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Popular Music
& Age
Keith Negus Popular Music in Theory (1996)
Popular Music and Age
Negus challenges the connection between popular music and youth culture. He argues that popular music is listened to and performed by an ageing demographic. Johnny Cash Rolling Stones Stevie Nicks
Popular Music and Age
NIRVANA DONNY OSMOND
He also takes issue with the view that popular music is inherently rebellious.
Popular Music and Age
Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory (1996)
Punk rock finally challenged, deconstructed and
exposed the mythologies of rock at the very moment when the original teenagers and youth of the rock generation were beginning to grow old and beginning to hear things in a different way: songs of generational rebellion, sexual liberation and social concern were starting to be used to advertise wine coolers, executive cars and personal insurance. Keith Negus Histories, Popular Music in Theory (1996; Polity Press, Cambridge).
Levis Marvin Gaye Ronettes The Clash
Babylon Zoo
Popular Music and Age
Criticism: Negus falls into the classic Frankfurt School trap of
seeing all commercial uses of popular art as problematic.
Popular Music and Age
Adorno saw Popular Music as the antithesis of Art Music. According to him it is pseudoindividualised offering only a thin veneer of diversionary pleasure that conceals from the listener its fundamentally formulaic quality.
Popular Music & Gender
Norma Coates Revolution Now (1997)
Mary Hannon McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)
Popular Music and Gender
Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)
Hannon looks at the messages and values encoded in genres of
popular music. She argues that rock is suggestive of authenticity and the real, while pop is synonymous with in-authenticity and artificiality.
Popular Music and Gender
Rock stands for
geniuses and heroes. Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)
Popular Music and Gender
Pop stands for
mutability and glitter Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)
Popular Music and Gender
Generally speaking the notion of authenticity in relation to contemporary popular music is indexed quite clearly to the terms rock and pop. Mary Hannon observes this in her article McRock: Pop as Commodity. She suggests that while pop stands for mutability and glitter rock believes in geniuses and heroes. In every instance it would seem that pop testified its own artificiality while rock proclaims its authenticity. Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity, (1988), pp.209-210. Abba
Led Zeppelin
Popular Music and Gender
Norma Coates, Revolution Now (1997)
Norma Coates extends the work of Mary Hannon. She focuses on the way in which authenticity is synonymous with the way in which gender is constructed.
Popular Music and Gender
Rock is masculine
Popular Music and Gender
Pop is feminine
Popular Music and Gender
Norma Coates, Revolution Now (1987) (R)ock is metonymic with authenticity while pop is metonymic with artifice. Sliding even further down the metonymic slope, authentic becomes masculine while artificial become feminine. Rock, therefore, is masculine, pop is feminine, and the two are set in binary relation to each other, with the masculine, of course on top. Norma Coates, Revolution Now in Sexing The Groove Popular Music and Gender by Sheila Whitely (ed) (1997; Routledge, London), p.53.
Popular Music and Gender
In an age before Madonna, Deborah Harry and Blondie blurred the
boundaries between rock, pop and gender: a hybrid of music styles and gender performance.
Many theorists have moved beyond this binary and prefer to look at the more subtle ways in which gender and authenticity are constructed in musical performance.
Popular Music and Gender
It is generally accepted that rock is no less performative and artificial
than other genres of music. Bruce Springsteens image, for example, as the down to earth blue collar American is no less contrived than that of Madonna or Gwen Steffani.
Post-modern approaches to Popular Music
Andrew Goodwin Sample and Hold Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction (1990)
Lawrence Grossberg The Media Economy of Rock Culture (1993)
Postmodern approaches to Popular Music and
Laurence Grossberg argues that the first thing any pop theorist needs to do is admit everything is fake. There is no such thing as an authentic performance in the world of popular music.
Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and
From the first gramophone recording to the twelve inch single,
MTV to downloads popular music is the embodiment of postmodern cultural practise: a simulacrum (a copy without an original)
Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and
Perhaps most well known, however, is Lawrence Grossbergs mediation of the notion of authenticity in The Media Economy of Rock. In this article he suggests that the only possible claim to authenticity in the music industry is derived from the knowledge and admission of your in-authenticity. He argues that the only authenticity is to know and even admit that you are not being authentic, to fake it without faking the fact that you are faking it. Lawrence Grossberg, The Media Economy of Rock Culture Cinema, Postmodenrity and Authenticity in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), (1993; Routledge, London), p.206.
Black Box Milli Vanilli Grammy
Loleata Holloway Milli Vanilli Girl Im Gonna Miss You
Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and
Not only does he suggest that contemporary pop musicians have often learned to program every bit as skilfully as earlier generations learned to play but he ventures that, far from being an age of plunder, sampling culture actually recuperates pops history. Andrew Goodwin, Sample and Hold Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction, (1990).
Hung Up
Gimme Gimme
Bob Sinclair C + C Music Factory
Scissor Sisters Four Seasons Nolans Leo Sayer
Post-modern approaches to Popular Music
What shift is not the insidious qualities of the music itself but the way in which we interpret them. Abba is the same as Led Zeppelin is the same as Goldie Looking Chain is the same of Elvis Presley there is a very narrow spectrum of difference. What changes is the narrative of authorship we impose upon popular music texts.
Conclusion
Conclusion to Popular Music Theory
Popular music history is downloadable at the touch of a button and is
incorporated into the portfolio of consumer choices that define contemporary life.
Conclusion to Popular Music Theory
Consequently there is less anxiety about conflicting genres, time
periods and value systems. It is okay to like Led Zeppelin and Abba.
Conclusion to Popular Music Theory
Audiences have multiple strategies for listening. They can shift from The Beatles to The Neptunes because contemporary ideas about the self are less singular. Audiences have plural identities; they are dexterous.
Conclusion to Popular Music Theory
And listening to popular music is one of the ways in which
we find out how to produce new versions of ourselves.
