Research: Popular Music Theory - Ms Begum

Popular Music Theory

Introduction

- It is important to understand theory because it provides information that should be known for people within the industry to follow and therefore develop their own ideas in order to achieve, be successful and survive to make a stance for themselves in the mainstream. 

- It is also important to understand the theorist because it provides their personal interests and where they found information and motivations from in order to come up with theories that was created to be learning about throughout generations.

 

Popular Culture

- Popular culture is a chosen culture that is based on the taste of ordinary people rather then bourgeoisie elites. Popular culture is everywhere. 

- Popular culture is sometimes viewed as being dumbed-down in order to find acceptance throughout the mainstream. 

 

Antonio Gramsci - Hegemony

-  Gramsci introduces the concept of hegemony. This occurs when ruling class values and ideas are dominates the society this effects every institutions including music.
- Capitalist societies, with the ruling – class relying heavily bourgeoisie. With Gramsci he believes that they are able to do this due to the control they have over the influential institutions, such as popular media like magazines, TV, music and different media platforms.

Hegemony:

-  This is a media texts represented to the world usually in order to support a dominant ideology.
- With the hegemony is the way the people with the power keep and maintain their control of the ruling class.
-   Most/all ideologies are pretty much considered hegemonic; with the power in the society is maintained by constructing ideologies which usually are promoted by the mass media.
-  With them allowing it be promoted by the mass media it allows the young audience, what it does is allow them to follow it as that is what they would want so that their wouldn’t be any riots to the bourgeoisie.

- Hegemony is when the dominance if one social group over another such as the ruling class over all the other classes below them.
- With this theory what is claims is that the ideas of the ruling class come to be seen to the people as normal. As they are being seen as universal ideologies, with it being perceived to benefit everyone whilst it actually only benefiting the ruling class.
- Cultural hegemony is the sociological concept that the culturally diverse society can be ruled or be dominated by one of is social classes which is the ruling class.

  

Frankfurt School

- Popular music is the end product of a production line where everything sounds similar.

- This is an industry that exploits the mass population for profit and social control, in hope that they accept a certain ideology about the world they are living in.

- The music industry promotes absorption. Everything about these pop stars becomes a commodity (product). These includes their clothes, image, like and dislikes etc.


 

Theodor Adorno

- Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society. He was also one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II
-   He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society.



-  Adorno argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a ‘’culture industry’’ – the opposite of ‘true’ art – to keep the passively satisfied and politically apathetic (no interest).
-  Adorno adopted the term ‘culture industry’ to argue that the way in which cultural items were produced was analogous (comparable) to how other industries manufactured vast quantities of consumer goods. Also, culture industry exhibited an ‘assembly-line character’ which could be observed in the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products. The metaphor of the ‘assembly-line’ was used to stress the repetitive and routine character of cultural production.
- These features are particularly true in the popular music industry. All popular music products are commodities to be sold to an audience who believe that they are consuming ‘true’ emotion.
- Popular music products are characterised by ‘standardization’ (they are basically formulaic and similar) and ‘pseudo-individualization’ (incidental differences make them seem distinctive, but they’re really not).
- Products of the culture industry maybe emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic – we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.- Pseudo individuality: (meaning fake) - Adorno was critical of what they referred to as pseudo individuality. By this they meant that artists within the cultural industry, when examined, had very little differences whose uniqueness lies only in very minor modifications e.g. trade marks - Adorno believed that the culture industry allows people to become ‘masses’ and be easily manipulated by capitalist corporations and authoritarian governments. And due to control of capitalist production: music becomes merely standardized, formulaic and repetitive. It has no value whatsoever and leads to a very specific type of consumption that is passive, obedient and easily manipulated for the purpose of propaganda or advertising.

The Birmingham School

- In the inaugural lecture that followed his appointment as Professor of English at the University of Birmingham in 1962, Richard Hoggart announced his intention to conduct research into ‘mass’ culture. Two years later, Hoggart had founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
- Under the directorship of first Hoggart and then Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, and with the commitment of Michael Green throughout, the Centre operated at the intersections of literary criticism, sociology, history and anthropology. Rather than focus on ‘high’ culture, the intention was to carry out group research on areas of popular culture such as chart music, television programmes and advertising. 
-Work produced at the Centre showed that popular culture was not only worthy of academic study but often also politically significant. It showed, for example, the importance to young people of subcultures based around style and music, the ideological influence of girls’ magazines over their young readership.

Dick Hebdige

- Consumption is an active process in which different audiences have different readings into the same cultural products.
- Adorno's ideas are very pessimistic and dismissive of mass audiences as passive and easily manipulated. (Challenges Adorno)
- Audiences are active and not passive. Through resistance of pop culture creates sub-culture.

Conclusion

- All the information above has helped me to learn all the ideologies of the six theories we have studied. As a spectator, the audience are those who contributed and make the artists famous as they are in the popular culture. Without audience are being seen as passive, I strongly disagree to this statement due to people have different backgrounds and religions plus cultures therefore different view points thus meanings is created. In addition, I believe that the audience is not passive but rather active. Within my music video, I will represent my artist/band in a way where they can more appealing to the audience and in relation to 'popular culture', my audiences will rather be active.

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