Redefining Mainstream Popular Music

Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136465307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the "mainstream" in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.

PART I

Reappraising the Mainstream

1

MAINSTREAM AS METAPHOR

Imagining Dominant Culture

Alison Huber

Mainstream Matters

Proper music fans are doing what they always do when the mainstream smells stagnant – visit the tide pools and freshwater burns where new talent spawns.

(Liner notes to Q Magazine CD, Rise and Shine:
The Best New Music of 2002)

This chapter is interested first and foremost in the idea of the mainstream. Mainstream is a particularly important category of value for popular music cultures, particularly for the reasons exemplified in the quote above, which rehearses the full range of negative associations stereotypically attached to the concept. However, the term ‘mainstream’ is deployed in a variety of contexts, ranging from politics and social policy to cultural identity and popular culture, and emerging from academia, journalism, public debate and beyond. Read across this array of situations, the word has a habit of seeming nonsensical, and probably fuels the notion that ‘mainstream’ is a term so nebulous that it has little usefulness as a theoretical tool. Yet, paradoxically, mainstream's utility continues: start listening for it, and you'll hear and read it every day. It is even likely to form part of your own imagining of the world.

My interest in the idea of the mainstream began when I fell in love, rather unexpectedly, with a Top 40 song. The song was ‘Say it Once’ (1999) by Ultra, one of the many groups that joined the seemingly endless parade of boy bands crooning and shimmying their way into the musical mainstream in the late 1980s and 1990s. I listened to this CD single incessantly, and was drawn magnetically to the television whenever its film clip appeared. For someone who had envisaged herself as (having become) anti-mainstream, who felt she had found her natural home in so-called ‘indie’ music, it came as something of a shock to have such an intensely affective response to this song. How could I love something that was so clearly ‘mainstream’? Even though my cultural studies training had repeatedly assured me that I was not, in the words of Stuart Hall, a ‘cultural dope’ (1981: 232) in the dead-eyed thrall of capitalist mass culture, things still didn't feel right. What we can observe in my confused reaction to this moment of ‘mainstream love’ is the range of complex relationships between the idea of a mainstream and identity politics, taste and cultural value, entwined as they are with practices of consumption. We can also find a sense of why mainstream matters so much to the articulation of these relationships. I had learned from my peers explicitly and tacitly through the very same cultural studies training that alterity to the mainstream of culture was what should be desired. Yet my love for this song made me start to think seriously about what ‘mainstream’ might be all about, beyond these normalized, devalued associations.

But try checking for the word ‘mainstream’ in the index of almost any book published under the broad rubrics of cultural studies or popular music studies, as I began to do, and your search will reveal only a few texts that reference the term.¹ This dearth of indexed reference to ‘mainstream’ does not mean, however, that the word – and, in turn, the concept(s) it is called upon to describe – do not figure in scholarly work. Indeed, the idea of the mainstream has not only been deployed regularly in cultural and popular music studies, but it is in many ways integral to the understandings and analyses of cultural subjects, practices and products that have been developed by practitioners in these fields. The role of the concept of mainstream, then, has generally been unacknowledged, and it has remained largely undefined and under-theorized. Nevertheless, it has been working quietly behind the scenes, upstaged by the romantic bravado of concepts like ‘subculture’ and ‘resistance’ – words that have continued to enjoy much academic interrogation and re-imagination in the years since they emerged as key terms of analysis during the subcultural studies moment of the 1970s (e.g. see Thornton 1995; Muggleton 2000; Hodkinson 2002; Gelder 2007).

To complicate matters further, ‘mainstream’ acts not only as the undefined, multi-purpose centre to the periphery, the ‘other’ to subcultural, alternative, underground, outsider, folk and art cultures (which was the way that I had imagined it in my Ultra encounter). Look a little more closely and its use is even more flexible than this. It is sometimes imagined to be a place (when things ‘go mainstream’ or ‘cross over into the mainstream’); sometimes it is a cultural force, a natural energy that ‘sweeps’ things into its magnetic pull (thus seeming to reify its metaphorical promise); at other times, it is used as a marketing synonym for the ‘mass audience’ of popular culture's products; frequently, it is used as an adjective, attached to a noun to signify some inherent aesthetic trait; you'll hear it used in place of the word ‘normal’ or ‘normative’; it can also refer to a socio-economic category used by politicians to refer to the majority of their constituency. The mainstream is, in some ways, a schizophrenic category, a cultural imaginary comprising multiple ‘inconsistent fantasies’, as Sarah Thornton (1995: 93) puts it. Indeed, despite acknowledging the powerful status and broad utility of these fantasies, Thornton ultimately concludes in her Club Cultures study that mainstream is an ‘inadequate term’ (1995: 115). But how did we arrive at a situation where a term so vague, yet simultaneously so potent, appears to describe everything and nothing, in all sorts of contexts? And how might we start to deploy the notion with more precision?

What follows in this chapter is an extended consideration of the cultural imaginary of the category, which works to expose some of the origins of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the term. I begin by revisiting one particularly influential example from the emergent field of cultural studies where mainstream is used as an ‘other’ to the category ‘subculture’. I then connect the negative associations replicated in this work to the function of mainstream as a metaphor, and its spatialized imagining of dominant culture. In other words, this chapter is an exercise that clears some room to begin to think about and use mainstream ‘as a substantive category’ (Toynbee 2000: 122), instead of as a hold-all term with little or no concrete definition, or that operates purely at an ideological level (Thornton 1995). Like Jason Toynbee, I want to think with mainstream, not against it, and I want to avoid replicating the ‘relentlessly negative approach’ (Toynbee 2002: 149) that often accompanies deployment of ‘mainstream’ in both academic/critical and popular registers; however, I do want to try to think productively about the origins of this negativity. In working towards a reappraisal of the term in this way, mainstream has the space to emerge from this chapter as a fresh term with the potential to hold a clear utility in cultural analysis because it describes something specific and particular: a space of cultural production and consumption with its own logics, practices and processes.

Mainstream and Hegemony: Mainstream as the Subculture's Other

It is not news that the idea of hegemony was integral to work done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s, or that the relationships between dominant and subordinate culture, parent culture and subculture, cultural dominance and cultural marginality comprised the foundations of the Birmingham School's world-view. In particular, the many inequalities between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, drawn into high relief by the juxtaposition of these binary pairs, influenced much of the politically charged work from this time. Moreover, the politics at the heart of the modish theories that guided this work (particularly those derived from Karl Marx, Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci) drew critics into high-level theoretical considerations of lived experience.

It is in this CCCS context that the connection between the cultural mainstream and hegemony was subtly – yet perhaps definitively – described by Dick Hebdige in his oft-cited, landmark book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), and I want to look briefly at this work to show some of the ways in which mainstream was framed in this influential contribution to cultural studies. Hebdige's work has been critiqued routinely (even relentlessly) ever since it was written. However, it is important for my purposes to revisit it here because it belongs to one of the historical theoretical trajectories that continues to influence cultural studies in general and the study of music cultures in particular, and it is for this reason that it is also the genesis of one of the most enduring usages of mainstream.

Hebdige, like many of the early cultural studies scholars, was particularly uninterested in the mainstream. In fact, his interest lay squarely in the mainstream's opposite – the subversive and the marginal – and it was these subjects that formed the basis of Subculture. As a consequence of these concerns, Hebdige's focus was the methods by which (specifically) male, working-class youth cultures managed to define themselves as other than mainstream. His writing is thus concerned with how resistance to dominant culture might be achieved and how symbolic power might be claimed through, in particular, stylistic differentiation.

Early on in his study, Hebdige defines hegemony as:

[Referring] to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert ‘total social authority’ over other subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by ‘winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural’ (Hall 1977). Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes ‘succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range’ (Hall 1977), so that subordinate groups are, if not controlled, then at least contained within an ideological space which does not seem at all ‘ideological’; which appears instead to be permanent and ‘natural’, to lie outside history, to be beyond particular interests . . .

(Hebdige 1979: 15-16)

This definition, drawing heavily on Stuart Hall, who in turn finds inspiration in Gramsci, focuses attention on the fact that hegemony appears to be ‘natural’. Hegemony's power lies in its consensual nature: both the ‘ruling’ and the ‘ruled’ are implicated in the ongoing effectiveness of its control. In every sense, the ideological ‘containment’ of the subordinated classes is naturalized and thus does not seem like containment at all. In light of this, it is particularly interesting to note how Hebdige goes on to refer to the mainstream. He discusses the overt theatrical and constructed ‘display’ of spectacular subcultural style, and he describes this stylistic signification as:

[going] against the grain of a mainstream culture whose principal defining characteristic, according to Barthes [1972], is a tendency to masquerade as nature, to substitute ‘normalized’ for historical forms, to translate the reality of the world into an image of the world which in turn presents itself as if composed according to ‘the evident laws of the natural order’.

(Hebdige 1979: 101-2)

Hebdige's connection between the mainstream and hegemony is clear. For him, the mainstream Is hegemony. Like hegemony, the mainstream ‘masquerades as nature’; it appears to be ‘normal’, it is ‘ahistorical’. For Hebdige – in this example at least – mainstream represents everything that the youth subculturalists in his study were trying to subvert: the stifling presence of the majority, complicit in their own subjugation and too complacent to realize their containment, let alone effect any sort of opposition. Underlying this rhetoric is a latent disdain for those who do not choose to oppose the mainstream actively, or who choose to experience (or at least find themselves experiencing) life in its space. In championing the semiotic moves of certain youth subcultures, Hebdige implicitly criticizes what Gary Clarke later identified to be “‘straight” working class youth’ (Clarke 1982: 1) and their perceived ‘normalcy’ (2). In doing so, Hebdige's focus has the effect of implicitly devaluing subculture's binary opposite: the ‘mainstream’. Problematically, the simple pitting of specific subcultures against a vaguely defined mainstream does little to denaturalize or understand mainstream/hegemony in the theoretical terms to which this approach aspired. In other words, this is an understanding of mainstream (and hegemony) that is achieved in the negative, defined by what it isn't rather than what it is.²

Hebdige also uses the word ‘mainstream’ in a different way in this wordy discussion of the incorporation of subcultural style:

[T]he succession of post-war youth styles can be represented on the formal level as a series of transformations of an initial set of items (clothes, dance, music, argot) unfolding through an internal set of polarities (mod v. rocker, skinhead v. greaser, skinhead v. hippie, punk v. hippie, ted v. punk, skinhead v. punk) and defined against a parallel series of ‘straight’ transformations (‘high’/mainstream fashion). Each subculture moves through a cycle of resistance and defusion . . . Subcultural deviance is simultaneously rendered ‘explicable’ and meaningless in the classrooms, courts and media at the same time as the ‘secret’ objects of subcultural style are put on display in every high street record shop and chain-store boutique. Stripped of its unwholesome connotations, the style becomes fit for public consumption.

(Hebdige 1979, 129-130)

In this instance, ‘mainstream fashion’ is presented in binary opposition to ‘high fashion’ – the inference here is less about hegemony and more about low or mass culture. Hebdige's point is that the mainstream eventually – even inevitably – incorporates and subsumes subcultural style. In the act of incorporation, a subculture's power is diffused, and it will need to create new ways of showing its resistance. Eventually, as the moral panic surrounding subcultural style disperses and its shock value wanes, subcultural style is integrated into the mainstream, thus losing its potency and potential to resist. In other words, it is ‘watered down’ enough to be consumed by the undiscerning, uncreative mainstream masses.

While these are just a few instances of Hebdige's use of ‘mainstream’ in Subculture, we can see the term being used in multiple ways – as Thornton (1995: 93) notes, ‘each reference to the “mainstream” in Subculture points in a different direction’. In its many guises, mainstream becomes, at various times and sometimes all at once, a synonym for hegemony; a social group; the opposite of art; the epitome of ‘straightness’; the enemy of creative youth culture; the repository of cultural artefacts ripe for resignification with subversive meaning; the site of artifice; the locus of all that must be resisted. We can also detect in Hebdige's words the tacit d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Reappraising the Mainstream
• Part II Perceptions of the Mainstream
• Part III Historicizing the Mainstream
• Part IV Production Aesthetics and the Mainstream
• Part V The Mainstream and Vernacular Culture
• List of Contributors
• Index