Popular Music

&
Age

Keith Negus
Popular Music in Theory
(1996)

Popular Music and Age

Negus challenges the connection between popular music and youth culture. He
argues that popular music is listened to and performed by an ageing
demographic.
Johnny Cash Rolling Stones Stevie Nicks

Popular Music and Age

NIRVANA
DONNY OSMOND

He also takes issue with the view that popular music is inherently
rebellious.

Popular Music and Age

Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory (1996)

Punk rock finally challenged, deconstructed and

exposed the mythologies of rock at the very moment
when the original teenagers and youth of the rock
generation were beginning to grow old and beginning
to hear things in a different way: songs of
generational rebellion, sexual liberation and social
concern were starting to be used to advertise wine
coolers, executive cars and personal insurance.
Keith Negus Histories, Popular Music in Theory (1996; Polity Press,
Cambridge).

Levis
Marvin Gaye Ronettes The Clash

Babylon Zoo

Popular Music and Age

Criticism: Negus falls into the classic Frankfurt School trap of

seeing all commercial uses of popular art as problematic.

Popular Music and Age

Adorno saw
Popular Music as
the antithesis of Art
Music. According to
him it is pseudoindividualised
offering only a thin
veneer of
diversionary
pleasure that
conceals from the
listener its
fundamentally
formulaic quality.

Popular Music
&
Gender

Norma Coates
Revolution Now
(1997)

Mary Hannon
McRock: Pop as Commodity
(1988)

Popular Music and Gender

Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)

Hannon looks at the messages and values encoded in genres of

popular music. She argues that rock is suggestive of authenticity and
the real, while pop is synonymous with in-authenticity and
artificiality.

Popular Music and Gender

Rock stands for

geniuses and heroes.
Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)

Popular Music and Gender

Pop stands for

mutability and glitter
Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity (1988)

Popular Music and Gender

Generally speaking the notion of authenticity in relation
to contemporary popular music is indexed quite
clearly to the terms rock and pop. Mary Hannon
observes this in her article McRock: Pop as
Commodity. She suggests that while pop stands for
mutability and glitter rock believes in geniuses and
heroes. In every instance it would seem that pop
testified its own artificiality while rock proclaims its
authenticity.
Mary Hannon, McRock: Pop as Commodity, (1988),
pp.209-210.
Abba

Led Zeppelin

Popular Music and Gender

Norma Coates, Revolution Now (1997)

Norma Coates extends the work of Mary Hannon. She focuses on the
way in which authenticity is synonymous with the way in which gender
is constructed.

Popular Music and Gender

Rock is masculine

Popular Music and Gender

Pop is feminine

Popular Music and Gender

Norma Coates, Revolution Now (1987)
(R)ock is metonymic with authenticity while pop is
metonymic with artifice. Sliding even further down the
metonymic slope, authentic becomes masculine while
artificial become feminine. Rock, therefore, is masculine,
pop is feminine, and the two are set in binary relation to each
other, with the masculine, of course on top.
Norma Coates, Revolution Now in Sexing The Groove Popular
Music and Gender by Sheila Whitely (ed) (1997; Routledge,
London), p.53.

Popular Music and Gender

In an age before Madonna, Deborah Harry and Blondie blurred the

boundaries between rock, pop and gender: a hybrid of music styles and
gender performance.

Many theorists have moved beyond this binary and prefer to look at
the more subtle ways in which gender and authenticity are
constructed in musical performance.

Popular Music and Gender

It is generally accepted that rock is no less performative and artificial

than other genres of music. Bruce Springsteens image, for example,
as the down to earth blue collar American is no less contrived than
that of Madonna or Gwen Steffani.

Post-modern
approaches
to Popular Music

Andrew Goodwin
Sample and Hold Pop Music in the Digital Age of
Reproduction (1990)

Lawrence Grossberg
The Media Economy of Rock Culture (1993)

Postmodern approaches to Popular Music and

Laurence Grossberg argues that the first thing any pop theorist needs to do is
admit everything is fake. There is no such thing as an authentic performance in
the world of popular music.

Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and

From the first gramophone recording to the twelve inch single,

MTV to downloads popular music is the embodiment of postmodern cultural practise: a simulacrum (a copy without an
original)

Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and

Perhaps most well known, however, is Lawrence Grossbergs
mediation of the notion of authenticity in The Media
Economy of Rock. In this article he suggests that the only
possible claim to authenticity in the music industry is derived
from the knowledge and admission of your in-authenticity. He
argues that the only authenticity is to know and even admit
that you are not being authentic, to fake it without faking the
fact that you are faking it.
Lawrence Grossberg, The Media Economy of Rock Culture
Cinema, Postmodenrity and Authenticity in Sound and Vision: The
Music Video Reader by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and
Lawrence Grossberg (eds), (1993; Routledge, London), p.206.

Black Box
Milli Vanilli Grammy

Loleata Holloway
Milli Vanilli Girl Im Gonna Miss You

Post-modern approaches to Popular Music and

Not only does he suggest that contemporary pop
musicians have often learned to program every bit as
skilfully as earlier generations learned to play but he
ventures that, far from being an age of plunder,
sampling culture actually recuperates pops history.
Andrew Goodwin, Sample and Hold Pop Music in
the Digital Age of Reproduction, (1990).

Hung Up

Gimme Gimme

Bob Sinclair C + C Music Factory

Scissor Sisters Four Seasons Nolans Leo Sayer

Post-modern approaches to Popular Music

What shift is not the insidious qualities of the music itself but the way
in which we interpret them.
Abba is the same as Led Zeppelin is the same as Goldie Looking
Chain is the same of Elvis Presley there is a very narrow spectrum
of difference.
What changes is the narrative of authorship we impose upon
popular music texts.

Conclusion

Conclusion to Popular Music Theory

Popular music history is downloadable at the touch of a button and is

incorporated into the portfolio of consumer choices that define
contemporary life.

Conclusion to Popular Music Theory

Consequently there is less anxiety about conflicting genres, time

periods and value systems. It is okay to like Led Zeppelin and Abba.

Conclusion to Popular Music Theory

Audiences have multiple strategies for listening. They can shift from
The Beatles to The Neptunes because contemporary ideas about the
self are less singular. Audiences have plural identities; they are
dexterous.

Conclusion to Popular Music Theory

And listening to popular music is one of the ways in which

we find out how to produce new versions of ourselves.