Articulating musical meaning/re-constructing musical history/locating the ‘popular’

Abstract

In thinking about how to locate popular music within music history, I start from two propositions. Firstly, that attempts to isolate and define musical types, functions and effects by purely empirical means are likely to be unhelpful. Understanding ‘popular music’ – for example – in terms of a quantitively measured ‘popularity’ (sales figures) is not only methodologically difficult to do coherently but, more important, it hypostatises what is in reality a result of living, historically changing relationships. Secondly: if, then, musical categories should be grasped as part of social processes, it does not however follow that in this relationship (between musical type, concept or practice on the one hand, social group, factor or formation on the other) the relata are in a one-to-one correspondence. Thus – quoting again examples from commonly assumed positions – the idea that ‘popular music’ is ‘really’ confined to authentic proletarian self-expression is no less misleading than the Adornian notion that it is part of an undifferentiated blanket of leisure-goods imposed on the unresisting masses by a monopoly-capitalist ‘culture industry’.

Hip Hop Aesthetics and the Will to Culture1

“…This is suggestive, both to the analyst looking for a totalising reading of the 'subculture', and to the members of the scene, of an underlying structural, generative unity. I want to move towards qualification of understandings of 'homology' dominant in subculture studies, by following Feld, and the work of the musicological analyst Middleton (1985), to suggest that homology is always the product of the labour of the 'articulation' of values, beliefs and knowledges, by partially constrained agents, through, and to, particular practices. This is especially marked in the case of Hip Hop, with its 'origins' in the African American and Latino inner cities of the United States, now being appropriated by Sydney youth.…”