Is music emancipation or exploitation?

Is popular music a means to emancipation or exploitation (of both artists and fans)?
(With special reference to the 1st wave of Rock ‘n Roll 1955-7)

Popular music has provided unequalled pleasure to untold millions, yet is still subject to unrivalled cynicism. Its definitive audience has always been the youth of the day, and they are alternatively viewed either as naïve and pliant new born consumers taking their first economic baby steps or as active participants discovering their role in society through engaging with the culture of their time. Popular music is thus variously seen as a tool that provides disenfranchised youth with a voice or the commodified ‘product’ of a cynical industry, exploiting emotion and providing a false sense of belonging. ‘Political economy’ (chiefly the ‘Frankfurt School) and ‘transmission models’ stress the exploitative elements of popular music. They typically view the music industry as an all- controlling corporate monster, another head of the cerberus of the capitalist entertainment industry, mass producing mechanized music that reflects our existences as pseudo- cyborgs. ‘Active’ models, (chiefly the ‘Birmingham School’) stress the emancipatory elements. They point to the vital critical and participatory space pop music provides for its audience (especially the young), where they can contest dominant values, gather alliances and even effect social change. The placement of different forms of music within these categories stirs passionate debate. Music means something to people. They have personal stake in the music they identify with and has given them pleasure, and are thus easily offended if it is criticized and dismissed as shallow and meaningless. There is some truth to the cliché of the parent who cannot understand their child’s music and dismisses it as 'noise'. There seem to be ‘paradigms’ of musical form that articulate with the youth culture in their moment that simply cannot be understood by the previous generation (this is certainly the case with the 1st wave of Rock ‘n Roll). Theodore Adorno championed his conception of ‘real’, authentically expressive music (as opposed to standardized), yet failed to recognise genuinely expressive popular music when it arrived, as the paradigm had shifted beyond his outmoded understanding. Yet the music industry being exactly that, an industry, commodifies and co-opts any form that becomes popular, both standardizing and institutionalizing it. At this stage, appropriated into the establishment, musical form cannot be purely resistant as it is serving the industry. The more records a politically-minded song writers sell, the more they may find they fund the exploitative endeavours of the very hegemony they set out to resist. Popular music can certainly be emancipatory, yet by the pervasive infiltration of the entertainment industry, our choices become limited and we are directed. Certainly the industry exploits us as much as it can possibly get away with, and although of course there are people who ‘care about music’ within the industry, even their priority is necessarily to make money. However, music has always been a result of a dialectical relationship between the audience and the industry and revolves through cycles of breakthrough/assimilation, of standardizing hegemony followed by ‘brief bursts of competition and creativity.’
This post will attempt to highlight the arguments of both views of popular music (exploitative and emancipatory), and then to discuss the manner in which they interrelate.

The argument that popular music is overwhelmingly exploitative is compelling.
Throughout the 20th century, an oligarchy of 5-8 companies has controlled 70% of the entire output of popular music. Via the increasing trend of corporate mergers, that number had by 2008 shrank to a ‘G4’ (SonyBMG, EMI, Universal and Warner) that between them now control the means by which 80-85% of worldwide popular music is produced, manufactured and distributed. In 2000 their annual combined revenues exceeded $40 billion. This colossal power axis constitutes a musical wing of a vast multi-national, integrated entertainment business that effectively ‘colonizes leisure.’ Sony, to take one example, also either owns or has significant interests in film (Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures), home video, television and wide ranging accompanying distribution/advertising media. Its ‘Sony Music’ subdivision alone encompasses Sony Music Publishing and several record labels, including Columbia and Epic. As the music industry chases profits dealing with an unpredictably performing product, it adopts ‘ruthless and exploitative’organizational procedures in order to maintain stable market performance and control the flow of production. Artists are ‘systematically exploited’ as record companies seek to limit the costs of production and the risks involved in any innovation. Such is the industry stranglehold on the market that any artist seeking a wide audience is forced to compromise - ‘succumb to the sausage machine and be compensated with cash’, leaving no place for artistic principle in the culture industry production line. Stylistic conservatism rules, with marketing departments often directly intervening to change the sound, length or presentation of recordings. As with any musical movement - industry control, standardization and mass production of Rock ‘n Roll style and form led to its eventual appropriation as ‘sanitized commodity form’, utterly decontextualizing it and eradicating its radical potential. Rock ‘n Roll became standardized by the early 1960’s with Cliff Richard and Larry Parnes’ stable of sanitised Rock ‘n Roll protégés having little in common with the wild dynamism of Little Richard, despite their adopted ‘rebellious sounding’ pseudonyms.
Artists today typically sign long term deals that handcuff them to a label for 5-10 albums and are only permitted to release new material every two years in order to squeeze maximum profit from their previous release. This results in artists being tied to their first contracts for up to 20 years in some cases, with new artists being left with little choice but to accept derisory royalty rates. Companies are typically able to dump the artist at any time, whilst maintaining the distribution rights of master recordings and the artist’s music remains their private property. George Michael, Prince and The Stone Roses are just a sample of the many artists who have been involved in lengthy court battles to release themselves from such situations. In the early Rock ‘n Roll era, signed black artists were forced to tone down their music and lyrics to make it more ‘palatable’ and were frequently denied official authorship of their own work, denying them any access to lucrative publishing royalties.

Whereas artists have the terms of their exploitation made contractually clear, the systematic exploitation of fans is rather more Machiavellian. For example, prices are kept artificially high in certain target markets such as South America in order to discourage the creation of pirate sell- on markets to Europe. In 2003 The Federal Trade Commission of America ruled against the large American labels for employing intimidation tactics to keep cd prices higher within the United States. This practice alone is estimated to have generated an extra $500 million in revenue between 1997 -2004. Record companies also regularly employ underhand tactics to manipulate ‘mass media gatekeepers’ (such as disc jockeys) to give exposure to their products in independently regulated markets where advertising is illegal. (In the Rock ‘n Roll era this was a standard practice known as ‘payola’). Such practices do not simply encourage sales, but allow companies a key piece in an integrated market research jigsaw. Consumer feedback, in the form of sales, cues producers ‘as to which experiments may be imitated profitably and which should probably be dropped…analogous to the pre-selection of electoral candidates by political parties, followed by voter feedback at the ballot box.’ Overproduction is thus in fact a proactive rational strategy where companies purposefully feel out the market in an ‘environment of low capital investment and demand uncertainty.’ This process is typical of the entertainment industry in general, relentlessly streamlining its effectiveness in encouraging sales as audiences become statistics in a survey and artists become human flyers. Rock ‘n Roll was a pioneer of efficiency in this regard, described at the time as the ‘most efficient tool yet invented to separate youth from its money.’
The resulting targeting of audience demographics is arguably the recording industry’s most cynical practice. A conveyor belt of saccharine ‘boy band’ product is available for the teenage girls (who make perhaps the most reliably significant contribution to the industry’s coffers), and ‘rebel rock’ bands/ hip hop ‘hard men’ are marketed to the boys. Now there is even a ‘tweenage’ market which treads a fine ethical line between providing entertainment and economic grooming. The older generation, who have already paid for their music are re-sold it via ongoing format succession and‘re-mastering.’
Theodore Adorno felt that the standardization of musical form in popular music is ‘wholly inappropriate to an individual in a free society’ and reflected the mechanized working lives of the masses is industrialized society. Pop is therefore ‘a perpetual busman’s holiday.’ It is divested of ‘spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes’, being ‘frozen under the centralized conditions and copycat policy’ of the music industry. For Adorno, this standardization comes with an attendant ‘pseudo-individualization’ where cultural mass production is endowed with the halo of [illusory] free choice…which keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to ‘is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested.”’ Adorno saw popular music as simply another commodity with no extra- market autonomy (and therefore no resistance capability), nor any true expressiveness. It was the ‘natural’ musical form of commodity capitalism and had political economy in its function as ‘social cement’, helping sooth ‘psychical adjustment to the mechanisms of present-day life.’ Listeners fetishize popular music and familiarity becomes ‘a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it.’ He divided its listeners into two categories – ‘rhythmic obedients’ (typically young and whose collective dancing represents the self-renunciation and herd-mindedness of the ‘machine age’), and ‘emotional types’ who find cathartic consolation in popular music, not through wish-fulfilment but by ‘becoming blissfully aware of the wretchedness of their lives. Adorno was equally scathing towards Rock ‘n Roll when it appeared. He believed that good music (chiefly classical) was that which explored whole themes in dialect with its parts, leading to ‘an exposition of the whole’. Such music required focused and attentive listening.

Adorno has been heavily criticized for developing a monolithic theory that fails to take into account the active role of many popular music audiences and artists. Lewis and Jensen have argued that, rather than suffering from pseudo-individualization, fans are frequently imaginative and discerning. The recording industry and mass media gate keepers may control which products are distributed, but they cannot control how such texts are used.Often more traditional codes and modes of music are used in novel combination with new technologies to create original musical forms. Subcultural theorists (especially those of the ‘Birmingham School’, such as Hebdige) have demonstrated how audiences have continually and actively transformed mass produced products by appropriating them for novel expressive purposes, for example record turntables in early 1980’s rap music. Rock ‘n Roll took previous forms of music, such as country & western and blues and infused it with newer technology (e.g. the electric guitar), enabling a new soundscape ‘canvass’. David Riesman believes that such activity has a ‘double articulation’ social function, enabling youth to both participate in parental modes, and to develop new modes of response that allow them to confront and solve inherent problems and contradictions in the parent culture, resulting in an emancipated and distinctive generational identity that prepares them for the challenges of their age.
Others conceive of popular music as the most powerful unifying force in western culture. Grossberg sees it as uniquely capable of creating empowering ‘affective alliances’ between people ‘which in turn can create the energy for social change that may have a direct impact on politics and culture.’ At a variety of stages over the past 50 years popular music has provided youth with a genuine voice and platform for resistance. As the original musical movement centred around youth, the 1955-1957 Rock ‘n Roll movement is a fitting illustration of this.
As the 1940’s ‘baby boomers’ reached their teenage years they found themselves enjoying unprecedented purchasing power and time on their hands due to the rise of an affluent middle class. Fewer ‘teenagers’ (a new term at the time) were required to work and become part of adult life, and were granted allowances or paid to do chores. For the 1st time ‘a social system of adolescents’ existed, with the time and the means to spend money on pleasure en masse. Any such social system requires a cultural space in which to invest and empower themselves to express their identity. This adolescent space had not yet been created in society and struggle was required in order to do so.
The mid 1950’s in the USA was a time of intense conservatism and cold war paranoia (McCarthy ‘witch hunts’ etc.). In the UK class segregation, condescension, sexism and racism were rife. Underneath this a ‘festering sexual ignorance…only slightly ameliorated since the 19th century’, national service and anachronistic air of formality had led to psychic tension and ‘unrest in the young.’When Rock ‘n Roll emerged, it was seized upon by the youth with a fervour perhaps unsurpassed since. They embraced it as an authentic expression of their desires, resonating ‘youth’s common feelings and experiences in a shared public language.’ It served to map ‘the specific structures of youth’s affective alienation on the geographies of everyday life.’ In John Lennon’s words, ‘Rock ‘n Roll was real, everything else was unreal.’Songs lyrics were typically concerned with adolescent struggles at home, school and in love (e.g. Chuck Berry’s ‘School Days’). Its blatant sexuality, thrillingly articulated by the likes of Little Richard and Elvis Presley was compellingly novel and powerfully expressive of adolescent physical energy and desire. The musical emphasis on rhythm and tone (rather than technique) gave Rock ‘n Roll a refreshing, unpretentious immediacy and was the key to both its expressive capability and to its subversiveness. Not only did it ‘gave back middle class whites their bodies’, but it served to make music more accessible and to encourage participation, as did the youth of many of its stars (Elvis, buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran). Similarly to punk 20 years later, the audience/ performer barrier was broken down. With a sense of rhythm and verve, anyone could participate, empowering young bands that would lead the 1960’s counterculture in the next decade.
Rock ‘n Roll was in effect, ‘a weapon…the only language and expression kids have versus authority.’ It was revolutionary in the manner in which it ‘articulated with social, economic and cultural changes and served a ‘key role in the struggle over cultural norms.’ Rock ‘n Roll was the soundtrack to an awakening of a youth movement that would profoundly alter society. Yet it operated from within an exploitative system.
Rock ‘n Roll is an excellent rebuttal to Adorno; it demonstrates how unsuitable his approach is for understanding popular music. His theory is informed by assumptions made from a musicological standpoint grounded in rigid definitions. He never studied how people engage with musical forms, and simply gave his subjective opinion of their subjective relationships with it. Neither did he ‘look beneath the bland surface of the cultural mainstream’, and witness the ‘conflicts of styles between 1890 -1930’, only being familiar with the resulting ‘homogenous synthesis.’His idea of musical autonomy is rooted in modernist conceptions of bourgeois compositional individualism (an alienated subject in conflict with ‘a reified social totality’) which prevents him from seeing how new forms of collective, mass subjectivity can find genuine creative expression. Adorno believed that mass produced popular music, even Rock ‘n Roll, could only be regressive and manipulative, and as such could never provide any means of resistance. For Adorno, spontaneous participation, even dancing, is only ‘self deceiving’ and a means to pseudo-individualization as we become rhythmic obedients of the machine age. He had no conception of the possibility of an audience collectively co-producing meaning. Rock ‘n Roll fit into the 3 minute time slots of commercial radio and sold in vast mass produced quantities. It frequently spoke directly to the ‘baser’ emotions, it made no attempt to refer to a totality and encouraged participation. Yet it gave people back their bodies. It provided an escape from manipulation. Most importantly, through the very collectivity that Adorno considered central to its impotence, it achieved authentic resistance.
Adorno ‘draws the net too tightly’, and his views are an effect of being conceptually trapped in a cultural paradigm that blinded him to the evolution taking place around him. In this regard, Adorno can be superseded by ‘historicizing his historicism.’Although his views still have great relevance today as an accurate description of much of contemporary pop, the active audience within popular music is a significant minority that cannot be overlooked. In general, ‘transmission models’ overstate the determining power of the music industry and fail to grasp the multitude of modes of activity and languages of expression available in culture.
Active models are equally vulnerable to criticism. Hebdige, for example, has been criticized for focusing on how audiences construct texts whilst neglecting how, conversely, texts ‘construct their own appropriate audiences.’ Music has a role in creating the conditions for subcultural enterprise, providing the impetus or ‘inspiration’ for gatherings and style creation. From this perspective (although this particular argument is somewhat circular), participation and audience co-production is always surrogate to the product provided.
Sarah Thornton argued that British rave culture (late 1980’s and early 1990’s) was in fact carefully constructed by commercial interests rather than being an innocent spontaneous subculture. Regarding ‘genuine’ subcultural movements, although constructing subcultural texts is a creative, communal activity, it is a far cry from sharing power. The overwhelming majority of music and music video we hear and see around us every day has its origins in executive boardrooms. Non- major label music is denied a voice in the mass media as only the large labels can afford the radio and television coverage necessary to provide exposure (in 2000 a single page in Q magazine cost £8000). As such, ‘the possibility of alternative voices making themselves heard is always small.’
Simon Frith has suggested that active models romanticize activities that only amount to the ‘shadowboxing of consumers.’ He argues that there is no such thing as an active audience and that any such distinctions are purely arbitrary, as;
‘What music means –what we hear as authentic- is already determined by the technological and economic conditions of its production; it does not exist in any ideal or innocent state.’
Frith’s point sums up the relationship between the industry and the audience neatly, yet perhaps unintentionally. The industry may own the means of production, but what occurs in its reception truly belongs to the audience. Popular music affects and ‘speaks to people’ in what is certainly a profound experience for the individual. It has provided unrivalled quantities of feeling, pleasure and quality to untold billions of lives. Were this not true, there would not be a $40 billion industry.

The emancipation/exploitation debate is analogous to the nature/nurture debate in psychology. The industry may largely supply the potential (genetic code) in product form, yet it is the activity of the audience that supplies the mediating experiences through which the development (or not) of such potentials are determined. Both the active and transition models are thus over- rigid. Active theory may exaggerate, even romanticize participation, but transmission models cheapen enriching experiences, often attacking them through arguments rooted in arbitrary or outmoded concepts which, in the end, amount to little more than taste snobbery.
The question of to what extent popular music is exploitative or emancipatory largely depends upon the extent to which music is a result of market imposition or whether it has an authentic place in our lives. In truth, popular music is a complex and ‘contradictory combination of the manufactured and the authentic.’Music is an area of self expression for the young but also ‘a lush grazing pasture for commercial providers.’ As the industry feels out audience demand and projects back a ‘condensed ideal-type version of its own image’, it and the audience are engaged in a dialectical symbiosis. Popular music can neither be ‘resistance…nor is it the forms which are superimposed on or over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked’. Culture is thus ‘always squeezed out between these two conflicting pressures.’
Meaning and form can change rapidly in culture, making both active and passive models untenable. In postmodern society cultural turnover is rapid and mediated by a multitude of ‘networks of knowledge and practice, linked to different cultural contexts, modes of agency and discursive positions… with no single measure of truth.’ Here, active models are inadequate as this leaves no discernible direction of agency between the industry and the audience to map as their relationship is symbiotic. Active models are, however, much more appropriate in postmodernity, as they recognise dialectical activity. Transmission models may help us ‘know the enemy’, but active models show us the tools available for resistance. The main contemporary field of resistance is in the ‘spaces in the cracks and margins within the monolith itself’, and the use we can make of what is available. This is where we can emancipate ourselves through the exploitative. Transmission models cannot allow for this and become fossilized, stuck in their ‘moment’ and unable to adapt. Such models must themselves shift to a similarly postmodern hermeneutical form of ‘and/and, rather than, either/or if they are to reflect anything more than hollow echoes of obsolete forms of snobbery. Through technology and the shift in social paradigms, both identity and subjectivity themselves can change form. To accept this is to accept that no model can be so arrogant as to assume what the succeeding generation experiences. One person’s exploitation is another’s emancipation. Even if our subjective worlds have been manipulated, a vastly diverse variety of music has profound meaning for groups and individuals. In postmodernity, one could respond to Adorno in the words of the Rolling Stones; ‘I know it’s only Rock ‘n Roll, but I like it.’