Consuming
Music
Philippe Wealer reviews 3 essays on 'the consumption of music'
Finnegan, R. (1997) Music, Performance and Enactment. In Mackay, H. (ed.) Consumption and Everyday
Life. London: Sage, pp. 114-153
Miles, S. (1998) Consumerism as a Way of Life. London: Sage
Chapter 7: Consuming Popular Music, pp.107-125
Lury, C. (1996) Consumer Culture. Oxford: Blackwell
Chapter 6: Changing Races, Changing Places, pp. 156-91
How to Reference this Article: Wealer, P. (2002) Consuming Music, Vanguard
Online, December 2002, http://www,vanguardonline.f9.co.uk/021201.doc
Please send correspondence and letters on this article to ed@vanguard-online.co.uk
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Question: What is the difference between a Negro and a tire?
Answer: A tire won’t start singing as you apply chains to it.
Popular ‘Joke’
This text delivers a critical review of three chapters dealing with the socio-cultural
processes of music exchange. A first aim is to examine Lury’s (1996) 1, Finnegan’s
(1997)2 and Miles’ (1998)3 contributions towards our knowledge and understanding
of the consumption of music. Particular attention will be paid to uncovering any
neglected black racial issues which seem to be of particular importance in
postmodern consumption in general, and in music in particular (Hall, 1992).
Secondly, a brief overview of the scientific approaches to music will be sketched.
Relevant methodological decisions made by the three authors will be exposed and
located into the broader context of contemporary consumption studies. Before
turning to the individual chapters, let us first have a brief look at the volumes in which
they appear.
Music is an inter-human activity, an art, of such a great complexity, that the idea of
analyzing or even defining it might appear off-putting, if not perverted. However, the
point made clear by Miles’ volume is that everyday consumption in post-industrial
societies has begun to adopt increasingly rigid, material and ideological pattern. Also
Mackay (1997) is concerned to distill general consumption trends from a number of
local case-studies, focusing on creative and critical, everyday practices. Lury’s book
is interested in how social roles of class, gender, age and race structure individual
participation in consumer culture. This essay attempts to explains how the selected
authors have tried to understand the production of music by people for people and
the reception of music by people (hereafter consumption of music) by categorizing
and interpreting these highly interlacing practices.
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In as far as its theoretical commitment reaches, this work is an attempt to situate the
cultural field of music into the landscapes of social power relations, the dynamics of
which it ‘refracts rather than reflects’ (Crang, 1997:8). It will moreover be argued
alongside the reviews that no up-to-date investigation into the consumption of music
can afford to ignore the cultural movement of rap and hip hop. In fact, this is to agree
with Ogg and Upshal in that ‘... if the post-war music boom is often referred to as
“The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years”, perhaps the century’s final quarter may come to be seen
as “The Hip Hop Years” (1999:7)4.
In her chapter ‘Changing Races, Changing Places’, Celia Lury (1996) relies on a
range of social factors that she believes, underlie consumer culture. She draws upon
previous research in that domain, especially (Hall, 1992), (Gilroy, 1987) and (West,
1992) to show that the mainstream media fail to present these: She emphasizes that
multicultural pastiches in pictures and music tend to dissimulate, or at least distort, a
persisting reality of racial segregation (Harvey, 1989) (see popular joke on previous
page). To demonstrate this, the author defines the notion of style as a negotiator
between racial identity and consumption activities. Whereas racial identity is so
taken for granted by white people ‘... that their whiteness is invisible to themselves’,
she argues that this is different for black consumers. She quotes West (1992:38) to
show that the latter are ‘...hungry for identity, meaning and self-worth’ because of
their historical past of oppression and degradation (Both quotes found in Lury,
1996:186-187). Hence, the resulting cultural style as characterized by the attitudes of
idiosyncrasy and resistance often found in the musical styles of diasporic minorities.
Complexities arise with her recognition that white and black cultures have been
persisting in a constant dialogue over the past century. She argues that any attempt
to understand the collapse of the hierarchy in traditional Western culture must take
into account the intervention of diasporic, creoling modes of consumption (see also
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Bourdieu, 1984; Featherstone, 1991 and Gilroy, 1992). In fact, as her argument
moves on, it becomes clear that various osmoses have largely relied on the
particular music styles of the past century, of which rag, blues, Elvis’ and Michael
Jackson’s performances are only the most obvious examples given to illustrate this
point. The strength of Lury’s historical materialist account is clearly that it gives
insight into the consumption of music by black minorities as an ambivalent ingredient
of a predominantly white mainstream.
However, some post-structuralist scholars (e.g. Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000; Spivak,
1988) might accuse Lury of cementing pre-existing roles of the Western ‘Self’ and
the subaltern ‘Others’. Issues that are mentioned, but remain unanswered by her text
are those relating to the respective authenticity of black and white cultural roles. If all
post-classical and post-romanticist musical styles are influenced by the black culture,
what, then, is the point of opposing both groups in the first place, if not to
conceptually reinitiate active segregation? Another point of critique is that Lury fails
to recognise rap as a recent change in the complicated sets of responses and
counter-responses between black and white music. Especially as she successfully
combines racial segregation with the consumption of black music, one might expect
her to have noted the recent overspill of violence in rap scenes. In fact, Cartwright
(2002) notes the third murder of a popular rap artist5 in the United States within four
years.
Form and content of Finnegan’s chapter, ‘Music Performance and Enactment’
(1997), radically differ from Lury’s contribution to the debate. Rather than drawing on
numerous different authors in order to inter-subjectively establish a social reality,
Finnegan presents a case-study (Finnegan, 1989) about the consumption of music in
Milton Keynes between 1980 and 1984. This study summarises her insight into
several hundred music groups, functioning in the town’s multiple spaces. On this
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basis, the author exposes the consumption of music as an inherently subjective
practice that difficultly allows for generalizations. At first sight, the method of
empirically gathering information in the (regionally delimited) field thus appears to be
a successful means of bypassing the debate between the structuralist and poststructuralist understanding of consumer culture. Finnegan postulates music as
collective action, concluding that, therefore, the only valid method of researching it,
should be that of ‘performance’, as defined by Becker (1982). Although this is an
important point to make (because it subverts the ways in which many structuralist
scholars think of the consumption of music), in practice, she does not succeed in
reconciling it with her ethnographic findings. Attempts to let her descriptions (of e.g.
how a rock band composes a new song) emerge from their local context to more
general statements about musical communication are correspondingly uneasy. Her
analysis lacks the fluidity and her synthesis, the interconnectedness, of typical poststructuralist thinking (see Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000).
Also, after a closer look at Finnegan’s arguments, one discovers generalisations
which are not acknowledged as such by the author: For example, she agrees with
Lury (1996) in that ‘black music’ has brought rhythm, vocal expressivity and
audience-participation to the more rigid western tradition of music consumption.
From her reading of a (limited) range of music styles 6 she goes on to state that
music has a ‘non-linguistic‘ basis and that, by extension, any ‘logocentric (wordbased) [sic] approach to music bypasses the music itself’ (Finnegan, 1997:130 and
136). However these two claims fail to prepare the analytical ground for the
perception of the rap movement which has increasingly permeated the popular
music scenes in towns all over the world since the 1980s (Ogg and Upshal, 1999).
Because, as a matter of fact, Rap music originally relies on a speaking voice
accompanied by more or less crude, electronic beats. Here, the artist’s voice
becomes the main instrument; semiotic and asemiotic (i.e. timbre) at the same time.
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Therefore, if music is to be studied as an unstructured performance one will have to
leave behind any a priori conceptions of what music should, or should not be, in the
first place.
Social or stylistic issues surrounding Rap or any other style embraced by the vast
ensemble of ‘Jazz’ are not at all addressed by Finnegan’s article. It can be assumed
that this is less so because of a cultural-stylistic homogeneity in Milton Keynes
(although the Newtown’s demographic composition may have a certain relevance)
than because of the early date of the study on which she draws (1980-84, see
above). Her intervention can, then, be criticised of first, recycling a study in 1997 that
has been overrun by 20 years of evolution in the relevant music scenes and
secondly, of generalizing her local findings from a British-centred perspective. In fact
her account has missed the influence of the diasporic influences, noted by Lury and
(Miles, see below), by marginalizing (an imprecise notion of) Jazz, ignoring the
current issues of rap and falsely associating ‘Pop’ with ‘Brit Rock’.
In his chapter, ‘Consuming Popular Music’, Miles seeks to explore whether popular
consumption of music can be seen as a means for creative expression and protest
or must rather be condemned as a catalyst for global control and audience
exploitation. This binary analytical mould persists throughout the chapter, revealing
musical exchange processes as economically guided by the ‘music industry’
(1998:108). Ontologically, then, his approach is much more structural and top-down
than Lury’s, and certainly, Finnegan’s account. As in Lury’s chapter, a full
methodological account is missing, and lot of claims are simply set in the context of
other authors’ opinions on the topic.
On one hand Miles believes that consumption offers a framework in which audiences
can find and fix their identities. The author makes a continuous effort to let, both,
structures and agencies act and react upon the points he makes. Hence, his critique
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of Horkenheimer and Adorno (1988), urging to abandon elitist, a priori classifications
of consumer behaviour (see also Middleton, 1990 and Longhurst, 1995). Miles notes
that it is possible for musicians and audiences alike to consume music without
subjecting to the laws of supply and demand. To support his claim, he draws
attention to the existence of alternative forms of music, such as world music, dance
music, and to the following words of Frith in relation to rap: ‘...the most exciting and
political music of the early 1990s should be the hip hop sounds of young urban black
bands like “Public Enemy”, groups that are heavily dependent on, both, the latest
technology and street credibility’ (Frith, 1992:74, quoted in Miles 1998:113). Public
Enemy have initiated the northern American ‘gangsta rap’, a style marked by its
aggressive lyrics of protest, in the early eighties.
However, the argument does not stop here. Miles goes on to argue that it is an
especially important characteristic of modern society to assimilate marginal ideas
within the dominant culture, such as those rebellious aspects of popular music,
‘...which could potentially serve to negate that culture’ (1998:107). Although this
perspective overlaps with Lury’s, the relationships that it invokes are certainly less
flexible. Eventually, Miles sees consumers as dupes, and the industry of popular
music as a system of audience exploitation, mass deception and global control. On
the other hand, then, Miles’ way of thinking forces consumers into a rigid structure,
distinguishing those who are passively trapped within the system of consumption,
and the others who (unsuccessfully) try to resist it. In reality, then, the chapter is
opposing itself less successfully against the position taken by Horkenheimer and
Adorno (1988) than its author might want to admit. It is rather another example of
social enquiry which practices identity politics instead of patiently excavating the
grain of component social worlds (Philo, 2000). The post-structuralist critique which
holds that too rigid academic definitions are vulnerable of automatically reproducing
a social status quo, is certainly applicable here.
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In terms of the matter exposed by this review, we can conclude that specific stylistic
interventions (as somehow correlative with nuances in skin colours) in the
consumption of music have proved far more complex and fluid than rigid forms of
binary thinking might allow for. Whereas Lury and Miles focus on authoring sites,
arguing that culture is structured by economic laws, Finnegan tends to prefer reading
culture as this great diversity of political identities, essentially resulting from the
agents’ responses to each other. Although Lury has most skillfully set musical
performances into the wider context of relatively flexible, social structures, upheld by
racial divides, Miles’ account displays the full range of difficulties, top-down
approaches can entail. In addition to this, Finnegan’s work demonstrates that, no
matter how vigorously descriptions are specified, generalizations are inevitable.
Although the theoretical ground has been well prepared for various combinations of
both strands (Jackson, 1993), the practical hand-in-hand conception of structure and
agency still seems to be fraught with difficulties. Must we then conclude that
empirical work can only follow the inductive track towards generalizations and that
post-structuralist approaches impair, rather than enrich the established methods?
Consumption cultures rely on producers and consumers, authors and readers,
allusions and inferences; especially in the case of music, boundaries between these
are spatially and temporally fluid. Therefore, it can be argued that performance must
persist as a valid method for investigation (because it allows for fluidity), but that it
cannot stand on its own. It must be inclusive of agentic descriptions and structural
speculations, where the latter can only act as an extension to the arguments brought
in by the former. Any further research in the consumption of music should make an
attempt to take both strands into account. Examining the nature of the violence
which seems to have erupted in rap circles as a consequence to the style’s
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sanitization by mainstream culture, would be an example for further work in this
domain.
P. Wealer
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endnotes
1 Lury,
2
C. (1996) Consumer Culture. Oxford: Blackwell
Chapter 6: Changing Races, Changing Places, pp. 156-91
Finnegan, R. (1997) Music, Performance and Enactment. In Mackay, H. (ed.) Consumption
and Everyday Life. London: Sage, pp. 114-153
3
Miles, S. (1998) Consumerism as a Way of Life. London: Sage
Chapter 7: Consuming Popular Music, pp.107-125
In the context of this essay, ‘Hip Hop’ and ‘Rap’ can be used to refer to the same style of
music.
4
Jason Mizell ‘Jam Master Jay’, a peacemaker, in the scene, was shot dead in a recording
studio on Oct 30th 2002. He was amongst the first to introduce rap music to a world wide
audience by incorporating rock tunes into his sound. (Cartwright, 2002)
5
6
classical, jazz, folk, brass band, country, western and rock styles