppressive political environment, or to offer a more grassroots and spontaneous form of culture and political protest as the 1980s progressed.

Notes 1

2

3

Grounded theory, as developed in the social sciences, uses qualitative data to generate theory, rather than imposing a top-down theoretical construct onto the reading of a subject. It is particularly suited to studies where the intention is to uncover hidden narratives, voices, and the culture of people who situate themselves outside the mainstream, in this instance, punk subculture. Cambridge graduates included Ed Victor who founded Ink (May 1971–February 1972), International Times (1966) co-founder John “Hoppy” Hopkins, and Australians Germaine Greer and Clive James who wrote for Oz (first published in Australia in 1963, then in England from 1967–73). Editors and contributors throughout International Times’s duration were from mixed backgrounds, although they usually had a university education, in part due to institutions widening their intake to include students from working and lower-middle-class backgrounds at that time. Black Dwarf (1968–72) was started by self-made media man Clive Goodwin. Included on its production and editorial team were Oxford graduates Sheila Rowbotham, Dan Jones, Tariq Ali, and Cambridge economist (and member of International Socialists) Bob Rowthorn. Others (such as David Mercer) had more ordinary backgrounds. Friends (1969) also featured a range of graduates, including several from Oxford (Jerome Burne, Johnathon Green and various others who came and went). Often the bands learnt the requisite skills from releasing their first record on Crass Records (1979) while the label also provided start-up funds. This was the case for anarcho-punk band Flux of Pink Indians, who set up Spiderleg (1981) following the release of their first EP, Neu Smell (1981) on the Crass Records label. Following the release of their music on Spiderleg, Subhumans set up the record label, Bluurg (whose first record was released in 1981). Derek Birkett (bass player) of Flux then set up the independent label One Little Indian (1985). Following the release of their music on Crass Records and Corpus Christi, Conflict set up Mortarhate Records label who released their first record in 1982.

93

94

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

4

This organized squad were members of or associated with the SWP at the time. But the SWP as an organization took a strong stand against mob violence such as this, expelling high-profile figures such as Gary O’Shea for such squadism. O’Shea went on to found Red Action for the purpose of militant street confrontation of fascists in 1981, which evolved into Anti-Fascist Action as the decade progressed.

Discography Angelic Upstarts (1981), “Kids on the Streets,” Zonophone. Aswad (1981),“African Children,” New Chapter, CBS. Crass (1979), “White Punks on Hope,” Stations of the Crass, Crass Records. Crass (1979), “Hurry Up Garry (the Parson’s Farted)’, Stations of the Crass, Crass Records. Crass/Poison Girls (1980), “Bloody Revolutions/Persons Unknown,” Crass Records. Crass (1982), “The Greatest Working-class Rip Off,” Christ - The Album/Well Forked - But Not Dead, Crass Records. Misty in Roots (1979),“Ghetto of the City,” Live at the Counter Eurovision 79, People Unite. Sex Pistols (1976), “Anarchy in the UK,” EMI. The Clash (1977), “White Riot,” CBS. The Clash (1977), “Remote Contro/London’s Burning,” CBS. The Clash (1977), The Clash, CBS.

Works Cited Chesham City Rocker (1978), letter, Temporary Hoarding, No 5, Spring. Colin (1979), “Epileptics Interview,” Toxic Graffiti 4: 14–16 De Lyon, H., B. Fagan, S. Greenberg, G. Heathfield, E. Keep, S. May, P. McDiarmid, and J. Murray, (1978), Brighton against sexism-NOT SEX, Temporary Hoarding, No 6. Fielding, N. (2016), The National Front, Oxford: Routledge. Fitzgerald, P. (1978), “A Pathetic Way of Life,” Temporary Hoarding, No 6, Summer. Fountain, N. (1988), Underground: The London Alternative Press, 1966–74, London: Routledge. Gina, Paloma, and Vicky (1979), “Raincoats,” Brass Lip, Issue 1: 4–8. Goodyer, I. (2003), “Rock Against Racism: Multiculturalism and Political Mobilisation, 1976–81,” Immigrants and Minorities, 22, (1), 44–62. Hain, P. (2007), “Blood and Glory,” The Guardian, March 4. Available online: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/04/race.otherparties (accessed April 12, 2019). Huddle, R., and R. Saunders, eds (2016), Reminiscences of RAR: Rocking Against Racism 1976–1979, Nottingham: Redwords. Jake (1979),“Heretics,” Toxic Graffiti 4: 9–12. Johnson, G. (1981), The Story of Oi, A View from the Dead End of the Street, Manchester: Babylon Books. Kidron, A. (1978), “Review of RAR gig: Sham 69, Misty, Central London Poly,” Temporary Hoarding, No 5, Spring, back page.

Class and Politics in Rock against Racism

Lance (1983), “Poison Girls”, Acts of Defiance, Issue 7: 30–33. Lewis, P. (2010), “Blair Peach killed by police at 1979 protest, Met report finds,” The Guardian, April 27. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/apr/27/blair-peachkilled-police-met-report (accessed April 2, 2019). Mensi (1980), “The Angelic Times,” Rising Free, Issue 3: 10–11. Misty (1978), “If only we could live together then I know we’d live forever: JIMMY PURSEY,” Temporary Hoarding, No 6. Perry, M. (1976), “No doubt About it,” Sniffin’ Glue, No 5, November: 2 Punk London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture (2016), London. Pursey, J. (1978), “If only we could live together then I know we’d live forever: JIMMY PURSEY,” Temporary Hoarding, No 6. Rachel, D. (2016), Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge, London: Picador. RAR (1978), response to letter, “Brighton Against Sexism-Not Sex,” Temporary Hoarding, No 6. RAR (1979), “FEEDBACK …,” Temporary Hoarding, No 9: 27–28. Rimbaud, P. (1979) “Following the 8/9/79 Conway Hall Agro …,” Toxic Graffiti, No 4: 7–8. Sabin, R. (1999), “‘I won’t let that dago by:’ Rethinking punk and racism” in R. Sabin, (ed.), Punk Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk, 199–219, Oxford: Routledge. Shelton, S. (2015), Rock Against Racism, London: Autograph ABP. Staple, N., with T. McMahon (2010), Original Rude Boy: From Borstal to The Specials, London: Aurum Press, 2010. Stringey (1979), “Eratics,” Toxic Graffiti 4: 4–6. Toothpaste, L. (1977), “Important Message,” Jolt 3, Holiday Bumper Issue: 5. Toothpaste, L. (1978), “Wouldn’t You Like to Rip Him to Shreds?, Adam and the Ants,” Temporary Hoarding, No 6. Toothpaste, L. (1979a), “You Could Could Get to Touch Her if Your Gloves are Sterilised,” No 9: 8–9. Toothpaste, L. (1979b), “Sex V Fascism,” Temporary Hoarding, No 7, Winter: 4–6. Trotwatch (2009), “Everything you always wanted to know about sects (but were afraid to ask)…,” libcom.org, September 18. Available online: https://libcom.org/blog/trotspottingeverything-you-always-wanted-know-about-sects-were-afraid-ask-18092009 (accessed March 29, 2019). Widgery, D. (1986), Beating Time: Riot ‘n’ Race ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll, London, Chatto and Windus. Wilson, M. (2017), “Recording No Doves/Laughing,” in G. Bull, and M. Dines (eds), And All Around was Darkness, 21–29, Portsmouth: Itchy Monkey Press. Worley, M., and N. Copsey (2016), “White Youth: The Far Right, Punk and British Youth Culture, 1977–87,” JOMEC Journal, 9, 27–47. Zerox, A. (1979), “Long Time, See Them Come,” Temporary Hoarding, No 9: 4–5.

95

5 Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Popular Music Education: A Matter of Class Alison Butler and Ruth Wright

Introduction Sociologists have drawn attention to the close relationships between education, class and culture (Bernstein 2000; Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Moreover, sociological work has highlighted the strong reproductive effect of education in perpetuating class-based social inequalities, ensuring class-distributed differential educational outcomes that perpetuate social injustice and exclusion (Bourdieu 1984). Culture is closely involved in this process. Gramsci had earlier identified the role of hegemony in societal reproduction, whereby the values and interests of dominant social groups are universalized and thereby reproduce and justify their societal dominance. Gramsci described hegemony as: “[A] condition in process in which a dominant class (in alliance with other classes or class fractions) does not merely rule a society but leads it through the exercise of ‘moral and intellectual leadership’” (qtd in Storey: 2003, n.p., italics in original). Bourdieu detected the involvement of culture in a process he called symbolic violence, performed through education, where students are led to misrecognize class-based differential educational achievement as engendered solely by ability and application, unaware of the hidden advantages conferred by class, culture, and family background (in Bourdieu’s terms habitus) and the role these play in school success: For Bourdieu, most domination in advanced societies is now symbolic rather than achieved by force and, furthermore, the process is not one of simply “duping” people or flooding them with propaganda, or even persuading them. Domination usually involves at least some sense of largely below-conscious complicity on the part of those subjugated. (James 2015: 101)

This, for Bourdieu, therefore, is a form of violence: symbolic violence. Scholarship in the field of the sociology of music education, from the seminal work of Christopher Small in Music, Society, Education (1977) onwards, has demonstrated the close

98

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

involvement of music education in this symbolic violence. This has been exemplified by the disputed status of popular music in music education at all levels: elementary, secondary, and higher education. As we will see throughout this chapter, the implications for students from different class backgrounds of the inclusion or exclusion of popular music in or from music education at all levels has far reaching societal effects. These include, but are not restricted to, who may access higher education and at which institutions, who may enter the music industry, who may become, for example, a professional performer, composer, conductor or producer, and who may become a teacher or professor of music. The ways in which entry to these fields is couched within taken-for-granted musical rules, and expectations skewed in favor of Western Art music abilities and understandings, represents a form of misrecognition within which members of society believe that success in music is due to aptitude and application, when it is in fact subject to classed and cultured factors that are highly unequally distributed throughout society. Put in its simplest form, this means that those with the abilities and understandings suited to and derived from popular music are disadvantaged at all stages of formal music education. More important, perhaps, is the effect this has on individuals across society of perceptions of their own musicality and the right to the label of musician.

Popular Music and Music Education Nordic countries, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, were the first to include popular music as music curriculum content in schools. In the 1930s a Danish educator, Bernhard Christensen, began to work with rhythmic improvisation with students in schools using jazz and other genres beyond the Western Art music tradition. Gradually, as popular music developed as a genre or collection of genres, other Scandinavian countries began to incorporate popular musics into the curriculum until teacher education programs in Sweden, for example, moved to include jazz, folk, rock and pop musics (Olsson 1993) and in Norway, Ruud (1981) produced a text on pop and rock in the classroom. There is also evidence of a long tradition of popular music education in Finland (Westerlund 2006). It is perhaps unsurprising that popular music found its least-contested geographic domain in music education in these countries where there is a less hierarchical social structure and a more egalitarian approach to social life. The impetus for popular music in schools seems to have emanated from a similar ethos and to center around matters of cultural democracy and youth culture representation. The German approach to introducing popular music into schools appears to have begun in the 1950s. From the beginning, we see a different rationale underlying this work to that of Scandinavia. Here popular music education originated from a concern to immunize young people against the perceived socially alienating effects of popular music and the manipulation of susceptible young minds by the media (Johansen 2010; Rolle 2010; Wright 2017). From the 1960s this evolved into a thrust to develop students’ critical listening

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

abilities and to promote reflection on the social circumstances of the music’s production. This involved using the analytical schema of Western Art music to analyze and discuss popular music (Rolle 2010), thus re-inscribing the superiority of the Western Art music canon as capable of explaining all other musics. Since the 1980s, however, the focus in German classrooms has shifted to the making of music, with popular music being a frequent and often preferred genre (Rolle 2010, Wright 2017). Influential British music educator Keith Swanwick’s (1968) book Popular Music and the Teacher introduced the idea of using popular music in English-speaking music education. The work attracted increasing support which was amplified by the publication of Pop, Rock and Ethnic Music in Schools (Vulliamy and Lee 1982). There were differences of opinion concerning the basis for working with popular music in schools resulting in some heated exchanges between academics. These concerned whether music of all genres had universally recognizable qualities, or whether specific musics such as popular music were culturally and therefore socially located, relying on shared cultural context for understanding. Despite these differences, popular music gradually made its way into curricula and became incorporated into the English and Welsh National Curricula for Music and the GCSE and A level public examination syllabi. This was not uncontested however: Power and culture intersected to insert into the National Curriculum for Music a compulsory consideration of Western Art music irrespective of pupils’ or teachers’ musical interest or enculturation, so as to ensure that in England, in particular, but arguably no less so in Wales, pupils “continued to know and appreciate their own cultural heritage and traditions” (O’Hear 1991), a statement of effortless superiority of the cultural traditions and heritage of this particular, right-wing conceptual analyst in assigning those of his social group to all others. (Wright and Davies 2010: 47)

Problems with popular music in schools concerning disputed authenticity and value persisted into the twenty-first century, when Green’s (2001) seminal research in How Popular Musicians Learn and Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (Green 2008) revolutionized thinking about popular music education, beginning in the UK and spreading around the world. Following in-depth examination of the learning practices of popular musicians mainly working in guitar-based rock genres, including observations of these musicians and interviews with them about their paths to musicianship, Green developed five pedagogic principles that could be used to work with popular music in schools in a pedagogy more in sympathy with the authentic learning practices accompanying these musics in society. This was termed by Green informal music learning and was trialed in the Musical Futures project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in the UK. It has since developed into an international movement, with popular music and Green’s informal learning pedagogy now being present in South East Asia, the Antipodes, Canada and India among participating countries. In the United States the path to popular music in education has been more difficult (Mantie 2013). A similar claim may be made of the progress of popular music education in Canada. Although support for popular music in US schools was witnessed from music educators as early as the 1960s, including mention in the Tanglewood Declaration from the

99

100

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

influential Tanglewood Symposium on music education (Choate 1968), the appearance of popular music in classrooms in the United States has been much sparser and more disparate than in some of the other countries that we discuss. Where it has appeared, it has tended to enter curricula in the form of large ensemble arrangements of popular music, by nature lacking idiomatic authenticity and thus changing the nature of the music. Only recently have projects such as Little Kids Rock (https://www.littlekidsrock.org, n.d.), founded by elementary school teacher David Wish in the United States, and Musical Futures in Canada, begun to make inroads in introducing popular music and associated pedagogies into North American schools, and this primarily in urban and high-needs contexts. The so-called triumvirate of wind band, choir, and orchestra, the omniscient conductor/ pedagogue, and the associated Western Art music repertoire still reign supreme in many other music education contexts.

Problems Faced/Posed by Popular Music in Music Education Authenticity One of the persistent debates plaguing work in popular music education has concerned matters of authenticity. Inevitably, when cultural content such as popular music is moved from one societal context to another, questions occur as to whether it remains authentic. The “schooling” of popular music was no exception to this. Many of the pedagogic approaches to the early introduction of popular music into the formal context of schools involved teachers making arrangements of the music for students to perform. Rolle (2010: 210) describes the way in which students in Germany no longer saw this music as authentic but rather as a bastardized form of popular music, termed by Rolle “musikpädagogische Musik” or “music education music,” dominated by former teacher-centered pedagogic practices. Similar debates occurred in Britain where authors suggested that popular music loses its legitimacy with students as representative of their youth subculture by the very fact of its introduction into the classroom (Green 2006; Vulliamy 1977). As Green states: “Indeed, when popular music is introduced into the classroom, it’s very presence often means that it ceases to be considered as ‘pop music’ by the pupils” (2006: 105). Green has suggested that it rather becomes a simulacrum of the real thing. She identifies two ways in which the teaching of popular music has often been problematic: first, that curriculum content is chosen based around the universal, complex, original and autonomous properties privileged in the Western Art music canon, and second that the use of formal pedagogies frequently ignore the practices of relevant popular musicians. In these cases, “a peculiar, classroom version of the music is likely to emerge, stripped of the very methods by which the music has always been created, bearing little resemblance to its existence in the world outside” (Green 2008: 211–12).

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

Pedagogy Green’s work in the Musical Futures project was largely underpinned by a theory that incorporating popular music into schools as curriculum content was not sufficient to remedy the disconnect students experienced between their engagement with music outside school and their lack of engagement in and with it in school. She based this on extensive philosophical/sociological and empirical work. Her philosophical/sociological work concerned a theory of musical meaning that considered music as capable of arousing celebration, ambiguity or alienation in individuals depending on their response to two types of meaning: one inherent or intersonic as she later termed it, carried by the sounds of the music itself, and the other delineated/engendered in the social and cultural associations students connected with the music. She suggested that formal pedagogies applied to popular musics engendered negative musical meanings and killed their legitimacy in the eyes and ear of students, resulting in demotivation, lack of engagement, and low achievement and enjoyment. She demonstrated, however, that when more authentic pedagogy was developed from the practices of popular musicians in community contexts and implemented in work with popular music in schools, the effects were very different, resulting in much greater engagement, enjoyment, achievement, and motivation amongst students. An evaluation study of the Musical Futures project conducted by the Institute of Education, UK (Hallam et al. 2009) provided evidence to support these claims. The rocky road faced by advocates of popular music education in the US has been attributed by Mantie (2013) at least in part also to matters of pedagogy. He suggests that a pedagogic philosophy focusing on process rather than product in the UK, prioritizing student experience, has been at the root of the ease with which popular music has entered UK music education. By comparison, the situation in the US places emphasis on the pedagogic model of the large ensemble, and high-quality products/performances of challenging repertoire. Mantie suggests that this also dictates a certain concentration on “repertoire, quality and preservation” (Mantie 2013: 345), which tends to lead to a conservationist approach to music education and overrides matters of student experience and cultural relevance (Wright 2017).

Balance Another issue for debate, particularly in Scandinavian countries where popular music in education has been the norm for some forty to fifty years, concerns matters of educational balance. Questions arise as to what the balance should be between students’ experiences of music they know and identify with (primarily popular musics) and the duty of educators to introduce them to unknown musics including the Western Art music canon. Similar discussions ensue concerning the importance of student experience of pedagogies, of a variety of ways of learning, both the formal and informal. These points raise questions about equity of ownership and control in the classroom, including whether there should be a balance between student and teacher control of curriculum and pedagogy. The concerns

101

102

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

outlined above are representative of some of the main themes in discussions over popular music in Scandinavian schools. There are other concerns, including the problem of gender role reinforcement, the growing use of technology in popular music, and the need to adapt to the changing production of popular music away from the guitar-based band, which we do not have space to discuss in detail here. One constant remains, however, which is that the culture clash between popular/“lowbrow” culture and elite/“highbrow” culture resonates throughout the classrooms of the world and is the site of contestation for ownership of the music curriculum. Moreover, in many countries any gains in ground made by popular culture in music education have been bitterly contested, are precariously held, and are under persistent attack. One such example in England is the renewed assault on the democratization of the music curriculum in favor of students’ popular music interests posed by the revised English National Curriculum for Music (Department for Education 2013), as this extract from the Key Stage 2 (students aged 6–11) curriculum demonstrates: Pupils should be taught to: ▪ play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression ▪ improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music ▪ listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory ▪ use and understand staff and other musical notations ▪ appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians ▪ develop an understanding of the history of music. This curriculum document demonstrates how Conservative influence has returned to a focus upon the classical canon, insistence that students gain acquaintance with staff notation and “great composers,” and a conceptualization of music as having a single history—the underlying assumption being that this is the history of Western Art music. This makes a curriculum focused upon popular music much more difficult to implement.

Class, Culture, Education, and Popular Music The changing hierarchy of culture is often discussed with reference to the “cultural omnivore” theory initially suggested by Peterson and Simkus (1992). The original study and much of the research that has followed has focused on the cultural activities associated with music. Bourdieu claimed that “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” (1984: 10). Moreover, Hazir and Warde (2016) suggest that people express stronger opinions about music than other domains, including reference to “brow” categories, high, middle, low, and that music’s easily-accessible status (e.g. through technology, and institutions such as school curricula) contributes to its unusual status in debates about culture.

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

British sociologist of education Basil Bernstein (2000) suggested that schools resemble mirrors and amplifiers. He posited that the mirror of the school reflects to students images of those who are valued by its ideology. Some students receive these images as affirming, by recognizing themselves in the valued image, while others see them as discouraging and not bearing resemblance to their own image. There are strong correlations between student social class and the degree to which they recognize themselves in the mirror. To summarize very briefly, extending his early socio-linguistic work to apply more broadly to schooling as a whole, Bernstein suggested that the code within which education operates is an elaborated code based on ways of being most likely acquired in middle- to upperclass families. Therefore, students originating from these social backgrounds are likely to experience little social, linguistic, and cultural disjunction between the worlds of home and school—and are likely to recognize themselves in the school mirror—far more readily than students of lower social class origins. Importantly for the current work, however, is the potential for this class-based inequality to extend to musical worlds as well. Bernstein’s claim that schools similarly possess an acoustic that determines “whose voice is heard, who is speaking and who is hailed by this voice” (2000: xxi) may perhaps be extended to the musical soundscape of the school. As cultural acquisition is also class-related, with children from higher social classes more likely to acquire elite culture at home and be predisposed to acquire further capital in this area in schools, children from more advantaged families tend to recognize themselves in the elite culture-dominated acoustic of the school far more readily than their peers from lower social class backgrounds. One of us has previously suggested (Wright 2010) that music has a key role to play in the acoustic of the school and the self-recognition or otherwise of students. The genres of music and the pedagogies experienced in their music education may play an important role in whether or not less advantaged students recognize themselves in the school acoustic. The hegemonic practices of much music education and the lowbrow status accorded to popular music in many music education institutions are central here, as the genres of music that students experience in their music education may either affirm their identity or confront it. The dominance of the Western Art music canon in many curricula around the world may produce a school acoustic that signals to students of different classes that this place is “for the likes of me” or “not for the likes of me.” In Music, Society, Education Christopher Small (1977) was among the first, if not the first, to challenge the field of music education for its involvement in the reproduction of elite culture and the socially exclusionary and dominating educational and societal effects thereof. In this way, he foreshadowed the claims of Bernstein and Bourdieu, albeit their work was oriented more broadly across the curriculum. He discerned the root of the problems as caused by the dominance of Western Art music within the post-Enlightenment philosophy and the reliance of man upon a scientistic view of enquiry, leading to a belief in Western cultural superiority that justified variously the domination and subjugation of nature, colonization of less powerful states, and the subjugation of the child as learner and musician. He was also one of the first to suggest, however, that there were other forms of music in other societies demonstrating the possibility of different musical aesthetics and forms of musical and pedagogic relationship based on exploration and mutual respect. It was to these that he

103

104

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

looked for hope in a future where humanity might be free of its power sickness and need to dominate. He saw in the popular music of North America, for example, the potential for a more egalitarian form of musicking representing more egalitarian social relationships. Most importantly perhaps, Small suggested that music was “too important for the musicians” (1977: 4) and called for music to be returned to all members of society. He suggested that removing the specialist status of musician might be one of the main features of a more just society. The furore caused in the field of music education by the evolution of popular music and youth culture, and considerations of their incorporation into or replacement of the hereditary hegemonic domination of school music curricula by the Western Art music canon, are indicators both of the value of the stakes of this game and the heat of the battle enjoined for them. They are indeed further proof that the one who controls the curriculum controls society. So far, this chapter has taken a rather uncomplicated view of social class as a category. Let us now trouble these waters a little.

Class as a Changing Sociological Category It is widely recognized that traditional conceptions of social class in many countries are no longer relevant or useful. In the UK, for example, the categorizations of “working,” “middle,” and “upper” class, which originated in the nineteenth century and were further developed in the post-war period, are no longer an accurate classification system for British society. Instead, large-scale data analyzed by Savage et al. (2015) show that classifications in the early twenty-first century include small groups that experience extremes of wealth (the elite) and poverty (the precariat), whilst the majority reside in the “fuzzy and complex”(3–4) middle layers of a class system where different combinations of capital provide resources that do not threaten the elite ranks. Over 161,000 individuals participated in Savage et al’s 2011 research project, the Great British Class Survey, and the significant work done by these scholars in analyzing this data verifies wider global claims by Piketty (2014) that increasing inequality contributes to these new class boundaries and classifications. Of particular interest to us is the researchers’ focus on Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as a form of currency and their identification of “emerging cultural capital,” which differs from the more traditional “high” forms of cultural capital legitimated during the time of Bourdieu’s own research.

The Changing Relationship Between Class and Culture: plus ça change Belief in a hierarchy of cultural activities became widespread in the nineteenth century (Bellavance 2016). Although twentieth-century developments such as middlebrow culture and the massification of culture have challenged the hegemony of culture and binary

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

presentations such as high/low and elite/popular, “we have not arrived at an often feared and proclaimed situation in which anything goes” (Hanquinet and Savage 2016: 1). While less-advantaged groups do have specific cultural interests and engagements, their choices are likely to be informal and therefore less centered on recognized, legitimate institutions (Savage et al. 2015: 106). Accordingly, traditionally “high” forms of culture continue to hold more societal value than popular culture, as demonstrated by public funding for particular art forms and the canonization of certain works in education curricula (Savage et al. 2015: 95–6). These policies are supported by beliefs that popular culture should be commercially sustainable, whereas “‘high’ culture rises above grubby commercial considerations” (Savage et al. 2015: 95–6). These changing class and culture conditions do not therefore appear to have made any great impact in democratizing music curricula in terms of a more even distribution of curricular time and value to musics other than elite art music.

Class, Culture, and Generations Analysis of The Great British Class Survey, documented in Savage et al. (2015), identified significant differences in generational responses, suggesting that hierarchical boundaries may be further disrupted by younger generations whose “emerging” cultural capital includes “ease and grace in moving between genres, playing with classifications and typologies” (51). As the authors observe, highbrow consumption alone is not sufficient to become part of the elite: “‘Eliteness’ is performed not by simply copying ascribed ‘highbrow’ habits and practices, but by demonstrating individual originality and ‘knowingness’. It is hard work being one of the ‘ordinary’ elite” (Savage et al.: 328–9). Although these skills and confidence levels are not institutionalized in the same way as more traditional highbrow cultural capital, they are still often acquired through formal education and in turn increase the individual’s sense of entitlement to participation in, or service from, other institutions. There is no evidence we know of to suggest that this has in any way engendered more equal access to music in education or that it enables a wider social class base of students to enter the field in an equitable manner.

Music Education, Social Class, and Popular Music The cultural omnivore concept established by Peterson and Simkus (1992) provides a useful lens for research about the impact of music teachers, and how their own status as, for example, omnivores or “experts” may influence curriculum planning, repertoire selection, and more implicit messages about musical value. Outlining their theory of musical gentrification, in which lower-status musics are made into objects of acquisition

105

106

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

by those in more powerful positions, Dyndahl et al. (2014) suggest that researching the musical life stories of music educators would provide insight into the operation of omnivorousness and musical gentrification, and how they influence the legitimation of certain musics and practices within education systems. One such legitimation is the common requirement that students use staff notation rather than other notations or approaches to music learning. Whilst staff notation is rarely prioritized in popular musicking, “reading music” is often part of the doxa-invisible, taken-for-granted rules and assumptions-within school music education fields, and is further legitimized through the privileged position of Western Art music and staff notation in government music education policies in many countries. When popular music is gentrified in this way it becomes inauthentic and, furthermore, often inaccessible to those belonging to the social groups from whom it originated. This has socially exclusionary effects in marginalizing certain students within music education. As mentioned earlier, the sociology of music education has been much occupied with consideration of music education’s role in the reproduction of social inequalities. Problems exist on a macro level as well as at the micro level of the school, as we will now discuss with an example from the UK. Music education is often a site where multiple factors combine to limit access and achievement for those facing other social disadvantages. This may mean that, superseding issues of class and genre in music education, children of lower social class may not experience any music education at all. Statistics about music participation consistently show that participation in music is correlated to social advantage at micro and macro levels: the most advantaged children within each school community are more likely to participate in music opportunities, and schools with a higher social demographic are likely to offer more of these opportunities to their pupils (Gill and Williamson 2016; Ofsted 2012). Historical data also show that children who choose to participate in music are unlikely to have special educational needs or a disability (Bray 2000; Ofsted 2012). In recent years, however, additional concerns have been raised about the continued availability of school music education to all children. Since 2010, funding has been reduced or cut from many local authority music services and other community music organisations (Ballantyne, Hanley and Widdison 2015). For families of lower socioeconomic status, school music is increasingly the only opportunity for formal music education, yet there are increasing numbers of schools that, due to funding limitations, are no longer providing a weekly music curriculum to all children aged 5–14 or offering post-14 optional music courses (Daubney and Mackrill 2016). As demonstrated above, there is growing concern that formal music education is becoming the preserve of those who can afford to pay. A further consideration concerns the moral value placed on music education. Bull (2016) describes how Western Art music-dominated education programs inspired by the Venezuelan El Sistema program in the UK appear to receive government funding for their “middle-class civilizing mission” (121), rather than for any intrinsic musical value. These public investments therefore contribute to the broader stigmatization of working-class children and communities, and further entrench the moral high-ground of middle-class values. Indeed, she suggests that classical music is valued intrinsically

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

for middle-class children but is used as a tool for cultural reform with working-class children (Bull 2016: 139), moving them away from the “deficit” culture that they occupy (represented by popular music), and replacing it with middle-class values such as delayed gratification and restraint (131), which is associated with Western Art music. Again, we are reminded of how government subsidy tends to benefit classical musics and musicians in comparison to popular music and musicians. Yet classical music is rarely presented as “middle class.” It is common for both school music education figureheads and high-status classical musicians to speak passionately about the value of classical music, and the importance of working-class children having access to it. These conversations, however, rarely acknowledge the innate middle classness of this music, which can serve to increase feelings of alienation and imposter syndrome to incomers and convey a devaluing of popular music. Working-class children, it seems, are expected to “aspire” to the middle-class morals of classical music. Although we do not have space here to venture extensively into the intersectional ramifications of these issues, it is of note that class is strongly connected to race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality to name but a few tenets of identity, and the classed inequities observed so far in this chapter are the tip of the iceberg of further social implications, as Bull observes of her experiences in a youth orchestra: We all wore modest, elegant clothing except one young woman who stood out for having very high wedge heels and bright peroxide blonde hair. These differences operated as transgressions within this social environment because they are signifiers that are attached to working-class femininity (Tyler 2008; Skeggs 1997). It was only through the difference of her appearance that the similarity of the rest of us became visible. In this way, symbols of taste appear neutral to those who inhabit them as their “norm” but as Skeggs (2003: 101) describes, they operate as “condensed class signifiers.” Within educational institutions, Archer et al. (2007) demonstrate the subtle ways in which pupils are regulated and policed according to the ideal of “respectable” middle-class femininity. (Bull 2016: 136–7)

Bull’s description of clothing in a youth orchestra provides a valuable example of the invisibility of many middle-class expectations. The moral value of music in schools is further complicated by its status not “just” as a curriculum subject. Music is often part of assemblies, special events, and public engagements, and is frequently an optional “extra” part of the school day in the form of individual lessons, ensembles, and clubs. Messages about who participates in these musical occasions, who chooses the music, and who is celebrated through the music, often further perpetuate middle-class moral and cultural values. Savage et al. (2015) give the example of Fraser, a retired primary school headteacher, who “described how he had deliberately ‘inflicted’ his taste on his pupils in an attempt to ‘broaden their horizons’” (100). Fraser, and others with his social capital, had considerable conviction in the legitimacy of their own cultural activities, which were drawn from the art music sphere. They presented sharing their good taste with others as a social concern, with the implicit message that students’ existing cultural interests in the popular sphere were not of sufficient value.

107

108

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Access to Higher Education in Music and the Music Industry The factors above have macro level effects in terms of class distribution within music as a profession across genres. Allen’s (2019) recent UK data collection using the Teacher Tapp app revealed “stark inequalities” in school-music-education provision, with independent schools (fee paying, often populated by upper-middle/upper-class students) and state schools (non-fee paying, predominantly populated by working- and lower-middleclass students) that serve affluent communities offering far more musical opportunities to children than schools in the most disadvantaged communities. This echoes previous comments by music educators about the importance of parental input for in-school music programs to thrive (ABRSM 2014). It is therefore unsurprising that more than 75 percent of workers in the arts industry are thought to come from a middle-class background (EllisPeterson 2015). Furthermore, Cloonan (2007) shows that working-class people have also been discouraged from entering the music industry by government policies, with arts subsidies largely being directed towards Western Art music rather than popular music cultures that originate in working-class communities. Both national education systems and individual schools, therefore, are institutions where middle-class values and their class-related cultural values are frequently prioritized, and where class distinctions are further exacerbated (Archer 2003; Rist 2000; Whitty 2001.) In 1970, Rist observed a strong correlation between the social-class characteristics of Kindergarten children and teacher expectations of their success; expectations that quickly became entrenched academic pathways (Rist 2000). Rist’s work was not unusual: as Whitty (2001) discusses, there is much evidence to suggest that those children who enter school with social advantages tend to accrue proportionally more capital throughout their education than their less-privileged peers, thus widening the gap between different social groups. Not only do these gaps occur within schools, but between them: Savage et al’s (2015) Great British Class Survey data suggest that an elite independent school education is just as likely to influence social reproduction as a university education. Discussions of achievement gaps are often framed as working-class lack (Reay 1999), although Whitty suggests that working-class failure could be seen as “a relational outcome of middle-class power to define what counts as knowledge and achievement” (2001: 287). As we have seen earlier in this chapter, in music curricula this often results in the marginalization or denigration of the value of popular music. Such middle-class power is often disguised in rhetorics of choice that reproduce existing hierarchies; but the choices made by some social groups, such as middle-class withdrawal from state education, have consequences for others (Reay 1999; Whitty 2001). In music education, this is often camouflaged as interest in a particular instrument or genre: Fautley and Daubney (2018) comment that curriculum processes often most benefit children who play a Western classical instrument and are exposed to its associated cultural capital at home. In contrast, a child whose musical experiences and interests lie elsewhere (frequently in the realm of popular music) “is immediately placed at a disadvantage because of their background—an aspect of their

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

life about which they can do nothing” (219). The authors continue to suggest that “Social capital—or lack therefore—is a hidden disability” in music education, and one that is rarely acknowledged (220; see also Green 2012). Inequities continue beyond schooling into Higher Education (HE). Although far more young people now attend university, the proportions of graduates from social classes remain similar to those of the 1950s and some researchers suggest that the gap in educational achievement between different classes is actually increasing (Leathwood and Hutchings 2003; Savage et al. 2015). In music, as in other subjects, the type of institution attended and the subject studied have considerable impact on an individual’s future employability. Here again, we can see class-based discrimination and exclusion at work within the field of music, and the marginalization of students from a popular music background. Born and Devine (2015) used a large data sample provided by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) to analyze student entry into UK traditional music and music technology degrees. They found that whereas traditional, Western Art music-dominated, music degree cohorts were fairly gender-balanced but included a higher-than-average number of students from selective (higher social class) schools and lower-than-average number of black and minority ethnic (BAME) students, the majority of music technology degree students were white working-class boys. Popular musicbased music technology degrees have made a significant contribution to the changing representation of popular music in higher education: the number of students taking music technology degrees in the UK rose by nearly 1,400 percent in the period 1994–2011. Whilst the number of degree courses and HE students also rose significantly during that time period, Born and Devine suggest that music technology degrees are “perhaps the key institutional response [to changing the social demographic] in music in HE” (Born and Devine 2015: 142). The authors caution, however, that music technology degrees do not appear to have the same cultural legitimacy as traditional music degrees and note that most of these degrees are offered by post-1992 institutions (former polytechnics), which correlates with the concerns raised by Archer, Hutchings and Ross (2003) that some groups of institutions, generally seen as being of “lower status,” are undertaking the majority of the work in increasing diversity within the HE system. Born and Devine’s study raises further questions about the value of degrees in general and the value of certain subjects and disciplines. The data suggest that both race and class restrict access to higher education in music, and that where students with non-Western Art music backgrounds are allowed access, it is to degrees in music technology, which are of lower societal value and status. These degrees are also disproportionately populated by white, working-class males. This leaves large questions about access for female students and black and minority ethnic students from non-Art music backgrounds to higher music education. A further implication is that such music technology qualifications are not universally acceptable to teacher education programs, therefore restricting the number of such students able to enter the teaching profession. While we have seen above that many music programs for compulsory schooling began, however grudgingly, to admit popular musics to their curricula in the latter years, such advances have only very partially extended to the field of higher education in

109

110

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

music. Here hegemony has been hard at work, ensuring that the common-sense, takenfor-granted assumptions underlying the necessary qualifications and skills required to study music at elite post-secondary-level institutions remain enshrined in the musical code of Western Art music. This further ensures that valued cultural capital in this field remains securely attached to elite Western Art music, its languages and literatures, and those programs and experts specializing in studying and performing them. The reverse side of this situation is that hegemony works hard to position those laboring in the teaching of popular music, and students wishing to study it, in a less advantageous field position in many elite universities and conservatoires. Their capital is only valuable, by and large, in less prestigious institutions of higher music education. This is particularly true in North America, and particularly those institutions specializing in music teacher education. As invisible measures such as these ensure that the distribution of cultural capital remains the same among institutions of higher education in music, this has a further reproductive effect in ensuring that future music teachers are shaped and formed by agents of the hegemonic force in disproportionate numbers to those coming from more liberal higher education backgrounds. As a result, the social class and cultural affiliations of student music teachers alters very little from generation to generation, ensuring smooth reproduction of unexamined hegemonic musical values.

Popular Music, Social Class, and Music Education: The Future Little is likely to change in the relationships between popular music, class, and music education until what Bourdieu termed the doxa of the field are made visible and reexamined. These implicit, taken-for-granted rules permeate music education at all levels. They work, as discussed above, to enforce hegemonies that reify musics, placing Western Art music and its associated cultural capital in the position of privilege. The reification of musics has broader societal classed implications and consequences dictating the social distribution of musics and musicians. In a keynote address at the Research in Music Education Conference 2017, later published in the journal Music Education Research, Wright (2018) used as an illustration the unfortunate events surrounding the resignation of Michael Butera as President of the National Association for Music Education in the United States. It seems appropriate to retell this story here. Mr. Butera’s unknowing internalization of the existing doxa of the field of music education led him to make a statement, in a small group breakout meeting during a session convened to discuss the lack of diversity in the music industry, which landed him in extremely hot water. The outcry led to his resignation, which made copy in the New York Times. The headline read “Music Education Group’s Leader Departs After Remarks on Diversity.” The first paragraph states: “The head of the National Association for Music Education, an advocacy group, left his post on Wednesday after participants at a recent meeting on diversity said that he had told them that his organization was not diverse partly because “blacks and Latinos lack

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

the keyboard skills needed for this field” (n.p.). A charitable reading of this statement might suggest that Mr. Butera was so deeply immersed in his field, that of compulsory music education, that he was unaware of the water in which he swam, to use Einstein’s metaphor. His statement is useful however in that it makes visible a number of the doxa of the field. First, that keyboard skills are a necessary prerequisite for any study in music: this assumes that the only conceivable form of musical study is that offered by university and conservatoire music departments specializing in Western Art music (one might nowadays include jazz programs within this category as well), where it is almost impossible to meet program requirements, especially in theory and harmony, unless one has a reasonable standard of keyboard facility upon entry. Second, that the only conceivable genres of music to be studied are those of the Western Art music canon: if the field as conceptualized by Mr. Butera was one of musics, plural, rather than music, singular, keyboard skills would not be a barrier to entry as it is possible to achieve extremely high standards of musicianship in guitar-based or technology mediated forms of popular music, among others, without ever touching a piano keyboard. Third, that students of color should aspire to acquisition of the necessary Art music skill of keyboard facility in order to redress their shortcomings in fulfilling the requirements of music education: this assumption suggests that any problems of diversity in the music industry are due to a deficit in non-Caucasian students, and not in the requirements of the field and the lack of musical diversity and value for differences in genre, class, and ethnicity, to name but a few, that they reflect. Until these assumptions change throughout the field of music education, the reproduction of musicians and music educators steeped in outdated, hegemonic musical assumptions will persist. What might a future music education field look like in which these assumptions had been replaced by those more welcoming and favorable to the success of popular musicians? We can begin to answer this question by addressing the doxa revealed by Mr. Butera. First, music education would be reshaped, at all levels, to fit its students, rather than all students being compelled to fit one particular conceptualization of music education. A first step in such a process would be that the reification of musics and musicians would have to be disassembled from the top down and the bottom up. Thus, from the top down this would mean that university degrees in music and music education would reflect an understanding and valuing of the intrinsic qualities of many musics, and comprehension of the fact that there are distinct musical languages, skills, understandings, histories, and literatures relevant to each. This would also require the final demolition of the post-Enlightenment myth of the superiority of Western Art music and supporting arguments concerning originality, authenticity, and complexity, with recognition that no music is superior. Therefore, university music programs would be broader in scope and content, and more accessible to students from a popular music background among others. Similarly, institutional entrance requirements would be reformulated to reflect such differences and to permit students to enter with various musical skills, including those of popular music performance and production, not just the ubiquitous orchestral/wind band/classical voice audition and Western Art music theory test currently in place in so many contexts. The reliance on keyboard skills would be replaced by consideration of where and whether these were absolutely necessary

111

112

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

and, in these cases, how students might achieve these goals using technology-mediated equivalents or be given the opportunity to acquire these skills during the program. A bottom-up restructuring would present students, from their very earliest engagements with compulsory music education, with a wide variety of musics, including popular music and associated instruments and technologies, in whose materials they would be enabled to immerse themselves, explore and experiment. Each would be valued and talked about on its own terms and merits and with its own vocabularies. The idea of a singular musical canon, vocabulary and history and any notion of musical hierarchy would be rejected in favor of the embracing of musical multiplicity and diversity. In particular, the musics in which students are immersed outside of school would be welcomed in classrooms and explored with appropriate pedagogies. In most cases, this would involve a decentering of power in the classroom, with power-sharing and assumptions of knowledge-holding more equitably and respectfully shared between student and teacher. One of the outcomes of such a view of music education might be that no two music programs look the same. This might not be such a bad thing! Standardization of curricula, learning outcomes and widely assessable indicators of achievement benefit government reporting, not the needs and futures of students. They also provide space in which hegemony may operate. Proliferation and lack of uniformity make the action of hegemony much more difficult, as Day (2004, 2005) has suggested with respect to non-hegemonic approaches to social activism. Day suggests that the only way to counter hegemony is not to deliberately try to confront it but to operate in parallel and alternative to it, and to have multiple affinity projects of this type. Such an approach to music education might perhaps result in the returning of trust and individually directed and appropriate professional growth to music teachers and, through this, the returning of music and musicianship to society.

Works Cited ABRSM (2014), “Making Music. Teaching, Learning and Playing in the UK,” ABRSM, September. Available online: https://gb.abrsm.org/en/making-music/ (accessed April 15, 2019). Allen, B. (2019), “Who Gets a Music Education?” Teacher Tapp. March 8. Available online: http://teachertapp.co.uk/2019/03/who-gets-a-music-education/ (accessed March 8, 2019). Archer, L. (2003), “Social Class and Higher Education,” in L. Archer, M. Hutchings and A. Ross (eds), Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion, 5–20, London: Routledge. Archer, L., S. Hollingworth and A. Halsall (2007), “University’s Not for Me—I’m a Nike Person”: Urban, Working-Class Young People’s Negotiations of ‘Style’, Identity and Educational Engagement,” Sociology 41 (2): 219–37. Archer, L., M. Hutchings and A. Ross (eds) (2003), Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion, 5–20, London: Routledge. Ballantyne, R., D. Hanley and F. Widdison (2015), “The National Plan for Music Education: The Impact on the Workforce,” Musicians Union, March. Available online: https://www.

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

musiciansunion.org.uk/Home/Advice/Education/Hubs-Co-ops/Music-Education-Hubs(England) (accessed April 28, 2019). Bellavance, G. (2016), “The Multiplicity of Highbrow Culture: Taste Boundaries Among the New Upper Middle Class,” in L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds), Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, 324–36, New York: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Born, G. and K. Devine (2015), “Music Technology, Gender and Class: Digitization, Educational and Social Change in Britain,” Twentieth-Century Music, 12: 2, 125–72. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. and J. C. Passeron (1990), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage. Bray, D. (2000), “An Examination of GCSE Music Uptake Rates,” British Journal of Music Education, 17: 1, 79–89. Bull, A. (2016), “El Sistema as a Bourgeois Social Project: Class, Gender, and Victorian Values,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 15: 11, 120–52. Choate, R. (1968), “Music in American Society: Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium,” Washington, DC: Music Educators National Conference. Cloonan, M. (2007), Popular Music and the State in the UK, Aldershot: Ashgate. Daubney, A. and D. Mackrill (2016), “Changes in Secondary Music Curriculum Provision over time 2012-16,” ISM, November. Available online: https://www.ism.org/professionaldevelopment/webinars/changes-in-secondary-music-provision (accessed November 11, 2016). Day, R. (2004), “From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements,” Cultural Studies,18: 5, 716–48. Day, R. J. (2005), Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Toronto: Between the Lines. Department for Education (2013), “Music Programmes of Study: KeyStages 1 and 2 National Curriculum in England,” DfE, September 11. Available online: https://assets.publishing. service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/239037/ PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_Music.pdf (accessed April 25, 2019). Dyndahl, P., S. Karlsen, O. Skårberg, and S. Graabraek Nielsen (2014), “Cultural Omnivorousness and Musical Gentrification: An Outline of a Sociological Framework and its Applications for Music Education Research,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 13: 1, 40–69. Ellis-Peterson, H. (2015), “Middle Class People Dominate Arts, Survey Finds”, The Guardian, November 23. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com (accessed November 23, 2018). Fautley, M. and A. Daubney (2018), “Editorial: Inclusion, Music Education, and What it Might Mean,” British Journal of Music Education, 35: 3, 219–21. Gill, T. and J. Williamson (2016), “Uptake of GCSE Subject 2015: Statistics Report Series No. 107,” Cambridge Assessment, April. Available online: https://www.cambridgeassessment. org.uk/our-research/our-research-team/tim-gill/ (accessed April 26, 2019) Green, L. (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn, Farnham: Ashgate. Green, L. (2006), “Popular Music Education in and for Itself, and for “Other” Musics,” International Journal of Music Education, 24: 2, 101–18.

113

114

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Green, L. (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Farnham: Ashgate. Green, L. (2012), “Music Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Group Identity,” in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 206–16, New York: Routledge. Hallam, S., A. Creech, C. Sandford, T. Rinta, K. Shave and H. McQueen (2009), Survey of Musical Futures: A Report from Institute of Education University of London for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London: Institute of Education, University College London. Hanquinet, L. and M. Savage, eds, (2016), Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, New York: Routledge. Hazir, I. K. and A. Warde (2016), “The Cultural Omnivore Thesis: Methodological Aspects of the Debate,” in L. Hanquinet and M. Savage (eds), Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, 77–89, New York: Routledge. James, D. (2015), “How Bourdieu Bites Back: Recognising Misrecognition in Education and Educational Research,” Cambridge Journal of Education, 45: 1, 97–112. Johansen, G. (2010), “Musikdidaktik and Sociology,” in R. Wright (ed.), Sociology and Music Education. Farnham: Ashgate, 207–22. Leathwood, C. and Hutchings, M. (2003), “Entry Routes to Higher Education: Pathways, Qualifications and Social Class,” in L. Archer, M. Hutchings and A. Ross (eds), Higher Education and Social Class: Issues of Exclusion and Inclusion, 175–92, London: Routledge. Little Kids Rock, Little Kids Rock. Available online: www.littlekidsrock.org, (accessed April 13, 2019). Mantie, R. (2013), “A Comparison of Popular Music Pedagogy Discourses,” Journal of Research in Music Education. 61: 3, 334–52. Ofsted (2012), @Music in Schools: Wider Still, and Wider: Quality and Inequality in Music Education 2008–11,” Ofsted, March. Available online: https://assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/413347/Music_in_schools_ wider_still__and_wider.pdf (accessed April 28, 2019). O’Hear, A. (1991), “Out of sync with Bach,” The Times Educational Supplement (February 22). Olsson, B. (1993), SÄMUS – en musikutbildning i kulturpolitikens tjänst? En studie om musikutbildning på 70-talet [“SÄMUS – music education in the service of cultural policy? A study of a teacher-training program during the 1970s”], Gothenburg: Gothenburg University Press. Peterson, R. A. and A. Simkus (1992), “How Musical Taste Groups Mark Occupational Status Groups,” in M. Lamont and M. Fournier (eds), Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, 152–68, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Piketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Boston: Harvard University Press. Reay, D. (1999), “‘Class Acts’: Educational Involvement and Psychosocial Class Processes,” Feminism and Psychology, 9: 1, 89–106. Rist, R. C. (2000), “HER Classic: Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations: The SelfFulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education,” Harvard Educational Review, 70: 3, 257–301. Rolle, C. (2010), “Über Didaktik Populärer Musik. Gedanken zur Un-Unterrichtbarkeit aus der Perspektive ästhetischer Bildung,” in J. Terhag and J. Terhag (eds), Musikunterricht heute Bd.8. Zwischen Rock-Klassikern und Eintagsfliegen. 50 Jahre Populäre Mus ed. Oldershausen: Lugert Verlag.

Hegemony, Symbolic Violence, and Education

Ruud, E. (1981), “Rock og Pop i Klasserommet [Rock and Pop in the Classroom],” Oslo: Norsk Musikforlag. Savage, M., N. Cunningham, F. Devine, S. Friedman, D. Laurison, L. McKenzie, A. Miles, H. Snee and P. Wakeling, (2015), Social Class in the 21st Century: A Pelican Introduction, London: Pelican. Skeggs, B. (1997), Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London: SAGE. Skeggs, B. (2003), Class, Self, Culture, 1st edn, London: Routledge. Small, C. (1977), Music, Society, Education, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Storey, J. (2003), Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization, Oxford: Blackwell. Swanwick, K. (1968), Popular Music and the Teacher, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyler, I. (2008), “Chav Mum Chav Scum”, Feminist Media Studies 8 (1): 17–34. Vulliamy, G. (1977), “Music as a Case Study in the ‘New Sociology of Education’,” In J. Shepherd, P. Virden, G. Vulliamy and T. Wishart (eds), Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages, London: Latimer, 201–32. Vulliamy, G. and E. Lee, (1982), Rock, Pop and Ethnic Music in School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westerlund, H. (2006), “Garage Rock Bands: A Future Model for Developing Musical Expertise,” International Journal of Music Education, 24: 2, 119–25. Whitty, G. (2001), “Education, Social Class and Social Exclusion,” Journal of Educational Policy, 16: 4, 287–95. Wright, R. (ed.) (2010), Sociology and Music Education, Farnham: Ashgate. Wright, R. (2017), “The Longer Revolution: The Rise of Vernacular Musics as ‘New Channels of General Learning’,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1: 1, 9–24. Wright, R. (2018), “Envisioning Real Utopias in Music Education: Prospects, Possibilities and Impediments,” Music Education Research 20: 3, 1–11. Wright, R. and B. Davies (2010), “Class, Power, Culture and the Music Curriculum,” in R. Wright (ed.), Sociology and Music Education, 35–50, Farnham: Ashgate.

115

6 “Every Noise at Once”: Online Music Discovery Maps and Cosmopolitan Subjectivities Matthew Ord

Introduction The rise of digital streaming comes with the promise of new musical territories waiting to be explored. Paid streaming now accounts for 62 percent of total music spend globally (ERA 2019: 29), and as of April 2019, the Swedish firm Spotify has 108 million subscribers in 79 countries who are able to choose from over 50 million individual tracks (Spotify 2019). Streaming not only expands the range of music on offer but shapes the how and even the where of music consumption, promoting eclecticism and encouraging users to imagine themselves as part of a global musical community. In 2009 Spotify began its march towards market dominance by offering its users “all the world’s music in one place,” inviting them to explore “the world” as a space of unconstrained musical discovery (Morris and Powers 2015). Access to musical content does not necessarily entail the desire to “explore,” however: “The ability and disposition to ‘discover’ new music” bespeaks “cultural capital, opinion leadership and social distinction” and is an acknowledged characteristic of elite consumption (Tepper and Hargittai 2009: 230). Cultivation of a diverse taste in music has historically been constrained by access to economic and social capital, and “opinion leaders have tended to come from the ranks of the elite” (Tepper and Hargittai 2009: 230). Additionally, the sheer quantity of content available threatens to inundate listeners, and services have expended much creative energy in easing processes of search and discovery in an attempt to transform the complex and unfamiliar terrain of online music into a more navigable space. Curated playlists actively encourage more eclectic listening; playlists based on mood, data or time of day merge practices of discovery with the rhythms of everyday life; and algorithmic recommendations allow users to effectively “outsource” their listening choices altogether (Hu 2019). Through these and other strategies, streaming services continually seek to refine their product, finding new ways to convince users of the value of their vast catalogues.

118

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Rather than transparent channels of musical content, streaming platforms are complex digital environments that mediate the experiences of listeners, actively promoting certain forms of engagement and discouraging others. This essay explores a series of online spaces that actively facilitate music discovery, and promote a worldly, cosmopolitan subject position characterized by musical eclecticism and openness. While symbolically transcending traditional commitments to class, place, and genre, music discovery sites construct elite consumption in terms of the ability to access and navigate the vast proliferation of global genres in real time and present musical discovery as a powerful metaphor for a global community of cosmopolitan values. An analysis of four case studies, Music Map, Radio Garden, Radiooooo, and Every Noise at Once, explores how they promote particular listening styles and cultural attitudes, the resources they provide for self-making through musical consumption, and the opportunities they afford for exploring questions of genre, class, and identity in contemporary digital contexts of reception.

Music, Self-Hood, and Class Music has long been acknowledged as a resource for self-making and the articulation of class distinction; “nothing,” as Pierre Bourdieu famously stated, “more clearly affirms one’s class, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” (qtd in Shuker 2005: 44). Writing at the turn of the millennium, Keith Negus described the “genre worlds” of popular music as inseparable from “social categories”; “Moving within or across musical genres,” he insisted, is more than a musical act: it is a social act. More than a struggle for new musical relationships and sounds, it can also involve a desire for new social relationships and harmonies. Crossing genre worlds and bringing new genre cultures into being is not only an act of musical creation, it is also an act of social creation, of making connections, of creating solidarities. (Negus 1999: 183)

In this passage, Negus suggests that the freedom of individuals to move between musical worlds depends on the social networks and “solidarities” they have forged; in other words, it is contingent upon the social and cultural capital resources they are able to mobilize from their location in social space. Musical connections not only reflect but make social connections. In the techno-utopian mythology of the “digital sublime,” however, listening choice is often located within a classless space where temporal, spatial and social distance has been finally overcome by the irresistible advance of technology (Burkart 2014). As they make their way through a continuous musical field, digital consumers are expected to disregard borders as a matter of course. Like elite travellers, they are whisked through customs, experiencing the transcendence of genre-worlds as a banal, everyday state. Spotify’s promotional material constructs the listening culture of its millennial customers as a technological transcendence of “the music tribes of generations past (mods, rockers, punks, grunge)”:

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

Because they use streaming to access music from all over the world and across the ages, millennials are eclectic and wide-ranging in what they consume. 85% say their music taste doesn’t fall into one specific genre or category. (Spotify 2019)

According to this reasoning, all that separates the genre “tribes” of the past from today’s eclectic “millennials” is the degree of access afforded them by technology; the will to explore is assumed to follow logically from the ability to do so. Research on the sociology of cultural consumption, however, suggests that the kind of exploratory subjectivity Spotify are at pains to promote has its roots in notions of the middle-class self as “a ‘project’ to be worked upon, accruing its value over space and time” (Skeggs 2004: 78). As becoming “a subject of value” rests on the ability to “consume, display and propertize culture,” middle-class cultural practices are shaped by a strong imperative to acquire and display a range of cultural competences as a basic condition of personhood (Skeggs 2015: 209). Erikson et al. argue that Spotify’s strategy for packaging music interpellates users as part of “the new global digital youth class that emerged in early 2010s” (Manovich qtd in Erikson et al. 2019: 125). Through dayparted playlists (“Monday Motivation”; “Your Office Stereo”; “Your Coffee Break”), which emphasize hard work and productive leisure, the ideal user is constructed as “a happy, entrepreneurial subject—young, urban, middle class” (Erikson et al. 2019: 136). Streaming platforms like Spotify are thus far from neutral spaces for the free exploration of musical identities; they address a subject for whom musical discovery forms part of an ongoing lifestyle project in which work and leisure are intimately connected through continuous musical consumption. Streaming’s promise of limitless resources for self-expression, therefore, arguably presupposes a characteristically middle-class disposition towards the accrual of cultural exchange-value as part of an ongoing project of self-making, or what might be called a millennial “habitus.” Bourdieu’s concept posits an internalized, socially inculcated disposition, which is at once “the product [of] mechanisms unknown to the individual [and] the future-projected, strategizing, accruing, exchange-value self ” (Skeggs 2004: 83). The habitus subjects the individual to “an ‘immanent law’ laid down […] by the internalisation of objective structures” which include family, education, access to economic resources, and social connections (Skeggs 2004: 84). “Without understanding these histories and dependencies,” Skeggs (2015: 209) argues, “we lose sight of the context for any social practice and the significance of social location” (2015: 209). Arguments against the continued relevance of class distinction in contemporary cultural practice, which are based on “assumptions [of] equal access to the cultural resources for self-making” (such as those offered by streaming services), imagine a world in which “the self can be entirely divorced from the conditions which make it possible” (Skeggs 2015: 75). Perhaps most importantly, however, in constructing the disposition to eclecticism as a simple matter of free choice, other modes of cultural engagement are recast as individual moral lack, “a failure of the self to know its self, rather than […] a lack of access to the techniques and knowledge required to enable the display of the reflexive self ” (Skeggs 2015: 81). Techno-utopian claims that digital streaming acts to “flatten hierarchies and cultural

119

120

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

advantage,” should thus be tempered by an awareness of the role of inherited systems of value, and persisting inequalities of access, in the aesthetic choices of digital consumers (Tepper and Hargittai 2009: 230).

Music Discovery and Cosmopolitan Forms of Distinction Online spaces of musical discovery, by inviting listeners to imagine themselves within a global space of consumption, encourage the adoption of a specifically cosmopolitan subject position. While sociological analyses of music consumption and class distinction have primarily focused on the national level, a growing strand of research has highlighted the importance of transnational space for the articulation of contemporary middle-class identities (Urry 2000; Calhoun 2008; Schiller et al. 2011; Cheyne and Binder 2010; Igarashi and Saito 2014). The notion that the consumption patterns of different classes within a society might reflect an underlying spatial logic grounded in social experience was posited by Murdock and Phelps in their classic study of the musical tastes of adolescents in London’s East End. They observed that, whereas their working-class informants were “very much locals” rooted in the culture of the neighborhood, middle-class grammar school pupils were better understood as “cosmopolitans,” looking towards a nationally disseminated “pop media culture” (Murdock and Phelps 1972: 481). Much subsequent research, however, suggests that contemporary middle-class identities are imagined within a transnational, as opposed to a national, cultural domain (Calhoun 2008; Cheyne and Binder 2010). Cosmopolitanism is generally presented by its proponents as “a genuinely attractive ethical orientation towards a common human community of fate” (Calhoun 2008: 106). Part of the concept’s appeal is the ostensibly progressive notion of an inclusive identity that transcends nation and class; “the idea (or indeed, dream) that lifestyles may defy the gravity of the social field” (Roose et al. 2012: 493). In the figure of the cosmopolitan consumer there are echoes of Peterson’s (1992) “cultural omnivore,” whose eclectic appreciation of highbrow and lowbrow forms seemed to indicate a transcendence of inherited values and prejudices. Bryson (1996) and others suggest, however, that rather than a rejection of traditional elitist values, omnivorous consumption itself functions as a strategy of class distinction that substitutes an opposition between middle-class omnivore and working-class univore for earlier models that set highbrow elites against lowbrow, mass consumers (Skeggs 2004; Jarness and Friedman 2017). For several writers, the key to both omnivore and cosmopolitan forms of distinction is the ability to differentiate within rather than between genres (Cheyne and Binder 2010). In the post-war folk revivals in the US and UK, for example, the appropriation by white, middleclass audiences of genres associated with minority ethnic and low economic status groups was justified by authenticity claims articulated in anti-commercialist terms (Frith 1981). Middle-class fans of the “delta blues,” for instance, were thus able to signal their rejection of mainstream values (and their superiority over mainstream consumers) by choosing

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

it over contemporary African American styles thought to be tainted by commercialism (Wald 2004). Importantly, black audiences (who had often moved on to newer sounds) were unable to appropriate these musics in the same way; there was no principled rejection of the mainstream involved in listening to the blues for black audiences—the blues was already their music, the product of the commercial “race” market. Similarly, Skeggs (2004) points out that, while a taste for country music amongst blue-collar, southern (“redneck”) audiences is not usually seen as a marker of high cultural status, the same music when appropriated by elite consumers, often within the terms of anti-commercialist discourses of authenticity, is capable of embodying cultural capital and signaling distinction (Skeggs 2004: 78). Rather than indicating a decoupling of musical taste and class, then, the adoption of low status musics by higher status audiences is able to support discourses of elite taste, connected with processes of distinction observable at the national level. Cheyne and Binder (2010: 359) identify a similar dynamic at work in contemporary cosmopolitan discourse, suggesting that “As it exists among contemporary American elites,” cosmopolitanism “is neither innocent nor idealistic.” Their research on US rap criticism shows how preferences for foreign rap expressed by upper-middle-class fans are used to assert their aesthetic superiority over low-status US consumers of more commercialized, domestic manifestations of the genre. As with omnivorism, cosmopolitan discourse neutralizes class as a factor, instead framing variations in consumption practices as freely adopted individual dispositions. Side-stepping the classed associations of highbrow/ lowbrow distinctions, cosmopolitans “draw a boundary between themselves and others in terms of mobile, open-minded, creative and reflexive versus stuck, narrow-minded, traditional and non-reflexive” (Roose et al. 2012: 494). The strategic focus on aesthetic “attitudes” masks underlying economic and social inequalities. In an interesting parallel, James (2017) shows how the aesthetic discourse of US hipsterism articulates a rejection of place, class, ethnicity and genre as the triumph of “diversity” over a parochial snobbishness (James 2017: 25). But she also notes that this “transcendence,” which masks a bedrock of class and ethnic privilege, obscures new forms of distinction, setting white, middle-class hipsters above those to whom such a rejection of the rules is unavailable. Similarly, the cosmopolitan invitation to embrace openness does not address all equally; it “hails” some and invites them to take up a position already prepared for them.

Listening Formats and Listener Identities Listening formats not only offer resources for the exploration and expression of consumer identities but actively promote particular modes of listener engagement. The practices of ownership and curation presented by physical formats made collecting a key subcultural practice within the genre cultures of Rock, Jazz, Northern Soul and hip-hop allowing individuals’ mastery of search and discovery practices to be celebrated and quantified (Tepper and Hargittai 2009). Writing in the heyday of vinyl, Willis (1990) went deeper into this relationship between listeners and listening formats, tracing homologous

121

122

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

relationships between physical formats and the class-specific cultures of biker and hippy subcultures. Where the vinyl LPs collected by middle-class fans of progressive rock supported notions of a “serious” listener, “stationary and mono-channeled toward the music,” the 45-rpm single, favored format of the predominantly working-class bikers was perceived as “responsive to the active, moving listener” (Willis 1990: 48–9). The latter group’s preference for singles, a response to the unique affordances presented to them was, for Willis, “an honest, logical projection of a coherent set of attitudes on to an appropriate object” (Willis 1990: 49). Digital technologies similarly provide specific affordances for self-making through cultural consumption, often building on earlier practices of ownership and curation. With digital “libraries” and personalized playlists, software interfaces sought to provide “symbolic substitutes for physical collections,” combining “a kind of materiality” with the potential for a variety of curational practices (Hagen 2015: 627–8). In this way, the iPod and iTunes library sustained received notions of ownership, personal choice and the personal curation of music as techniques of cultural capital into the mp3 era (Prior 2015). Although often understood as the final stage in music’s dematerialization, the shift from ownership to access has created new spaces of engagement with music and new resources for the performance of listener identities. Digital interfaces are multimodal “zones of affordances” that constitute “particular realities and ways of being” (Erikson et al. 2019) and as such, are as much about the user’s sense of self as they are about access to specific content. While “digital music environments respond to the listener’s interest in self-reflection by supplying seemingly infinite resources toward that end” they also “invite a certain kind of musical consumer […] who will […] find reciprocity within a service’s musical ethos” (Hagen 2015: 643; Morris and Powers 2015: 110).

Music Maps and Cosmopolitan Subjects While Spotify is designed to facilitate both “lean in” and “lean back” approaches, there are a growing number of sites that facilitate more active practices of search and discovery. The remainder of this essay considers four such sites: Music Map, Radio Garden, Radiooooo, and Every Noise at Once. The sites all promote music discovery as part of an ethos of cosmopolitan “openness.” As Urry (2000: 26) notes, “the globe itself is a metaphor,” and the first three examples discussed here integrate world maps into their user interface order to construct a globalist perspective in which the listener is free to “travel” through a global soundscape, symbolically transcending their own physical location. While celebrating the local and diverse, the aesthetic disposition that the maps encourage and celebrate is “worldly,” connecting with universalist values of mobility and cultural hybridity. As Calhoun (2008) argues, however, cosmopolitan discourses of openness can act to obscure the networks of privilege and inequalities of access that support them. In facilitating the discovery and sharing of new and obscure music from around the world, music discovery sites afford the cultivation and display of elite taste and attitudes, and as such, are embedded

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

in established strategies of distinction (Cheyne and Binder 2010). Above all, in giving beautiful and pleasurable expression to cosmopolitan forms of subjectivity, these sites defer questions of access to cultural capital and resources by invoking the “digital sublime,” the fantasy of “instantaneous and complete gratification through immersion in millions of intangible digital commodities” (Burkart 2014: 405).

Music Map: “Where the Global Music Community Comes Together” Music Map is a product of the Record Play music consultancy, a company specializing in audio sync and music supervision for a list of corporate clients that includes British Airways, Revlon, and Reebok. Described as a hub “where the global music community comes together,” the site incorporates artist profiles and interviews, playlists, and a world map searchable by continent and country. The map uses a fixed, 2D projection centered on the Greenwich Meridian, which vaguely recalls the world map of European school textbooks. Unlike traditional maps, however, it has no text or physical detail, its minimalist design, in which continents “light up” when scrolled over with the cursor, suggesting modernity rather than nostalgia. The site’s creators present themselves as expert sources of music recommendations, “an international network of music scouts who curate cutting-edge sounds from every corner of the planet [whose] aim is to give you a global view of local music scenes” (Music Map 2019a). As a component of Record Play, whose other products include an e-guide to sync for musicians, and Music Hub, a site where corporate clients can find pre-cleared music for commercial use, Music Map responds to commercial demand for brand-appropriate or location-tailored musical identities for companies, stores, films, and adverts. Insofar as the site is aimed at individual consumers, the emphasis is on those with an interest in mastering and displaying musical diversity. The ideal user might be imagined as a mobile entrepreneur, active across multiple territories and professionally sensitive to local cultural differences. The site celebrates localness while promoting an aesthetic disposition that transcends local and national space. At the same time, the countries featured on the map are political or commercial territories, rather than cultural regions. As a result, there is no Basque, Sami or even Scottish music available here, and while these sub-national identities may emerge as voices within the contemporary music of a national territory, it is more likely that they will manifest themselves as markers of an individual musician’s own diversity of influence rather than as distinct cultural identities in their own right. The site’s textual content foregrounds the mobility and globality of the musicians featured. A piece on a new Spanish label Whoa! Music celebrates the label’s aim “to transcend once again the national creative ecosystem […] setting its sights far beyond those borders” (Music Map 2019b). The artist and label features privilege fusion, international collaboration, and genre-bending. Featured artists are presented as mobile individuals,

123

124

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

favoring cross-cultural collaboration as a creative strategy, and knowledgeable about scenes in other places around the world. In an interview with LA-based producer Anenon about a recent recording project in Tuscany, when asked, “Where in the world would you most like to perform?” he responds, “Tasmania/anywhere where people with open minds, ears, and hearts want to hear me” (Music Map 2018). The site’s Instagram emphasizes the same mobile, hybrid aesthetic, featuring collaborative projects between Israeli and Japanese artists, alongside profiles of artists from Uruguay, Austria, and Yemen, and invoking music’s power to symbolically transcend political boundaries. The music of Yemeni artist Shiran, for instance, combines “Iraqi harmony, Afro-beat grooves, and a dash of Western R&B,” allowing her to “transcend the complex politics of the region, binding different cultures together in a progressive, powerful and thoroughly modern depiction of Arab-Israeli traditions co-existing in harmony” (MusicMapGlobal 2019). As well as authenticating the musicians as global in their creative outlook, the site asserts the user’s privileged position as a mobile aesthete; the creator’s emphasis on “transnational preference underscores their, and their readers’, access to cultural and economic capital relative to non-elites” (Cheyne and Binder 2010: 354).

Radio Garden: “Radio Connects People and Places” Radio Garden, part of the Transnational Radio Encounters project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) programme, allows users to browse the world’s radio stations using a 3D globe. After the site went viral upon its launch, receiving ten million visitors in its first ten days, Dr Peter Lewis, one of the site’s creators and principle investigator on the project, remarked that “the huge response in visits to the Radio Garden and on social media shows that people like crossing borders to find the music and stations that mean something to them” (Lewis 2017). Curiosity about others, however, is surely an equally powerful draw: As Lillehammer in Norway tinkles with earnest piano folk, Radio Immaculée Conception in Benin doggedly transmits Def Leppard. A station in Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) endlessly dissects the National Hockey League, and it seems every station in Panama City is playing something languid. (Quirke 2017)

The glimpses of familiar national stereotypes implicit in these allusions to Nordic earnestness and Central American languor suggest that part of the site’s appeal lies in its vindication of the notion that the listening habits of others tell us something essential about them. At the same time, Radio Garden imagines and seeks to encourage a globalized subject position characterized by a transcendence of geopolitical boundaries. The technology of radio is presented as an inherently transnational technology, subverting national borders even as it provides a medium for symbolically binding national communities:

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. Radio Garden allows listeners to explore processes of broadcasting and hearing identities across the entire globe. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from “home” from thousands of miles away—or using local community radio to make and enrich new homes. (Radio Garden 2019)

The site encourages the development of a global perspective, inviting the listener to “explore a world of radio as it is happening right now. Tune into any place on the globe: what sounds familiar? What sounds foreign? Where would you like to travel and what sounds like ‘home’?” The “History” section of the page curates “clips from throughout radio history that show how radio has tried to cross borders.” National identities are imagined in terms of their place within a larger global community: “How have people tried to translate their nations into the airwaves? What did they say to the world? How do they engage in conversation across linguistic and geographical barriers?” This notion of radio transcending place is visually supported by the absence of political borders on the map. Instead only the natural terrain is shown, and the only indication of having left one territory for another is the transition from one language to another. There is no text, and clickable dots mark the position of a station. It is the world experienced as a global “garden” of sounds; a continuous space reimagined through the medium of radio. This can be a highly affecting experience. Antonia Quirke in the New Statesman describes the experience of cultural diversity as transcendently pleasurable: An exploratory feeling overwhelms you (So that’s Togo. And ah, Hiroshima mon amour!). As a rule, we flick through television channels and stick somewhat primly to one or two on the radio. This site flips that convention on its head, until it becomes almost too much. The thrill is inexorable.

Radio Garden deftly avoids traditional Eurocentric visual strategies by showing a moveable globe, evoking the first shots of the earth from space produced by the Apollo space missions. Rather than an object of contemplation, however, the site presents the globe as an instrument, ready to be familiarly grasped as scrolling with the mouse transforms the globe into a multi-dimensional “dial.” Responses to the site on social media celebrate the experience of virtual mobility it offers: “Finally a way to travel through space and time!!!”; “Been to Togo, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire and all before breakfast”; “Quick and easy way to travel from home!”. Others interpret the site as promoting an experience of global unity and connectedness: “Thank God, music is followed and loved without any boundaries”; “It’s amazing how we can connect to the world as one”; “Now World Music has no borders.” While some expressly view the site as a resource for acquiring transcultural capital (a Californian school recommends the site as tool for foreign-language learning; a Spanish speaker recommends it as a way to learn English specifically), for the majority of users it is not so much the content as the experienced capacity for searching the globe itself that seems to provide the most value; with the “World at your fingertips” you can “spend hours and hours discovering new music from all over the world.”

125

126

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Radiooooo: “An Infinite World of Musical Discoveries” The French site Radiooooo (each “o” stands for a continent) features a traditional map projection centered on Europe and divided according to existing political boundaries. The site’s content is crowd-sourced with material selected by the site’s creators from files uploaded to the site by over 30,000 users. The site’s playful take on the metaphor of travel and discovery is signaled most clearly by the visual interface with its retro, hand-drawn map conjuring nostalgia for early-twentieth-century travel. Users are invited to imagine themselves as world travelers, part of a network of global connections with other users all over the globe. Music is accessed by clicking on a location at a selected place and time, or alternatively users can “create [their] own trip” by pre-selecting a series of destinations for automated recommendations. The site offers “an infinite world of musical discoveries, curated with love by a crew of passionate melomaniacs that […] work hard everyday to promote culture, encourage curiosity & expand horizons for a more open minded world!” (Radiooooo 2019a). The fantasy of promoting universal values (open-mindedness) through cultural exchange belies the fact that the site’s contributors appear to be largely concentrated in Western Europe (particularly France) and North America while much of the map remains “empty” of content. The 2000s, for instance, are notably light on music from South America, central and southern Africa, the middle-East and central Asia, and this pattern is reflected across other time periods. The 1970s and 1980s see African music much better represented than in other periods, reflecting the popularity of retro Afro-beat sounds among Europeans relative to contemporary sounds from those countries. With a focus on production rather than listening habits, there is a sense that the sounds selected to represent specific places and times may reflect perspective of the site’s largely European contributors rather than local audiences. An innovative aspect of the site is the “gamification” of musical discovery. Gamification applies principles from computer-game design, such as points, rewards, storylines and characters or avatars to “support and motivate” activities such as exercise (e.g., the workout app Zombies, Run!) or language learning (e.g. Word Dive and Duolingo) by adding a “hedonic element” and promoting an experience of effortless “flow” (Koivisto and Hamari 2014: 180). Apps and services may also add a social component, allowing users to display their progress to other users and thus engage in practices of self-making via multiple connected platforms. This social dimension is a significant source of value for users, who have been found to link utility with the number of other users on a platform (Koivisto and Hamari 2014: 180). Mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also incorporate elements of the gaming experience, facilitating self-making through the accumulation of “likes” and the selective sharing of cultural content (Johnson and Ranzini 2018). While appearing to promote playful, ironic or even trivial modes of cultural interaction, gamified online spaces of cultural consumption support the quantification of cultural capital. In the case of Radiooooo, the accrual of cultural capital is motivated and

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

quantified through practices of pursuing, points and rewards. The “discoverer” of each track is named, and a location given (cryptic pseudonyms are more common, perhaps reflecting the ambiguous status of the site within EU copyright law). Tracks can be “liked” or “purchased,” allowing users to build up a virtual “collection.” In addition, users are offered the chance to “Win special reward [sic], increase your ranking, and gain glory with your actions!” (Radiooooo 2019b). Users gain status based on getting “likes” and contributing tracks with awards displayed on each profile as markers of esteem. There are no specific rewards for breadth of musical knowledge. Instead, the points system values new, valid and useful knowledge, increasing status (and cultural capital) in relation to other users’ evaluation of their contributions. The site allows users to demonstrate cosmopolitan capital and act as knowledge brokers: “By acquiring new knowledge that others find useful, people can secure status and prestige. In short, they can become opinion leaders in culture” (Tepper and Hargittai 2009: 229). The emphasis is on utility for other users, valorizing knowledge that leads to enhanced cultural prestige for the recipient. Radiooooo can be thus be interpreted as a site of what Schiller et al. (2011: 402) call “cosmopolitan sociability”; a “domain of play” in which musical knowledge as a form of multicultural capital can be quantified, ascribed and transferred. At the same time, the “gameful” character of the online space frames the competitive acquisition of cultural capital as a playful, social activity. In the playful space of the Radiooooo website there is something parodic about the world map that provides it with a backdrop and an organizational framework. The trope of earlytwentieth-century travel is continually sent-up by the site’s instantaneous and effortless crossing of temporal and spatial distance. The map does not determine the traveller’s route, so much as testify to its own obsolescence. Rather than being constrained by the map, the traveler creates the map as she or he goes, adding to it and remaking the places it contains. The site allows users to imaginatively enact their own transcendence of local and national perspectives while acting as postmodern, postcolonial “discoverers” of new and obscure musical territories.

Every Noise at Once Every Noise at Once (ENAO), the product of music intelligence platform the Echo Nest, is “an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 2,928 genres by Spotify” (Every Noise at Once 2019a). The sheer scale of this musical field is spectacularly rendered on the site’s homepage as a vast constellation of genres. Although “calibration is fuzzy […] in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier” (Every Noise at Once 2019b). The site offers three main methods of organization: the aforementioned “scatter plot,” a list view and a Spotify playlist (“The Sound of Everything”). These are supplemented by a plurality of other algorithmically derived search options.

127

128

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

In marked contrast to the other maps, location as an organizing criterion is downgraded in favor of “musical similarity” (here imagined as an objective variable). On the standard “scatter-plot” view, geographically distributed genres may be grouped together according to musical similarity. Place re-asserts itself elsewhere, however, and it soon becomes apparent that there is an implicit center/periphery schema at work. While the ranking of global genres in terms of their “xmasness” is unapologetically US-centric, the definition of “folk” results in some potentially surprising inclusions for non-Americans. The site reflects an emplaced logic in which location-specific aesthetics and struggles for distinction are masked by globalist narratives of freedom and autonomy and the celebration of localness. The site’s design affords a number of place-based modes of access. “The Sounds of Places” organizes places in terms of “the acoustic characteristics of their music” (Every Noise at Once 2019b). According to this logic, Jamaica is the “spikiest and bounciest” country, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ethiopia the most “organic,” and Russia the most “electronic and mechanical.” The Nordic countries Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland and the Faroes are the most “dense and atmospheric.” The notion of “musical similarity” obscures the socially constituted and constitutive aspect of genres that Negus (1999) emphasizes. Defining similarity in terms of quantifiable metrics such as timbre, tempo, and “density,” the scatter-plot connects musics that are widely diffused in space and time and made within very different contexts of production. This has the effect of separating the music from its social, historical baggage. Playful descriptors such as “bouncy” suggest immediate, embodied, affective responses, implying that it is the instantaneous moment of individual encounter that defines the meaning of the musical experience on offer, rather than any sense of music’s social and historical contexts. Calhoun (2008: 110) notes the tendency of cosmopolitan discourse to conflate experiences of “diversity and mobility” for a fundamental truth about the modern world. To those with the right connections, the world feels connected; and for streaming users, the global networks that support their mobility may be mysterious and hidden. The specific aesthetic disposition the site embodies is naturalized as an acknowledgment of the “state of the world”—a new reality created by digital technologies. In this new reality (which one may “choose” to accept—although refusal to do so, one suspects, would not be encouraged), a mastery of the world’s musical genres is a matter of free personal choice: The point of the map, as with the genres, is […] to invite you to explore music. It is an attempt – however uneven, idiosyncratic, and incomplete—to embrace this new state of the world, in which nearly all of humanityʼs recorded music is streamable or downloadable. (Every Noise at Once 2013)

In keeping with its commitment to discovery, the site promises novelty and a subversion of the familiar (“Maps are, after all, as much machines for getting lost as they are for finding yourself”) (Every Noise at Once 2013). The user is promised “things that you don’t yet realize you love, and branching points where you will be amazed and thrilled to have veered” (Every Noise at Once 2013). At the same time, however, the map is

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

designed to preclude potential cognitive dissonances arising from a globalized musical field in which “Rock” may no longer be reliably centered on the Anglo-American context. “Our music intelligence platform,” we are told, “responds in great depth to a wide variety of structured inquiries. Among many other things, this means we can ask it for the 10 hottest artists commonly described with the word ‘rock’” (Every Noise at Once 2013). Unfortunately, the results that emerge from the raw data are unsatisfactory, producing a list that includes Demi Lovato, Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake, and Lil Wayne: When we say “rock music,” of course, we arenʼt talking about term frequency in a corpus of descriptive text, we’re talking about a kind of music. It’s an amorphous, evolving, impreciselydelineated genre of music, to be sure, but still, if we were talking in person about this idea of rock music, we could straightforwardly clarify: “You know, rock music, man! Guitars, drums. The Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, that kind of thing.” Or maybe weʼd say Nirvana and U2, or maybe weʼd say The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Maybe we really mean classic rock, or album rock, or alternative rock. (Every Noise at Once, 2013)

Despite the overt celebration of newness, then, the map is not designed to surprise users but subtly mirror their expectations by reflecting a US-centered viewpoint. This belies the place-less perspective the site seems to encourage: why shouldn’t clicking on “rock” play you Rihanna and Pink, if that’s how those artists are most commonly identified? Why should it only play male, white, British or American bands from the 1970s golden age? Why not Iranian or Finnish rock? The nesting of ethnic subgenres of “universal” (Western-centered) genre categories indicates an implied progression from American center to global periphery. Approaching the centre, the gravitational pull of locality weakens. The map’s use of sonic factors to organize the music obscures the fact that, the further out onto the musical margins one travels, the more place is woven into the names of genres (“Bulgarian hip-hop” “Uzbek Pop,” “Polish Reggae”). The creators argue that “we can build a nearly infinite number of views of the world.” Their chosen interpretation of this infinite possibility, however, reveals the implicit centrality of Western canons in calibrating diversity for the site’s users. The virtual journey through the world of music offers users a means of nurturing a relativist viewpoint: “You might not want to abandon your old life and stay there with them forever, but youʼll go home knowing that there are other ways to live.” But where is “home,” for the site’s ideal user? Somewhere between genres or “ways to live.” This suggests that there are those for whom musical genres are a place to “stay forever” and those who (like site’s users) continually transcend and move between these places. Ultimately, the purpose of mapping music is to relinquish both “home” and maps altogether: We make maps to mark treasure when we think treasure is rare, and then, later, to remember where we’ve been, once we start to realize that there are treasures everywhere. Eventually, these maps become something to do with our hands while we listen. (Every Noise at Once 2013)

129

130

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Music Discovery Maps: Post-genre, Post-nation, Post-class The unifying thread that runs through the case studies considered here is the notion of transcendence. Earlier in this essay, I noted how Robin James (2017) identifies a metaphorical transcendence of established relationships of class, place and ethnicity in the post-genre style in US artists such as Taylor Swift. Like Spotify’s “millennial” customers, the music of these artists consciously eschews tribalism appealing instead to a diverse, “post-genre” aesthetic. The post-identity culture described by James is also, at least by implication, post-class, but in fact, as she demonstrates, it creates a new form of distinction between musical cosmopolitans and locals. In the same way as post-identity discourses frame a transcendence of earlier commitments to ethnic and aesthetic purity as a matter of personal aesthetic choice, cosmopolitanism is framed as a personal transcendence of social, economic, and ethnic determinations. Both, however, use questions of aesthetics to mask deeper inequalities of access that are socially and geographically distributed. As Cheyne and Binder show, while the US middle-class consumer of foreign hip-hop performs cosmopolitan status through their consumption of the music, the authenticity ascribed to these artists is determined by the value hierarchies of Western consumers, and derives from their connection to their immediate locale (see Cheyne and Binder 2010) and not from their transcendence of it. Excluded from the dominance in matters of taste possessed by the now-cosmopolitan elites, they retain the status of “locals.”

Conclusion Digital music maps are powerful tools for navigating the vast quantity of music available to internet users; but they are far from neutral spaces of music discovery. Drawing users into specific subject positions, all of the maps considered in this essay privilege cosmopolitan notions of cultural mobility and openness. Some, like Radio Garden, do so explicitly, in the context of global discourses of togetherness and community, while others, like Music Map, effectively appropriate this discourse into the realm of corporate branding. They invoke the “digital sublime” promising “fantasies of the perfect search, the ultimate discovery, and instantaneous and complete gratification through immersion in millions of intangible digital commodities” (Burkart 2014: 405). The utopian vocabulary, however, masks strategies of distinction and inequalities of access. As Prior argues, “the field of popular music, even under digital conditions, is still stratified and people’s tastes and modes of listening are still expressions of social characteristics” (2015: 501). All the maps considered here offer resources for self-making, facilitating the sharing of music via social media and, in the case of Radiooooo, the construction of site-specific avatars that allow for the accrual of cultural capital through approved patterns of consumption. Users can associate themselves with positive globalist

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

values, or position themselves as knowledgeable, open, and progressive. Music discovery sites, insofar as they are linked to social media and the projection of ideal cosmopolitan identities, may be defined as sites of cosmopolitan sociability, or “domains of play,” which nevertheless “constitute interaction in which we assert our common humanity [providing] a miniature picture of the social ideal that one may call freedom of bondage” (Simmel, qtd in Schiller et al. 2011: 402). This freedom is not accessible to everyone, however; within the global imaginary of music discovery sites, the refusal to “play” has an implied moral cost, becoming potentially “an individualized moral fault, a pathology, a problem of bad-choice, bad culture, a failure to be enterprising or to be reflexive” (Skeggs 2004: 91). The relational aspect of cultural consumption, its role in self-making and the performance of distinction, is obscured by the image of individual openness to “discovery” within a post-national space. The imagined global consumer that these sites materialize and celebrate appears to exist in a fundamentally different relationship with genre from his or her analogue forebears. Whereas, for Willis’s bikers (1978) or Hebdige’s (1990) punks no other music was possible, for the implied consumer of ENAO, any music is possible; the new reality is a radically connected musical world inhabited by mobile travelers. Decoupled from physical and geographical location, genres become way-markers facilitating freedom of movement through and between musical worlds. For all the rhetoric of transcendence, however, these maps show how the act of listening to music online entangles us in an ever-wider network of actors, connecting listening practices with transnational research programs, the branding activities of global businesses, questions of access and ownership, and the ethics of globalized consumption. The question of our relationship to music more than ever connects with our sense of ourselves as classed subjects, and with distant others across a globalized field of musical experience.

Works Cited Bryson, B. (1996), “Anything but Heavy Metal: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes,” American Sociological Review, 61 (5): 884–99. Burkart, P. (2014), “Music in the Cloud and the Digital Sublime,” Popular Music and Society, 37 (4): 393–407. Calhoun, C. (2008), “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary,” Daedalus, 137 (3): 105–14. Cheyne, A., and A. Binder (2010), “Cosmopolitan Preferences: The Constitutive Role of Place in American Elite Taste for Hip-Hop Music 1991–2005,” Poetics 38 (2010): 336–64. ERA (2019), Yearbook 2019, London: Entertainment Retailers Association. Erikson, M., R. Fleischer, A. Johansen, P. Snickars, and P. Vonderau (2019), Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Steaming Music, Cambridge: MIT Press. Every Noise at Once (2013), “How We Understand Music Genres,” Every Noise at Once. Available online: http://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf (accessed April 18, 2019). Every Noise at Once (2019a), “Other Things,” Every Noise at Once. Available online: http:// everynoise.com/engenremap.html#otherthings (accessed April 18, 2019).

131

132

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Every Noise at Once (2019b), “The Sound of Places,” Every Noise at Once. Available online: http://everynoise.com/countrysounds.html (accessed April 23, 2019). Frith, S. (1981), “‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community,” Popular Music, 1: 159–68. Hagen, A. (2015), “The Playlist Experience: Personal Playlists in Music Streaming Services,” Popular Music and Society, 38 (5): 625–45. Hebdige, D. ([1979]1990), “Style as Homology and Signifying Practice,” in S. Frith, and A. Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, 55–65, London: Routledge. Hu, C. (2019) “Give Me What You Want,” Real Life [blog] February 21, 2019, Available online: https://reallifemag.com/give-me-what-you-want/ (accessed April 19, 2019). Igarashi, H., and H. Saito (2014), “Cosmopolitanism as Cultural Capital: Exploring the Intersection of Globalization, Education and Stratification,” Cultural Sociology, 8 (3): 222–39. James, R. (2017), “Is the Post- in Post-Identity the Post- in Post-Genre?” Popular Music, 36 (1): 21–32. Jarness, V. and S. Friedman (2017), “‘I’m Not a Snob, but …’: Class Boundaries and the Downplaying of Difference,” Poetics 61: 14–25. Johnson, B. and G. Ranzini (2018), “Click Here to Look Clever: Self-presentation Via Selective Sharing of Music and Film on Social Media,” Computers in Human Behavior, 82: 148–58. Koivisto, J and J. Hamari (2014), “Demographic Differences in Perceived Benefits From Gamification,” Computers in Human Behavior, 35: 179–88. Lewis, P. (2017), “Sowing the seeds in the Radio Garden,” London Metropolitan University. Available online: https://www.londonmet.ac.uk/news/articles/sowing-the-seeds-in-theradio-garden/ (accessed April 18, 2019). Morris, J. and D. Powers (2015), “Control, Curation and Musical Experience in Streaming Music Services,” Creative Industries Journal, 8 (2): 106–22. Murdock, G. and G. Phelps (1972), “Youth Culture and the School Revisited,” The British Journal of Sociology, 23 (4): 478–82. Music Map (2018), “LA’s Anenon Tells Us How He Found His Tongue in Tuscany,” Music Map. Available online: https://musicmap.global/article/anenon-tongue-tuscany-interview (accessed March 7, 2019). Music Map (2019a), “About,” Music Map. Available online: https://musicmap.global/ (accessed March 7, 2019). Music Map (2019b), “How to Redefine Pop: Alizzz Launches Whoa! Music,” Music Map. Available online: https://musicmap.global/article/alizzz-whoa-music-spain (accessed April 18, 2019). MusicMapGlobal (2019), “Yemen,” Instagram. Available online: www.instagram.com/p/ BwCZDW2BjTR/ (accessed April 9, 2019). Negus, K. (1999), Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, London: Routledge. Peterson, R. (1992), “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore,” Poetics 21: 243–58. Prior, N. (2015), “Beyond Napster: Popular Music and the Normal Internet,” in A. Bennett and A. Waksman (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, 493–508, London: SAGE. Quirke, A. (2017) “Around the World in 80 Clicks: Now You Can Browse the Planet’s Radio Stations, Live,” New Statesman [online] January 5, 2019 (accessed April 23, 2019).

Discovery Maps and Subjectivities

Radio Garden (2019), “Homepage,” Radio Garden. Available online: https://radio.garden/ listen/radio-fiji-two/lxTrNA6S (accessed April 18, 2019). Radiooooo (2019a), “Radiooooo,” Legloberadiooooo.com, Available online: https://www. legloberadiooooo.com/ (accessed April 30 2019). Radiooooo (2019b), “Gamification!,” Radioooo.com. Available online: https://www. legloberadiooooo.com/ (accessed April 30, 2019). Roose, H., K. van Eijck, and J. Lievens (2012), “Culture of Distinction or Culture of Openness? Using a Social Space Approach to Analyze the Social Structuring of Lifestyles,” Poetics 40: 491–513. Schiller, N., T. Darieva, and S. Gruner-Domic (2011) “Defining Cosmopolitan Sociability in a Transnational Age. An Introduction,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (3): 399–418. Shuker, R. (2005), Popular Music: The Key Concepts, London: Routledge. Skeggs, B. (2004), “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘the self,’” The Sociological Review, 52: 75–95. Skeggs, B. (2015), “Introduction: Stratification or Exploitation, Domination, Dispossession and Devaluation?,” The Sociological Review, 63, 205–22. Spotify (2019), “Company Info,” For the Record. Available online: https://newsroom.spotify. com/company-info/ (accessed April 18, 2019). Tepper, S., and E. Hargittai (2009), “Pathways to Music Exploration in a Digital Age,” Poetics, 37: 227–249. Urry, J. (2000), Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, London: Routledge. Wald, E. (2004), Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, New York: Amistad. Willis, P. (1978), Profane Culture, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Willis, P. (1990), “The Golden Age,” in S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, 43–55, London: Routledge.

133

7 Art at the Cutting Edge: Class, Cultures, and Globalization in African World Music Mark LeVine

Globalization, world music, and class—three terms that have so many histories and levels of meaning that doing justice to any of them is nearly impossible, never mind all three as intersecting phenomena. The argument could also be made that none of the three terms can be understood apart from the other two when it comes to analyzing the contemporary production, distribution and consumption of culture today. This chapter explores their implicate relationship, and how achieving a better understanding of the nature of that relationship opens new areas for studying the fundamental characteristics of each in the global era.

Intersectional Disciplinarities of Class Let us start with the obvious: all music reflects the larger social conditions in which it is produced, circulated and consumed. Every aspect of the musical experience lies at the intersection of structural (economic) and superstructural (cultural-ideological and political) elements of the social world in which it is embedded. It can thus be analyzed, in part, for what it tells us about these broader cultural and political economies. Even when music is performed, recorded, or consumed completely outside the chain of commodification, with no economic motive, consideration or implication, the instruments and voice(s), the musicians playing and singing, the audience, and all the various stylistic, aural and technological components of the music itself reflect the underlying economic conditions, flows and dynamics of the time and place in which the music was produced, performed and/or “consumed.”

136

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

In her seminal Epistemology of the Closet Eve Sedgwick argued that “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance” if it doesn’t include at its core a critique of normative homo/heterosexual binaries (Sedgwick 2008: 1; cf. Najmabadi 2005: 3). As Crenshaw has similarly (and) definitively shown (inter alia 1989; 1991), the intersection of sex and gender with race and class, and the manner in which all four implicate and interpolate each other in ways that render already marginalized people socially, politically and legally invisible—not quite a pure “state of exception” but without a doubt in the societal underground—must comprise the architecture of any Critical Theory that desires to uncover the complex ideological foundations of domination and hegemony in its myriad forms. Of these various components of identity, class is in many ways the most complex and contradictory, especially when it comes to studying the dynamics of the “cultural production cycle” (the circuit and matrix of production, circulation and consumption of culture between artists and fans/consumers: hereafter CPC) under conditions of neoliberal globalization. Like every other member of a modern society, artists and their audiences are embedded in multiple class relationships equally inflected by racial, gender and ethnic discourses without whose understanding the economic conditions and dynamics surrounding music are unexplainable. For me, the best way to gain this understanding is through a reading of class grounded in the mongrel soil of the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism, Gramsci and Foucault, fertilized by a strong measure of intersectionality, indigenous, Southern, decolonial critical theory, and tilled by scholar-practitioners who know what it feels like to find themselves at the wrong end of a charging squadron of riot police with mayhem in their eyes. In other words, I understand the present-day material conditions in a given place and the histories producing them to be the fundamental components of how music is created, circulated, experienced and consumed within it. And in the era of contemporary globalization, “place” can in fact be constituted out of myriad non-contiguous spaces which, as Lefebvre (1991) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 2009) remind us, can be either rigid and state-controlled or more “nomadic,” “clandestine” and subversive, or contested between the two. But I also understand these material conditions to be inherently discursive, mediated by various and often contradictory and competing ideologies, governmentalities, disciplinary formations, inflections of gender, race and other performative identities and cultures, all of which are engaged in unending struggles for hegemony within and transversing communal boundaries and national borders. Given this complexity, the best way forward is to pay heed to our Zapatista compas and, albeit slowly, advance (“lento, pero avanzo”). But where to advance? For the purposes of this chapter, the terrain of exploration will include three African countries that have strong international music scenes, and long and complex experiences of neoliberal, WashingtonConsensus-shaped globalization that have been both deeply shaped by previous class relations and in turn exacerbated by longstanding class tensions and inequalities: Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria.

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

The problem one faces when discussing class is that both as a sociological category and as an often weaponized way of differentiating people by their income or resources (e.g., poor, middle class, wealthy) the term is inherently relative, both as economic metric and social category. John Elster’s famous Introduction to Karl Marx (1986) finds upwards of fifteen classes in the various modes of production he explores; indeed, many have criticized Marx for never offering a clear and well-developed theory of class (cf. Andrew 1983; Ollman 1968; Ossowski 1963), pointing the finger at the incompatibility of his tasks as a sociologist and a revolutionary. Reading through his most important works where class is discussed (The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Poverty of Philosophy as well as Capital) two things stand out for the purposes of exploring the relationship between music or any form of cultural production and class as a prism to explore it. First, whatever its grounding in particular modes of production, class is necessarily experienced as a social relationship embedded within a larger tapestry of social relations. For the purposes of a purely economic analysis, class might best be established “by nothing but [one’s] objective place in the network of ownership relations” without the need to consider “consciousness, culture and politics” (as G. A. Cohen described it; 1978: 76–7). But such reductionist deployments of class are rarely helpful in elucidating its function within the larger body of social and political relations, which is precisely why a far more complex understanding is called for, one in which its economic determinants and components are enmeshed with its social dynamics. This reality is, of course, what allows art and other forms of cultural production to play such an important role in variously defining, solidifying and challenging class relations and the hierarchies they inevitably produce (in Gramsci’s terms, in the various struggles for hegemony). Indeed, class goes deeper than just the relationships between people; it’s simultaneously a state of mind, one that is either “in” or “for” itself, which emerges (however problematically and often “falsely”) between the objective conditions underlying and shaped by economic relations of individual people. That is, class is inherently psychological and moral; perhaps even more than ideological or superstructural, although the “psychological,” “ideological,” “superstructural” and moral dimensions are clearly inseparable and even overlapping concepts). It can only be experienced and understood through political, ideological and cultural epistemologies that surround them (cf. Andrew 1983). From this perspective, almost everyone who came after Marx—whether “marxists” like Lenin, Poulantzas or Althusser, or Weber and his line—has inevitably tried to render if not define the unbridgeable aporia between objective and subjective relations between people, the existence of which is in fact the prerequisite for people to enter into such relations and “work upon one another,” through which they form class relations. Marx again has important insights for any attempt to explore how music functions in a globalized economic and cultural context, explaining in The Eighteenth Brumaire (Part III) that the intelligentsia (here of the bourgeoisie but arguably any class that is not yet “for itself ”) are “the ideological representatives and spokesmen … [for their class, who] in their minds do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, [so] that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problem and solutions

137

138

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically.” As important, these “ideologists,” who can cut across one class and form a “cluster of classes,” “make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief sources of livelihood” (Marx, The German Ideology, qtd in Ollman 1968: 574). Marx’s description of the role of the intelligentsia or “ideologists” can, I would argue, also fit well with the role of artists in a larger society, whether they act—as Benjamin hoped—as either class vanguards or betrayers offering visions of a new socio-economic order, or— as Adorno warned—as shills ensuring the stability of the existing system through their unique power to create an “aura of style” that masquerades as transgressive authenticity (Benjamin [1936] 2008; Adorno and Horkheimer [1947] 2002; cf. Frank 1997). Specifically, perhaps more than in previous eras, today class is a perfectly quantifiable category; or at least it must be imagined that way for the system to function smoothly (without ideological indigestion). For the contemporary bourgeoisie, the “business leaders” and corporate titans of the contemporary neoliberal age, “It’s not really an issue of ‘class’ at all, but rather income and spending power” that defines “class” (Ernst and Young 2013: 3), which means the only information that matters is “accurate and quantifiable information.” Even the World Bank has been forced to divide the “middle class” into two brackets in order to have any analytical clarity with the term. There are at least a dozen different ways to define “middle class” alone, and they cover a wide range of incomes below and above the median income in a society (see Reeves, Guyot and Krause 2018a, 2018b). Moreover, as the middle class has been “hollowed out” as wealth has been squeezed upward in the context of both sustained aggregate growth and changing patterns of consumption, the definition and meaning of poverty as well as wealth changes too, as reflected in the raising of the base line income levels for poverty by the World Bank. For its part, no one really knows how to define “wealthy” since no one really knows how much wealth has been surreptitiously concentrated in the hands of local political and economic elites in various countries. On top of this, the quantity and quality of the data collected and deployed by the UN, World Bank and other institutions is, by their own admission, suspect and often contradictory, which means some data will support the idea that inequality and poverty are being reduced, while others will support the opposite claim (see World Bank 2017 and 2018a; 2018b; Lanchovichina 2018 for positive claims about the political economy of the MENA; see LeVine 2005 for a critical presentation). Even if we could obtain reliable data, income and/or wealth are by no means the only ways economists and other social scientists measure class. Educational levels as well as occupational status and individual attitudes and self-perception about social position also shape (self-)perception of class status. On top of all this, neoliberalism and the “structural adjustment policies” it has generated across the Global South has had very different impacts between and within countries depending on a host of economic, political and cultural factors, although a common dynamic has been to encourage greater interpenetration of political and economic elites, resulting most of the time in higher levels of corruption and state violence and rising levels of inequality. And finally, the fact that different professions and education levels are associated with very different economic outcomes in different countries (for example, doctors and teachers in Egypt earn far less than their

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

counterparts in Europe or the United States), constitute yet another obstacle to arriving at a definitive understanding of how class functions in real world contexts in any given society. What remains to be understood in any sophisticated manner is how the dynamics of contemporary neoliberal globalization in its many and evolving forms impacts and changes the way class as a category and arena for cultural production, transmission and power and music interact. Clearly, then, it’s quite difficult to define and measure “class” and its various implications with any precision or confidence. And indeed, as I saw when I reviewed the already extensive quantitative literature on economic globalization in the Arab and larger Muslim majority world from the 1970s through the beginning of the present century, analyses produced since the 2007–8 crash present strikingly different conclusions about several of the core measurements that normally define not only class positions but poverty, inequality, growth, unemployment and other indicators more broadly (LeVine 2005). A review of over a dozen in-depth analyses by the World Bank, various think tanks and economists confirms the confusing trajectories of various social classes during the last decade. What is clear, however, is that “deteriorating socioeconomic conditions combined with high aspirations increased discontent among the middle classes,” exacerbating not just inequality but “inequality of opportunity” for a generation that has little reason to buy into the system (Cammett and Diwan 2013a, 2013b). For the World Bank and other international financial institutions responsible for managing development in the Global South, the fact that there was so much discontent among people in countries that were experiencing sustained and even high levels of growth and other positive indicators created an “inequality puzzle” they were unable to explain, especially with the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in some of the most pro-growth countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. All the countries of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, and of the Sahelian-equatorial belt across Africa as well—and particularly the five case studies explored in this chapter—are defined by “prolonged discontent” (Cammett and Diwan 2013a, 2013b) by citizens, a sentiment that is the product of crony capitalist systems, increasing inequality in the midst of rising GDP, a growing middle class that is seeing its aspirations harmed by increasing precarity, high youth unemployment (at least 10 percent higher than in most other regions or countries), low social mobility, environmental degradation, intensified foreign support for authoritarian systems, and all this accompanied by greater violence (and in everyone’s case by Morocco, some sort of war), repression and the demise of any sort of authoritarian bargain as regimes curtailed social welfare spending to enable the enrichment of the newly privatized elites. What becomes clear is that even the country one might imagine has done better than most, Morocco, is shown to be beset by “alarming social inequalities” (Achy 2010; Gibson 2018; Noury 2017) along with increasing inequality (most recently the highest levels in North Africa, a dynamic that only gets worse as we move east to our other case studies). As an Oxfam report on poverty in Nigeria pointed out (and the same is true in most of these countries), “Poverty and inequality … are not due to a lack of resources, but to the ill-use, misallocation and misappropriation of such resources” (Oxfam 2017; Cammett and Diwan 2013a, 2013b). The above dynamics fit, sadly, Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria equally, as well

139

140

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

as a host of other countries in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and indeed globally. In all of them we see in the last decade what has been most remarkable is that, even as GDP and other aggregate measures grew, the broad picture was one of ever worsening inequality (Ncube, Anyanwu and Hausken 2014; Kolawole, Olufunsho and Yaqub 2015). Much of the growth that did occur (or prevented an actual aggregate decline) came in the form of remittances from workers abroad, which exacerbated the social and economic dynamics at home. What is most crucial about the dynamics described here is that they have clear psychological and cultural impacts. As Melani Cammett and Ishac Diwan (2013a, 2013b) well demonstrate, “dissatisfaction with life” is a major issue for most countries in the region; the more dissatisfied young people in particular are, the more likely they are to reach out for forms of expression that both channel and even cleanse the rage. Intense religious belief, devotion, ideologies and actions can certainly achieve these results, but so can Sufi rock, metal and hip-hop. Nigeria’s economic anxieties are worse than almost any non-war torn country in the MENA region, with three in every five Nigerians living in poverty, massive inequality and corruption on a scale that exceeds even its huge oil reserves. Indeed, despite having less than one eighth of the population of India, the country is today home to the most poor people on earth; all the immense wealth produced by petroleum goes to the least possible number of people (https://www.stearsng.com/article/inequality-innigeria-is-worse-than-it-looks; https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jul/18/ shameful-nigeria-doesnt-care-about-inequality-corruption).

Grand Illusions: Why World Music Still Matters According to ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, “World music is that music we encounter, well, everywhere in the world. [It] has no boundaries and … is open to all” (Bohlman 2002: 20). At the same time, he argues, “The old definitions and distinctions don’t hold anymore; world music can be Western or non-Western, acoustic or electronically mixed … There’s ample justification to call just about anything world music” (Bohlman 2002: 20). Yet world music still tends to be considered “out there” and not recognizably “Western.” Today those boundaries between the “West” and the “Rest” of humanity are quickly disappearing, or at least being rearranged and redefined, internally as much as between cultures. Thus it’s not surprising that world music has been from the start “inseparable from another equally difficult to define phenomenon of our age, globalization” (Bohlman 2002: 20). To start, we need to point out that all music, even if it’s not “world music” in the geographically broadest sense of the term, still is the product of multiple origins, as every existing human community, and the culture it comprises, is the culmination of centuries if not millennia of movement, interaction and cross-fertilization and hybridization with others. Even music most closely associated with one particular culture or civilization, such as European classical, Australian aboriginal, or Mongolian throat music, is in fact the

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

products of centuries of evolution, development and influences which, far more often than not, can be traced—however faintly in the present—“elsewhere,” far afield of their present locations or the locations with which they are typically identified (Frith 2000: 306, 311). Whether the millennia-old “Gypsy trail” stretching from China to Appalachia (and especially from the Subcontinent to Ireland), or the Atlantic circuit linking together West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas that began in 1492, or the thoroughly contemporary lineage of K-Pop from Seul to Los Angeles, music has always been on the move and in its movement it has been part of various forms of cultural and economic exchange that have shaped whatever particular moment one wishes to study. Cultures have always traveled, and they’ve also brought music with them, however short or long the journey, whether at the dawn of human civilization or today. The closer we get to today, the more music has been not merely the product of travel, but the generator of it, or at least at the avant-garde of new interactions and conversations. That is precisely what world music does, and why it remains so important politically as well as aesthetically. Interestingly, as the idea of “world music” began to solidify in the public’s mind in the 1980s, a narrative took shape of its origins that claimed it was created by UK-based music executives in a north London pub early in the decade as they sought, quite legitimately one hastens to add, to come up with a monicker that would allow their artists to be placed in one easily identifiable section of record stores whether they were in London, New York, Paris or other major Euro-American cities where most of the music was bought and consumed outside its home markets. While the mythical ur-event at a long-since closed pub seems in fact to have occurred (as recounted by pioneering world music DJ and historian Charlie Gillett, who was there; see Llewellyn Smith 2011), the term “world music” was actually first used by academics a generation before, in the early 1960s, not surprisingly, to call attention to and celebrate the great wealth of music across the world. Their hope in deploying “world music” was to entice and expose students and their communities to the wonderful but until then largely unknown and unheard music of cultures outside the “West.” And to be sure, whether in 1969 or 2019, “world music” sounds a lot less frightening than “ethnomusicology” on an undergraduate syllabus or concert poster. What’s particularly relevant for our purposes, as Steven Feld (2000) points out, is that it was in the 1980s—precisely the moment when neoliberal globalization became the normative economic model globally—that world music underwent a discursive shift from an academic designation to a marketing category, one that would hopefully lure people to specific and till-then underutilized sections of record stores. By the time the 1980s were over, two of the seminal world music albums in history had been released—Paul Simon’s Graceland and David Byrne’s Rei Momo, and both Billboard and the Grammys had created a world-music category to track and reward the music, further popularizing and commercializing it. But while the broad history of the term’s usage has been established, delineating precisely what “world music” means remains a far more difficult task. It is true that one of the genre’s greatest patrons, David Byrne, felt the need to declare “I Hate World Music” in a 1999 New York Times OpEd of that title. From a critical scholarly perspective, Martin Stokes (2004) argues that the “expansive claims” of world music “inject energy” into the music industry while also testifying to the possibility of

141

142

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

more peaceful and harmonious intercultural relations even as it re-presents a return of colonial contexts in which music has circulated between “Western” and what could be called “restern” music—that is, the music from the rest of the world that was collapsed into the category of “world music.” But as someone who’s worked in the genre and taught “world music” for over twenty years, I do not share Byrne’s dislike for the term, nor do I believe that the energy it injected into the music industry simply reflected a neoliberal and, even if to a small degree, neocolonial political economy at work. Rather, my experience has led me to conclude that “world music” remains useful as both a marketing tool—musicians gotta earn a living!—and an often very useful heuristic device in the classroom. We know that the term originally connoted traditional or folk music located mostly outside what could be termed the “white West”—that is, Western Europe and the white settler colonial-dominated areas of North America. Thus Tibetan, Andean, Sahelian, aboriginal Australian and other local, often indigenous ethnic musics outside the white West, as well as the remaining indigenous communities of North America and the areas of North America and Europe—for example, Appalachia and the Bayou, Ireland and Romania— where the local music was clearly rooted at least partly “elsewhere,” even if the peoples associated with it were, at least to a large degree, understood as “white.” Just as quickly, however, the dominant form of identifiably “world music” evolved away from music that sounded or was at least understood to be “traditional”—read: locally rooted and sounding somehow “primitive” sounding genres—from outside the main metropolitan urban cores of the West. In other words, something that sounded like it could have come from a Library of Congress field recording or was discovered on an old 78 or even acetate from early days of recorded music. (And indeed, where there have been controversies over cultural appropriation in world music it is often been around the ill-considered use of field or similar non-commercial recordings as samples for European or American pop, dance or electronica tracks (Feld 2000).) Rather, world music became associated with a specific kind of aural, aesthetic and along with them, cultural hybridity; a mix of multiple styles of music from various elsewheres, genres that often included but were by no means limited to European and American rock, pop and/ or jazz as the defining element of their sound. To the present day, like Justice Potter Stewart and obscenity, most of us “know” world music when we hear it, even if we can’t provide a succinct definition. The world music charts and Grammys give an indication of this process. The first world music charts were dominated by bands like the Gipsy Kings, South Africa’s Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba and Johnny Clegg & Savuka, Black Uhuru (which dominated the Reggae as well as world-music charts), Zimbabwean guitar legend Thomas Mapfumo, Haiti’s Boukman Eksperyans, Brazilian singer and guitarist Milton Nascimento, and innumerable compilations from various Latin American and African countries as well. More well-known Western artists, especially in collaboration with those from the global south, were also represented, such as The Kronos Quartet, Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder’s Talking Timbuktu, Buena Vista Social Club, Mickey Hart’s famous Planet Drum (1992), and mainstays Zakir Hussain (India) and Khaled (Algeria/France), Manu Dibango (Cameroon),

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

Youssou N’Dor, Zap Mama (Belgium/Congo), the Chieftans and a lot of other Irish/Celtic groups. Yet other artists, from Bob Marley to Andrea Bocelli also appeared on the world music charts even though they would rarely be considered as such. As for Grammys, aside from the above-mentioned artists, other prominent nominees and winners include Salif Keita (Mali), Ravi Shankar (India), Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Pakistan), King Sunny Adé, Femi and Seun Kuti (Nigeria), Tinariwen (Mali), Angelique Kidjo (Benin) and, of course, Ladysmith Black Mambazo (South Africa) I would argue that what makes “world music” a still-relevant and useful term is its connotation of music that does more than just bring together various forms of “exotic,” “primitive” and/or “spiritual” genres of “foreign” music, or as forms of music in a form of postmodern pastiche and/or ornamentation for otherwise clearly Euro-American rock or dance tracks. Rather, it is a kind of hybrid music that consciously brings together sounds and styles that aren’t already normally in contact or mixed together, from two or more distinct cultures (as opposed to the natural diffusion of many cultures through each other over long periods of time that is always there, or adjacent cultures like Punjab/Gujarat or Arab/ Kurdish, and so on) in a way that creates a hybrid music, a music where the elsewheres of multiple cultures, histories and aesthetic traditions come together to generate an affective aesthetic force that remains ineffable no matter how hard we try to explain it. So a Pakistani or Egyptian death metal band or trap group wouldn’t be world music; but full on “Oriental” or “Sufi” metal, or a Gnawa hip-hop band would be. Buena Vista Social Club wouldn’t be; Pakistani Sufi rock pioneers Junoon would be. If world music first emerged as a way to generate interest in Euro-America for nonWestern forms of traditional and/or folk music, it crossed over to the mainstream with collaborative projects featuring British and American superstars like Paul Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel and Ry Cooder with virtuoso artists from the Global South. It became a truly recognizable genre on its own terms when Southern artists themselves (whether in the South, in Europe or some mixture of the two) began to blend Euro-American musical instrumentation, sounds and styles into their own original music, or even played rock, funk, disco, metal, jazz, calypso and other forms of North American popular music with a local tinge (in fact, this has been going on since recordings from the United States and Latin America first made their way to Africa and the Middle East already in the 1920s, almost as soon as these genres emerged. But few people who weren’t from or didn’t spend a lot of time in these regions ever had the chance to hear the often exquisitely original versions of these styles). As I explore below, the resulting hybrids were not artificial or even conscious practices, at least not at first. However, once their aesthetic/musical as well as financial potential and then actual popularity became clear, these genres were quite consciously developed as hybrids, as exemplified by artists like Manu Dibango, Youssou N’Dor, Fela Kuti, Cheb Khaled, The Gipsy Kings, Rachid Taha, Ali Faka Toure, and so many other lesser known rock, funk, metal and other forms of music down to the present day, when hip-hop has become the defining vehicle for transcultural musical collaboration and genre-making. Here let us remember that every one of these artists also impacted European and American artists, completing and restarting the cycle of mutual influence. Yet as far back as the 1932

143

144

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Cairo Congress on Arab Music, which brought together classical luminaries from Europe with the greatest practitioners of well-known Arab styles, Western “experts” cautioned their non-Western colleagues to keep their music pure and avoid miscegenation with Western styles. Not surprisingly, their pleas went unheeded, and remain so—thankfully—today.

Globalization’s Compressed Tempos and Expanded Grooves I have long made a discussion of world music the centerpiece of the course on globalization I teach at UC Irvine’s “Global Cultures” program. But if we hopefully have arrived at a useful description of how we might deploy the term world music today, globalization remains an even more difficult term to define. Even the most casual perusal of the vast literature on globalization reveals how hard it would be to derive a concise definition, but in the context of the case studies I offer below, I will delineate contemporary globalization in the following manner: First, globalization is in no way a new phenomenon. Rather, it began at the dawn of capitalist modernity, which from the start has been inherently globalizing. However it has had multiple distinct phases, beginning with what we can term the “protoglobal” era lasting from 1492 till 1797, and included the Age of Exploration, the rise of New World colonialism, genocide and trans-Atlantic slavery and mercantilist capitalism; the first phase of globalization, from 1798 till 1914, which saw the fullest extent of European empire, the era of High Imperialism, steam-powered industrialization and the first great wave of mass migration; and then, after the long interregnum including the two world wars, the second phase of globalization, under the guise of the Cold War division of the world into two competing and one non-aligned blocs; and finally, the third phase of globalization, from the late 1960s through the present day, in which the guiding framework has been neoliberalism. Several dynamics that are relevant to our story took shape in this period. All surround the transformation of the global economy away from the Fordist style of vertically integrated top-down production-oriented methods. In contrast, neoliberal contemporary globalization is marked by a post-Fordist, flexible accumulation production strategy that is defined by a relentless focus on creating new and ever-expanding consumer desire. The three dominant processes associated with the rise of post-Fordist neoliberal globalization are the intimately related revolutions in computers, communications and transportation technologies, all of which facilitated unprecedented levels of efficiency and profitability, and fundamentally changing the balance of power between capital, labor and governments away from the latter two, as the “compression” of time and space enabled by new technologies allowed for production to move out of the increasingly high wage, highly regulated metropoles, and to the far more pliant, regulation-free postcolonial world—with all the massive inequality and corruption, environmental devastation and global warming the system has produced.

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

Besides periodization, we can divide globalization into three facets: political, economic and cultural; while they all intersect in lived experience, each are epistemologically as well as practically distinct. That political globalization has yet to occur in any meaningful way requires little elaboration, although the strangulation of the United Nations and threat of dissolution of the European Union bear sad witness to this reality. Economic globalization is the component that was sold by neoliberalism’s boosters as the engine of a market-based, consumer-driven global miracle for the post-Cold War world. However, as I have elsewhere elaborated in detail (LeVine 2005), at least through the mid-’00s—with the exception of China—neoliberalism had produced an intensification of flows within the countries of the Global North rather than greater diversification globally. At the same time, much if not the majority of the wealth generated globally during the first four decades of the neoliberal era was siphoned off by the top 10 to 1 percent of the world’s wealthy, even as many countries in the developing world did see some increase in the middle class. The process of “time-space compression”—the fact that with exponential improvements in the speed of computation, communication, transport and travel the experience and meaning of both time and space have been radically compressed—so famously described by Harvey in his majestic The Condition of Postmodernity (1991) as a singular marker of globalization has in fact been the hallmark of capitalist modernity from the start. In the colonized world this process shaped the experience of “unhomeliness,” “deterritorialization” and “disembedding.” How people experienced these related phenomena depended very much on their class position, educational levels, cultural identity, and related markers, with results ranging from the production of strongly chauvinist and closed “resistance identities” to far more optimistic and open “project identities” (Castells 1996). One thing that was clear, however, was that to the extent that economic globalization could be said to occurring, economies were “becoming globalized to the extent they [were becoming] culturalized” (Tomlinson 1999), that is, mediated symbolically in the digital realm— whether through the abstract calculations of increasingly computerized financial industries and the financialization of capitalism more broadly or, more concretely for our purposes, through the economic impacts of the growing ubiquity of high-quality, low-cost and even free digital technologies for the production, distribution and consumption of culture. Not surprisingly, those who stood the most to benefit from the greater openness to or “penetration” of foreign cultures brought on by cultural globalization found the process liberating; they have the money or ability to reroot themselves in the “new economies” of their home countries, or even become rerooted or reterritorialized in the Global North. They can literally as well as figuratively take off and fly. For those who are not included or can’t take advantage of these processes, cultural globalization can feel like an “invasion” while the process of disembedding and deterritorialization can literally be devastating (as the refugee and migrant crises along the US–Mexican and EU borders makes clear). As with previous eras in the history of capitalist modernity, the changing economic foundations of developing societies would strongly shape the dynamics and development of the culture industries. Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School long ago warned of the dangerous illusion of freedom and happiness fostered by the culture industries in the age of high capitalism; and no doubt culture has become a singularly effective weapon for

145

146

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

elites in the wars of position within their societies as neoliberal structural transformations in their economies radically alter (or intensify existing unequal) class relations. But as the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti (1998) told us, culture, and music in particular, is also the greatest weapon that the people have in confronting both the culture industries and the broader hegemonic capitalist political and cultural systems. Indeed, whatever their deleterious impact for workers in other industries, the technological transformations associated with the digitalization of music production, distribution and consumption have had a radically equalizing effect on music industries world-wide—at least for a time—offering even the poorest artists the ability to record, distribute, and consume music in an unprecedentedly inexpensive and even free—and as important, uncontrolled and largely uncensorable—way. It also reshapes the aesthetic contours of world music, as new styles such as hip-hop and experimental electronica and EDM (electronic dance music) become more mainstream, and rise of YouTube and other social media enables a sharing of techniques and knowledge in an unprecedented and completely free manner. And yet at the same time, in this new media environment corporations and big money eventually penetrates and gradually gains influence and ultimately degrees of control that disempower the same artists whom it originally empowered, even as new and seemingly rhizomatic flows bring ever newer generations of artists (today, on Soundcloud and Instagram; tomorrow, who knows where?) with their own still unadulterated, commodified and coopted music to the fore. The three case studies presented here—Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria—explore precisely the new spaces, possibilities and struggles opened by the emergence of the digitized music-scapes of the last twenty years; how they’ve reshaped the production, distribution/ circulation and consumption of music in these countries; how they’ve engendered new styles of “world music,” opened the possibilities for new collaborations, for disembedding and deterritorializing from home and re-embedding and reterritorializing in multiple locations at dizzying speed, even as the inevitable process of corporatization and cooptation and struggles for political control are never far behind. What is most interesting about all the groups I mention below is that with one exception—the Master Musicians of Jajouka—none have ever been on the world music charts or even been nominated for a Grammy. What I want to argue by highlighting them is precisely how the political and cultural economies of globalization, particularly as regards to world music (but one imagines, in most forms of artistic production), are truly revealed in the capillaries of the scenes, often far from the charts, awards and wealth “world music” generates for its major stars.

Morocco Morocco in many ways is a quintessential example of how “world music” in a globalized context operates at multiple economic levels and registers. Viewed one way, Morocco became one of the first locations for the production of what today would be termed “world

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

music” with the “discovery” of the Sufi music of the Rif mountain village of Jajouka (also spelled Joujouka). First visited by beat poets and writers in the 1950s and made famous by William S. Burrough’s or Timothy Leary’s declaration that they were a “four thousand year old rock band” (no one knows for sure who described them this way first), Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones visited the village in 1968 and recorded the musical troupe, members of a local Sufi order dating back over a millennium, whose shrine was located in the village. The album, Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, released (for him posthumously) in 1971, saw Jones engaging in various forms of manipulation of the recordings using tape echoes and other effects, producing a sound that was not merely a faithful field recording of the band, but a hybrid of an ancient—or at least traditional— styles and sounds with modern aesthetics and technology (the next year saw the release of another seminal world music album, Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa). Not surprisingly, the release of the album raised the profile of the band significantly, leading to a long career as a touring and recording group (in fact, two groups, after the original group split in the mid-1970s). Naturally, relatively significant wealth was brought to a village that had no running water or electricity (and in fact, only got both very recently). It also brought a steady stream of visitors and musicians to the village, which in the last decade has started holding annual festivals to accommodate the fans. At the same time, the group has regularly toured globally, including major festivals like Glastonbury. Most recently the joint musical accompaniment were in collaboration with the EDM duo Orb for the 2020 Dior Couture show in Marrakech. One hesitates to think of a more globalized moment for world music than that. Normally, when a local group in Africa suddenly becomes popular on the world music scene, selling records and touring outside their home country, it has a powerful impact on the rest of the country’s music scene, leading other groups to change their traditional sounds and emulate the pioneering group and leading to a homogenization of the sound in the process (a dynamic which, in fact, is common to most every musical genre). But in this case the popularity of the Master Musicians did not impact the broader Moroccan scene for several reasons. First, as a small and self-contained sufi-family group it was not possible for others to simply emulate a style that takes years – in fact generations – of tutelage and initiation in one small place to perform correctly, and as a group. Second, other Moroccan Sufi styles, gnawa chief among them, soon became even more popular both in Morocco and globally (there are thousands of gnawa in Morocco and only two dozen or so MMJ. The Fesitval de Gnaoua in Essaouira welcomes upwards of 500,000 people a year, the average Joujouka micro festival about fifty people). Third, the money and touring were not sufficient to persuade many in the next generation(s) to remain in the poor and relatively remote village when better paying factory jobs awaited them in Tangier, 70 km to the north. Finally, other equally “world” music styles also began circulating widely beginning in the 1970s, from “Marockan rock” of groups like the Fes-based group Les Variations (who would move to France and become one of the progenitors of the the Continental prog-rock scene) to the contemporary “world fusion” group Hoba Hoba Spirit.

147

148

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Along with the massive Gnaoua and micro-Joujouka festivals, Morocco is in fact home to several other of the world’s largest music festivals, including the Fes World Festival of Sacred Music, held annually since 1994; the Mawazine Festival, which since 2001 has brought in some of the world’s biggest Arab and Western pop, rock and hip-hop stars; and the Boulevard festival, which began in 1998 as the Boulevard des jeunes musiciens and which, with well over 100,000 attendees a year, is the largest truly DIY festival in Africa, if not the world (The festival traditionally had four nights in a row, although this year it has split into two weekends of three nights each). Finally, the newest festival, known as Hardzazat Hardcore Festival, takes place in the desert near Ouarzazate with under 100 truly DIY hardcore fans creating a mini-festival for local (and occasionally, European) hardcore punk, rap and metal bands who share an explicitly anti-capitalist, “decolonial” worldview. Morocco is perhaps the world’s capital of what could be termed world music festivals, which individually and collectively cater to multiple sectors of Moroccan and international societies, from extremely wealthy local and international VIPs (especially at Mawazine and Fes) to poor and/or alternative urban youth (L’Boulevard and Hardzazat). Many artists who started off at Boulevard have since “graduated” to Mawazine, Essaouira and/or Fes, which in turn become a springboard for international recognition and hopefully tours and music sales. Together all of these festivals have cemented Morocco’s image as one of the great homes of world music. What is clear from even this cursory review of these festivals and the many dozens of Moroccan artists who perform at them is that it is impossible to engage in any kind of linear discussion about the role of class in the shaping of the music or its production, circulation and/or consumption, as artists from across Morocco from every ethnic and social class background are part of the world music tapestry in the country. The more traditional styles like Gnawa or Joujouka are often performed by musicians that are fairly poor—at least until or unless they achieve a measure of success. More traditional andalusi (Andalusian) music, and also rock and metal on the other end of the spectrum might have a more middle- and upper-middle-class basis in terms of who becomes a musician, but they appeal to a wide spectrum, of social classes. Finally, as is the case the world over, some of Morocco’s biggest artists today are rappers, many of whom came from working-class backgrounds (Fnaire, Don Bigg, H-Kayne), but who have become superstars in Morocco and beyond. Their success, and the “globalization” of Moroccan hip-hop—like that of Moroccan Sufi and trance music—has fundamentally altered their class position, and even the position of class as a component of musical identity. We would be remiss to leave Morocco without pointing out the larger political economy of the festivals in which every Moroccan musical artist of any stature perform at some point. These festivals are among the most important components of the “soft power” or cultural offensive that Morocco has engaged in for several decades to define itself before the world as a modern and “moderate” Muslim country, one that is friendly and open to tourists while also remaining just exotic and other enough to be a desirable destination. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign currency flows into Morocco every year thanks to these festivals and the broader musical economies in which they operate. But beyond the economic impact, and how that has transformed the position of music and the arts

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

more broadly (Morocco also has a very well-established film industry), the King and his court (known as the Makhzen) have created a “festivalization of dissent” (Boum 2012) that redirects and channels and political and social tension in the Kingdom away from protests against the government, while at the same time creating a system of patronage of artists by the King, government and economic elite (through direct payments, financial support, and sponsorships and commercial and licensing opportunities otherwise unavailable to most artists) that ensure their support, or at least silence, at times of major protests such as the Arab Spring protests—when most of the country’s major musical artists across genres either supported the King or kept silent about the protests and the reform measure enacted in response (LeVine 2020).

Egypt Egypt was perhaps the first great exotic tourist destination, the avatar of a globalized place a century and more avant la lettre. Indeed, it’s been at the crossroads of global cultures, migration, and commerce for over five millennia. So it’s not surprising that Egypt was among the most important centers of Arab cultural production, and particularly music, in the modern world; so much so that one of the first—if not the first—international gatherings to explore non-Western music took place in Cairo in 1932, at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music, which brought together not just many of the greatest musicians and singers in the Arab world, but several of the most important European composers of the era, including, Paul Hindemith, Rodolphe d’Erlanger, Henry George Farmer and Béla Bartók. This was the same period that the greatest singer—indeed, artist—in the modern history of the Arab world, began her career. Umm Kulthum, the “voice of Egypt” and “fourth pyramid,” began singing with her father’s ensemble around the First World War, and first came to prominence in the 1920s when a well-known composer Mohamed El Qasabgi, created a virtuoso ensemble around the young prodigy. Although she came from and, at least publicly, stayed close to her humble, village origins, by the 1930s Umm Kulthum had become not just the most famous singer in the Arab world, but also one of its first movie stars, holding her status as “star of the East” (Kawkab al-Sharq) until her death in 1975. While her career peaked and ended LONG before “world music” became an official genre, Umm Kulthum was the paradigm of a very specific kind of world music artist—the kind who takes a style of music rooted and produced largely if not entirely in one culture and/ or society and transcends it without changing the music, the evolutionary trajectory of the music, and neither does/do my feminist colleagues. Indeed, with eighty million albums sold during her lifetime, it is hard to think of a more successful “world music artist” since her. However, other “divas” emerged during her long career, most notably Lebanon’s Fairuz, and beginning in the 1980s, a slew of “Arab pop divas,” including at least two dozen from Egypt, have become famous across the Arab world and beyond, blending the more sophisticated sound she and her amazing composers (particularly Mohamed Abdel Wahab) made famous and turning over the years to an increasingly synthesizer and beat-driven dance style.

149

150

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

At the same time, at least three other distinct genres of what we would define as “world music” developed in Egypt, which paralleled stylistic developments in the surrounding Middle East and North Africa region. The first is what could be described as neo-traditional music building on historic local folk styles, epitomized by groups such as El Tanboura and the El Mastaba Center for Egyptian Folk Music, as well as groups focused on Sufi music (including more “exotic” variants such as the zar (exorcism), and Nubian and other regional varieties. The musicians have come from a range of backgrounds; it would be impossible to generalize any relationship between their initial economic position before becoming artists and the music they wound up creating, especially in comparison to their geographical location and the cultural and religious milieux in which they lived. What is most interesting about this group is that much of their income comes from either support by European or other “Western” NGOs, foundations and governments, international music labels, promoters and elements of the world music industry looking to monetize their music, and tourists and even Egyptians who purchase their music or see their concerts to get a taste of an “authentic” Egyptian musical heritage. Another sub-group of musical styles that represent the manner in which globalization and class interact comprises the metal and hip-hop scenes in Egypt. These two scenes, which mirror the metal and hip-hop scenes across the Arab and larger Muslim worlds, are rarely considered “world music,” because they too are identified with Euro-American mainstream styles. But in the context of the Middle East and/or Africa, they certainly should be considered world music (in fact, they are two of the most globalized forms of music on earth). Moreover, their spread to Egypt and other Middle Eastern and African countries is a quintessential example of the intersection of economic and cultural globalization, from the use of the most advanced new media technologies of the time to create, produce, distribute and consume both genres to their global reach. In fact, hip-hop is the most globally dominant music today while metal remains the fastest growing genre as measured by Spotify and other streaming services. Contrary to the traditional imagination of metalheads as being white and middle to upper-middle class, and rappers as being black and largely working class or poor (which was never more than partly true in the US or Europe where both genres emerged), in Egypt the class and ethnic basis of both genres has been somewhat broader. Yes, the majority of metal fans and musicians have tended to be middle class and above, but as in much of the broader world in Egypt many are also lower-middle class and even poor. Similarly, Egyptian rappers have come from a broad economic and social spectrum, as they have in most every other country. Perhaps the main difference between Egypt and other countries is that few if any Egyptian metal or rap artists can support themselves entirely if at all from their music; although that’s starting to change as their commercial potential—literally their potential to be used for advertising—has become greater. Perhaps no genre epitomizes the ever-changing relationship between globalized dynamics, world music and class as much as the music known as mahragan (also, mahraganat or electro-shaabi). Hip-hop might have its origins in the post-industrial meltdown of the largely black and Latino inner cities of the United States, but to produce it properly always required a certain level of technological competence and equipment

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

that is frequently not available to working-class and poor aspiring artists. In Egypt of the early ’00s, as hip-hop was becoming popular, a specific strain of the genre emerged in Cairo’s poor or “popular” (sha’abi) neighborhoods that bore many of the hallmarks of the genre but was also unique in crucial ways. Mahragan was from the start a more lo-fi version of the much more sophisticated hip-hop productions. Made with clearly cheaper equipment, and by MCs who, according to many hip-hop MCs with whom I’ve spoken, were at first not as talented or at least developed in their style as the more established and experienced MCs, mahragan artists took these ostensible handicaps and turned them into their own aesthetic, adding a large helping of auto-tuned vocals and loud, distorted mixes that evoked the sounds of the almost rave-like weddings where the sound emerged. Mahragan was initially dismissed even by hip-hop artists. But like a viral video or meme, it soon was not merely ubiquitous in Cairo’s and then Egypt’s public spaces but had all but taken over the music scene, its ear-worm like sound making it impossible to ignore and in the process making its emerging voices, who truly did come from some of the most depressed communities in Egypt, celebrities and even major stars. With a “boost” from the 2001 uprising (even though the poorest areas of Cairo were in fact among the least directly involved in the protests), the music caught onto the EDM wave and the top artists, producers and DJs of the scene were regularly featured in international media and began appearing in Europe as well as collaborating with major Euro-American artists. Mahragan is a perfect example of how class and economic conditions more broadly contributed to the aesthetic as well as economic trajectory of a rapidly emerging genre of world music. But the scene would not have exploded internationally, nor likely even at home, the way it did were it not for figures like Mahmoud Refat, a one-time heavy metal drummer-turned-experimental electronic music impresario whose label 100Copies was an early supporter of the genre, helping produce, release and publicize many of the first major artists in the scene. Refat was already an established presence in the Cairo music scene, fluent in English (unlike most of the mahragan artists), with his own production house and label, access to studios, producers, international media and money. While it has not become nearly as successful, Egypt’s pioneering experimental electronic music scene—not to be confused with the EDM scene—is far more commercial and less improvisational on stage, at which Refat has also been at the center. It is hard to imagine two scenes from more opposite ends of the cultural and economic spectrum than the highly intellectual, international and avant-garde experimental electronic music scene and mahragan, yet the two evolved symbiotically and with a clear degree of mutual influence. This context problematizes any attempt to define the role of class in the emergence of mahragan, never mind the broader tapestry of Egyptian music today. What is clear is that the various music scenes we’ve discussed force us to expand our understanding of what constitutes both “world music” and “globalization,” and the role of class and economic considerations in reconceptualizing them. At the same time, it’s clear that while the artists themselves are most responsible for their success, mahragan would not have developed as quickly and successfully as it did without the participation of a range of people from different class backgrounds.

151

152

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Nigeria Both culturally and economically, Nigeria can be conceived of as holding a pride of place vis-a-vis sub-Saharan Africa similar to Egypt’s traditional prominence in the Arab world: the most populous country with (until the discovery of oil in the Persian Gulf and gas off the southern Mediterranean) the most important economy and, because of its size and economic weight as well as geographic position, the region’s center of cultural gravity. Like Egypt and Morocco and every other location in Afro-Eurasia, the territories that comprise present-day Nigeria have long been criss-crossed by trade and migration routes, by land and sea, that incorporated them into continent-wide networks, and even farther still. Whether it was the arrival of Islam to present-day northern Nigeria a millennium ago, the prevalence of Indian textiles thanks to trade with European slaving vessels in the eighteenth century, the constant travels of the Kru peoples along the West African coast (which helped introduce many European instruments to the region), or the more intensive globalization that began with British rule in 1905, Nigeria has been a core region for cultural as well as economic globalization. Indeed, the very music that first made Nigeria one of the early progenitors of “world music”—highlife and Afrobeat—was the product of centuries of movement of people, instruments and styles back and forth across the great trans-Atlantic circuit connecting Africa with the Caribbean and the American South. Seminal artists like King Sunny Adé, Victor Uwaifo, Fela Kuti, and synth-funk pioneer William Onyeabor, all derived their unique styles from this common heritage. Fela Kuti in particular developed “Afrobeat” after first studying jazz in London, creating a highlife group back in Lagos, touring in the US and meeting the Black Panthers as well as being inspired by James Brown and Sierra Leonian funk pioneer Gerald Pino, hooking up with the half-Ghanaian half-Nigerian drummer Tony Allen (who sewed together the traditional rhythms of multiple regions of both countries to create the “beat” of Afrobeat), and blending all this into a once-in-acentury musical cocktail that was inseparable from his rising political consciousness. A generation after his untimely death from AIDS in 1998, an entirely new sound, deceptively called Afrobeats (also known as the Naija sound) has blended together the dembow and reggaeton rhythms of Jamaica and Puerto Rico with hints of the original Afrobeat and clave rhythms and a heavy dose of auto-tune to create a sound that today literally dominates the world, or at least the world of hip-hop and R&B. Nigerian artists like Davido, Wizkid, Burna Boy and Tiwa Savage have become some of the biggest music stars on the planet, collaborating with the likes of Beyoncé and Drake while inspiring some of the biggest hits of Justin Bieber and Diplo (in their 2015 megahit “Sorry”). These artists no longer depend on album sales or even the low returns of streaming (although when one averages in the tens of millions of views/streams per song the numbers do add up). Rather, most of their income outside of live performances is derived from mobile phone downloads and ringtones, as well as merchandise sales, licensing and placements or endorsements and advertising. Wherever they started on the economic latter, today these artists are among the richest on earth. On the complete other end of the economic spectrum, there continues to be a tradition of what Nigerian musicologist Austin Emielu terms “village highlife,” a much more

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

traditional-sounding highlife performed by local bands across the middle belt of Nigeria, which is largely sold in local markets in CD form and rarely if ever circulated or streamed online. This localized economy both prevents the artists from achieving widespread success but also allows them to continue the political tradition of highlife that most of the bigger stars have avoided; their local footprint, lack of online presence or major corporate support keeps them off the government radar. As I have seen first hand in my work with the group Chicoco Community Media Initiative in Port Harcourt, finally there are certain groups in Nigeria and many other developing countries that are the product of organizations and NGOs and that have unique access to funding and other local as well as international resources. This creates a situation in which artists who are in fact quite poor, and normally would not have the resources at their disposal to engage in any way in a professional level recording or have access to any kind of decent equipment for performing and recording, suddenly have access to equipment and resources way beyond their economic means. In some cases, the incongruences are glaring, as when homeless young musicians are sleeping in recording studios, yet creating music that allows them to move beyond their desperate economic circumstances to a chance at a professional career. When these local organizations are in fact well-funded by international NGOs like Amnesty International, Comic Relief and the Roskilde Foundation, as well as receiving support from various European governments, the possibility to create and distribute music, and perform far from their immediate home base, becomes much more real. But how and even whether to interpolate class into this scenario, in which poor youth are working with well-educated local and international NGO staff in groups that receive significant foreign funding and through it become linked to important Nigerian and international networks, remains to be adequately considered.

Conclusion: World Music as a Weapon/ Commodity World music has long been the soundtrack for social and political change and even revolution across the Global South. From South African artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Hugh Masekela to Senegalese icon Youssou N’Dour and Africa’s most famous political artist, Fela Kuti, there was a fortuitous confluence of highly public struggles against oppressive regimes and the rise of a kind of hybrid, highly infectious and danceable styles of world music that captured the imagination of the (Western) world. Artists like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and other Muslim artists, have become ambassadors for cross-cultural and interreligious tolerance and cooperation. More recently, the Iranian Green Wave and then Arab “springs” (in fact, various kinds of protests, uprisings and civil wars) have produced dozens of artists who have become unofficial “singers” or “rappers” of their respective “revolutions.” And if we move both west and east—to Mexico and Latin American more broadly, and to India, we see how genres such as Bollywood, salsa and corrido, and Sufi rock, have become hugely influential internationally, transforming the very aesthetic grounding of world music, taking it from a self-contained style based in one location to an aesthetic marker and tool

153

154

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

used by artists from around the world often coming from completely different cultural and musical places. But all we have to do is wonder at the seemingly strange popularity of American country music in parts of Kenya and Nigeria to understand that this process goes back to the very dawn of recorded music, and in fact long before. If it is clear that world music and globalization are two concepts that not only emerged around the same time but also are the product of the same economic and cultural processes, the specific relationships of class to these two terms remains much harder to define. Nor is it necessarily very informative to map out the class positions from which various artists and genres began their journey towards global recognition. What is interesting in the context of both world music and globalization are the ways in which “world musicians” have variously acted either within or against the interests of the hegemonic classes in their societies, in the latter case turning their music into the very “weapon” Fela Kuti declared would be crucial to the political conflicts of the now present. In the same way as does class, I would argue that world music can exist in both “in itself ” and “for itself ” forms. World music “in itself ” comprises the majority of music affiliated with the genre whose aesthetic power and qualities clearly push it beyond its immediate borders to have a truly global impact, but where the artists producing it don’t necessarily see the music as having greater social and/or political function or power. World music “for itself ” would, conceived in this manner, be music that is created and/or used by artists specifically as a tool or “weapon” in struggles for political, economic and/or social transformation. And it is this type of world music where class becomes a useful tool of analysis of its aesthetic as well as political dynamics and impact. Marx was not an expert or a frequent writer on musical topics, but it is clear that he saw the music and art produced by a culture, more than reflecting the ideology of the class that produced it, as deeply shaped by the broader society’s level of development and social structure as well (Marx and Engels 1976). Yet he also saw music, at least potentially, as “free labor”—that is, created of a “social nature” and with a “scientific character and … general work” in which rather than being directed by the dominant economic forces and their attendant ideologies, becomes “the activity of a subject controlling all the forces of nature in the production process” (qtd in Lindley 2010). But where to put music and musicians in the dialectical relationship between economic base and cultural/ideological superstructure? If we recall the discussion above in which Marx defines class as not merely an economic relationship between people but also a psychological state of mind, we can understand his description of the “intelligentsia” and “ideological classes” firmly in the camp of the bourgeoisie (Ollman 1968) as a placement that can change as the state of mind of both artist and consumer changes. Especially in liminal moments of intense political and/or social conflict, there is room for significant agency by musicians in terms of whether their music supports or subverts existing orders, regardless of their own immediate class position. Indeed, the early Marx saw art as existing at an “archimedean point” outside, or at least before, being embedded in the material conditions of society (Werckmeister 1973: 505–8). Viewed thus, artists are not merely part of an “intelligentsia” tied to the dominant class but as having the possibility to function as “organic intellectuals” who operate outside and

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

even against their class position. And so art, and music in particular, has the possibility to transcend the strictures of the social and economic formation in which it emerges and which produces it and instead reveals the possibilities for a very different future. It is that portal to a different future that makes art, and especially music, so powerful and so threatening to those in power; the “richness of subjective human sensibility,” the “senses affirming themselves,” as Marx puts it in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (qtd in Lindley 2010), becomes a central means towards freedom. And thus for Marx music becomes a way for artists to move beyond merely “perfecting the illusions” of the bourgeois or other elite classes and towards creating new possibilities for the future. Gramsci’s development of Marx’s small but important artistic turn with the concepts of hegemony, organic intellectuals and the war of position, helps us further understand how artists, and musicians among them, function either to reinforce or disrupt larger ideological and political imaginaries. Gramsci seemed to have a somewhat negative view of the artist, considering her or him to be part of the “traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual” along with the man of letters, philosopher and journalist, denying their claim to be “true intellectuals” until their works “no longer consist of eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor [and] organizer, as ‘permanent persuader,’ not just simple orator” (Gramsci 1971: 9–10). Similarly, and as I have elsewhere discussed in greater detail (Hjelm and Kahn-Harris, and LeVine 2013), in the seminal struggle within the Frankfurt School between Benjamin’s optimism that an auraless art of the age of “mechanical [lit: technological] reproduction” will finally catalyze its liberatory force, and his good friend Adorno’s belief that the spiritual and individual aura of the pre-industrial era will simply be replaced by an “aura of style” that even more powerfully reinforces the hegemonic political, economic and cultural order(s), one can look towards Gramsci’s imagination of a truly praxic and weaponized art as a guide to illuminate whether, how and when “world music” under conditions of (neoliberal) globalization becomes what LeVine and Reynolds term emurgent (urgently produced in the midst of struggle), transversal and revolutionary (2016, 2020). Or, if we remain more Adornian in our pessimism about the possibility for revolutionary transformation in the near future, can we see globalized world music fulfill its potential for inspiring and sustaining ongoing immanent critique of society without which no substantive transformation will ever be possible? The rise of “new media” in the last thirty years, particularly inexpensive yet powerful computers, the internet, social media and smart phones, clearly marked a fundamental transformation away from “mechanical” and towards “digital” production, distribution and consumption of culture (LeVine, 2011). I have argued (LeVine 2011) that these changes allowed for a “return of the aura” to music which, at least for a time in the years leading up to the 2010–2013 Arab uprisings era, gave unique power to artists to play a powerful role in their societies struggles for revolutionary political change. The same dynamics also helped artists across Africa and the Global South more broadly, simultaneously to evade and avoid government censorship or control by corporate media, to engage in “political music” to a greater degree than in the previous era and, equally important, to develop new ways of monetizing their music that enabled new possibilities for sustainable careers.

155

156

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Several issues need to be considered at this point. First, the computers, the internet and digitalization might have revolutionized the way music is produced, circulated and consumed. But “social media” has always existed, and artists have always had ways to communicate directly to desired audiences. Fela Kuti didn’t need to tweet that his compound was burned to the ground and his mother thrown out a window in 1977. He put the photo of him marching her coffin to the presidential palace on the cover of his next album. Almost three dozen years later, Ramy Essam did not become the “singer of the Egyptian revolution” because of Facebook and YouTube (where the video of his first public performance of the soon-to-be anthem “Irhal” quickly went viral), but rather because his music moved people who were right in front of him in Tahrir Square. In between the two events a host of South African music groups didn’t top the-then-new “world music” charts and win a host of Grammys because of any advances in technology, but rather because the world knew about their struggles against Apartheid and because they’d created a sound, as has always happened in popular music and rock and roll, that transcended cultural and national boundaries and got the whole world to dance and share the pain and joy they so powerfully expressed. Finally, hip-hop did not become the culturally hegemonic popular music aesthetic globally because of the move from the “mechanical” to “digital” eras of reproduction; rather it did it because it was both hypermodern and rooted in the most ancient rhythms and modes of communication—the counterpoint between percussion and speech All of these forms, styles and groups have in various ways been revolutionary in their potential if not their endpoint. But while most of these revolutionary imaginations concerned at their core calls to address rampant inequality and bring poor and workingclass people (the vast majority of the world’s population outside the major industrial countries) a measure of dignity, social justice, and if possible, democracy, the imagination of “tearing down” the existing “systems” and replacing them with something more equal and just was not grounded in any kind of self-conscious class analysis or program. The intersection of globalization and world music cannot be understood without, never mind divorced from, issues of class. But neither can it be reduced or even defined by class motivations. All three must be understood holistically. Ultimately, the greater political and financial freedoms and possibilities represented by the freewheeling manner that existed from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s could not last. By around 2013 most governments had figured out how to monitor social media and other forms of digital communication, hamstringing the “digital public sphere” while economic elites, allied to governments and increasingly controlling the commercial distribution pathways for digital music, made it harder for artists to monetize their music if they were considered too political or in any way a threat (or event just irritant) to governments. Music as a weapon in struggles for creating solidarity lost ground to ethnic, religious, gender and other forms of chauvinism and violence. The cycle has moved again to what appears to be a low ebb; but the fundamental nature of all revolutions is that especially at their lowest point, their return, albeit in a very different form and under different circumstances, is inevitable. Music may have lost ground recently as a catalyzer and amplifier of movements for social change, but it will always be, as Fela Kuti so famously put it, the weapon of the future.

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

Discography Adé, King Sunny (1998), Odu, Atlantic. Arabian Knightz (2012), UKnighted States of Arabia, Magnum Opus Music. Bieber, Justin (2015), “Sorry,” featuring J Balvin, Purpose, Def Jam. Bigg, Don, (2018), “170 KG,” DBF. Black Uhuru (1981), Black Songs of Freedom, Greensleeves Records. Bocelli, Andrea (1999), Sogno, Polydor Records. Byrne, David (1989), Rei Momo, Luaka Bop. Cooder, Ry, (1997), Buena Vista Social Club, Nonesuch. Chieftans (1996), Santiago, RCA Records. Clegg, Johnny & Savuka (1993), Heat, Dust and Dreams, Capitol Records. Davido (2012), Omo Baba Olowo, HKN Music. Deep Forest (1995), Boheme, Sony Records. Dibango, Manu (1972), Soul Makossa, Société Française du Son. Eskenderella (2013), Safha Gedeedam, DJ Recording. Eksperyans, Boukman (1991), Vodou Adjae, Mango Records. Gipsy Kings, The (1991), Este Mundo, Elektra Records. Hart, Mickey (1992), Planet Drum, Rykodisc. H-Kayne (2005), HK 1426’, Platinum Music. Hoba Hoba Spirit (2005), Blad Schizo, Hot Lunch Records. Jones, Brian (1971), Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, Rolling Stones Records. Keita, Salif (1987), Soro, Mango Records. Khaled (1993), N’ssi N’ssi, Barclay. Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali (1996), Night Song, Real World Records. Kidjo, Angelique (1985), Ewa Ka Djo (Let’s Dance), Nova Zembla Records. Kronos Quartet, The (1992), Pieces of Africa, Nonesuch. Kuti, Fela (1998), Music is the Weapon of the Future, ExWorks Records. Kuti, Femi (2001), Fight to Win, MCA Records. Kuti, Seun (2011), From Africa With Fury: Rise, Knitting Factory Records. Ladysmith Black Mambazo (1987), Shaka Zulu, Warner Brothers. Lazywall (2010), Restart, self-released. Louca, Maurice (2010), Garraya, 100Copies Music. Makeba, Miriam (1962), The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba, Kapp. Mapfumo, Thomas (2006), Rise Up, Real World Records. Masekela, Hugh (2012), Jabulani, Listen 2. Mounir, Mohamed (2012), “Ezzay?” Various Artists, From The Kasbah/Tunis To Tahrir Square/Cairo And Back, Network Medien. Nascimento, Milton (1997), Nascimento, Warner Bros. N’Dor, Youssou (1992), Eyes Open, Columbia Records. Onyeabor, William (1978), Atomic Bomb, Wilfilms Records (reissued Luaka Bop 2015). Sadad and Alaa 50 Cent (2013), Best of Sadat and Alaa 50 Cent, Generation Bass. Savage, Tiwa (2013), Once Upon a Time, Mavin Records. Simon, Paul (1986), Graceland, Rhino Records. Taha, Rachid (1998), Diwan, Barclay.

157

158

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Tinariwen (2010), Tassili, Anti. Touré, Ali Farka and Ry Cooder (1994), Talking Timbuktu, World Circuit. Uwaifo, Victor (1980), Obrosho, Polydor. Les Variations (1974), Moroccan Roll, Buddah Records. Wizkid (2011), Superstar, Empire Mates. Zap Mama (1992), Zap Mama, Imports.

Works Cited Achy, L. (2010), “Morocco’s Experience for Poverty Reduction: Lessons for the Arab World,” Carnegie Papers #25, December. Available online: https://carnegieendowment.org/files/ morocco_poverty1.pdf (accessed May 4, 2019). Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer ([1947] 2002), The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Andrew, E. (1983), “Class in Itself and Class against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 16 (3): 577–84. Benjamin, W. ([1936] 2008), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Bohlman, P. (2002), World Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boum, A. (2012), “Festivalizing Dissent in Morocco,” Middle East Report, 263: 22–5. Byrne, D. (1999), “Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity: ‘I Hate World Music’,” New York Times, October 3. Cammett M. and I. Diwan (2013a), “Toward a Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings (Part One),” Jadaliyya, December 26. Available online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/ Details/30000/Toward-a-Political-Economy-of-the-Arab-Uprisings-Part-One (accessed May 13, 2019). Cammett, M. and I. Diwan (2013b), “Toward a Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings (Part Two),” Jadaliyya, December 26. Available online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/ Details/30001/Toward-a-Political-Economy-of-the-Arab-Uprisings-Part-Two (accessed May 13, 2019). Castells, M. (1996), The Power of Identity, London, UK: Blackwell. Cohen, G. A. (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1989), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1: 139–67. Crenshaw, K. (1991), “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2009), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. R. Hurley), New York: Penguin Classics. Ernst and Young (2013), “Hitting the Sweet Spot: The Growth of the Middle Class in Emerging Markets.” Available online: https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ Hitting_the_sweet_spot/%24FILE/Hitting_the_sweet_spot.pdf (accessed May 4, 2019).

Class, Cultures, and Globalization

Feld, S. (2000), “The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop,” in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, 280–304, Berkeley: University of California Press. Frank, T. (1997), The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frith, S. (2000), “The Discourse of World Music,” in G. Born and D. Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, 305–22, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gibson, C. (2018), “The 10 Most Important Facts about Poverty in Morocco,” The Borgen Project. Available online: https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-poverty-in-morocco/ (accessed March 21, 2019). Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International Publishers Co. Harvey, D. (1991), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hjelm, T., K. Kahn-Harris, and M. LeVine (eds) (2013), Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures, London: Equinox Publishing. Kolawole, B. O., A. O. Olufunsho, and J. O. Yaqub (2015), “Poverty, Inequality and Rising Growth in Nigeria: Further Empirical Evidence,” International Journal of Economics and Finance, 7 (2): 51–62. Lanchovichina, E. (2018), “Eruptions of Popular Anger The Economics of the Arab Spring and Its Aftermath,” Washington, DC: World Bank. Available online: https:// openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28961 (accessed March 30, 2019). Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space (trans D. Nicholson-Smith), London: Wiley-Blackwell. LeVine, M. (2005), Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil, Oxford: Oneworld Publications. LeVine, M. (2011), “New Hybridities of Arab Musical Intifadas,” Jadaliya, October 29. Available online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3008/the-new-hybridities-ofarab-musical-intifadas (accessed May 4, 2019). LeVine, M. (2020). Heavy Metal Islam, Vol. 2, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. LeVine, M. and B. Reynolds (2016), “Uprisings,”, in K. van Nieuwkerk, M. LeVine, and M. Stokes, (eds), Islam and Popular Culture, 58–78, Austin: University of Texas Press. Lindley, M. (2010), “Marx and Engels on Music.” Available online: https://mronline. org/2010/08/18/marx-and-engels-on-music/ (accessed May 15, 2019). Llewellyn Smith, C. (2011), “‘World Music’ Is Invented in a North London Pub,” The Guardian, June 15. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/16/ world-music-term-invented (accessed May 4, 2019). Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976), Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers (trans. A. Blunden), Kolkata: Progressive Publishers. Najmabadi, A. (2005), Women With Mustaches and Men Without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties in Iranian Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ncube, M., J. Anyanwu, and K. Hausken (2014), “Inequality, Economic Growth and Poverty in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), African Development Review Volume 26: 3: September, 435–53. Noury, A. I. (2017), “Lifting Moroccans Out of Poverty,” Fair Observer, April 5. Available online: https://www.fairobserver.com/world-news/poverty-morocco-world-newssustainable-development-34540/ (accessed March 31, 2019).

159

160

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Ollman, B. (1968), “Marx’s Use of ‘Class’,” American Journal of Sociology 73 (5): 573–80. Ossowski, S. (1963), Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, New York: The Free Press of Glen Cove. Oxfam (2017), Inequality in Nigeria: Exploring the Drivers, Nairobi: Oxfam. Reeves, R. V., and K. Guyot, and E. Krause (2018a), “Defining the Middle Class: Cash, Credentials, or Culture?” Brookings Institution, May 7. Available online: https://www. brookings.edu/research/defining-the-middle-class-cash-credentials-or-culture/ (accessed March 13, 2019). Reeves, R. V., K. Guyot, and E. Krause (2018b), “A Dozen Ways to Be Middle Class,” Washington, DC: Brooking Institution, May 8. Available online: https://www.brookings. edu/interactives/a-dozen-ways-to-be-middle-class/ (accessed March 13, 2019). Sedgwick, E. (2008), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stokes, M. (2004), “Music and the Global Order,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 33: 47–72. Tomlinson, J. (1999), Globalization and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Werckmeister, O. K. (1973), “Marx on Ideology and Art,” New Literary History 4 (3): 501–19, (Spring, 1973). World Bank (2017, 2018a), Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2017 and 2018, available online: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/2018-atlas-sustainable-development-goalsall-new-visual-guide-data-and-development (accessed May 4, 2019). World Bank (2018b), “Poverty in Morocco: Challenges and Opportunities.” Available online: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/morocco/publication/poverty-in-moroccochallenges-and-opportunities (accessed May 4, 2019).

8 Songs of the Outcast: Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC Hon-Lun Yang

Popular music is sensitive to what is happening in society. A product of the negotiation of many fields—the political, the social, the cultural, and also the aesthetical—it reflects the society, but at the same time, it has its own aesthetic logic. Even in autocratic states such as the People’s Republic of China (hereafter the PRC), the government exercises strict control over contents circulated, and what type of music was/is censored changes over time just as the regime’s ideology evolves in response to many external factors. Naturally, what each type of music means to the state as well as to its citizens, and what kind of class identity a particular type of music embodies changes along with social mobility, people’s taste and musical perceptions and receptions. The purpose of this chapter is to unravel the intricate relationships between popular music, class, and censorship in the PRC. Looking at music examples from three different phases of the country’s development, this chapter examines how the regime’s censorial practice reinforces and strengthens a certain type of class ideology; but at the same time, it also reveals how censorship may work in an opposite way to help the transmission of the music and even to immortalize it. In addition, this study shows censorship’s impact on musicians as well as the public; but most of all, it unravels censorship-inspired discourse and related activities as a means of resistance. It argues that while the act to silence a particular voice or message works to foster class consciousness for a limited time, censorship transcends a certain song’s class boundaries in the long run.

Theoretical Framework Music censorship—the restriction of a certain type or a certain piece of music’s circulation—has a long history and is exercised for various reasons (see Hall 2018). The fact that music can impact those who listen to it explains why those who fear its power want to control it (Brown and Volgsten 2005: xiii). In our time, it is popular music that

162

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

is most often targeted for censorship. It is not because of the nature of popular music being inherently oppositional (Peddie 2006: xvii), but rather, it has to do with popular music’s quick dissemination. Its commercial success as a product of mass circulation is what accounts for its political power as a good tool to share opposing ideas to the dismay of opponents (Kirkegaard and Otterbeck 2017: 257). As John Street points out, “[s]ome of the strongest claims for the political importance of popular music have been made by its greatest enemies …. From the earliest days of rock ‘n’ roll, priests, parents and politicians have warned of the dangers inherent in the rhythms, the voices, the words and the images of the music. And each new wave in pop history has been greeted by the outcry of those who fear for its consequences” (2010: 243). Even in democratic countries such as the UK and the US, censorship of popular music exists in myriad forms (see for instance Cloonan 1996 and Jones 1991, respectively) that can range from radio and television bans to the restriction of concerts and raves, from a record company’s not signing a particular artist to retail outlets not carrying certain recordings, not to mention moralist pressure groups and religious sects to impose warning labels, and last but not least, the use of aesthetic critiques and advertisements to manipulate audience’s tastes (see Cloonan 1996). The role censorship plays in fostering or hindering popular music’s relationship to class, however, is an uncharted territory in popular music scholarship. This has to do, on the one hand, with music’s relationships to class and censorship being very much under studied, and on the other, with scholars seeing reasons for censorship as varied and without a clear pattern (see Cloonan 2004, and Kirkegaard and Otterbeck 2017: 257). In other words, censorship is not thought to be class oriented but instead largely ideologically or politically driven. Nonetheless, it is not to say that there is no connection between the three. In this regard, I would like to posit censorship in connection to the three commonly identified ways of unpacking popular music from the lenses of class as mentioned in WisemanTrowse’s study (2008) of how class is performed in British popular music. First, the class position of the audience of a particular type of music, which, among other factors, can account for the gratification brought by music consumption, and which forms a part of the nexus that constructs music’s meanings; second, the class-specific messages communicated through musical and lyrical contents, to be received variously by audiences of different class positions; third, the class position of music’s creative actors—its practitioners and producers that might mark the music they make with this particular class identity (Wiseman-Trowse 2008: 10–11). Bearing the above in mind, I propose that censorship does have a role to play in establishing the class orientation of a certain type of music by restricting songs and musicians already labeled or seen as associated with this particular class position. While censorship can be in many forms and censorial agents can be the “governments, mass media, religious authorities, industries, business firms, school systems, retailers, music groups, parents, and even individual musicians” (Korpe et al. 2005: 240), this study focuses on government censorship, which operated differently in different phases of the country’s development, exemplifying both constrictive as well as restrictive forms of censorship. In addition to its detrimental impacts on musicians, I argue that censorship in the PRC also plays a part in creating a new class, the class of the outcast, an individual rejected by

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

society. The restriction of content likely foregrounds the people behind these restricted contents and in a way draws attention to them, as the rejected, censored songs become the embodiment of the hearts and souls of the outcast, who are the marginalized in the society. Lastly, I would like to emphasize the fluidity of class in our times, particularly in the PRC, be it in its label as well as in its making. Regarding class as an entity or imagination that is “made,” Beverley Skeggs (2004) takes note that “class cannot be made alone, without all the other classifications that accompany it” (3). She argues that class is construed through exchange, inscription, value systems, institutions, and even nationhood, which, in a way is related to Bourdieu’s four main types of capital—economic, cultural, social, and symbolic, as one’s class identity is based upon the amount of capital he/she possesses while each type of capital is transferrable. The capital one possesses also performs the function of inscription, “the essential social characteristics” of a particular class group that “shapes bodies in the making of strata and behaviour” (Skeggs 2004: 12), and also sets limits to the body’s possibilities for exchange or conversion of capital (16–17). For instance, those limited in economic capital are likely to be short of the mainstream type of cultural and social capital as well. In this regard, censorship can reinforce class identity, class values, and class messages even though this may or may not be the censor’s reason(s) to restrict and to silence. Nonetheless, censorship’s consequence and impact on individuals of different classes may vary. Most of all, taking a holistic look at censorship, despite its horrific impact on individuals, the unanticipated consequence of censorship can be illuminating about a regime’s capacity as well as incapacity to restrict music’s circulation and impact in the long run.

Yellow Songs of the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie The question of “class” was in the limelight of the PRC’s political debate for the first three decades of the country’s history. New class categories emerged after the founding of the communist state in 1949. Frequently found in writings was the use of terms such as “capitalists,” “petite bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” “working class,” among others, the socalled label of “Marxist classes” (Fitzpatrick 2005: 71). According to Eddy U (2016), these new category of classes “had nothing to do with the actual social structure of production” (7), but were instead “constituted through official classification,” which impacted on “selfidentities and social identifications, but also governance, marriage patterns, individual aspirations, and so on” (2). The following will show that the re-emergence of the genre known as “yellow song,” and the act to remove it, was intricately connected to the regime’s will toward the formation of these new “Marxist classes” in the late 1950s. “Yellow song” was used in the late 1950s to refer to popular songs circulated in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s. A product of China’s urban media culture, which was covered in quite some details by Andrew Jones (2001) in his seminal volume Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, these pop songs from Shanghai,

163

164

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

known in Chinese then as shidai qu (modern songs) are “a hybrid genre of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk forms” (6). Left-wing writers and musicians such as Tian Han and Nie Er were the first to criticize these songs as decadent, sexy, and jazzy back in the early 1930s (see Jones 2001: 73–104).1 These early left-wing cultural workers, seeing the country as suffering from national humiliation brought by imperialism, called for musicians to write songs that were upbeat, marshal, and positive so as to motivate the masses to fight for their nation’s self-determination. These so-called “red songs” were the ideological other of the “yellow songs.” Such lines of left-wing rhetoric informed the PRC’s cultural policy for almost three decades from the founding of the nation in 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. In fact, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders returned to such a rhetoric time and again as a tool to rid dissidents from the party. In March 1957, in his speech at the Communist National Conference, Mao voiced the view that even though the CCP had won a basic victory in transforming the ownership of the means of production by founding the new communist nation, it had not yet won complete victory on the political and ideological fronts. Thus, it had to “wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. Therefore, “[a]ll erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked” (Mao 1967: 23–27). After Mao’s 1957 speech, “Yellow song” was soon dubbed “poisonous weeds” and was deemed necessary for eradication (Wang 1958: 10). Just as hygiene was a subject matter deployed by the new bourgeoisie in Britain in the nineteenth century to distinguish themselves from those without such consciousness (see McClintock 1995), in the same vein, “yellow song” was an important element in the CCP’s metanarrative to construct its proletariat class identity by denouncing such a genre of music. Critiqued as the embodiment of mimi zhi yin (decadent and weak music), yellow song was thought to be able to cause people to languish. Its link with old China was also conveniently equated with the resurgence of the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie, the social classes that emerged in Republican China. The songs’ lyrical contents were deemed unhealthy, “propagating the sentiments and lifestyle of the petite bourgeoisie” (Zhou 1958: 15). Most of all, “yellow song” was seen as able to “fool people into forgetting about the cruel reality of the past and indulging in the materialistic life of a selected group” (Li 1959: 15). Such a narrative could be seen to be based on the assumption that certain types of music carried the class identity of its creative actors and then the consumer of such would be influenced by the class position of its creators or by the messages embedded. The inscription of such an ideology came in many forms aside from censorship, such as through partyled symposiums or political campaigns and movements. For example, a symposium on “yellow song,” led by the Chinese Composers Association, was held in Liaoning in October 1957. Its main objective was to alert participants—cultural workers of the country—to the danger of this type of songs. Apart from making participants reflect on what caused the prosperity of the genre, the event also intended to nudge participants to join the “anticapitalist war against ‘yellow music’” (Chen 1957: 44). In 1958, the mandated ideology was raised to a higher level of political importance in the form of a nationwide “anti-yellow

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

song campaign” that involved cultural workers of all levels, so as to increase the production of “musical works that would instigate the appropriate class attitudes among the masses” (Wang 1958: 10). This type of ideological propaganda was an example of constrictive censorship that worked to control the cultural workers’ psyche. Not only were all “yellow songs” eradicated from the national soundscape, songwriters such as Li Jinhui, Chen Gexin, and Liu Xue’an were persecuted for having produced such “poisonous weeds” of society. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), LPs and phonographs were smashed for their association with the petite bourgeoisie, which exemplified the extreme form of restrictive censorship as well as its often violent acts.

Popular Songs of the Masses As a result of strict ideological control in the first three decades of the PRC’s history, most citizens born in the mid-1950s–1960s were totally alienated from Western-style popular songs prior to the country’s economic reform in 1978. The extent to which lyrical songs disappeared from the national soundscape can be gleaned from the shock experienced by those who encountered Teresa Teng’s (aka Deng Lijun) singing for the first time, as exemplified in the reminiscence below: I heard Deng Lijun’s song for the first time in the late 1970s. It was a song called “The Girl from the Southern Sea” seemingly played on Australia’s Chinese broadcast. At the time, Deng was seen as Taiwan’s black general to corrode China youth. Her songs were classified as “yellow songs” that could not be heard through regular channels. I was a high school student. Even though the broadcast was very much interfered and was of very bad quality, I was struck by her singing. [The song’s] melody was totally different from revolutionary songs. Deng’s charming style of singing, her airy use of vocal timbre was my first experience of femininity and sex desire. (Wang 2008: 223)

Many testified to the same experience, while reasons for the “shock” were manifold. The excitement and sensation from violating the ban on hearing forbidden music not only revealed the irresistible temptation of Teng’s songs but also illuminated a collective desire to break away from the “red songs”—the “ideological other”—the anti-colonial mass songs that stood in stark contrast to the Western-influenced popular songs. In the handbook How to Recognize Yellow Songs (Zenmo bianbie hunagshe gequ) (1982), popular songs, particularly the “yellow” type, were reported to be marked by the following recognizable musical characteristics: 1) soft, swinging, and seductive rhythmic features that resulted from the use of syncopations; 2) narrative melodies that lead to the vocal climax as a way to release negative emotions; and 3) an airy and sexual way of singing that gives the voice emotional power because of the vocal quality’s association with intimacy and storytelling (Zhou 1982b: 22–5). As one Chinese scholar explained, during the so-called “revolutionary song era” all that people heard were songs with slogan-like lyrics marked by forceful and marshal music, the so-called “red songs” that defined the “emotional structure” and means of expression of the

165

166

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

masses. Teresa Teng’s songs were thought to have destroyed such a fixation, as her decadent vocal quality was thought to have awakened the masses’ sense of affects and desires that were suppressed prior to the 1980s (Zong 2005: 65). Teresa Teng (1953–1995) was a Taiwanese singer who sang largely pop songs, including covers of Shanghai pops. One of her hits, “When Will You Return?” (Heri jun zailai?) was such a cover, a love song composed in 1937 by Liu Xue’an for the movie Three Stars Around the Moon (Sanxing ban yue) with the famed Zhou Xuan playing the lead role, and who also sang the song (Nan 1980/1982: 43). An ill-fated but extremely popular song (it was covered in an anti-Japanese film made in 1939 and was later also covered by the Japanese-China-born singer Yoshiko Yamaguchi [her Chinese name was Li Xianlan] in one of her recordings), it was targeted for censorship by rulers of different regimes (see Steen 1999/2000). The song was again singled out for criticism and censorship in the early 1980s when Teng’s cover was transmitted to every part of the country. A Chinese writer’s first encounter with the song is rather illuminating as to its impact: I felt like I was being electrocuted, my whole body falling numb and tingling. Teresa Teng’s singing voice was like a poison that dissolved my ear, putting me into a hallucinatory state. This temporary “out of my mind” experience was, however, not because of the shock of her beautiful voice, but instead, the terror of hearing a “yellow song.” I asked myself—I have heard a yellow song, my god, what am I going to do? How can I cleanse myself? … I was only a junior high student, but my school principal, class teacher, and particularly the teacher in charge of political learning had warned us about the harm of yellow songs many times, in class, during assembly, and even at morning exercises. I was quite sure that Teng’s “When will you return?” was a “yellow song.” My first reaction was to leave the site right away; my second reaction was to report to my class teacher; my third was feeling very upset—how could someone broadcast such a song among the people! I froze in time for almost half a minute. I must look very silly …. In the end, I decided to look for the song’s source. (Ye 2011: 26)

At the time, Teng’s songs, along with other popular songs originating in Hong Kong and Taiwan, were collectively labelled gangtai yinyue (Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular music), and their widespread transmission was due to the country’s economic reform after the Cultural Revolution. By 1980, several hundred thousand cassette players were imported into the country. Western-style popular songs became fashionable, and sheet music and cassette tapes of gangtai music were in great demand. To attract audiences, state performing troupes broadcasted gangtai songs prior to as well as during the intermission of their performances. Some even incorporated singing them into their routines. Local singers, too, imitated foreign singers’ singing styles, using the microphone to express intimate sentiments as well as wearing eye-catching clothes and shaking their bodies (Zhou 1982a: 38–9). Such a new trend in China’s soundscape, with Teresa Teng as its icon, caused alarm among CCP politburo. Some efforts were made to regain control as was evident in the various campaigns to curb “yellow songs,” though to no avail. For example, key musical figures wrote about their views on “When Will You Return?” in music journals (Ying 1980; Nan 1980; Chang 1980; Wu 1982). Even though the song’s prior label “traitor song”

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

was removed, it was still considered a “yellow song” for two major reasons, namely, its creative actors’ lack of socio-political consciousness (that they actually composed such a song amid the looming Sino-Japanese War in 1937); and its lyrics propagated a negative outlook toward life, which was deemed vulgar (Nan 1980/1982: 42–5). In fact, vulgarity would become a legitimate reason for censorship after the 1980s and will be discussed later in this chapter. Looking at Teng’s songs now, they are just popstyle songs that have catchy tunes sung with deep emotion. In a way, these are songs, as per Simon Frith’s definition of pop, that “we listen to without meaning to, the songs we know without knowing how we know them” (2001: 104). In other words, Teresa Teng’s songs were ubiquitous music in the 1980s that China’s masses came across in their daily lives, very often without conscious effort. Many recalled that they have encountered Teng’s songs publicly, at local stores, bus stops, public playgrounds, and friend’s homes, etc. But more often, Teng’s songs were heard privately, the listeners trying not to share their shock or enjoyment due to the songs’ “yellow” status. In other words, the act of hearing Teng’s songs created a private space to address socially unsanctioned emotions and desires, which were connected to sensations often described as sensual as well as sexual, that were hard to refuse. It may seem that the proletariat class ideology of the CCP crumbled in the face of Teng’s songs. That was not the case. Rather, it was the change in the socioeconomic system that forced party ideology to change, which in turn led to new musical tastes. Because of the economic reform, the CCP’s will to fight against the capitalistic class was no longer practical, and ideological control was relatively relaxed from the mid-1980s to the mid1990s. Without such a context, Teresa Teng’s songs would not have been circulated as they were (Zhao and Zhu 2014: 9). This is, however, not to overlook the fact that people’s consumption of the music also led to new perceptions and ideologies about entertainment. After the mid-1980s, the label “yellow song” was dropped and Chinese pop songs acquired the new nomenclature tongsu gequ, meaning songs of ease and accessibility (Zhang 1986; Liu 1986), which was and still is used interchangeably with liuxing qu (popular song). Even though the young generation was seen as the major consumer of popular songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan at the time, it is not possible to put a specific class label on Teresa Teng’s songs. In their study of Teng, Cheng and Athanasopoulos (2015/2016) reported different perceptions of the class orientation of Teng’s songs. The younger interviewees, who had come to know Teng’s songs through their parents, saw Teng’s songs as originating from the working class, whereas middle-class interviewees, who said that Teng’s songs were first recognized by China’s intellectuals (college students at the time), considered her songs conservative, boring, uninspiring, and not worthy of the intellectual class (57). Such contradictory perceptions of Teng’s songs from audience groups of different class origins as surveyed recently should be taken with a grain of salt. As suggested by Cheng and Athanasopoulos, class boundaries were blurred after the Cultural Revolution as many of the intellectuals at the time were originally peasants and workers who were fortunate enough to be able to go to college after 1978 (57). I suggest that audience perceptions and musical tastes changed rapidly in the PRC. The middle-class interviewees, even though they had once loved Teng’s songs, now looked at them differently. Presumably, this group of

167

168

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

interviewees must be a part of China’s new middle class—the professional, managerial, and administrative as well as the private business owners and small entrepreneurs—who must have gone through a “class transformation” in the past twenty years thanks to the immense opportunities afforded by the country’s economic reform (see Tsang 2014). It is safe to assume these interviewees’ new class identity must have an impact on their musical tastes and perceptions. Whilst China’s new middle class embraces classical music, as testified by the country’s prosperous classical music scene and the number of children learning Western musical instruments, it is inevitable that these interviewees see Teng’s songs as old fashioned and more or less associated with the lower-class masses from the countryside. Despite the fact that Teresa Teng had never performed in the PRC before she passed away in 1995, she is sanctified in China’s popular music discourse—highly revered and studied, with over two hundred articles devoted to her and her music. While the ban on “yellow song” was lifted after the mid-1980s, three of Teng’s songs—“Ode to the Republic of China” (Zhonghua minguo song), “The Plum Blossom” (Meihua), and “My Home on the Other Side of the Mountain” (Wo de jia zai shan de na yibian)—are still censored, the first two probably for their explicit connections to Taiwan, and the third for Teng’s singing it at the June 4th Student Movement, which is still a taboo and censored topic in the PRC.2 All this is not to overlook Teng’s complex identity and class position. She came from a middle-class family and had a trans-Asian career; she was active not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and Japan, as well as other Asian countries, and she sang songs in different languages. These traits made her the embodiment of what the PRC was not and what it expressly forbade, for she embodied internationalism, capitalism, sensuality, sexual desires, and personhood. She became thus the “imagination” of hundreds and thousands of the Chinese masses of the 1980s. While her songs have become the collective memory of the 1980s, they also testify to what Simon Frith says about popular songs, “Once a pop song is launched on the world, all sorts of things can happen … if unexpected things happen to songs, so songs have unexpected effects on us” (2001: 107). In a way, had it not been for censorship many of Teresa Teng’s songs may not have been so popular.

Rock and Roll of China’s Angry Youth While Teresa Teng’s songs opened up China’s soundscape, it was Cui Jian who enriched it with the sounds of rock and roll, hence his nickname “China’s Godfather of Rock and Roll.” Even though underground rock groups had existed prior to the mid-1980s (see Guo 2007: iv–viii), it was Cui Jian who brought them to the public’s attention in 1986 in a pop music concert at Beijing’s Worker’s Stadium to mark the World Peace Year.3 Cui Jian’s singing the song “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwu suoyou), a song that mixed rock and roll and local musical elements known as Xibeifeng (meaning the style from the North-West), his stage attire (a hat and unequal length pants), and his coarse voice backed by his band shocked but also touched the concert audience just like Teresa Teng and her songs had done half a decade ago, naturally for different reasons. The fact that Cui Jian had been

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

eliminated in the first round of a singing competition organized by the Chinese Musicians’ Association earlier in the same year (He 2018: 45) indicated rock music’s marginalized status in China at the time. His singing the “red song” “Nanni Bay” (Nanniwan) in rock and roll style in January 1987 at Beijing Capital Gymnasium not only resulted in this song being banned from all media but it also cost him his job as a trumpet player at Beijing Symphony Orchestra (AiDiRen 2009). Looking at it retrospectively, the incident was a blessing in disguise as it forced Cui to devote himself to rock and roll full-time. Just oneand-a-half-years later, the government’s attitude toward the genre changed and there was even a report about the popularity of Cui’s music in the state newspaper People’s Daily on 16 July 1988 (Gu 1988: 7), which was taken as a sign of ideological openness (Gu 2013) that nevertheless did not last. If Teresa Teng’s songs were seen as symbolizing the “screams” and “outcries” of the new generation, the “angry youth”, as instrumental in awaking the supressed senses and emotions of the masses, Cui’s songs played a role in releasing the frustration and disappointments of the new generation, which witnessed the country’s many drastic changes. The disintegration of state-ownership, the urbanization of the countryside, the re-development of cities, and the burgeoning numbers of migrant workers toiling in factories, brought drastic changes to China’s socioeconomic structure (Chen 1997: 188). Cui’s songs captured his generation’s sense of puzzlement and helplessness in the face of the disintegration of communist ideologies. For instance, the lyrics of “Nothing to My Name” (Yiwusuoyou)—the song’s protagonist who gives up his dreams and freedom is however teased by his lover for having nothing— were often read as an allegory about the relationship between the people and the state. Cui’s way of singing it, emphasizing authenticity and expression rather than “bel canto,” was seen as symbolizing the new generation’s “screams” and “outcries” of the “angry youth,” as a new social class emerged in the face of a changing society (Yan 2018: 89). Likewise, Cui’s singing the song “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Yikuai hongbu), with his eyes blind-folded by a piece of red cloth, was a performance of disillusionment, a sentiment that must have struck a chord among his contemporaries, particularly the youngsters of his generation. His songs and acts were taken to mean “a protest against the established forces and authorities that control people’s minds” (Wang 2013: 144). In the West, Cui was said to have “introduced into postrevolutionary China a whole new ethos that combined individualism, nonconformism, personal freedom, authenticity, direct and bold expression, and protest and rebellion, in short, the essence of Western rock culture” (Baranovitch 2003: 32). The rock ideal that Cui Jian embraced, as Keir Keightley points out, “involves a rejection of those aspects of mass-distributed music which are believed to be soft, safe or trivial …. [T]he styles, genres and performers that are thought to merit the name “rock” must be seen as serious, significant and legitimate in some way” (2001: 109). Such an aesthetic orientation of rock music has given many rockers, including the PRC ones, the impetus and will to distinguish themselves from the “mainstream,” to be individualistic, different, reactionary, and anti-establishment. In the West, such rhetoric works to give rockers and rock music a unique identity and thus to be associated with a particular class. But this does not work in the PRC where conformity reigns. For instance, as stipulated by media regulations, singers wearing long hair, dyed hair, and tattoos are not allowed on TV, and

169

170

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

likewise performers are not allowed to talk to the audience during concerts, the former presumably for fear of setting bad examples, and the latter allegedly for fear of chaos. Those who violate the rules may suffer dire consequences. Cui Jian, who tried to cross the line, was punished. In 1990, his ten-city concert tour to raise one million RMB for Beijing to host the Asian Games was terminated halfway through. While the reason was unclear, various internet sources did mention that he said the following words: “I hope last year’s shot was really the last” after singing the song “The Last Gunshot” (Zuihou yichang).4 In an interview with the Hong Kong reporter Patrick Boehler (2013), Cui admitted that the ban on his music was due to his veiled condemnation of the Tiananmen crackdown. In fact, “The Last Gunshot” is still being banned probably because of its association with the June 4th Student Movement. However, the song’s birth actually pre-dated the student movement. Collected on the album Unknown Heights (Vol. I) Chinese Red Stars Golden Songs released in 1987, two years prior to the movement, the song was inspired by the Vietnam War just as a number of the album’s other songs were also on such a theme. The song’s lyrics are about sacrifice, the humble wish of a dying soldier that what killed him would be the last gunshot that he heard. The sentiment in the song was taken as a premonition for the students killed in the June 4th incident, which Cui also participated in. The song was included again on Cui’s (1991) album Resolution (Jiejue), though in a version with only part of the lyrics. Had it not been banned, the song could have been forgotten, but because of its perceived embodiment of the June 4th spirit, the song has been sanctified and in a way immortalized to represent those who sacrificed their lives at the event. Even today, quite a number of youngsters are still curious about it, testified by proliferation of blog discussions and writings on the song. As Cui Jian himself aptly put it, “Music should not have political intention, but also cannot escape from its political responsibility.”5 The extent to which Cui Jian suffered from censorship after the cancellation of his concert tour in 1990 is difficult to pinpoint. That is the case with many other musicians in the PRC, who were/are reluctant to talk about their experience for fear of further trouble. Cui was allegedly banned from organizing large-scale concerts under his name in Beijing from 1993 to 2005, and his concert applications were allegedly said to be frequently rejected during the period. But then, he did appear in various less advertised or smallscale concerts in Beijing, and he performed regularly in other Chinese cities as well as globally. It is also not clear why his second album Resolution was only released in cassette format in 1991 whereas it appeared in other formats in Taiwan and Hong Kong, etc. His third album The Egg Under the Red Flag (Hongqi xia de dan), released in 1994, in which Cui experimented with rap and the incorporation of Chinese instruments into the rock sonority, was banned after 3,000 copies were sold.6 Since 2005, all bans on Cui Jian were lifted with the exception of the song “The Last Gunshot,” and he has been quite active in China’s rock-music scene, having organized various large-scale rock concerts in various cities to keep the genre’s momentum going. Even though he despises the politicization and commercialization of rock, he has appeared in national TV shows to sing with other singers. As rock is a genre imbued with a rebellious sentiment against oppression and conformity, it never quite overcame its marginalized status in China and has always been treated with caution by the regime.

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

Songs of the Outcast Since China joined the internet superhighway in 1994, Chinese citizens have been open to a much larger soundscape than ever before. With 829,000,000 internet users, the largest number in the world, (“Internet World Stats” 2019), numerous local music platforms have emerged, for karaoke singing, file sharing of commercial and internet songs, uploading and downloading of remixed sound files, as well as chatrooms for the exchange of ideas.7 Perhaps more than any other prior social changes in human history, the internet is the quickest to erase class boundaries, or at least that is how it appears so. Its global accessibility and its anti-conventional operation are seen to be able to create a virtual world that sidelines traditional social hierarchy. For many Chinese, the internet gives them a window to the world as well as a tachytopia (a short-lived and transient community; see Saffle and Yang 2010) that temporarily removes them from their humdrum existence, and it is particularly important for the working class, migrant workers and low-paid employees who struggle to make ends meet in a system with very limited social security networks for citizens without resident status. As a result of the internet’s ubiquitous nature in people’s lives, it has caused fear among those in power, and the PRC government is no exception. Consequently it has set up various state agencies to regulate its nation’s soundscape.8 Having invested heavily in censorial technology, the government is now able to monitor and control its citizens’ online behavior by blocking domains, filtering keywords, re-routing links, monitoring chat rooms, blogs, and net-postings, etc. Google has left China, and many other Western sites including Facebook and YouTube were blocked. In the process of blocking and filtering, non-political sites are also affected. For example, one of my informants related to me that, as almost all Taiwan sites were blocked, it was almost impossible to get any music information from Taiwan, which created a certain blind spot in people’s knowledge field.9 At times, even websites of musical organizations such as the Berlin Philharmonic were also blocked. Music uploads, even those non-political in nature, if considered sensitive, have to go through months of screening. Such practices of self-censorship by music platforms owners, known as “self-mutilation,” is one of the measures adopted by the government to control contents circulated on the internet. Not only do site-owners have to be registered, but users do too. Since 2003, the Ministry of Culture has issued various Interim Provisions on the Administration of Internet Culture, requiring providers to remove the following contents voluntarily: 1) products violating intellectual property rights; 2) unscreened imported products not having been approved by state agencies; 3) products deemed as propagating vulgarity; and 4) products seen as harmful to ethnic customs, minority, social harmony, and social stability.10 Because of such laws, hundreds and thousands of songs were removed from the internet. A news report gave the following statistics about three different music sites’ bans (KBS, MBC, and SBS) between 2009 and 2012: a total of 1,738 songs banned, 1,190 for defamation and indecent language, 263 for innuendo and allusions, 218 for indirect advertisement, and 63 for negative portrayal of the physically challenged, but only 207 songs were common bans (“KBS, MBC, SBS”: 2012). While the reliability of the

171

172

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

figures is in no way verified, they do suggest the extent of music platforms’ practice of selfcensorship and the lack of consistency in censoring measures. As one netizen remarked, “In this area, our country’s policy is difficult to understand—similar stuff, some are banned, some are not; similar people, some are arrested and some are not.”11 Censorial measures in the PRC flip-flop, as what is considered sensitive tends to be circumstantial. For example, even the clip of the party leader Hu Jintao singing the song “Jasmine Flower” (Mo Li Hua) was removed from China’s internet in 2011 after the outbreak of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia (Jacobs and Ansfield 2011). Curbing internet illegal music sharing and piracy is one of the reasons for music censorship in the PRC. All my informants admitted that they had at one point in their lives downloaded music illegally, particularly during their early years on the net, though they all emphasized that they had stopped such behaviors. A number of them said the peer-to-peer technology had given them access to a great repertoire of music otherwise not affordable or accessible at the time. Another informant said the convenience of getting to something they had in mind with a click was what led them to illegal downloads, in addition to the fact that they had no concept of intellectual property rights or the consequence of such behavior. To my surprise, all my informants were in strong support of intellectual property rights and accepted censorship in connection to the protection of such rights. The fact that none brought up notions such as internet freedom, the benefit of point-to-point transmission, the hegemony of the music industry, which are arguments often used against legal attempts to curb illegal downloads, surprised me. Such strong adherence to mainstream values is perhaps indicative of indoctrination. Songs seen as satirical or cynical about social mores are banned as well. For example, the already disbanded punk-rock group Top Floor Circus’ (Dinglou maxituan) song “Shanghai Does Not Welcome You” (Shanghai bu huanying ni) was a target. A cover version sung in Shanghainese dialect of the 2008 Beijing Olympic song “Beijing Welcomes You” (Bejing huanying ni), “Shanghai Does Not Welcome You” went viral on the internet after a performance at the Rock Shanghai concert in 2009. The song’s lyrics poking fun at Shanghai being a materialistic city that only welcomed the rich found resonances among Shanghainese who were at the time bothered by various governmentled projects for the World Exposition to be held in the following year. The song’s popularity inevitably raised alarms; the group was said to be “invited for a talk” by National Security officials, and the song was later removed from the internet (“The lead singer …” 2010). The song’s addressing the class clash between the poor and the rich must be seen as creating social friction rather than promoting social harmony: thus it had to be silenced. Many songs that spoke to the experiences of the people, the so-called laobaixing (commoners), shared the same fate as “Shanghai Does Not Welcome You.” Another case in point is a song called “July’s People” (Qiyue de renmin) sung by the rocker Cun Zi. The song was inspired by the catastrophic high-speed train accident in Wenzhou on July 21, 2011, its lyrics describing the “disappearance” of some four hundred victims. The song went viral probably as a result of the public’s anger toward how the incident was handled by the local government, who buried the wrecked train along with the victims’ bodies without waiting for a proper inspection, fired reporters who tried to attribute responsibility, and

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

refused to investigate details of the accident (Branigan 2011). Despite being banned, the song was said to have come back again and again, it being seen as the voice of the voiceless, especially in terms of the fact that it protested on behalf of the hundreds and thousands who have become victims of oppressive government policies, corruption, and mismanagement. While this song testified to music’s power in everyday life, it also underscored the power of the internet in musical transmission. Songs deemed politically sensitive—that is, songs seen as spreading subversive messages or as posing a threat to national security as well as hindrance to social harmony—are strictly censored. As mentioned earlier, any songs with the slightest reference to the June 4th Student Movement are censored, such as Cui Jian’s “The Last Gunshot,” or the Taiwan singer Angus Tung (Tong Ange)’s “June 4th—I Am Still Alive” (Liuyue siri—wo hai huo zhe), a song written to commemorate the students who fought for their beliefs in the movement. What is ironic is the fact that this is Tung’s most popular song on YouTube—it has attracted over 200,000 views since the song’s first posting in 2011—the year stringent censorship began to take place in the PRC, whereas most of Tung’s other songs have less than 30,000 views.12 Based on the comments left on the song’s YouTube site, it is safe to say that most of the viewers were from the PRC. These viewers wrote about the singer, praising him for composing such a song, or alternatively, expressed their views about the regime as well as the student movement. Some even said that they climbed over the firewall simply to breathe some fresh air of freedom. While a ban is supposed to make certain music inaccessible to the public, such an act sometimes leads to unexpected results. For instance, the Ministry of Culture’s announcement on August 10, 2015 of a ban on 120 songs (“The Ministry of Culture …” 2015) ignited unprecedented interest in these otherwise mostly unknown or forgotten songs of largely minor performing groups. Just after the announcement, many netizens requested the sharing of these songs, some succeeded in downloading them before they were removed from online platforms, while the disappointed ones requested private sharing of copies publically.13 The group most affected by the ban was IN3 (Yinsaner), a Beijing-based underground hip-hop group founded in 2006, who have only two released albums. Seventeen of their songs were on the ban list, which is almost all of their songs. The reason for this round of bans, as published in government presses, was to clean up internet songs and remove content that “trumpet obscenity, violence, and crime and harm social morality.”14 A quick browse through the lyrics of these banned songs would raise questions about the censorial rationale as none of the songs are explicitly political, though some of their lyrics are frivolous and vulgar. For instance, IN3’s better known songs—“Teacher How Are You” (Laoshi nihao) and “Beijing Evening News” (Beijing wanbao)—from the group’s 2008 album Unknown Artists (Weizhi yishujia) make fun of social ills in contemporary Chines society, the former about school teachers who are abusive toward their students and the latter about the decadent after-dark lifestyle of a privileged group in Beijing. As a hip-hop group, and having positioned itself in the tradition of hip-hop as a subcultural musical form, IN3 insisted on making music that was not mainstream, but instead exposed the socalled hard truths of society. In this regard, one cannot help but wonder if the censorship

173

174

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

is just for a healthier internet or an attempt to purge alternative voices from subcultural groups, ones that the government sees as fearful or socially unacceptable. Is such a ban legitimate? Most of all, to what extent is it successful? After the announcement of the list of banned artists and songs, this once marginalized hip-hop group gained unprecedented fame overnight; its members, its past endeavors as well as its songs, became the subject of heated conversation among netizens. As one netizen wrote, “after many attempts, I finally found this way for my post not to be taken down …. Thanks to the internet, IN3 will not be forgotten” (dated June 24, 2017).15 Even though many of such posts were removed, some are still extant probably due to the posters’ clever way of “framing” the content to evade robotic and human censorial eyes. One such comment was posted on August 12, 2015; the author started with lauding the importance of learning from the Ministry of Culture’s ban in order to instigate proper ideology, but the rest of the article was largely about the group, and poked fun at the ban (Cao 2015).16 Such a response from the public was probably anticipated by the group, which posted the following on its Weibo shortly after the ban: “The Ministry wanted to use us as negative example for the new generation, but the outcome may not be what they expected.”17 A considerable number of netizens simply climbed over the firewall to YouTube to learn about IN3’s songs. This was evident in rapid increases in traffic to the posting of their songs, especially “Beijing Evening News” and “Teacher How Are You.” Several hundreds of these thousands of visitors left comments on the sites, many praising the songs’ authenticity and criticizing the regime’s ban; a good handful even jokingly acknowledged the Ministry of Culture for making these very worthy but previously not well-known songs popular. Similar behaviors and responses to China’s banned songs can be found on YouTube. It is as though these pages of banned songs are being turned into “imagined communities” for PRC netizens to exercise freedom of speech, so as to share sentiments about certain forbidden topics such as the June 4th Student Movement or critiques of the government. Censorship, or to be more precise, the netizens’ ability to by-pass it, seems to have become a form of resistance, a reason to complain and to yearn for something better, in the virtual presence of others who also share similar experiences. In the West, internet freedom is of great public concern and is willingly defended almost at all costs by some. Chinese netizens appear indifferent toward internet freedom, and a prior study showed that 80 percent of Chinese netizens supported government censorship (Loewenstein 2008: 183), while the remaining 20 percent simply dealt with it by turning to VPN to get over the firewall. Almost all my informants took advantage of the VPN technology, paying a monthly fee for the service. As a couple of them have pointed out, government attempts to control the internet is futile and is merely a case of “closing their ears while stealing the bells” as the saying goes. But censorship does lead to complacency among those who do not have access to VPN, and for those who want to have unrestricted access to information on the internet for work or self-enhancement purpose, censorial practices do have a negative impact, and they even haunt the psyche of the people. As one informant noted, when he first climbed over the wall he was so excited that he kept on hitting those restricted sites to the point of forgetting what he wanted to find.

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

Conclusion Musical taste, presumably formed during adolescent years (Stephens-Davidswitz 2018), has long been seen to be closely connected to social class (see for instance Lynes [1949] 1976, and Bourdieu [1977] 1984). Musical preference is likewise often interpreted as a display of class and identity. As a certain song or type of music can only be popular in a short period of time and consumed by a specific group of audience, it is reasonable to assume such a song or type of music reflects a particular group of people’s class identity. However, such a presumption runs the risk of oversimplification. First, the popularity of some of the songs or types of music can reach out to different sectors of society beyond the confines of a particular time frame to reflect the class identity of more than one single group of people. The songs of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and likewise Teresa Teng’s songs in the PRC are a case in point. For some of the songs covered in this chapter, such as ‘Shanghai Does Not Welcome You” or “July’s People,” despite their lyrics being directed at the working class, their reach went far beyond this single class group. Second, while most songs tend to have a limited shelf life, some do survive the test of time and in the process these songs’ original class associations change. For instance, Cui Jian’s songs such as “Nothing to My Name” and “A Piece of Red Cloth,” that were originally associated with the “angry youth,” are now seen by Cui himself as reflecting the voices of the sub-class (diceng), who are classless, faceless and voiceless—the silent majority in the society—in opposition to the voice of the authoritative and mainstream (Guo 2015: 124). Lastly, it is important not to overlook censorship’s capacity to interfere with the originally presumed class identity of a song, as the censorial act inevitably gives the banned song a new class identity, such as the identity of the outcast. The group IN3 and its seventeen banned songs, as well as the other banned songs discussed in this chapter, are a case in point. Censorship does transcend the original class position of each of the banned songs discussed in this study. No matter to what class each song was attached or for what audience it was originally intended, censorship itself puts the song into a new class of its own—the class of forbidden songs by the government, or, in other words, what I term “songs of the outcast.” These are songs perceived by at least a considerable number of people as authentic, genuine, and speaking the truth, otherwise they would not be banned—such are the netizens’ perceptions! In this regard, censorship is also responsible for rendering certain songs classless, thus ensuring that they reach out to an even larger group beyond their original audience, turning them into martyrs, and creating, through YouTube uploads, imagined communities for people to share in as well as functioning to commemorate them in their absence.

Notes 1

Chinese names in this chapter are presented last name first according to Chinese practice; for instance, Tian is the last name of Tian Han. In the notes, Chinese authors’ first names

175

176

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

are given in full rather than in initials to avoid confusion due to the commonality of certain last names. 2 It is not easy to confirm if a song is banned or not in the PRC as some songs that were banned could later have the ban removed. Over the years, the government published various lists of removed websites and banned songs. When a song is banned, it is removed from all music sites registered in the PRC, and a search of it on Baidu, for example, leads to only severed links or simply yields no results. 3 Part of Cui Jian’s 1986 performance can be seen on YouTube under the title “1986 Cui Jian’s first public performance of ‘Nothing to My Name’” (1986 nian Cui Jian Shouci gongkai yangchu “Yiwu suoyou”), available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ytz6EoFIs-w (accessed January 27, 2019). 4 The reliability of the information is, however, unconfirmed but mentioned in a widely circulated online article entitled “A research on ‘The Last Gunshot’” (Dui “Zuihou Yichang” de kaozheng). There is no author or date attached to the article, but what is said in the article seems to be based on careful research, available online: https://www.bannedbook.org/bnews/zh-tw/cbnews/20180317/915744.html, https:// groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lihlii/iaoNVlnkcEo, https://www.aboluowang. com/2009/0627/135667.html (accessed January 22, 2019). 5 This quote, by Cui Jian, is considered sensitive by the government and is thus the victim of censorship. In a blog discussion on the meaning of relating music to politics on the platform Zhifu, a number of netizens’ posting of it were removed. See the content controller’s message on Wang Dachui’s post, for instance, as violating government regulation, available online: https://www.zhihu.com/question/36818151 (accessed January 22, 2019). 6 Such information is given in Baidu, China’s internet encyclopedia. The source of the information is supposedly taken from an article entitled “Resolved: ‘The Egg Under the Red Flag,’” cited on 16 November 2014, which is no longer available on the internet, presumably already removed from the website. Nonetheless, the same information is also found in an article entitled “Released of banned works: Cui Jian’s old works finally returned to the ‘sunshine path’’’ published on May 25, 2005, that is still accessible on the internet: http://movie.163.com/ent/editor/music/050525/050525_414125.html (accessed January 24, 2019 from Hong Kong; but nonetheless, the site is identified as “scam” when it is accessed from the UK). 7 Searching with PRC’s search engine Baidu, one can see the large number of music websites and platforms of various nature listed on the following URL: http://www.hao123. com/music/wangzhi (accessed January 25, 2019). 8 For more information on state agencies responsible for censoring different types of music-related materials in the PRC, see Yang (2018). 9 My research for this project took place in 2012, at the time the government had just started to implement various controls on internet content circulation, but those were less stringent than in the past couple of years. 10 For example, the first provision was issued in 2003, and updates in 2011 and 2017 are accessible on the following URLs respectively: http://www.gov.cn/flfg/2011-03/21/ content_1828568.htm and http://zwgk.mct.gov.cn/auto255/201801/t20180108_830558. html (accessed January 25, 2019).

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

11 Interesting to note, the netizen’s remark quoted here, which I downloaded on December 4, 2009, was blocked or removed on January 5, 2010 when I tried to find the URL for the quote. Searching with the exact phrase of Chinese words, I am still able to see its location embedded in a video available online: www.jahu.net/videos/video/ CgCBkLkyBS8/. But after I clicked, I was told the site was not available, and the search engine directed me to a different video. 12 Based on posting of Tong’s songs on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= T8vMVrLBiW4 (accessed February 1, 2019). 13 Evidence of such attempts were still very clear in 2016, but they are now totally removed from the internet. Most discussions about the ban are removed as though nothing had happened. 14 For more information about this round of the ban as well as prior ones, see Baidu’s entry “Blacklist of internet music” (Wangluo yinyue heimingdan), available online: https:// baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BD%91%E7%BB%9C%E9%9F%B3%E4%B9%90%E9%BB% 91%E5%90%8D%E5%8D%95/18344420?fr=aladdin (accessed January 26, 2019). The ban was also reported in “120 Songs So ‘Obscene’ That China Banned Them,” South China Morning Post, August 10, 2015, available online: https://www.scmp.com/news/ china/policies-politics/article/1848391/120-songs-so-obscene-china-banned-them (accessed January 26, 2019). 15 Unfortunately, the post is no longer found on the internet, but there are still many other recent discussions of and requests for the group’s songs in 2019. 16 When I accessed the article in 2017, it entailed pictures of IN3 which are now all removed. Among the pictures was the cover of the volume How to recognize yellow songs, accompanied by a discount advertisement from Alibaba Cloud about proxy servers and VPNs, all of which have been removed. 17 IN3’s posting on Weibo (China’s version of Facebook) was captured in Cao (2015), but it has been removed.

Discography Cui, Jian (1987), “Last Gunshot” (Zuihou yiqiang), Unknown Heights (Vol. I) Chinese Red Stars Golden Songs (Wuming gaodi – di yi ji – Zhongguo hong gexing jinqu xuan), China Oriental Song and Dance Troupe Recording Company. Cui, Jian (1989), “Nothing to My Name,” (Yiwusuoyou), Rock ‘N’ Roll on the New Long March (Xin changzheng lushang de yaogun), China Tourism Sound and Video Publishing Company. Cui, Jian (1991), Resolution (Jiejue), Flying Saucer Records (Feidie changpian). Cui, Jian (1991), “A Piece of Red Cloth” (Yikuai hongbu), Resolution (Jiejue), Flying Saucer Records (Feidie changpian). Cui, Jian (1991), “Nanni Bay” (Nanniwan), Resolution (Jiejue), Flying Saucer Records (Feidie changpian). Cui, Jian (1994), The Egg Under the Red Flag (Hongqi xia de dan), China Wencai Audiovisual Press.

177

178

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Cun, Zi (2001), “July’s People” (Qiyue de renmin), YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bXJJjoJ9cMI (accessed February 1, 2019). IN3 (Yinsaner) (2008), “Teacher How Are You” (Laoshi nihao) and “Beijing Evening News) (Beijing wanbao), Unknown Artists (Weizhi yishujia), internet release. The album is available on Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/ming-yeh-1/sets/in3, (accessed March 19, 2019). Teng, Teresa (1978), “When Will You Return?” (Heri zun zailai), A Love Letter (Yifeng qingshu), Polydor Records. Teng, Teresa (1989), “The Plum Blossom” (Meihua), Teresa Teng’s Greatest Hits, Polydor Records. Teng, Teresa (2007), “My Home on the Other Side of the Mountain” (Wo de jia zai shan de na yibian), Theresa · Ten Story – My Home is Beyond the Mountain (Teresa ten monogatari ~ watashinoie wa yama no muko), Universal Records. Teng, Teresa (2012), “Ode to the Republic of China” (Zhonghua minguo song), Teresa Teng 1982 Hong Kong Elizabeth Stadium Concert, Universal Records. Tong, Ange (1989), “June 4th—I Am Still Alive” (Liuyue siri—wo hai huo zhe), Where Dreams Begin (Meng kaishi de defang), PolyGram Records. Top Floor Circus (Dinglou maxituan) (2009), “Shanghai Does Not Welcome You” (Shanghai bu huanyin ni), YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-1pu3BKbbw (accessed February 1, 2019).

Works Cited AiDiRen (pseudo name) (2009), “Nothing to my name: pioneer of Chinese rock’s introspection” (Yiwu suoyou: Zhongguo yaogunyue zixing de xianqu), Wangyi yule, September 4. Available online: http://ent.163.com/09/0904/15/5ICL3J1P00033JIO.html (accessed August 19, 2019 from Hong Kong; but nonetheless, the site is identified as a “scam” when it is accessed from the UK). Baranovitch, N. (2003), China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997, Berkeley: University of California Press. Boehler, P. (2013), “China’s Youth Has Forgotten about Politics, Laments Cui Jian as He Plays Clockenflap,” Clockenflap archive, South China Morning Post (Edition: Hong Kong), December 2. Available online: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1370299/chinasyouth-has-forgotten-about-politics-laments-cui-jian-he-plays (accessed January 24, 2019). Bourdieu, P. ([1977]/1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Branigan, T. (2011), “Chinese Anger Over Alleged Cover-up of High-Speed Rail Crash,” The Guardian, July 25. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/25/ chinese-rail-crash-cover-up-claims (accessed January 24, 2019). Brown, S. and U. Volgsten (eds) (2005), Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, New York: Berghahn Books. Cao, Zhijun (2015), “Internet top hits and blacklisted IN3 had made it to New York Times and loved by Zhang Wei” (Babang wangluo yinyue heimingdan de Yinsaner cengshang niuyue shibao da Zhang Wei zuidai), TechWeb, August 12. Available online: http://www.techweb. com.cn/internet/2015-08-12/2188126.shtml (accessed January 26, 2019).

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

Chang, He (1980), “Give history its original face: about the discussion on the song ‘When Will You Return?”’ (Hai lishi de benlai mianmu: guanyu gequ “Heri jun zailai” wenshi jingguo de taolun zongshu), Sichuan yinyue, n.v. (10): 28–9. Chen, Chong (1957), “Association of Chinese Musicians Liaoning branch will hold a symposium to critique yellow songs” (Xie Liaoning fenhui jiang zhaokai pipan huangse gequ zuotan hui), Renmin yinyue, 7 (11): 44. Chen, Lian (1997), “Seeing contemporary Chinese popular music from the perspective of the sociology of art” (Cong yishu shehui xue de shijiao kan dangdai Zhongguo liuxing yinyue), Shanghai shehui kexueyuan xueshu jikan, 13 (3): 184–92. Cheng, C. and G. Athanasopoulos (2015/2016), “Music as Protest in Cold-War Asia: Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun), the Enlightenment for Democracy That Never Existed,” Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture, 60/61: 41–59. Cloonan, M. (1996), Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain: 1967-1992, Farnham: Ashgate. Cloonan, M. (2004), “Call That Censorship? Problems of Definitions,” in M. Cloonan and R. Garofalo (eds), Policing Pop, 13–29, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Fitzpatrick, S. (2005), Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frith, S. (2001), “Pop Music,” in S. Frith, W. Straw and J. Street (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, 93–108, Cambridge: Cambridge University. Gu, Shi (1988), “From ‘Nothing to My Name’ to rock and roll” (Cong “yiwu suoyou” shuodao yaogun), Renmin ribao, 16 July: 7. Gu, Shi (2013), “Why were Cui Jian’s songs popular in the 1980s” (Bashi niandai Cui Jian de ge weishenmo shou huanying), Tengxin pinglun, March 18. Available online: https:// history.qq.com/a/20130318/000006.htm (accessed January 22, 2019). Guo, Facai (2007), Shackles and run. 1980–2005: Observation on the cultural ecology of China’s rock and roll (Jiasuo yu benpao. 1980–2005: Zhongguo yaogunyue duli wenhua shengtai guancha), Hubei: Hubei renmin chubanshe. Guo, Jianmin (2015), “Voice politics: Teresa Teng, Cui Jian and Fei Xiang in 1980s popular music” (Shengyin zhengzhi: Bashi niandai liuxing yuetan de Deng Lijun, Cui Jian ji Fei Xiang), Wenyi zhengming, n.v. (10): 121–6. Hall, P. (ed.) (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. He, Xi (2018), “Cui Jian premiered ‘Nothing to My Name’: rock and roll shocked Chinese youth” (Cui Jian shouchang ‘yiwo suoyou’, yaoguanyue zhenhan zhongguo qingnian), Xinmin zhoukan (Xinmin Weekly), 17: 44–5. How to recognize yellow songs (Zenmo bianbie hunagshe gequ) (1982), People’s Music editorial committee (eds), Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe. Internet World Stats (2019). Available online: https://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm (accessed January 25, 2019). Jacobs, A. and J. Ansfield (2011), “Catching Scent of Revolution, China Moves to Snip Jasmine,” New York Times, May 10, 2011. Available online: http://www.nytimes. com/2011/05/11/world/asia/11jasmine.html (accessed January 25, 2019). Jones, A. (2001), Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, Durham: Duke University Press. Jones, S. (1991), “Banned in the USA: Popular Music and Censorship,” Journal of Communications, 15(1): 71–87.

179

180

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

“KBS, MBC, SBS a total of 1378 banned songs for inflammation and hurtful languages” (KBS, MBC, SBS gongyou 1378 shou jinge yin maren he xiedu de yuyan beijin) (2012), Zhongguo yule wang, 7 September. Available online: file:///G:/Articles%20to% 20work%20on/Class%20and%20censorship/Internet%20Music%20Censorship/Internet% 20music%20cencorship/KBS%E3%80%81MBC%E3%80%81SBS%E5%85%B1%E6%9C% 891378%E9%A6%96%E7%A6%81%E6%AD%8C%20%E5%9B%A0%E9%AA%82%E4% BA%BA%E5%92%8C%E4%BA%B5%E6%B8%8E%E7%9A%84%E8%AF%AD%E8% A8%80%E8%A2%AB%E7%A6%81_%E5%A8%B1%E4%B9%90%E6%96%B0%E9%97% BB_%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E5%A8%B1%E4%B9%90%E7%BD%91.htm (accessed August 19, 2019 from Hong Kong; but the link led to a “file not found” page when accessed from the UK). Keightley, K. (2001), “Reconsidering Rock,” in S. Frith, W. Straw and J. Street (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, 108–42, Cambridge: Cambridge University. Kirkegaard, A. and J. Otterbeck (2017), “Introduction: Researching Popular Music Censorship,” Popular Music and Society, 40(3): 257–69. Korpe, M., O. Reitov and M. Cloonan (eds) (2005), “Music Censorship from Plato to the Present,” in S. Brown and U. Volgsten (eds), Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, 239–63, New York: Berghahn Books. Li, Huanzhi (1959), “Songs are to serve the politics of socialism” (Gequ wei shehuizhuyi de zhengzhi fuwu), Renmin Yinyue, Z1: 13–16. Liu, Xiaojin (1986), “Again on the popular songs liked by young people” (Ye tang qingnian ren xiai de tongsu gequ), Qingnian tansuo, 4 (3): 19–20. Loewenstein, A. (2008), The Blogging Revolution, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing. Lynes, R. ([1949]/1976), “Highbrow, Lowbrow, and Middlebrow,” The Wilson Quarterly 1 (1): 146–58. Mao, Zedong (1967), Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work (March 12, 1957), Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. McClintock, A. (1995), Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge. “The ministry of culture announces that the provider of ‘black list’ internet music products will be pursued according to law” (Wenhuabu gongbu wangluo yinyue chanpin “heimingdan” – tigongzhe chang yifa chachu) (2015), Xinhua wang, August 10. Available online: http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2015-08/10/c_1116205562.htm (accessed January 26, 2019). Nan, Yong (1980/1982), “Give history its original face: answering the questions on ‘When Will You Return”’ (Hai lishi de benlai mianmu: guanyu “Heri jun zailai: dawen), Renmin yinyue, 21 (9): 24–5. Reprinted in How to recognize yellow songs (1982), People’s Music editorial committee (eds), 42–7, Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe. Peddie, I. (2006), “Introduction,” in I. Peddie (ed.), The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest, xvi–xxiv, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Saffle, M. and H. L. Yang (2010), “Aesthetic and Social Aspects of Emerging Utopian Musical Communities,” IRASM (International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music), 42 (2): 319–41. Skeggs, B. (2004), Class, Self, Culture. Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, London: Routledge.

Popular Music, Class, and Censorship in the PRC

Steen, A. (1999/2000), “Tradition, Politics and Meaning in 20th Century China’s Popular Music. Zhou Xuan: ‘When will the Gentleman come back again?’” Chime, 14–15: 124–53. Stephens-Davidowitz, S. (2018), “The Songs That Bind,” The New York Times, February 10. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-songs. html (accessed January 28, 2019). Street, J. (2010), “Rock, Pop and Politics,” in S. Frith, W. Straw and J. Street (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, 243–255, Cambridge: Cambridge University. “The lead singer of ‘Shanghai Does Not Welcome You’ is invited to have tea” (‘Shanghai bu huanying ni’ zhuchang beiyue tan hecha) (2010), posted on January 25, on the website of Radio Freedom Asia Broadcast (RFA): https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/ zhuchang-01252010150951.html (accessed January 25, 2019). Tsang, E. (2014), The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. U, Eddy (2016), “Rise of Marxist Classes: Bureaucratic Classification and Class Formation in Early Socialist China,” European Journal of Sociology, 57 (1): 1–29. Wang, Peiren (2008), The history of the people from the 1960s (Liushi niandai sheng ren changzhang shi), Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe. Wang, Yunjie (1958), “Yellow song is poisonous weeds and must be eradicated” (Huangse gequ shi ducao, bixiu chanchu), Renmin yinyue, 8 (1): 10–12. Wang, Ziyang (2013), “Independent and rebellious: an attempt to compare the core value of Chinese and Western rock culture” (Duli yu fanpan: Shi bijiao zhongxi fang yaogunyue wenhua neihe), Lilun jie, 480 (8): 143–5. Wiseman-Trowse, N. (2008), Performing Class in British Popular Music. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wu, Yongyi (1982), “Analysis of ‘When Will You Return?’ and ‘Rose is Everywhere’” (Fenxi “Heri jun zailai he” he “Meigui chuchu kai,” Sichuan yinyue, n.v. (6): 24–5. Yan, Cuijuan (2018), “Reflecting on the history of the ‘angry youth culture’ as well as its enlightenment: from the perspective of Cui Jian as an angry youth of rock and roll” (Fenqing wenhua de lishi zhuisi yu dangdai qishi – yi “yaogun fenqing” Cui Jian wei guancha shijiao), Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu, 30 (8): 87–93. Yang, H. (2018), “Curb that Enticing Tone: Music Censorship in the PRC,” in P. Hall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship, 453–76, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ye, Kai (2011), “Teresa Teng in the cassette recorder” (Danka luyinji li de Deng Lijun), Meiwen (first half of the month) 3: 26–8. Ying, Guojing (1980), “Also talk about the advent of ‘When Will You Return?’” (Ye tan ‘Heri jun zailai’ wenshi jingguo), Renmin yinyue, 21 (9): 27–8. Zhang, Hailong (1986), “Brief analysis of the popular songs liked by young people” (Qian xi qingnian ren xiai de tongsu gequ), Qingnian tansuo, 4 (2): 10–11. Zhao, Yong and Zhu, Xin (2014), “Teresa Teng, pop music and critical discourse in the 1980s – a contextual analysis of contemporary Chinese masses’ cultural values” (liuxing yinyue yu 20 shiji 80 niandai de pipan huayu – dangdai zhongguo dazhong wenhua jiazhiguan shengcheng yujing fenxi zhi yi), Wenxue yu wenhua, 5 (1): 18–19. Zhou, Dafeng (1982a), “Guided by the situation: about the infiltration of popular vulgar songs from Hong Kong and Macao” (Yinshi lidao, xunxunshanyou: tan gangao liuxing yongsu gequ de shenru), in How to recognize yellow songs, People’s Music editorial committee, (eds.), 38–41, Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe.

181

182

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Zhou, Yinchang (1982b), “How to treat Hong Kong and Taiwan pop songs” (Zenyang kandai gangtai liuxing qu), in How to recognize yellow songs, People’s Music editorial committee, (eds), 9–27, Beijing: Renmin yinyue chubanshe. Zhou, Yongxiang (1958), “See ‘love’ in yellow songs from several examples” (Cong jige lizi kan huangse gequ li de ‘aiqing’), Renmin yinyue, 8 (4): 15–17. Zong, Daoyi (2005), “The age of listening to Deng Lijun’s songs” (Ting Deng Lijun de niandai), Friends of High School Students (Gaozhong sheng zhi you), Z4: 65–6.

Part II Theoretical Approaches

9 Gaahl—Monster or Postmodern Prometheus? Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal Stan Hawkins and Nina Nielsen

Introduction Shades of white stretch across an ancient and barren landscape, where a cloak-clad figure wanders alone—a mere dark speck in contrast to a “land of mist and snow.”1 This might well have been an image from Shelley’s The Modern Prometheus (1831), with the creature driven into Northern exile. But this is Gaahl, photographed during the production of the Vice documentary film True Norwegian Black Metal (2007), as he ventures forth across a mountain plateau above the valley Espedal.2 He is seemingly impervious to the glacial wind that skims the drifts of snow all around him. Gaahl (Kristian Eivind Espedal), the shrieking front figure of black metal groups Gorgoroth,3 God Seed, and Gaahls Wyrd,4 is also a painter, start-up investor, gallerist, and an advocate for sexual equality. In this documentary, he is described as the “most despised man in Norway” (True Norwegian Black Metal 2007), alluding to violence and abuse convictions for which he served prison sentences on two occasions. Associations with such transgressive actions drew worldwide attention to Norwegian Black Metal in the 1990s, with the music known as “the second wave of black metal.”5 In terms of music, style, and attitude, Gaahl is unmistakably positioned within black metal. At the same time, he in significant ways represents a confounding of black metal identity. Despite entering the national imaginary with a spate of violent and transgressive acts, there gradually arose a particular kind of admiration for the brand of (a)morality that black metal represents—individualistic, unapologetic, raging, masculine, mournful, and unchristian. While such characteristics might bring to mind an era of Viking barbarism, they are today considered distinctly un-Norwegian. At least since the 1950s, a collective Norwegian self-image (while such images remain perpetually transient and diverse) is characterized by a strong sense of rural–urban distinction and idealization of small agricultural communities, combined with Lutheran Protestant values such as moderation

186

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

and austerity, as well as welfare and equality (Eriksen and Neumann 2011: 425–6). “Individuals are autonomous, yet alike,”6 in this collective identity construction; a form of individualism that is strictly normatively regulated, and in which each individual is responsible for her/his actions (adhering to Protestant tradition), is a core principle to the Norwegian self-image, explain anthropologists Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Iver Neumann (2011: 426). The idea that Norwegian egalitarianism and exceptionalism is rewarded in business also belongs to this image (Browning 2007: 31–6). As such, black metal’s entrepreneurial success in building a global brand is recognized as a distinctly Norwegian quality, in particular because that brand promotes Norwegian peripheral landscapes and Norse heritage. Within Norway, the music is commonly known as a musical export commodity, and black metal musicians have been lauded for entrepreneurial excellence. The successes of this music seem due to a mix of do-it-yourself attitude, norm transgression, opposition to Christian conformity, and uncompromising self-assuredness. Thus, the marketing of black metal seems to combine traditional values and notions of Norwegian identity with more current liberalist ideals and individualist understandings of the social order. The deep contrasts of the Nordic winter landscape and barren geography lends itself to aesthetics that emphasize the oppositional and the negative, which comes to the fore in black metal. The image described above, of a lone man trekking through the boreal whiteness of an uninhabitable snowy mountain—a scene aesthetically reminiscent of ascetic Lutheranism—becomes both an image of the smallness of man as he encounters the brutality of nature, as well as a metaphor for individual agency and overcoming. In black metal, transgression and rejection of the principles of Lutheranism, cultural normativity and socialism, may be interpreted as expressions of individualism, mobility, strength, and emancipation. The inverted Christian symbols of black metal are borne as talismans against Christian conformity, rather than as symbols of Satanic cult membership (Nielsen 2016: 6). Norwegian black metal presents an aesthetic paradox in that it seems to both promote and oppose a traditional portrayal of Norwegian landscape and identity. Gaahl might be characterized as Lokian. In Norse mythology, an inspirational treasure trove for much black metal, the demi-god Loki is depicted as destructive, self-interested, cunning, bi-gendered, oppositional, and mistrusted—more human than the other gods. Like his Greek counterpart, Prometheus, Loki is punished by the gods and tied to a rock. This punishment of Loki is due to the death of Balder, an event that marks the end of the Norse cosmological order and the onset of Ragnarok—the end of the old world.7 According to the Elder Edda (also called the Poetic Edda), Balder’s return marks a new and brighter era of the Norse gods. In an interview from 2008, Gaahl would claim that his goal with the project Wardruna is to “bring Balder home, where he belongs” (Espedal 2008). In fanzines, documentaries and music press, Gaahl switches opinion from one interview to the next. In 2009, he publicly announced the end of his metal career (Svendsen 2009), only to return to his former band three years later. While he might come across as deceptive, Gaahl certainly does not seem to care about sustaining a stable and credible persona. The theatrical stage performances, however, where he dons corpse paint and spikes while emitting satanic mantras in a menacing voice, noises which at first sound inhuman, appear remarkably

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

sincere. His guttural and animalesque shrieks are of a more primordial humanity, a cry of emotion, with a deeper source than conventional song. Surrounded by severed sheep heads and crucifixes, towering tall on an elevated stage above a crowd of black clad fans, Gaahl appears as a demon on an altar, preaching to his worshippers. Such a display illuminates a dark masculine power borne out by slow movements that emanate control and strength. His expression never wavers from being stern and fearless. One consistent motif in Gaahl’s music and public statements involves the idea of the superhuman. Whether inspired by the Nietzschean notion of the Übermensch, or by a demi-god of Norse mythology—Gaahl’s work references both—his dark aesthetics revolve around concepts of extraordinary power. In the 2005 documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, Gaahl claims that it is Satan that fuels his music, explaining that “Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and to become the superman. Every man who is born to be king becomes king. Every man who is born to be slave doesn’t know Satan” (Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey 2005). A belief in “[t]he God within man and the God within nature” gave name to the band God Seed (Visnes, 2009), a proclamation of individualism and individual moral agency.8 Gaahl expresses a contempt for fans, insofar as they are followers rather than self-assertive, autonomous thinkers: “There are so many of the sheep character that are drawn towards it as fans. There are so many lowlifes among the crowd. There are so many there for the music and nothing else. You don’t perform black metal if you are not a warrior. Black metal is a war against […] everyone else” (True Norwegian Black Metal 2007). Yet, the fans are the very followers who empower and afford an artist superstar status.9 Gaahl’s satanic sentiments have opposed a general conservative mindset, as well as the Norwegian State Church and the centrality of Lutheran morals in Norway (Espedal 2013). Individualism as an ethical imperative—a Satanic principle but to some degree perhaps also a feature of capitalism—represents an inversion of the social principle that unified the nation and its claims to solidarism. Outwardly supporting the series of church arson that brought Norwegian metal to global fame in the 1990s, Gaahl has proclaimed: “We have to remove every trace of what Christianity and the Semitic roots have to offer this world” (Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey 2005). While such “evil speak” might be dismissed as a marketing ploy, for the benefit of fans, or merely an attempt to sustain an image of unapologizing provocateur, it is worth considering the contemporaneous context of Norwegian Christianity, the origins of Norwegian black metal, and its continuing relevance to religion and identity. Rather than posing a novel threat to Christian morals and teenage credence, black metal articulates conflicting ideals, frustrations, and anxieties already deeply interwoven into the fabric of religious and national self-awareness.10

Culture, Class, and Collective Identity Norway, internationally and domestically, is portrayed as a comparatively egalitarian society. With its Nordic neighbors, it represents a model society when it comes to welfare and social security, with strong organized labor unions, a sound political party structure,

187

188

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

equal access to (higher) education, labor rights, and policies to limit wage gaps and disparities in quality and equality of life within its population (Olstad 1991: 162–3). These institutions, regulations, and structures can largely be attributed to a strong labor movement and class solidarity which collectively fought for and effected social change from the late eighteen-hundreds to the 1970s (Olstad 1991: 162–3). While the majority of the Norwegian population today may be said to live within Western standards of wealth, education, health and social security congruent with middle-class life, cultural and community dimensions do not necessarily indicate a cohesive middle class.11 Historically and structurally, Norway remains a class-oriented society, while class relations have lost their significance, and thus “Norway can be seen as both a class society and a class-less society,”12 explains historian Finn Olstad (1991: 163). The Norwegian labor class struggle’s “golden age” was the period 1945–1965 (the socalled Einar Gerhardsen era),13 during which Norway experienced revolutionary changes in terms of living standards and living conditions (Olstad 1991: 11). While noting that differences in wealth, power and status (critical aspects that have traditionally been measured to determine class relations) remain, and likely always will, Olstad claims that the era of class society in Norway passed, ebbing out in the 1970s (1991: 162–3). Drawing on E. P. Thompson, Olstad understands class as event or process of relations, in continual development, rather than as structural or quantifiable (1991: 9). While there are still social distinctions in Norway that manifest in cultural, moral, and socioeconomic differences, the solidarity and deliberate joint action of a group (sharing similar experiences and life conditions) in opposition to other groups, seems largely dissipated (Olstad 1991: 9–12). The concept of class, in particular when applied in regard to social circumstances in Norwegian contemporary society, is most meaningfully understood in an expanded sense of the term, which includes cultural analytical aspects and perspectives. But, to what degree can cultural distinctions and identity be said to be rooted in class? Which understanding of the analytical class concept most accurately highlights the conditions and social situation relevant to our analyses? As suggested above, definitions and understandings of class are continuously contested, with many arguing for not only a revision, but an expulsion of the term from analyses of contemporary society.14 If we acknowledge that class as an analytical concept is not a one-size-fits-all key to social analyses, and that in some cases a preconceived (and indeed also historical) analytical model might eclipse the mainsprings of conditions and distinctions arising from dimensions other than class, it seems necessary to apply the concept with caution. Bourdieu’s work on habitus, practice, and embodiment, questions of status, valuation, individualism, and taste have increasingly come into discourses about stratification and power relations. That said, we will not go into a discussion here on the cultural turn of sociology—it is excellently investigated in much sociological literature; with the brief mention above, we wish only to alert the reader of our orientation and understanding of class as a concept with cultural dimensions. Such an understanding seems relevant when considering how class impacts Norwegian musical culture, as well as the social and economic developments in the final decades of the twentieth century. By studying music as connected to cultural aspects, including religion and identity, in relation to class, we mean to invoke an understanding of culture as worldviews, forms of

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

consciousness, and ways of being and acting in societal hierarchies and networks. Max Weber, in response to Marxism, emphasized the complex and contingent relationships between material possessions and ideas, between economic motivation and spiritual motivation. His concept of rationalization, a process of codifying and synthesizing ideas into coherent systems, provided an explanation for the ways that ideas attained power, despite their (often) inherent irrationality (Swidler 1993: xiv–xvii). Rationalization functions in the service of giving meaning to the non-rational aspects of human existence. For Weber, it was the non-rationalizable features of life that ultimately inspired beauty and passion of life. In Rational and Social Foundations of Music, he writes, “Without the tensions motivated by the irrationality of melody, no modern music could exist” (1958: 10). Weber’s sociology argued determinedly for a complex view of capitalism, stratification, and culture, regarding class as a condition of the modern liberal market (rather than on property, and throughout human history). An expanded concept of class draws clearly from Weber, markedly in sociological scholarship of stratification of recent decades, which has broadened to include cultural analysis in order, partly, to make sense of postindustrial and post-Fordist societies.15 As a premise for our analyses and interpretations, a brief introduction to the historical context attempts to shed some light on the conditions surrounding Norwegian black metal and its anti-Christian expressions. Since the 1814 dissolution of the four-century-long union with Denmark, the Norwegian nation-building project, founded upon both Enlightenment philosophy and Lutheranism, has unified diverse regional cultural practices under a co-constructive cultural and political image of Norwegian identity. With the end of the dominion of Denmark, the need for a unified cultural community became urgent, so as to unite and invest a scattered population in the nation project. However, a lingering skepticism toward any kind of centralization of power, and inclinations toward regional autonomy have remained prominent sentiments in post-colonial Norway. The cultural distinctiveness of Norwegian regions in the early postcolonial period (especially a North/East and South/ West divide), affecting the political and electoral landscape are evident in 1) religious attendance and membership, 2) temperance and prohibition movements, and 3) language and dialects (Rokkan 1967). These distinctions, along with a socioeconomic distinctiveness given by variations of the regional primary economies, set the more equalitarian South/West region apart from the more hierarchical North/East regions and urban centers (Rokkan 1967). Such regional disparity seemed reflected in terms of class for much of the nineteenth century, when an urban working class (primarily in Oslo) had more political influence and better economic conditions than peasants in peripheral areas. In the early-twentieth century, changes and revisions to electoral systems and a strengthening labor movement increased the political influence of the peripheral electorate, and influences of international class movements increased egalitarian awareness (Stugu 2018: 12). The labor movement policies were the fundament of the social democratic project, which led to real wages tripling from the 1870s to the 1980s. Like most Western societies, Norway has seen increasing social gaps in the last decades, though the situation of its working class, in comparison with those in other Western countries, has progressed along with the general growth of wealth, ensuring

189

190

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

limited gaps between social classes (Stugu 2018: 12). Regional differences have often been articulated against a cultural hegemony, rather than against an economic or socially dominating class. As mentioned, rural Norwegians inherited a skepticism of centralized (and thereby also perceived as absent) political authority, and thus the Church and its local communities in some regions traditionally held a higher authority than state in many aspects of life, not least when it came to morality. The state–church union had to some degree ensured that the gap between political and theological authority did not split the population. However, in transitioning to a more liberal democracy, religious conventions increasingly seemed to jar with life of late modernity, and (as in other European states) the Church gradually lost much of its cultural dominance. The post-war decades in Norway are often referred to as a period of Americanization, during which standards of living changed dramatically, but Norwegian patriotism remained strong (Eriksen and Neumann 2011: 414), likely also boosted by the end of wartime Nazi occupation.16 The abandonment of the Church and the “nation-building project” as primary domains of collective and cultural activities accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, and the dissolution of relational foundations of the labor movement seemed almost complete by the end of the 1970s (Olstad 1991: 163). There is nothing to quite replace, at least not immediately, these institutions in terms of constituting collective identity. Without the moral compasses and solidarity instilled by such culturally dominant institutions, there perceivably is no longer an objectively good or meaningful way to live one’s life. Nuclear family units become more precarious, as increasing divorce rates demonstrate, and notions of values and goals that provide meaning and lifetime milestones become increasingly fluid and vague. With the abandonment of Lutheran morals and Christian community, the question of ethics and meaning to a greater extent becomes the concern and the responsibility of the individual—a choice, rather than a social and spiritual obligation. Having lost its supreme position, the Norwegian state church finds itself in a crisis, threatened by secularization and dissolution of unifying social institutions traditionally integral to the Church. In particular, rural communities have relied heavily on local Christian assembly houses for social activities, collective cultural experiences, and ritual markers that signify meaning and achievement in personal narratives. Perceived threats to such practices might give rise to anxieties about lost identity, collective beliefs, and values. Yet, secularization and reform occur gradually over time. Many rurally located Norwegian communities and schools continued in the Christian tradition throughout the 1990s, with government subsidized evangelizing rituals. The contrast between societal secular trends and rural conservatism perhaps reflected a gap that perilously widened, while youth in these communities became increasingly self-aware of the distinctiveness of their existence in relative periphery in a global context. Youth grew up in communities whose social focus rested on institutions that appeared already gutted of meanings that might sustain collective unity through shared cultural practices. Within the increasingly oil-driven market, occupations in agriculture and fishing were no longer passed from one generation to the next in the traditional manner.17 In the final decades of the twentieth century, electronic and digital media technologies and distribution systems made available international content, including music and film, with an unprecedented rate and quantity, and television

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

broadcasting expanded beyond the monopoly of the public broadcaster in 1992. Only in the final decades of the twentieth century did Norway emerge as a modernized, complex industrial society. But the collective image of Norwegian identity seemed to move in an opposite direction. Examining the 1994 Olympics as a “constituting event” in recent Norwegian history, Eriksen and Neumann point to a transition from modern to postmodern identity where the image presented to international and domestic audiences was of a pre-modern Norwegian society, represented by symbols such as “mythical creatures from folk lore, winter landscapes, and knitted wool sweaters”18 (2011: 419). Apart from the cross in the Norwegian flag and a few images of stave churches, the Christian foundation of Norway was all but absent from the presentation of the Norwegian nation at the Olympics. Instead, pre-Christian and Viking heritage was evoked. The romantic image of rural and untouched nature, of fisheries and traditional farming (in eighteenth-century costumes) was circulated as distinguishing identity features of the northern nation. While such symbolism had been important to the nation-building project since the 1800s, the staging corresponded poorly with the everyday reality of modern Norwegians (Eriksen and Neumann 2011: 419–20). Eriksen and Neumann stress that this symbolism would likely have had a lesser appeal two decades earlier, “when modernization still demanded significant political energy and collective work effort”19 (2011: 420). The presentation and production of symbols was primarily a commercial strategy and a means of marketing Norway as unique (Eriksen and Neumann 2011: 420). This symbolism is reminiscent of what we see in black metal. And perhaps it would be a mistake to interpret black metal music in this context—in the 1990s and beyond— as a subcultural attempt to wreak havoc, which was the general representation given in media coverage at the time of the church burnings.20 Conversely, by considering the milieu that nourished it, black metal seemed to demand the deconstruction of authorities that were not only socially unjust, but also founded on what were perceived as false principles. It expressed the deepest frustration with loss of meaning and history, a loss that left a generation with modern ideals yet without a way to realize such ideals. It also clearly resonated with already existing images of Norwegian identity and ideals of nationhood. In the final decades of the twentieth century, many abandoned sparsely populated rural communities that offered fewer options culturally and professionally than cities with globally connected and technologically advanced industries. From the decline or loss of unifying traditional narratives emerged a sense of dissolution as well as disillusionment amidst a thriving offshore oil industry and its economic influence. Black metal tapped into these, under a guise of opposition, but expressing a more general underlying sensibility. Music has at all times been used to grieve, to bind social and cultural communities, to recount personal and collective narratives, and to assert individual identity. Black metal grapples with the brutalities of life and death, but also enacts power and animates personas that challenge the narrative of music’s functions, and its social and historical significance. Personas constitute a vital part of the task of interpreting the black metal experience, which are central to working out the perceptions and impact of an artist, and how they are articulated performatively.

191

192

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Staging Personas and Personal Narratives As well as communicating notions of nationality, gender, class, and race, songs generally revolve around personal narratives. This is because they represent the artist through specific points of reference. While personas imply the fictional role or character played by a singer in a song, personal narratives relate to the “narrative reconstitution of the self through an open-ended process of reflection and revision” (Hawkins and Richardson 2007: 607).21 Performatively, personal narratives pertain “not only to what we tell but how we tell and act” (Hawkins and Richardson 2007: 607, authors’ emphases). Given that the biographical trajectory of an artist is usually an intricate affair, personal narratives not only disclose the features of a sonic environment, but subjectivities too. Ultimately, it is the act of singing that builds up our impressions of an artist.22 Central to this process is the voice, the most personal of instruments, which personifies stories23 by denoting the “real,” the “fictive,” the “imposter,” the “imaginary,” the “playful,” the “parodic,” and the “ironic.”24 The persona profiles the artist’s personality in a performance mode, where “the private-self of the artist greets the persona-on-display” (Hawkins 2020). Our quest is one of discovering the personal narratives found in black metal. To start with, fathoming out any performance is riddled with paradoxes, games, and ploys, chiefly discernible in the merging of personal narratives and personas.25 Staged as stories, songs arouse curiosity around the performer, a phenomenon that is based around personality and the disparate entities of roles, such as protagonist, antagonist, and observer. In particular, musical details implicated in parameters, from pitch, melody, rhythm, timbre, texture, to lyrical content, are instigated by powerful physiological and cerebral response. As such, it is the very sound that establishes our impressions of who the persona is and how they intend to come across. Within the broad tradition of black metal, the convergence of visuality and audiality is a critical point for reflection. For instance, the look is integral to the sound: corpse paint, a prominent visual feature in black metal, is important in stylizing lyrics, attitude and sound. To be more precise, consider how this operates in relation to the practice of singing. Black metal vocalists generally articulate their emotions with formidable force, and this requires numerous techniques, such as literally shouting out pitches and utilizing different parts of their vocal chords to attain vastly different effects. Inextricably, the persona is conjoined to the vocal-type, and in the case of Gaahl his register, mainly in the lower range, involves the death growl. The aesthetics behind this are intentionally ugly, dirty, menacing, or sinister, through their guttural edge, and require sophisticated extended vocal techniques to forcefully enunciate feelings of chaos, despair, misery, and a sense of darkness. Overall, the intensity behind Gaahl’s vocality is the result of a range of characteristics that are linked to the skillful regulation of pitch in terms of distortion, guttural timbre, and constricted throatal rasps. Lurking behind the mask is the enigma of agency, further blurred by facets of biography. Born in Sunnfjord, Gaahl grew up in Fjaler Municipality on the Norwegian west coast, where between 1970 and 1990 the population decreased by 20 percent, from 3,674 to 2,927, the most dramatic drop in

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

the post-war decades. Such a sparsely populated community is exposed to the winds and rains of the North Sea, with winters dark and summers cool. Gaahl’s roots are traceable back several generations in Espedal, his family name.26 With the “Poland scandal” in 2004, involving investigations into animal torture and blasphemy, Gorgoroth attracted mainstream media attention even though Gaahl was not at this stage a prominent public figure. When in his second court case he was charged again with violence, against which he appealed in 2004, details from the trial received sensationalist coverage in the media, with headlines claiming that he intended to “drink the blood of his victim.” Gaahl has denied this. Altogether he has been convicted of violence on two occasions (2001 and 2002), and served two prison sentences in addition to paying compensatory sums to his victims. In 2009 Gaahl left God Seed, and metal altogether, and started acting, appearing on Den Nationale Scene (Bergen) in 2010 in black metal’s first musical, Svartediket (“The Black Lake”). Some controversy surrounded his hiring. Following the revelation of his sexuality, he was awarded the somewhat contentious title “Homo of the Year” in January 2010, signaling a strong return to mainstream coverage with a new image as politically progressive. Mindful of his biographical trajectory and personal narratives, we want to consider how the persona is shaped generically. To start with it might be productive to consider black metal as a subgenre, its properties constructed around a range of stylistic preferences that define it as extreme for many. Originally a synonym for “satanic metal”, black metal is distinguishable by its instrumentation, production, vocal features, lyrics, imagery, and ideology, aspects that implicate the persona. It was as main vocalist for Gorgoroth’s fifth album Incipit Satan, released in 2000 by the independent label Nuclear Blast, that Gaahl’s performances would become legendary. Mesmerizing, demonic, and seductive, his låter have presented compelling scenarios.27 Black metal, with its counter-cultural pull, has showcased Gaahl as a dominant and authoritative male, “true to himself ” and defiant. Indeed, the subversive and subliminal qualities of his very construction have belied a friction based on what might be described as a “cognitive dissonance”, an integral part of the communicative potential (Gelbart 2003). Personas in popular music, as we have already asserted, are reliant on the voice, where attitude is inextricably linked to the technicalities of vocality.28 Often lyrics put vocality into context through expressions of obscurity. It is important to stress that in Gaahl’s låter there is little suggestion of ambivalence. Rather than delivering lyrics in the first, second or third person, he opts for a monologic-poesis style. This discloses a wayward satirist at work, where impersonation is implied by personal narrative. Specific features in his style of performance disclose a satanic disposition, which is exhibited by the theatrical effect of monstrosity. Arguably, the force behind this effect is triggered by the artist’s impression of himself: his role as storyteller involves a degree of mimetic role playing in the shaping of mood.29 This raises further questions of exigency and deliberation. Ultimately, Gaahl’s vocal and visual staging solicits explicit perceptions of the grotesque male in ways that point to extremity. His performativity situates the listener within a dark space that corresponds directly to antics of theatricality and being different.

193

194

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Monster Aesthetics: Being Indifferent to Difference Indifference can be a striking feature of being different, and playing the role of monster designates a move from one position of masculinity to another. Historically, the male monster conjures up fantasies of violence, horror, and terror, and for our purposes, a consideration of the relation of cathexis is pertinent to analyzing the aesthetics of Gaahl’s hyper-individualistic masculinity. Over the years Gaahl’s self-fashioning on- and offstage mediates a sense of dramatic fantasy. In one sense, this collides with a patriarchal order that produces tensions around values of conservative masculinity and the rejection of homosexual affection and practice. Against a backdrop of class, culture, and gender politics the monster voices aspects of darkness that prompt us to reassess our assumptions about gender, race, religion, and perceptions of Otherness. Let us consider how the Gaahlian monster challenges intransigent male autonomy, with a thread of continuity between the artist’s past and present-day preoccupation with paganism, which has tracked the new social orders to emerge in Norway during his career. His position, one of abjection, calls into line traditional ideas of national identity and masculinity. As a modern-day Prometheus, he promotes a pro-revolutionary rhetoric of le genre humain that is in stark contrast to the stereotypes of clean living, Christian values, and national welfare regulations. After all, monsters accentuate the fraught relationships between parts and wholes in society, exerting a specific influence that results from the rare, weird, and unconventional. Revelations around Gaahl’s sexuality have helped confound notions of hetero-patriarchy, another topic of media attention. Asked what it felt like to get an award for “Gay Person of the Year,” he dismissively responded: “Absolutely nothing. Thanks, being Straight Person of the Year is great! Real nice to be Pakistani of the Year! I think that handing out awards on the grounds of sexual orientation or race is silly. Still, it might mean a lot to others, so I accepted it” (Isdahl and Falkenberg 2011).30 Such nonchalance is a flippant effrontery, which resonates with David Bowie’s tactics of declaring himself non-heterosexual in the 1970s. Gaahl did not engage with the media sensation surrounding his “coincidental admission” of identifying as homosexual. Fred Maus has pointed to this phenomenon in the British duo, the Pet Shop Boys, where “ambiguity creates deniability, another feature fundamental to much discourse about homosexuality (more precisely, deniability and double-voicedness are not independent features, but logically related qualities of guarded communication)” (2001: 384). Not unlike the UK pop duo, Pet Shop Boys, Gaahl luxuriates in the signifiers of Otherness within a context that becomes a political source of highlighting vulnerability. Homosexuality and Whiteness are an ambivalent binary. Ghoulish signifiers of masculinity, reinforced by nonbinary polymorphism, offer Gaahl some respite from the regulatory and constrictive burdens of Norwegian society. Integral to this is a notion of playfulness, valorized by being an indifferent male subject. One might conclude that the function of such masculinity in black metal is to stage monstrosity as part of a personal narrative.

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

Jeffrey Cohen’s monster theory indicates that the “refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’ is true of monsters generally” (1996: 6). According to Cohen, monsters go against the grain in terms of nonconformity. Gaahl’s iconoclasm exposes the anxieties, angst, and prickly issues of conformity, which unsettles the very social apparatus upon which individuality is based. Performing the monstrous body succumbs to a condition of enactment, and this occurs through a series of theatricalized altered states. As a canvas for personal expression, black metal enables artists to craft a fetishized identity for showcasing an alternative world. Exaggeration typifies monstrous aberration and is self-deconstructive. From this it seems that the processes that define Gaahl’s on-stage personas and personality function as a pervasive rhetoric of extremity. His legendary live performances are as menacing as they are entertaining, and are borne out by meticulous attention to costumes, accessories, and gore. With his face often traced in black, resembling a cracked skull (Figure 9.1), his aesthetics entail a specific construction of maleness that

Figure 9.1  Gaahl, with monstrous intent. Nielson.

195

196

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

is scorched by vice. Transfigured into a fashion icon, Gaahl’s visual characteristics imply a performative move where, in a Butlerian sense, the force of artistic authority harnesses a specific set of practices. Repetition and citation hold an important clue to understanding Gaahl’s performativity, which contest the bourgeois and religious conventions of a mainstream culture. Above all, his imagery complements his dark, gruff, and hoarse vocality and the irrationality of his melodic embellishment, emanating in a signature that is decidedly hyperbolic. Underpinning this is a voracity in the form of a biting critique of the public domain that threatens to disrupt the natural order. Again, worth stressing is the mediation of a persona that builds on the extremities of representation. Evident in many of his interviews and performances is a degree of opacity. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone views Gaahl as a trickster, classifying his queerness as disruptive, for he confounds musical genre and sexuality simultaneously (2015: 88–9). In his allegiance to Norwegian black metal, Gaahl has refuted any sign of homophobia. In terms of his own preferences, he latches on to the aesthetics of ephebophilia (sexual interest in midto-late adolescents, a term originating in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries), stating: “When it comes to the ephebe as symbol, I’m more into the aesthetics of it all. Also, there’s something about the gaze and the will” (Clifford-Napoleone 2015: 90). In dealing with his own sexual difference, he insists on the prevalence of aesthetics rather than sex and sexuality itself. It is as if the attraction to the aesthetics of masculinity compensates for dealing with same-gender sexuality and the controversy of ephebophilia. Gaahl’s homoerotic potential indeed activates a narrativity that lays bare the constructedness of normative masculinity, which, as he knows, fuels the desires of an industry. Built into this is his brand of narcissistic hypermasculinity that indicates the gender politics of the black metal male within a transgressive context where performance is conditional on the rhetoric of seductive pose. In this way, Gaahl comes across as eccentric and even dandified; the peculiarity of his performance suggests a trope of behavior that is fashioned in similar ways to queer icons, such as Brummell, Bowie, Byron, Wilde, Coward, and Morrissey. The aesthete of dandyism in popular music stage-manages his public aura through the force of peculiarity, which down the ages has resulted in a faddishness that perpetuates their myth and radicalizes their behavior. What stands for the black metal dandy is a figuration that is resolutely magnified by the politics of audiovisual representation (Hawkins 2009). Gaahl’s close affiliation to Norse history is endorsed by a tendency to mythologize his role as a musician and artist. Of particular interest is the idiosyncrasy of monstrosity and how this intersects with black metal through gender display. By considering various theories of the monster, we would suggest that Gaahl turns to indifference as a manifestation of opposition and compliance, both agents of dandyism. Highlighting cultural difference from the mainstream population in Norway signals a distortion that is menacing and monstrous. Rendered tangible as part of an indifference towards his sexuality, the social context is nevertheless a homophobic and homosocial milieu, where female musicians are virtually absent. The challenging project of sustaining difference tugs at the boundaries of dominant sexual norms, eliciting an inversion of heteronormalization in black metal. Gaahl creates an image of aberrant gender while violating the cultural codes that bind the corrective fabric of Norwegian normalcy. An aspect of his indifference is to become

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

the Other via the categories of gender, sexuality, citizenship, and class; it is as if he has bought into the idea that the Hegelian slave/master dialect normalizes the subjugation of the normalized body for the Other. As such, the political-cultural monster admonishes difference by being indifferent; in choosing not to adhere to a system by destroying or chipping away at its very apparatus, one defines an alternative space. Hence, the monster of indifference exists to territorialize borders that should not be crossed. Yet, often, these are the borders primarily erected to nurture homosocial bonds, the links that maintain patriarchy’s social and political functions. The prototype of hypermasculine indifference therefore is to blur ideals in order to colonize new spaces. Transgressive and perversely eroticized, torturer, lawbreaker, and a supporter of arson, the Gaahl-monster persona is implicated in forbidden practices. To tantalizing ends, he shows how the forbidden makes the grotesque all the more perplexing and vulnerable.

Sublimity, Transcendence, and Transgression Gaahl’s aesthetic hardly seeks to please; his is an unbeautiful expression, and perhaps all the more elevating for this reason. Following Edmund Burke’s theory of the denigration of “beauty” as it gives way to the energy and power of the sublime, Lionel Trilling describes a revolution in art where “[T]he artist … ceases to be the craftsman or the performer, dependent upon the approval of the audience. His reference is to himself only, or to some transcendent power which—or who—has decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it” (Trilling 1972: 97). Beauty, Edmund Burke has observed, is a social quality (Burke qtd. in Trilling 1972: 97). Trilling also refers to Susan Sontag’s acknowledgement that “pleasure has nothing to do with artistic experience”; the sublime, in place of beauty’s charm, gives a kind of pleasure that is interfused with pain, and which produces “a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind” (Trilling 1972: 97). The sublime transcends taste, by evoking the obscured or the liminal in human experience, which nonetheless has the quality of giving the sensation of being universal or constant. In black metal, it is the sublimation of transgressive expression into an aesthetic that becomes the basis of artistic experience. The uncanny aesthetics of animating the dead— visually through corpse paint, and thematically in lyrics and titles—is here meshed with spirituality and anti-Christian voicings. The 2003 Gorgoroth album Twilight of the Idols borrowed the title of Nietzsche’s (1888) social critique of Christianity and German society, perhaps prompted by discussions on individualism and traditional Christian society. But Gaahl might also have discovered in Nietzsche an aesthetic philosophy, for example in Nietzsche’s theory of the Dionysian. For Nietzsche, to acknowledge the brutality of nature and destructive chaos, and to respond without fear and denial with an aesthetic that captures life as it truly is, is an essential process and a way to an experience of the sublime. The sublime might seem an elevated ideal for a black metal aesthetic that has often seemed to do no more than invert symbols of moral order to evoke havoc and fear, or worse, has

197

198

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

barbarically condoned violence, destruction, and crime for no better reason than to sell records. Yet, it might be interesting to consider, as Maggie Nelson has, the relationships between literal violence, expressed support of aggression and violence, and violence in art. Nelson notes that the aesthetic shock of literal violence is often associated with low-culture, while violence in the artistic avant-garde and high-culture institutions (e.g. Shakespeare, the Bible) is elevated to a level of allegory and symbolism (Nelson 2011). Can black metal, despite its youth-culture origins, elevate brutality to symbolize transcendent suffering, loss, and cruelty in nature and in human existence? Bjarne Melgaard is a Norwegian visual artist who has brought black metal into the galleries of the cultural elite, where inversion of Christian symbols gains another level of meaning, opening the expression to a different kind of scrutiny and mode of interpretation. Melgaard has compared black metal with Edvard Munch’s works, and regards black metal one of the extremely few interesting expressions to come out of Norway (Until the Light Takes Us 2008). That it was initially rejected by the mainstream, to Melgaard, only affirms its artistic value. In the romantic tradition, artists used epic nature as an expression of the sublime. In Norway, the national romanticism was part of a nation-building project. Many of these national romantics gleaned influence from pre-colonial times, often from Norse literature and mythology. In black metal we can observe a new kind of national romanticism, appropriating epic nature and Norse themes, again as expressions of the sublime and the transcendent. Themes of lament evoke lost spirituality (such as preChristian or Norse beliefs) and become a narrative premise that brings into music, and thereby into the present, irrationalized (in Weber’s sense) and historical worldviews. The mythology of ancestry provides an imagined affinity that transcends the Christian era.

Conclusion That Norway is a boring place to live was a recurrent trope of Norwegian black metal of the 1990s. What might have been a Norwegian generation’s version of punk (indeed, metal found a good deal of inspiration in punk), was in black metal about transgressing a range of norms. Tapping into general social anxieties related to religion, community, and national unity, this musical expression resonated on a wealth of levels, where battles over identity between liberal, traditional, social, and individualistic ideals were ongoing. The issues explored in this chapter are cause to reflect on matters of musical agency in a genre of popular music that encompasses class, gender, race, sexuality, and generation. In particular, the iconic status of Gaahl prompts critical thought on the intricacies of a genre that is male-dominated, white, and distinctly Nordic. Black metal is a form of Western musical practice; it is commonly aligned to the histories of the body and hegemonic masculinity. From a musicological perspective, as Ian Biddle has argued, it is the “constituting of masculinity as an object of study that has made way for new critical scholarly approaches to music and masculinity” (Biddle and Gibson 2009: 9).31 Returning to our conceptions of the persona, monstrosity, and the sublime, we have discovered that

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

black metal presents not only a platform for considering masculinities and how these are aestheticized through musical practice, but also that Norwegian cultural identity can be de-essentialized through music. Our approach to interpreting the representational politics of Gaahl seeks to expose the complex politics around human agency, a prime strategy for articulating powerful sentiments. When considering the concept of class within a Norwegian black metal context, we’ve had to contend with several challenges. First, black metal neither emerges from nor obviously expresses affiliation with a distinct social class on the domestic level. Further, any individual (in this case, Gaahl) cannot represent a class per se, and thus nothing profound can be said about class on the basis of a single-person case study. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, because Norway is widely considered a more or less classless society (at least since the Labor movement so firmly established the fundamental principles of its social democracy and welfare, which led to a distribution of wealth in the post-war era that is relatively egalitarian), this spells out a social phenomenon that is ostensibly unique. Therefore, any clear-cut conclusions about class in relation to Gaahl are somewhat redundant despite that this study attempts to further an understanding of the historical context where globalization is more a reality than a socialist dream. Gaahl suggests an inherited skepticism for centralized authority (particularly the kind of religious authority that was prevalent in geographically peripheral communities), which traditionally has been coupled with a new sense of individualism. In terms of cultural identity, black metal and its transgressive expressions highlight a number of social tensions that exist in the Norwegian context, and which mark a society in transition. These revolve, most apparently, around questions of unity, solidarism, faith, traditionalism, and morality, emphasizing a loss of objective or communal purpose. In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley noted: “Invention […] does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself ” (Shelley 1831: ix). As a national brand, Norwegian black metal bears this out. Paradoxically, by the early-2000s, the status of black metal was established as exemplary creative entrepreneurship, not least for its branding as distinctly Norwegian, and its innovative cultural export strategies, and today, it constitutes a landmark in Norwegian popular music. As we have argued, Gaahl’s transgressive performances operate as a socializing agent for illuminating class, politics, and gender constructs in an everevolving Norwegian setting.

Notes 1 In Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley summons the “land of mist and snow” from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and romanticizes the agony and struggle of man to achieve the supernatural. Today, black metal signifies a return to romantic sentiments.

199

200

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11

12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

This iconic photograph was taken by Peter Beste, photographer and documentary director of True Norwegian Black Metal (2007). Available online: http://www.peterbeste. com/tnbm/oxblhwa2rx1hgx6e8opxm7w232el5o (accessed September 2018). The band took their name from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where Gorgoroth is a desolate mountain plateau in Mordor. Gaahl has also been involved with the groups Gaahlskagg, Trelldom, Sigfader, and Wardruna. Though the origin of the term is uncertain, the “second wave of black metal” is widely used to refer to Norwegian satanic metal of the 1990s. Translated by Nina Nielsen. The Death of Balder is referenced in several black metal productions, most notably in the Burzum album Dauði Baldrs (1997). Gaahl and King ov Hell (Tom Cato Visnes) lost the right to the name Gorgoroth in 2009 after attempting to remove founding member Infernus (Roger Tiegs) from the band. The homo hubris, however, is a fairly common role to be acted out by black metal artists, and conceitedness should therefore not be interpreted as singular or spectacular in this context. A macho arrogance is in the style of not only black metal, but typical of aggressive or transgressive genres. Think, for example, of hard core, rap or death metal. For more on the historical context and development of religion, society, and public discourse about faith in Norway, see for example Botvar (2010) and Lundby and Gresaker (2015). For instance, Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven, front figure of black metal band Satyricon, has claimed that Norway is a working-class society, and as a result Norwegians don’t understand black metal: “[Expressions] with excess and greatness appear ironic” (Wongraven 2008). Translated by Nina Nielsen. Translated by Nina Nielsen. Labor leader Gerhardsen served three periods as Prime Minister, 1945–1951, 1955–1963 and 1963–1965. In 1951, he resigned from the Prime Minister post (appointing Oscar Torp as his replacement) but returned to the position with strong support in 1955. See, for example, Pakulski and Waters (1996). For a thorough discussion on the revision of the class concept, see, for example, Devine and Savage (2005). Norway was under Nazi occupation 1940–1945, and while Nazi persecution on the basis of ethnicity, culture and religion was not as widespread in Norway as elsewhere, systematic oppression of ideology, politics, free speech, mobility, and sovereignty deeply impacted Norwegians living under Nazi occupation. If Weber was right in connecting protestant ethics with capitalism, it is perhaps not too rash to consider that a crisis in one would impact the other. The multifaceted causal relationships, though, are beyond what we can speculate on here. Translated by Nina Nielsen. Translated by Nina Nielsen. The relatively low number of black metal artists and fans in Norway, with great geographical distances between them, hardly warrants the label “subculture.” Something of a scene emerged in the mid-1990s, once media coverage established Norwegian black metal as a trend and bands put out an increasing number of international releases.

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

21 See also Hawkins (2007) on the persona of Aphex Twin in the music video, ‘Windowlicker.’ 22 In advocating this position, Auslander (2006, 2008) delves into critiquing performance strategies alongside style and genre. From a musicological vantage point, Burns (2010) identifies “vocal authority” as a critical entity of listening engagement, where “one ascribes that authority to the personal and communal in addition to the more traditional authorial narrative mode” (2010: 189, author’s emphases). Also see Hawkins (2019). 23 See Kai Arne Hansen, whose musicological approach reveals that personas are “partly constituted by the personal narratives that meticulously manage their presentation of particular aspects of identity and biography across platforms” (2017: 166). 24 Negus has insisted that the narrative “is not just conveyed through the words” (2012: 372). Similarly, Nicholls, in his studies of various songs and albums, demonstrates that narrativity in popular music can be illusive, for it operates on many levels. Of the five levels Nicholls advocates, his fifth is arguably the most pertinent for studying the rock persona, defined as when “a complex narrative discourse is rendered through multiple media, including lyrics, music, prose, and art work” (2007: 301). 25 There is a long list of artists who have opted for alternative personas, including Laurie Anderson/Fenway Bergamot, Bowie/Ziggy Stardust, The Weekend/Starboy, Garth Brooks/Chris Gaines, Bono/Mr. MacPhisto, Joni Mitchell/Art Nouveau, Marshall Mathers/Eminem/Slim Shady, The Beatles/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Judas Priest/Painkiller, and Creedence Clearwater Revival/Willy and the Poor Boys. 26 Gaahl’s first band, Trelldom, was formed in 1992, followed by Gaahlskagg in 1998. It was in that same year that he joined Gorgoroth, albeit appearing as vocalist only on one track (title track) of their fourth album Destroyer (1998). Notably, Gorgoroth have not published their lyrics, for the reason that this would diminish the music and make it too easy for listeners, according to Gaahl. 27 We choose the Norwegian term låt to denote something more than just a song. From Norse láta “let, let out sound,” meaning (verb) “to sound,” or (noun) “song, tune, sound” (pl. låter). 28 See, for example, the work of scholars within popular music studies. 29 Gerard Genette’s concept of “narrative mood” (1980: 161–211) is useful for unpicking the features of narrative distancing that ensue in the acts of storytelling within performance situations. 30 https://www.vice.com/gr/article/exazb4/gaahl-hates-your-sweatpants-730-v18n3 (accessed 10 September 2019, 11.30) 31 Cf. Hawkins (2017) with a discussion of structures of masculinity in Norwegian popular music.

Discography Burzum (1997), Dauði Baldrs (CD), United Kingdom: Misanthropy. Gorgoroth (1998), Destroyer (CD), Germany: Nuclear Blast.

201

202

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Gorgoroth (2000), Incipit Satan (CD), Germany: Nuclear Blast. Gorgoroth (2003), Twilight of the Idols (CD), Germany: Nuclear Blast.

Works Cited Auslander, P. (2006), “Watch That Man. David Bowie: Hammersmith Odeon, London, 3 July 1973,” in I. Inglis (ed.), Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, 70–80, Aldershot: Ashgate. Auslander, P. (2008), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Biddle, I. and K. Gibson (eds.) (2009), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, Farnham: Ashgate. Botvar, P. K. (2010), ‘Endringer i nordmenns religiøse liv’ [Changes in the Religious Life of Norwegians], in P. K. Botvar and U. Schmidt (eds), Religion i dagens Norge [Religion in Norway Today], 11–24, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Browning, C. S. (2007), ‘Branding Nordicity: Models, Identity and the Decline of Exceptionalism’, in Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association, 42(1), 27–51. Burns, L. (2010), “Vocal Authority and Listener Engagement: Musical and Narrative Expressive Strategies in Alternative Female Rock Artists (1993–95),” in J. Covach and M. Spicer (eds), Sounding out Rock, 154–92, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Clifford-Napoleone, A. R. (2015), Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent, New York: Routledge. Cohen, J. (1996), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Devine, F. and M. Savage (2005), “The Cultural Turn, Sociology and Class Analysis,” in F. Devine, M. Savage, J. Scott, and R. Crompton (eds), Rethinking Class Cultures, Identities and Lifestyles, 1–23. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan. Eriksen, T. H., and I. B. Neumann (2011), ‘Fra slektsgård til oljeplattform: Norsk identitet og Europa’, [From Family Farm to Oil Platform: Norwegian Identity and Europe], in Internasjonal Politikk, [International Politics], 69(3), 413–36. Espedal, K. E. (2008), “Gaahl: My goal with Wardruna is to bring Baldr back home to where he belongs,” FaceCulture. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ubinkOgPSuA (accessed September 2018). Espedal, K. E. (2013), “Unleashing Satan: An Evening with Gaahl,” interviewer J. Salmeron, November 25. Available online: http://www.metalblast.net/interviews/unleashing-satanan-evening-with-gaahl/ (accessed September 2018). Gelbart, M. (2003), “Persona and Voice in the Kinks’ Songs of the Late 1960s,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128 (2), 200–41. Genette, G. (1980), Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, New York: Cornell University Press. Hansen, K. A. (2017), ‘Empowered or Objectified? Personal Narrative and Audiovisual Aesthetics in Beyoncé’s Partition, Popular Music and Society 40 (2), 164–80. Hawkins, Stan. “Aphex Twin: Monstrous Hermaphrodites, Madness and the Strain of Independent Dance Music.” In Essays on Sound and Vision, edited by John Richardson and Stan Hawkins, 27–53. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2007.

Masculinity, Class, and Norwegian Black Metal

Hawkins, S. (2009), The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture, Farnham: Ashgate. Hawkins, S. (2017), Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism in a Norwegian Context, in F. Holt and A.-V. Kärjä (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, 295–310, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Stan. ‘Rock personas: “We will, we will rock you!” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, edited by Allan F. Moore and Paul Carr. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Hawkins, Stan, and John Richardson. “Remodeling Britney Spears: Matters of intoxication and Mediation.” Popular Music and Society 30, no. 5 (2007): 605–629. Lundby, K. and A. K. Gresaker, (2015), “Religion i mediene – omstridt og oversett?,” [Religion in the Media – Disputed and Overlooked?], in I. Furseth (ed.), Religionens tilbakekomst i offentligheten?: religion, politikk, medier, stat og sivilsamfunn i Norge siden 1980-tallet, [The Return of Religion to the Public Sphere?: Religion, Politics, Media, Government and Civil Society in Norway since the 1980s], 69–104, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Maus, F. E. (2001), “Glamour and Evasion: the Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys,” Popular Musi 20, (3), 379–93. Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005), [Documentary film] Dir. Sam Dunn, Scot McFayden and Jessica Joy Wise, Canada: Banger Films. Negus, K. (2012), “Narrative, Interpretation, and the Popular Song,” The Musical Quarterly 95, (2/3) (Summer-Fall), 368–95. Nelson, M. (2011), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, New York: W. W. Norton. Nicholls, D. (2007), “Narrative Theory as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Popular Music Texts,” Music and Letters 88 (2), 297–315. Nielsen, N. (2016), “Englar og Demonar?” [Angels and Demons?], Klassekampen, 4 (January), 6–7. Olstad, F. (1991), Arbeiderklassens vekst og fall - Hovedlinjer i 1000 års norsk historie, [The Rise and Fall of the Working Class – Central Developments in 1000 Years of Norwegian History], Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Pakulski, J. and M. Waters (1996), The Death of Class, London: Sage. Rokkan, S. (1967), “Geography, Religion, and Social Class: Crosscutting Cleavages in Norwegian Politics,” in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, 367–444, New York: The Free Press. Shelley, M. (1831), Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, London: Colburn and Bentley. Stugu, O. S. (2018), Norsk historie etter 1905: vegen mot velstandslandet, [Norwegian History After 1905: The Path Toward the Welfare State], 2nd edn, Oslo: Samlaget. Svendsen, R. H. (2009), “Gaahl gir seg med metal,” [Gaahl Quits Metal], NRK, August 17. Available online: https://www.nrk.no/hordaland/gaahl-gir-seg-med-metal-1.6734905 (accessed September 2018). Swidler, A. (1993), “Foreword,” in M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, ix–xvii, Boston: Beacon Press. Trilling, L. (1972), Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard: Harvard University Press. True Norwegian Black Metal (2007), [Documentary film] Dir. Peter Beste, USA: VBS/Vice Magazine. Until the Light Takes Us (2008), [Documentary film] Dir. Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, USA: Artists Public Domain

203

204

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Visnes, T. C. (2009), “Ex-GORGOROTH Bassist Says GOD SEED Is A ‘Suitable Name’ For New Project,” Blabbermouth, March 23. Available online: http://www.blabbermouth.net/ news/ex-gorgoroth-bassist-says-god-seed-is-a-suitable-name-for-new-project/ (accessed September 2018). Weber, M. (1958), The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, eds. D. Martindale, J. Riedel, and G. Neuwirth, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Wongraven, S. (2008), “Det er jo ikke akkurat AC/DC-musikk vi holder på med – Noen tar jobben sin mer seriøst enn andre,” [It’s Not Exactly AC/DC Music That We’re Occupied With – Some Take Their Jobs More Seriously Than Others], interviewer H. Skjervold, Aftenposten, October 24. Available online: https://www.aftenposten.no/osloby/byliv/i/ jzOLb/--Det-er-jo-ikke-akkurat-ACDC-musikk-vi-holder-pa-med (accessed October 2018).

10 Women’s Music, #20GAYTEEN, and Lesbian Hip-Hop: Shifting Voices of Class, Race, and Sexuality in WSW’s Popular Musics Kirsten Zemke

In 1988, Women’s Music artist Tracey Chapman, in one of her most popular songs, “Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution,” sang about a “revolution” where people would “rise up” and “get their share.” Through popular music, she inserted radical discourse about class, race, and sexuality into mainstream popular culture. Class and sexuality are an often-overlooked intersection of marginalities, one that has led to fallacious stereotypes of gay affluence and the exclusion of the experiences and exigencies of working class and folks of color in queer activism. Race, class, gender, and sexuality operate in mutually reinforcing structures of hierarchy, with vastly different experiences of homosexuality oppressions between those of different class locations. Both class and sexuality operate under negotiations between structure and agency, with some bodies and identities subject to multiplications of discrimination, poverty, exclusion, and violence. In this chapter, I discuss three queer musical movements from women-identified artists as examples of how sexuality identities and alliances shift across time. There are various words, alliances, communities, and identities used by women who have sex with women (WSW), including lesbian, bi, pan, WLW (women who love women) and queer. While lesbianism was seen as a cohesive base for musical creativity and community in the 1970s, in two post-2010 music trends (#20GAYTEEN and lesbian hiphop), women who love women are exploring other music genres, offering varied racial and ethnic positions, expanding their activisms and audiences to a community of queer folks that includes gender and sexuality variances, and reaching a broader spectrum of class positions via the internet. Since the 1960s, gay liberationists and lesbian feminists have sought to absorb the “critical spirit” of Marxism (Seidman 2011) but have not maintained a focus on class or an economic-centered analytic. This can be seen in the culture and ideologies of Women’s Music, a musical movement centered on sexuality as a singular component of identity,

206

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

one which this musical and political community imagined and hoped would be enough to create a cohesive character with music able to speak to their experiences (Lont 1992). This lesbian-feminist movement, which has mostly utilized the genre of American folk music, has yielded a number of talented music artists as well as shaped a community who gathered at women-only festivals and spaces. These women operated their own record labels and tried to create an independent economy for themselves (Lont 1992). However, by avoiding class and racial differences, Women’s Music has been criticized for speaking for only a particular type of white, middle-class lesbianism. Despite the fostering of some notable black artists, like Chapman mentioned above, the Women’s movement’s essentialism around sexuality ended up seeing lesbians of color and working-class lesbians marginalized and ignored by the very movement supposed to empower them. African American feminist theorists in the 1990s such as bel hooks (1994) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) have explored how race, gender, and class engender dissimilar experiences of womanhood and, by extension, sexuality. For instance, black queer folks have different cultural and community pressures around coming out (McCune 2008; Meyer 2012); have increased vulnerabilities to violence (Meyer 2010); are more likely to receive inadequate responses to violence by law enforcement; and statistically have less access to medical care (Hutchinson 1999). Around this same time, queer theorists were also expanding the scope and applications of feminist discourse. Queer theory emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, employing the word “queer” as a “reverse affirmation” (Stein and Plummer 1994: 182). Queer theory embraces difference and spectra instead of binaries. The activism, affiliation, and scholarship around feminist and Gay and Lesbian Studies then expanded to include any gender presentation or sexual desire that does not fit into generalized heteronormativity and its power structures. The coalition of “queerness” (i.e., LGBTQIA+) subsequently began to also celebrate and advocate for bisexuals, trans, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, intersex, pansexual, polyamorous, and gender fluid folks. The inclusion of gender presentation into this alliance was a welcome acknowledgement of the many trans heroines who had always been a part of “gay” activism (e.g., Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at the Stonewall riot in 1969) and a rebuff to some trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Music is an ideal way to explore the voices, stories, and shifts in the identities of WSW. Music is related to the body (Moisala 1999); it can be used for activism and political change, and it can incite powerful emotional responses (Frith 1998). While still a site of misogyny and heteronormative dominance, popular music has a history of occasionally celebrating and accepting gender-queer and non-heterosexual icons (e.g., David Bowie, Prince, Janis Joplin, and George Michael). The three WSW-centred music cultures I examine in this chapter offer manifestations of a shift in discourse around sexuality and lesbianism, including understanding sexual identities in light of multiple marginalizations. In the first section, I briefly summarize discourse around class and sexuality as intersections of subordination and power. I then turn to the music and culture of Women’s Music, examining how the movement fought against the capitalist system of economy and power, while centering on the singular axis of “women who love women” without fully including lesbians and queer women from varied class and race locations. Matching

Women’s Music, #20GAYTEEN, and Class

the shifts in political and academic discourse, I then look at the #20GAYTEEN (hashtag 2000 and gayteen/18) phenomenon, which saw young queer performers use the internet and social media to attract the mainstream music industry to their overtly queer lyrics, personae, and videos. Here, I discuss three queer pop star women—Hayley Kiyoko, Kehlani, and Halsey—who express and politicize their lesbian, bi, and queer identities through fan interactions, music videos, and lyrics. Their queerness, rather than centering on lesbian feminism or advocating for social or political change, explores topics like “coming out,” queer representation, and self-acceptance in the attempt to provide a space of comfort and encouragement for other queer youth. In the final section, I discuss three queer black women—Young M.A, Syd tha Kyd, and Janelle Monáe—who use the black cultural expression of hip-hop to inject acceptance of their sexuality into the often homophobic genre of hip-hop. These women work within their own genre and communities to craft a queer music that speaks for the unique experiences of black women in the United States.

Class and Sexuality: “My Pussy Wrote a Thesis on Colonialism” There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself—whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. (Audre Lorde qtd in Hammond 1981)

Queer people and bodies can have multiple class locations, and class groups include people with varying sexual desires. While class structures are conspicuously hierarchical, notions of sexuality also come from a ranked power system, which sees heterosexuality as “normal” and queerness as “deviant” (Bryant and Hoon 2006). Throughout history, both queer and lower-class persons have been considered “deviant bodies” (Foucault 1990), with lower classes at times constructed as uncivilized and promiscuous (Groneman 1994; Santiago 2011). Being at the lower end of these hierarches can result in material realities of violence, poverty, and suffering. Both class and sexual identities are formed in bodies through interactions between structure and agency. They are both regulated and constructed by institutionalized power structures and can be contested and negotiated through transgression and resistance (Drucker 2011). Class and sexuality are also both material and symbolic. Class is measurably grounded in access to material resources, and sexuality is largely based in bodies, sexual experiences, and physical desires. However, both are also accomplished, discursively constructed, and representational. Class subjectivities and identities, like gender and sexuality performance, are grounded in repeated presentations of cultural signs and conventions (Valocchi 2005) and read by others as such. Class is unstable and contextual, with categories that shift according to social actors (Anthias 2001, cited in Bryant and Hoon 2006), just as sexuality can be fluid, ambiguous, and problematic. Class, sexuality, and gender can all be signified by dress (Bryant and Hoon 2006), with some visibilities of queerness related to the ability

207

208

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

to consume (Drucker 2011). Performance can consciously manipulate class norms and systems (Valocchi 2005), and similar to race passing, some queer folks may try to “straight pass”—often incorporating “class passing”—to avoid harm (Pitman 2000). The ability to self-identify as queer can be dictated by class. For instance, many queer signifiers and communities require certain amounts of economic capital for participation (Drucker 2011). Education around queer studies, feminism, and critical thinking is not always available to working-class folks (Jackson 2011). Many of the voices leading discussions around the politics and identities of queerness come from people with educational privilege (Podesta-Diverio 2017). Middle-class men and women have more economic and social resources to live outside the surveillance of their families and to defy conventions (Drucker 2011; Jackson 2011). The very notion of “outness” as an ideal for queer people is a “privileged understanding” of sexual identity that does not take into consideration the experiences and precarities of queer folks of color (McCune 2008). Working-class queer folks and queer folks of color thus, at times, “refuse affiliations which [demand] a visibility of them,” as it may be risky, even dangerous, especially in workplaces (Drucker 2011: 24). Homosexuality is often ostracized in working-class heterosexual masculine schooling, training, and employment (Heaphy 2011). The ideal masculinity of a “working-class male” is premised on being heterosexual (Embrick, Walther, and Wickens 2007; Heaphy 2011), which is often “naturalized and normalized” through “workroom banter and gay-bashing” (Embrick et al. 2007: 759). Ironically, working-class subjectivities are represented in some aspects of gay culture as eroticized Others (Johnson 2008, cited in Heaphy 2011). There is a desired gay type called “trade,” as depicted in YouTube performer Todrick Hall’s 2018 song “T.H.U.G. (Trade),” which features the heavily muscled bodies of (highly stereotyped and performed) workingclass men. This contrasts with the femme, high-fashion emulation found in ball culture, which sees young queer men and trans women of color, most often from the poorest of backgrounds, idolizing haute couture and expensively adorned music and fashion divas (Lawrence 2011). Social research is in itself a major source of misunderstanding around class and sexuality (McDermott 2011; Stein and Plummer 1994). It has fueled the pervasive stereotype that queer folks are overwhelmingly middle class, even though the reality is that, for example, gay men are actually less affluent than others with comparable education and occupation (Sender 2006). Sexuality is not always “visible” to researchers, and unless a person selfidentifies, such categories have no fixed criteria (Stein and Plummer 1994). Lower-class folks may be reluctant to indicate homosexual identity, activity, or unmarried partnerships on forms (Santiago 2011), as this can lead to stigma, exclusion, and violence. Racial and class locations may necessitate a “strategy of invisibility” for some queer folks, which skews research results and conclusions towards white, middle-class queer portrayals (Badgett 2003; Hutchinson 1999). Cultural representations of gay and lesbians have tended to be predominantly affluent and white (McDermott 2011), which in some ways has been received well by queer communities: the stereotype of the affluent, cisgendered, attractive gay man has

Women’s Music, #20GAYTEEN, and Class

in some ways helped to “normalize” queer folks within the notions of middle-class and mainstream values (Drucker 2011; Henderson 2003; Santiago 2011). Gay and lesbian activists in the past have shied away from advocating for the needs of working-class queer folks (e.g., concerning workplace safety, a living wage, and other issues), as such issues do not represent the needs of “ideal” middle-class gay men and lesbians (Santiago 2011). For instance, queer youth make up between 20–40 percent of homeless adolescents in the United States, yet this struggle is rarely the subject of LGBTQ activism (Santiago 2011). Numerous aspects of economic life (e.g., property, spousal benefits, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, tax laws, immigration, etc.) are based on heteronormative concepts of family and coupledom, which sees queer folks at a disadvantage (Henderson 2001; Sender 2006). Many workplaces and work sectors impose pressures to abide by heterosexual norms of behavior, which results in queer workers sometimes accepting lower wages in exchange for the comfort of working in queer-accepting environments (Drucker 2011). The lesbian feminists of the 1970s attempted to project a classlessness they felt was imperative to maintain cohesion in the movement, especially between Marxist feminists and others. This community tried to operate outside the mainstream economy, in a Lesbian Nation separatist utopian endeavor with a separatist economy, institutions, cooperatives, values, and culture (Murray 2007). These feminists knew that capitalism was linked with patriarchy and heteronormativity, but still used consumption to distribute their personal and sexual yearnings (Murray 2007). One of the creative outputs of this radical political and social movement was a grouping of artists, music styles and musical events called Women’s Music.

Women’s Music: “Sweet Woman Risin’ Inside My Glow” The Women’s Music phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s has been well explored and this work will be summarized here with particular highlights around in issues of class and sexuality. The focus of the activism and music of this movement was on women loving women and lived lesbian experiences—as Alix Dobkin said, “my music is not for everyone, my music is for lesbians” (qtd in Murray 2007: 269). The scene served as a site where lesbian sexuality and identity were addressed publicly, and lesbian lived experiences were expressed and codified in musical form (Dougher 2010). What distinguished Women’s Music from other music made by women of the period was its lesbian focus, in both lyrics and performance contexts (Dougher 2010). The scene also identified itself as feminist (Murray 2007), stimulated by the civil rights and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Staggenborg, Eder, and Sudderth 1993). Lesbian-centric Women’s Music festivals emerged in the mid-1970s, manifesting a shift in the lesbian feminist scene from lesbian politics to lesbian culture.

209

210

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class

Key artists of the folk-music-based scene in the 1970s included Holly Near, Meg Christian, and Cris Williamson (Jones 1999; Murray 2007). Women-run music labels like Olivia and Redwood Records formed to facilitate recording and distribution, in an attempt to stand outside the mainstream music market. These labels offered instead a female music community (Jones 1999), where women musicians and song writers could make music outside the conventional capitalist music and radio industries (Engstrom 2010). Most of the women involved in these companies identified as lesbian feminists (Murray 2007), not only in lyrics but in women-led production and ownership (Engstrom 2010). Central to this scene in the 1970s was a festival culture (Morris 2003), which saw thousands gather for the music as well as workshops and lectures (Murray 2007). These festivals encouraged women to get into popular music-making (Engstrom 2010) and helped feminist musicians gain exposure and audiences (Staggenborg et al. 1993). Women-only gatherings and record labels were a “separatist utopian endeavour,” which tried to create a “separatist economy” reflective of women’s values and culture outside the “corrupting force” of the market (Dougher 2010; Murray 2007). While they condemned mainstream consumerism, women tried to create and circulate their own lesbian goods and resources with the notion that “lesbians should buy from other lesbians” (Murray 2007). Problematically, however, this social, musical, and economic movement attempted to frame the category of “lesbian” as stable, unified, and coherent (Engstrom 2010). This strategic essentialism was deployed in an attempt to garner unity in the face of homophobia (Dougher 2010), but ended up marginalizing the minorities in their ranks (Drucker 2011) and marking white, middle-class lesbians as the dominant majority of the scene (Staggenborg et al. 1993). Black feminists and others subsequently began to critique the false universalism of feminism in the 1980s and 1990s (Stein and Plummer 1994), challenging the category of “women” it described (Clay 2007). The scene did foster some artists who achieved success in the mainstream music industry, such as Tracey Chapman, k. d. Lang, Melissa Etheridge, Sleater-Kinney, and the Indigo Girls. These trailblazing folk music singer-songwriters inserted lesbian voices, stories, styles, and culture into the normally heteronormative, folk-averse, and male-dominated music milieu. The dissipation of the scene due to political and discourse shifts around sexual identities and inclusion in the 1990s meant the loss of a social-cultural-economic space that specifically nurtured and discovered lesbian talent. However, technological changes in music distribution and transmission in the 2000s have provided a new space for WSW voices to sidestep the mainstream music industry in finding and evolving their audiences—the internet.

Two Thousands and GAYTEEN: “I Can’t Turn Off What Turns Me On” The hashtag 2000 and Gay (Eight) Teen (#20GAYTEEN) was started by Disney-teen-actressturned-queer-pop-star Hayley Kiyoko in 2018. #20GAYTEEN signals an online-centered

Women’s Music, #20GAYTEEN, and Class

pop music movement in which queer pop stars and their hits target queer fans with messages of acceptance (Gonzales 2018). In 2018, Billboard magazine featured the article, “LGBTQ Stars Who Have Come Out in 2018 So Far,” which mentioned Jason Mraz, Brendon Urie, Rita Ora, and Bebe Rexha. A May 2018 Billboard article titled, “13 Songs That Celebrate Bisexuality” included some of the artists I discuss here: Halsey (“Strangers” with Lauren Jauregui), Hayley Kiyoko (“Curious”), and Kehlani (“1st Position”); it also mentioned Demi Lovato’s “Cool For the Summer” as an example of “bicuriosity.” Highly visible male queer pop stars such as Perfume Genius and Troye Sivan have located and developed their fan communities using online platforms. Laura Jane Grace from the band Against Me! is a trans woman who has released songs exploring her identity such as “Transgender Dysphoria Blues” “and “True Trans Soul Rebel.” Grammy-winning songwriter teddy