On Record

Rock, Pop and the Written Word

Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134939503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Classic sociological analyses of 'deviance' and rebellion; studies of technology; subcultural and feminist readings, semiotic and musicological essays and close readings of stars, bands and the fans themselves by Adorno, Barthes and other well-known contributors

PART ONE
Groundworks

The academic study of pop and rock music is rooted in sociology, not musicology (for which, even now, popular music is at best of marginal interest), and the sociology of pop and rock is, in turn, rooted in two nonmusical concerns: the meaning of “mass culture” and the empirical study of youth (and delinquency). These were individual topics of academic interest in the 1930s, but they merged with the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. Rock ’n’ I was the first unavoidable mass cultural commodity explicitly aimed at teenagers, and it therefore stood symbolically for the more general fifties phenomenon of a commercial teen culture (which soon had its own complement of teen-market researchers, a phenomenon sardonically observed at the time by Dwight MacDonald).¹

The basic attitude of the educated establishment to rock ’n’ roll—in universities and the media alike—was a sometimes anxious, sometimes amused disdain. The educated taste for popular music might extend to the “authentic” sound of blues and jazz, on the one hand, or to the “sophisticated” sound of Broadway, on the other, but not to rock ’n’ roll, which was clearly a low-grade gimmick. The only real question, again echoed in both scholarly and mass market magazines, was whether or not it was actually a corrupting influence.

This is the context in which the three pioneering articles in this section need to be read. They each attempt, from different theoretical positions, to rescue young people’s music from the contempt of the academy. And they each follow the same strategy, one which was to be immensely influential on subsequent rock sociology: they take for granted the commercial production of pop and rock (the standardization, market manipulation, etc., described by the mass culture critics) but suggest that young people’s consumption of the music is much more active, more creative, more complicated than mass culture theory implied.

David Riesman’s piece, written in 1950, was prescient in a number of ways. It reflected his general concern to read American popular culture not in terms of market exploitation but as expressive of certain deeply held social-psychological values.² Although he was writing before the recognition of rock ’n’ roll as a market genre, he did pick up on the postwar emergence of specific youth music culture—his division of the youth audience into a casual mainstream and a hip elite remains commonplace today (not least in its gender assumptions about “passive” female pop fans and “active” male rock fans). His paper, in short, asked what became the basic sociological rock question: What is the relation between commerce and youth? Riesman gave what became the recurring answer: it depends on the music, it depends on the youth.

Donald Horton’s 1957 article is an example of what was until the mid-sixties the most common form of academic pop writing: content analysis of lyrics. This appealed to empirical sociologists because it employed an apparently scientific method. It was used both to expose the shallow fantasies of commercial pop and to measure changes in Americans’ underlying value system. The problem of such studies was their assumption that one can read the “meaning” of song words without reference to either their musical or performance context. But Horton’s article is important because he did, at least, ask the question, “How do people use pop songs?” He is more interested, that is, in the active place of songs in people’s lives than in how lyrics passively reflect audience values. He suggests that love songs (which then, as now, dominated the charts) work in dramaturgical terms: what is at issue is a rhetoric of romance. His approach, in short, remains interesting not just as a sign of its own times but also for its suggestiveness as a kind of discourse analysis.

Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s 1964 book, The Popular Arts, was written in the context of British anxiety about the effects of mass culture. Their work was informed not so much by either Marxist or elitist contempt for commercial taste in toto as by arguments developed in the 1930s by literary critic F.R.Leavis and his followers.³ Two aspects of Leavis’s work are important here: First, because it emerged from literary rather than sociological theory, it involved critical readings of mass cultural texts (rather than content analysis); second, it was an educational project—the task was to protect young people from mass culture by teaching them to “discriminate.”

These concerns for texts and teaching are apparent in Hall and Whannel’s work too, but like Riesman, they also describe the positive role young people can play in their own culture (while, unlike Riesman, raising questions about popular culture and class). We have edited their discussion of popular music to bring out the way it captures a moment of transition in both pop music itself (they were writing in 1964, the year of the Beatles) and in academic attitudes to it (one of the Beatles’ most profound achievements was to make music that academics liked!). And so, as the general sociological (and media) category was shifting from “teen” culture to “youth” culture, here we find the first hints of both the subcultural theory that was to develop under Stuart Hall’s direction at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, and of the “serious” criticism of pop music that was to characterize the ideology of rock.

NOTES

¹ Dwight MacDonald, “A Caste, a Culture, a Market,” The New Yorker, 22 and 29 November 1958, p. 24.

² See also David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950/1961).

³ For a further discussion of this see Simon Frith, Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon, 1981).

David Riesman
LISTENING TO POPULAR MUSIC
1950

The study of popular culture—radio, movies, comics, popular music, and fiction—is a relatively new field in American social science. Much of the pioneering in this field has been done by or on behalf of the communications industry to prove to advertisers that it can influence buying habits, and to pretest its more expensive productions, such as potential bestsellers and movies. At a more theoretical level, a good deal of current interest in popular culture springs from the motives, seldom negligible in scientific investigation, of dismay and dislike. Gifted Europeans, horrified at the alleged vulgarization of taste brought about by industrialization, or left-wing critics in the traditions of Marx or Veblen who see popular culture as an antirevolutionary narcotic, highbrows who fear poaching on their preserves by middlebrow “culture diffusionists”— all these have contributed approaches, and sometimes methods as well, to the present state of research in this field.

In using Harold Lasswell’s formula—“who says what to whom with what effect”—the question of effects has proved most intractable to study, being at the same time in my opinion the most important and rewarding area. By its very nature, popular culture impinges on people unceasingly; it is part of their environment, part of the background noise, color, and verbal imagery of their lives from the age at which they can first listen to the radio, watch television, or “read” comics. The researcher has two courses open to him. He can either question listeners and readers to see what uses they make of popular culture materials, or he can study the materials themselves and make guesses about the uses made of them. He is usually pushed by the difficulties of interviewing toward the latter procedure, that is, toward some form of content analysis. This is especially the case where he wants to discover the effects of nonverbal materials such as music and paintings. For he will find that, on the whole, people can talk more readily about their responses to words than about their responses, say, to a tune. Yet this very readiness to talk, this availability of a critical vocabulary, may hinder as well as help the researcher; words about words may screen rather than reveal underlying meanings. The current preference for the Rorschach test or the Thematic Apperception test (“inkblot” or pictorial stimuli) as a way of getting at underlying character is evidence that verbal responses to verbal cues are likely to be stereotyped and conventionalized.

I do not mean to deprecate content analysis where this is used to suggest possible audience effects. We must be on guard against a tendency to sniff at library or armchair research as against fieldwork; certainly the quickest shortcut to understanding what popular culture does for people—and hence to understanding a great deal about American culture as a whole—is to make oneself the relevant audience and to look imaginatively at one’s own reactions. But the danger exists then of assuming that the other audience, the audience one does not converse with, is more passive, more manipulated, more vulgar in taste, than may be the case. One can easily forget that things that strike the sophisticated person as trash may open new vistas for the unsophisticated; moreover, the very judgment of what is trash may be biased by one’s own unsuspected limitations, for instance, by one’s class position or academic vested interest.

While fieldwork may not cure this attitude, it may chasten and modify it, provided that we can find the vocabulary to talk to people about experiences which are not particularly self-conscious ones. My judgment is that the same or virtually the same popular culture materials are used by audiences in radically different ways and for radically different purposes; for example, a movie theater may be used to get warm, to sleep, to neck, to learn new styles, to expand one’s imaginative understanding of people and places—these merely begin an indefinitely expansible list. What these various ways and purposes are, we can scarcely imagine all by ourselves; we must go out and talk to various sorts of people in various moods to get at them. It may then appear that it is the audience which manipulates the product (and hence the producer), no less than the other way around.

This is a particularly important consideration in the field of popular music, where the music industry, with its song pluggers, its jukebox outlets, its radio grip, seems to be able to mold popular taste and to eliminate free choice by consumers. The industry itself may like to think it can control matters, even at the price of feeling a good deal of guilt over trashy output or dubious monopolistic practices. Nevertheless, there seems to me no way of explaining by reference to the industry controllers the great swings of musical taste, say, from jazz to sweet in the last decade; actually the industry ignores these swings in consumer taste only at its peril. Even in the field of popular music, there is always a minority channel over which less popular tastes get a hearing, eventually perhaps to become majority tastes.

These, then, are some of the very general assumptions which guided me in setting down the following hypotheses about a majority and a minority audience for popular music among teenage groups. These hypotheses were directed to the Committee on Communication of the University of Chicago as a tentative basis for research, and in the period since their drafting several students have been working in this area. They have, as was to be anticipated, come up against the great methodological obstacles already indicated: how to isolate music from the influences of other media; how to understand the relations between musical conventions and the conventions of the peer groups (the groups of age mates); how, in the case of popular tunes, to separate the mélange of words and music, performer and piece, song and setting.

It has proved easy enough, through Billboard, Variety, and other trade sources, to establish popularity ratings for hits; through a study of jukebox preferences in particular neighborhoods to get an indication of class and ethnic, sex, and age differences; through an analysis of chord progressions or arrangements to get clues to what musical patterns and conventions might be common to a group of hit tunes. But to move from there to the more basic problems of the use of music for purposes of social adjustment and social protest, or the role of music in socializing the young, teasing the adolescent, and quieting the old—such things as these loom on the far horizon as unsolved problems.

Bearing the difficulty of these problems in mind, I venture to suggest, nevertheless, that one role of popular music in socializing the young may be to create, in combination with other mass media, a picture of childhood and adolescence in America as a happy-go-lucky time of haphazard clothes and haphazard behavior, jitterbug parlance, coke-bar sprees, and “blues” that are not really blue. Thus the very problems of being young are evaded—the mass media also furnish comparable stereotypes for other deprived groups, such as Negroes, women, GIs, and “the lower classes.” I do not mean to suggest that in thus presenting the young with a picture of Youth drawn by adults there is conspiratorial intent—rather there is a complex interplay of forces between the adults, who are the producers, and the young, who are the consumers.

Most teenagers, though much more “knowing” than the picture gives them credit for being, do not think about this situation at all. Among those who do, some are aware that their group standards are set by outside forces. But their loss of innocence has made them cynical, not rebellious; and they are seldom even interested in the techniques of their exploitation or its extent.

A small minority is, however, not only aware in some fashion of the adult, manipulative pressure but is also resentful of it, in many cases perhaps because its members are unable to fit themselves by any stretch of the imagination into the required images. Such a “youth movement” differs from the youth movements of other countries in having no awareness of itself, as such, no direct political consciousness, and, on the whole, no specialized media of communication. If we study, for instance, the hot rodders, we see a group of young (and pseudo-young) people who, in refusing to accept the Detroit image of the automobile consumer, create a new self-image—though one in turn liable to manipulation. Likewise, the lovers of hot jazz, while not explicitly exploring the possibilities of how youth might take a hand in formulating its own self-images, do in fact resist certain conventional stereotypes. But they do so by making a differential selection from what the adult media already provide.

Thus, we may distinguish two polar attitudes toward popular music, a majority one, which accepts the adult picture of youth somewhat uncritically, and a minority one, in which certain socially rebellious themes are encapsulated. For the purposes of this analysis, I shall disregard the many shadings in between, and also neglect the audiences of hillbilly and “classical” music.

Most of the teenagers in the majority category have an undiscriminating taste in popular music; they seldom express articulate preferences. They form the audience for the larger radio stations, the “name” bands, the star singers, the hit parade, and so forth. The functions of music for this group are social—the music gives them something to talk or kid about with friends; an opportunity for competitiveness in judging which tunes will become hits, coupled with a lack of concern about how hits are actually made; an opportunity for identification with star singers or band leaders as “personalities,” with little interest in or understanding of the technologies of performance or of the radio medium itself.

It is not easy at this stage to state the precise way in which these indiscriminate listening habits serve to help the individual conform to the culturally provided image of himself. To discover this is one of the tasks of research. And to this end some further lines of inquiry suggest themselves.

First, it has often been remarked that modern urban industrial society atomizes experiences, isolating each experience from other experiences. Does this same pattern operate, as T.W.Adorno suggests, in the auditory experience of popular music? Such music is presented disconnectedly, especially over the radio—where it is framed by verbal ballyhoo and atomized into individual “hits”—like the disparate items on a quiz program. Can it be established that this mode of presentation reinforces the disconnectedness often associated with modern urban life?

Second, by giving millions of young people the opportunity to share in admiration for hits, hit performers, and the hit-making process, are identifications subtly built up which serve to lessen the effects of social conflicts and to sustain an ideology of social equality?

Third, does the music tell these people, almost without their awareness, how to feel about their problems in much the same way that the daytime serials package their social lessons?

Fourth, since this music is often dance music, does it help to create and confirm postural and behavioral attitudes toward the other sex? Does the facial expression assume the “look” the music is interpreted as dictating? Is the music felt as inculcating the socially right combination of “smoothness” with stylized “spontaneity,” of pseudosexuality with reserve? Do these psychic and gestural manifestations then carry over from the dancing situation to other spheres of life? We should not be surprised to find that such molding of the body image and body responses affects girls more powerfully than boys; as the subordinate group, with fewer other outlets, girls can less afford even a conventionalized resistance.

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Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• PART ONE: GROUNDWORKS
• PART TWO: FROM SUBCULTURAL TO CULTURAL STUDIES
• PART THREE: THE ORGANIZATION OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS
• PART FOUR: THE CREATIVE PROCESS
• PART FIVE: MUSICOLOGY AND SEMIOTICS
• PART SIX: MUSIC AND SEXUALITY
• PART SEVEN: READING THE STARS
• PART EIGHT: LAST WORDS: THE FANS SPEAK
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS