The Role of Popular Culture - Essay Example

Popular Music is now an established constant in modern life. There exists a huge music industry that produces entertainment for countless millions across the world. Various people have during its history considered Popular Music with reactions that range from revulsion to fanatical adulation to anything in between. In British Society the popular music industry has a famous legacy that stretches back more than 50 years. The cultural implications of Popular music in Britain are a less considered subject. There have been many schools of thought regarding the role of popular music in other arenas, such as its political and class implications. This paper will examine the role that Popular Music has played in British Society in both erecting barriers to social progress and in some ways lowering them; and in doing so will examine the role that class plays in British Life, and how the theories of the class consciousness have done much to shape intellectual discourse on the subject right to the present day. In doing so this paper will examine the influential theories of Karl Marx, then those of the Frankfurt School. Two men in particular Antonio Gramsci and Theodor Adorno did much to set the standard of discourse in the field. This paper will examine those ideas and apply them to Popular Music in Britain. Role of Class in Britain. Britain has until its recent history has been a society preocuppied by class divisions. Class divisions have existed in Britain throughout its history. The reasons are rooted in history and the need for a sense of order as Beloff explains: In all three centuries between Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II, Cannadine traces a basic continuity in assessments of the social scene both by contemporaries and by historians following in their footsteps. The dominant interpretation has been of a continuous social fabric within which individuals and new groupings resulting from technological change could find their place, that is hierarchy (Beloff,1999,p. 52) Clearly as Beloff suggests the influence of class in Britain has a long history. Karl Marx The idea of Class in Britain took deeper hold after the rapid changes of the Industrial Revolution from mid- 19th Century onwards. The early factories brutally exploited workers and there was clear demarcation between the lives of ordinary workers and the wealthy owners. Based in large part on the clearly evident injustice of the system Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital and later the Communist Manifesto. These were polemical works that described the course of history as a dialectic process of conflicts based on economic forces and progression through the resolution of those conflicts. Marx argued that at the time of the publication of his book Capitalist owners were exploiting workers and profiting from their labours. His was a sophisticated economic analysis that changed the course of history. He believed that as a matter of historical inevitability that the working classes would overthrow the owners of the capitalist owners. Marx's theories led to the Russian Revolution of 1917 . In the eyes of its adherents the changes in the future would lead eventually to a kind of utopian state where the means of production, as he put it, would be returned to the proletariat or working class. In Marx' s theories the system of capitalism that existed wherein wealth was concentrated in the hands of a relatively few was maintained by a social acculturation process where the working classes were led to believe that the system was the only way that things could be. He believed “class consciousness”or the workers recognition that they were being exploited would be a hard fought battle even if it was an inevitability. Religion he argued was the “opiate of the masses”, in other words, a way of pacifying the masses – as he referred to the working class – and he argued in a way for a new kind of religion, even if he was certain that his way was based on the inherent laws of history. His theories held sway with a great number of the intelligentsia in Europe who were dismayed by the exploitation of the poor that was characteristic of the early history of the Industrial Revolution. Other thinkers at first followed Marx implicitly but later in the face of historical changes raised new reasons for the way in which the Capitalist system was maintained. The Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School described a movement that first was institutionalized in 1923 under the auspices of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in its official capacity. The group itself was more informally composed of prominent intellectuals in the 1920's and 1930's that had originally subscribed to Marxist Theory but gradually grew dissatisfied by what they felt was the inadequacy of Marx' ideas to explain how the Capitalist system was maintained. They had the benefit of hindsight being witness to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution but in turn seeing how such a revolution had failed in Germany. Marx had focused principally on economic factors but they argued for an increasing role for the way in which cultural forces were used to maintain the Capitalist status quo. As Hanrahan succinctly puts it "For the Frankfurt School critical theorists, art and culture were important components of the critique of modern forms of domination." (Hanrahan,2000,p. 4) They argued the Capitalist rulers systematically reinforced their system through all of the accoutrements of culture, books, music, art. This they argued was a much more convincing way to explain how the system was maintained precisely because of its more seductive nature. They argued that the responsibility of critics was to unveil the hidden agendas of the Capitalist cultural agenda: Part of the Frankfurt School's project of cultural critique was that of unmasking the hidden interests embedded in the production of cultural forms. Mass culture appears in this critique as the reproduction of the ideology of capitalism or as the production of cultural commodities indistinguishable from commodities of any other type (Hanrahan,2000,p. 6) The Frankfurt School's ideas were influenced and further disseminated by the Nazi persecution in the 1930's that forced a number of its members out of Germany. The rise of Racism in Germany led them to strongly reject Positivism with its grand belief in the paramount importance of science in the future of society because these arguments were used to justify the political power of Fascism Also the fact that so many of the leading thinkers left Germany for Britain and North, America they were to leave lasting influence on the intellectual history in the West. These thinkers were the first to begin to link the notion of popular culture to the Marxist ideas of history and class struggle. A prominent intellectual who furthered the debate on the interrelationship between culture and class was the Italian Antonio Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci born in 1881 in Sardinia is along with Theodor Adorno who will be discussed later was the most influential Marxist thinker on the subject of culture and class. Gramsci in a short, tortured life postulated many principles on the nature of the relationship of culture and class that are still considered timely today. His experience with poverty in his youth and the struggle to attain an education informed much of his writing with a meaning that truly resonated for many people. Gramsci saw the relationship of culture and politics expressed in the concept of Hegemony. Hegemony in the original Marxist doctrine described the imminent control of society by the proletariat but Gramsci took the term in a different direction to explain why the revolution of the masses had not occurred during his time as Marx had claimed was inevitable. Gramsci used Hegemony to describe how cultural forces were used to maintain the dominance of Capitalism. Hegemony according to Gramsci was not a fixed relationship meaning that cultural forces could be used to fight against the domination of Capitalism as Woost points out: to be hegemonic, ideas must be embedded in practical activity, in practices 'that produce inequality, as well as the ideas by which that inequality is justified, explained, normalized, and so on. While Gramsci may have stressed consent, and sometimes the intertwining of force and consent, he never saw hegemony simply as ideology' (Woost,2005,p.45) Gramsci was the first to suggest the relationship between seemingly innocuous notions of culture and associate them with maintaining class barriers. His theories however did not as Woost indicates lay down a dogma about the objective intention of a whole class of products, rather he looked at the implicit message in the cultural products. With Gramsci's analysis popular music in Britain could both serve the working class as an instrument of dissent or it could be manipulated to maintain the status quo. The next thinker took the analysis another step further and argued that the form and structure of culture and especially popular music kept the class barriers firmly in place. Theodor Adorno Theodor Adorno refined the notions of Gramsci into a far more pointed attack on Popular Culture and its effect in maintaining class barriers. He believed that it was mass culture that numbed the masses, and as Strinati points explains: Mass Culture..... is a debased, trivial culture that voids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple, spontaneous pleasures'. This occurs because 'the realities would be too real and the pleasures too lively' to encourage 'a narcotized acceptance of Mass Culture and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling and unpredictable (hence unstable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality and beauty of real life.' (Strinati,2004,p. 12) While he was a Marxist he did not share Marx' optimism about the proletariat revolution in the future. Rather he argued that the dominating Capitalist classes had maintained their hold through means of culture and that the capitalist system had now become entrenched. The moment for revolution had passed, he argued ,and he therefore did not have the sense of millennial vindication that Marx had originally espoused. Perhaps because of this pessimism about the philosophy he supported, his theories implied that the structures of cultural dominance by the Capitalist classes needed examination because they were so deeply engrained in the world. His theory on how popular music limits the progress of the working class is useful to review since it encapsulates much of his thinking. Adorno and Popular Music Popular Music was a cultural instrument of domination of the working classes for a number of reasons. First there was the problem of Standardization. By this Adorno meant that there was uniformity in the form of Popular Music that meant that it expression of ideas or emotions growing out of the context of the history of the form in response to new experience but a static nominal thing. This is to to be distinguished from the idea of forms in classical music which Adorno considered true art as Witkin explains: There are broad regularities that allow you to say something is a symphony or a fugue or a sonata, but the form itself - sonata-form, fugal-form, etc. - undergoes change and development over time; it has an historical evolution or development that is responsive to the problems that a given historical moment sets for its composers. The formation of material must undergo this development if it is to constitute a truthful and meaningful reflection on experience because conditions change and the composer has to confront them with material that has been formed in the past (Within,2002,p. 99) Hence, according to Adorno, with no historical context the form of Popular music is merely a mould that can be applied and reapplied without regard to ideas and context and therefore it is not in any sense an art form. The development of true music, true art is mimicked in popular art but only in what he calls “Ornamentation”as opposed to the true development. Ornamentation described the way in which Popular music repackaged the same formula with certain stylistic flourishes in the form of hooks that gave the semblance of creating a new form when it was really the same tired old formula. The difference between true musical art Adorno believed and popular music was in art the concept of the whole could be found in each of the individual parts of the whole signifying the great challenge of creating balance in an original piece. In Popular music, on the other hand, the units had no relation to the whole. Indeed the connection between the parts were not really necessary since it was not really a concept presented but rather a melange of sentiments, a mix of ideas that had not been considered on any deeper level. Witkin sums up Adorno's ideas well in comparing a work by Beethoven to Popular Music: To sum up the difference: in Beethoven and in good serious music in general - we are not concerned here with bad serious music which may be as rigid and mechanical as popular music - the detail virtually contains the whole and leads to the exposition of the whole, at the same time, it is produced out of the conception of the whole. In popular music the relationship is fortuitous. (Within,2002,p. 101) The implications of such lack of rigor in Popular Music were profound considering its great popularity among a large proportion of the population. Adorno argued that the utter lack of demand placed on the listener of Popular Music suppressed development. This suppression was an intention of the ruling order to keep the masses from realizing that they were being exploited in the way that Marx originally argued. As Witkin quotes Adorno, “ In popular music the composition has done the listener's listening for her. It has pointed up the path whereby the listener can escape the complex by providing him with norms or models of the simple. The schematic build-up dictates how the listener must listen and makes effort unnecessary. (Within,2002,p. 102) The listener in this undiscriminating mindset is fooled into believing that new creation is continually occurring, Adorno argues through the twin processes of Standardization and Pseudo- Individualization. Standardization as already mentioned merely describes how the basic formats of Popular Music do not change. Pseudo-Individualization Adorno claimed made Popular Music appear to change . The end result of this process was a type of listening behavior that he buffered to as "a regression of listening'" (Strinati,2004,p. 60) In this state, a regressive state the listener's intellectual development was suppressed Adorno explained and as Strinati shows his words, “The listeners drawn to popular music are often thought to have infantile or childlike characteristics: they are 'arrested at the infantile stage…they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded” (Strinati,2004,p. 60) It is important to remember throughout all of this that Adorno was a musical composer of some talent and that he was witness to the dawn of truly popular music in the west so the ideas he presents make sense from his perspective. There is also a great deal of truth to what he says to anyone who has surveyed any steady stream of Popular Music which is often repetitive and unclear in its intention. What is interesting about Adorno is the leap he makes as a Marxist to the relationship between a culture of popular music and the maintenance of the capitalist status quo. His criticism of the music industry is unsparing and to some degree enjoyable to savor in its well expressed vitriol as Witkin surmises it: An audience that has been entrained out of making any genuine discriminations has, as a consequence, been prepared to purchase cultural goods indiscriminately. While it is true that mass audiences want these cultural goods, Adorno claims that they only do so because they are driven to seek, in their spare time, 'after-images' of the very mechanized existence to which they have been subjected in their working lives. They want standardized goods and pseudo-individualization because their leisure is an escape from work that is at the same time molded by the same mechanical, rationalized, disciplines that characterize the world of work. (Witkin, 2002, p. 107) Adorno leveled his scornful criticism to many forms of popular music. Even Jazz music he considered to be another example of the Standardized , Pseudo-individualized product as other forms. With these schemas in mind and the history of ideas in place it is important to apply them to popular music in Britain. Popular Music In Britain Viewing the development of popular Music in Britain it is possible to to subscribe to both Gramsci and Adorno's views depending perhaps on personal allegiances to the music in question. Popular music is definitely under regulation of the government: "programmatic and institutional…the role of government has become a crucial factor in the structural organization of rock music at the local, the national and ultimately at the global level’" (Shuker, 2002, p. 289) This is becoming more and more the case but when popular music became a widespread phenomena in the 1950s it appeared among a teenage population in the post-war economy with a disposable income and a need to distinguish themselves from the parents generation; it was, in effect, a form of teenage rebellion at a time in history when teenagers were first becoming a historical reality – in earlier times the division between childhood and adulthood was abrupt and not marked by this transition phase. This is the innocuous, topical interpretation of the events. Clearly to Gramsci this growth of the Capitalist Industrial machine would have had different implications. To him this early form of popular music would have been an affirmation of the dominant Capitalist values and in providing meaningless distraction to the future generations would have been in keeping with this agenda. Adorno would have, no doubt, scorned the corruption of youthful minds in a new form of music that simply gave vent to unqualified passions and sentiment without the benefit of reflection or insight. Both men would have been disappointed by the trend and probaly Adorno more so because he lived till 1969 and was clearly witness to the form. There might have been a divide in the outlooks of the two men to the music of the 1960s. It was at this time that Popular music in Britain moved into different themes: Music in the 1960s, however, began to develop a social conscience. Songwriters led by Dylan and followed quickly by Lennon and McCartney and a host of others dealt with issues that engaged real people in real situations. .... Suddenly, rock 'n' roll was not just the music of teenage rebellion and issues of adolescent interests but was a music of the masses, the middle class, the working class. (McDonald, 1992, p. 85) For Gramsci for whom the message was important, this form of change in the music may have heralded a move to the right direction with the working class trying to express their protest in their own art form. Adorno would have been dismissive of such claims in all likelihood. The half constructed ideas and form, listened with little attention would have not lead in any way to a sense of class consciousness but would have just perpetuated the same uncritical acceptance of Capitalist dogma guised in the cloak of protest. Perhaps today Adorno would have been vindicated as many of the great rock stars of the past are immensely wealthy and in many ways members of the establishment, David Bowie and Mick Jagger to cite just two. The Punk Music scene in Britain in the 1980s with its nihilistic message may have been an expression of despair by the working class, unable to escape their restrictive lives and having no means to escape regressing to a lower state. The Punks themselves did not disagree: But the British punk rockers, by comparison to their 1960s' counterparts, were anti-working class, preferring to be among the unemployed, the dispossessed, the economic bottom. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols said, "I know it's tough on the dole but it's not that bad. When I was on it, I was getting paid for doing nothing. I thought it was fucking great. Fuck up the system the best way." (McDonald, 1992, p. 86) It does not seem likely that Johnny Rotten would have been the kind of member of the proletariat that Gramsci had envisioned nor what he championed the kind of revolution of which he had dreamt. To Adorno the foul mouthed rants of Rotten would have not registered as much worse than other examples of Popular Music. Indeed he would have been consistent as he was throughout his life in his view of Popular music that this was just example of Pseudo-Individualism, a coarse example, certainly, but still no different from its predecessors. Rap Music originating in America is a form that has become very popular in Britain. Some have argued it is a form of dissent, directly quoting Gramsci to support their justification: Gramsci's concept of ideological hegemony posits that ruling class alliances maintain their power by developing consent among the subordinate class. .. , the best way to achieve control over a subordinate group is by means of cultural domination ... efforts to maintain hegemony coincide with efforts to dismantle it, because cultural domination inevitably produces its opposite--cultural resistance--from the subordinate classes . Blacks in the African diaspora have used language and music as a form of cultural resistance. (Kopano, 2002, p.1) Perhaps Gramsci would have concurred. But the widespread popularity of Gangster Rap seems to be an expression of the celebration of excess and this was hardly what Gramsci was arguing. Adorno would have not been kind to this genre either. He was dismissive of Jazz and up to now the form of rap is reductive dealing with the spoken word. It is a form that is theatrical where the confidence of the performer appears to play as an important a role as the content of the song. There are patterns in various styles of rap that Adorno would have most certainly called strong examples of Standardization and Pseudo-Individualization. This form of music representing a population in America that is often economically marginalized would have been for Adorno evidence of how the form of music prevents forward progress. Conclusion The interrelationship between Popular Music and barrier to class advancement in Britain is a difficult to establish. It requires a revision of the history of ideas that arrived at the relationship. It requires an understanding of the importance of class in Britain and it is necessary to apply this background and format to the main popular themes of Popular music as they have occurred in Britain in the last half century. In this paper such work entailed establishing the importance of class in Britain and from there advancing on to Marx's highly influential theory that argued that the class system involved the exploitation of the working class. The connection to how the barriers of class were perpetuated involved the examination of the ideas of the Frankfurt School who linked the dominance of the capitalist class to the the seduction of culture. Two inflluential thinkers that took Marxist ideas even further were Gramsci and Adorno. Gramsci argued that the messages of cultural products could be manipulated depending on context to serve either the working class or the capitalist class in theory, but he believed that the latter group were using it in this way with dismaying success. Adorno had no such ambiguousness in his ideas. He believed that the structure of popular culture , particularly popular music had kept the working classes in an uncritical acceptance of the established order. He was unsparing of all forms of popular music. When the ideas of these two great thinkers were applied to the dominant trends of popular music in the last 50 years in Britain, it appeared that their theories seemed, at least, empirically to be justified.The trends of 1950's rock and roll was a reflection of the newly formed teenage status in Britain in the wake of expanding industry. The social protest music of the 1960's appears now as a veneer for activism as many of the most important figures of this period are now extremely rich members of the establishment. The punk music of the 80's and the rap music of today make open criticisms of the establishment but they are defined by this protest and have no meaningful alternatives intellectually to what they criticize. Much of popular culture is marketed with profit being the underlying motive; this observation is quite popular. It is remarkable that men like Gramsci and Adorno were able to make such arguments before the widespread establishment of popular music had taken hold to the extent that it has today.For their foresight they are to be commended and studied for much could be learned from what they have to offer. References (2003). 7 Marxist Music Analysis Without Adorno: Popular Music and Urban Geography. In Analyzing Popular Music, Moore, A. F. & Krims, A. (Eds.) (pp. 131-157). 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