CONTEXTUAL STUDIES 1

2. What is Popular Music and Popular Culture

Adam Martin
adam.martin@lcm.ac.uk
Session Structure

1.  Introducing the idea of ‘Popular Culture’

2.  Explore understanding of ‘Popular Music’

3.  Beginning to analyse popular music

Core texts
•  Storey, John. (1993). An Introductory
Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular
Culture. Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.

•  Shuker, Roy. (2008). Understanding

Popular Music Culture. Oxon: Routledge.
 What does the term ‘Popular Music’
mean to you?
•  What immediately springs to mind?
•  How does the music achieve this label?
•  What is not popular music?
•  How is it made?
•  Who is it for?
What is Culture?
•  Raymond Williams provides three potential definitions of culture:
1.  A general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development
2.  A particular way of life, whether of a people, period or a group
3.  The works and practices of intellectuals and especially artistic activity
What is Popular Culture?
•  Within the ‘mainstream’ – ideas, individuals, cultural texts, events,
technologies
•  Day to day life
•  Raymond Williams suggests:
•  ‘Well liked by many people’;
•  ‘inferior kinds of work’;
•  ‘work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people’;
•  ‘culture actually made by the people for themselves’
 News

Internet Books

Popular Culture

Radio Popular Music

Television
Two Perspectives
on Popular Music
Two perspectives

Positivist:
quantitative

•  Literal use of the term ‘popular’

•  What are the problems of this

method?
Two perspectives

Essentialist:
qualitative

•  Qualities of the music

•  Who (listener) and what (music)

•  What are the problems of this

method?
Four Definitions
Four definitions – 1
‘Commercialism’

Popular music is made to sell

•  ‘When we speak of popular music we speak of music that is

commercially oriented’ (Burnett, 1996: 35)
•  ‘It is mass produced for mass consumption. Its audience is a mass
of non-discriminating consumers’ (Storey, 1993: 10)
•  ‘Sales’, ‘charts’, ‘radio play’, ‘units’, ‘platinum disc’
Four definitions – 1
Issues with ‘Commercialism’

•  Simon Frith observes that 80% of singles and albums lose money
(quote from 1983!)

•  Many ‘popular’ musicians are opting for a DIY route

•  Suggests that other forms of music do not need to make money

Four definitions – 2

‘Negative’

Popular music is music that is not

something else

•  Idea that popular is what is not ‘high’ art or culture –

presents it as inferior
•  Tells us very little about what it is
•  How are other types of music (‘folk’ or ‘art’) defined?
Four approaches – 3
‘Sociological’

Popular music associated with a

particular social group

•  ‘[P]opular culture is the culture which originates from ‘the

people’ (Storey, 1993: 12)
•  Youth markets
Four approaches – 3
Issues with‘Sociological’

Popular music associated with a

particular social group

•  Social groups are transient; social mobility and class

fluidity
•  Who is included within this group?
•  ‘Undifferentiated’ dissemination through mass media
•  Previous ‘youth markets’ are ageing
Four approaches – 4
‘Technologico-economic’

Popular music is disseminated through

mass media to mass markets

•  All music is now disseminated in this way

•  Popular music can be accessed in other ways
Why is Popular Music Unique?
1.  Primarily a recorded form
1.  Repeatable
2.  Tangible
3.  Portable
4.  Focus on timbre

2.  Shifts in technology

1.  Radio, consumer technologies
2.  Wax / disc / vinyl / tape / digital
3.  Performance technologies

3.  Shifts in culture

1.  Globalisation
2.  Hedonism
3.  Youth voice
Exploring ‘popular music’ – conclusion
‘Whichever terms are used, their contents should
not be regarded as absolute. Moreover, this
conclusion points to two additional guidelines.
‘Popular music’ (or whatever) can only be
properly viewed within the context of the whole
musical field, within which it is an active
tendency; and this field…is never still – it is
always in movement.’
Middleton, Studying Popular Music, p.7
Popular Music Analysis
Why Analyse Popular Music?
1.  To learn more about how people make and listen to
popular music

2.  To understand more about your own appreciation of

music

3.  To identify aspects of interest to incorporate within your

own creative practice
 What is analysis?
‘A detailed examination of the elements
or structure of a substance’ (Oxford
Dictionary)

‘[M]usic is surely among the most

baffling of the arts in its power to move
people profoundly whether or not they
have any technical expertise or
intellectual understanding of it’
Cook (1987)
Musicology
•  ‘The scientific study of music’
•  Should include ‘every conceivable discussion of musical
topics’ (Harvard Dictionary of Music)

•  ‘as
a general rule, works of musicology, theoretical or historical, act as
though popular music did not exist. Sometimes it is explicitly
condemned, as light, crass, banal, ephemeral, commercial or
whatever’. (Middleton, 1997: 103)

•  ‘Mainstream musicology’ is therefore often unequipped to deal with

popular music effectively
Issues in Translating Musicology
1.  Terminology is rooted in classical theory – accidental, tune, motive,
dominant, development

•  19th and 20th Century focus on harmony

•  Limited vocabulary for timbre and rhythm

•  How do we describe sound?

2.  Hierarchy of notation

3.  Musicology’s valuing the transcendental, the genius, the serious

and the value of analysis in itself
The Objects of Popular Music Study

Text Context

Assignment 1 Assignment 2 Assignment 3

Example
•  Led Zeppelin – When The Levee Breaks (1970)

•  What does this tell us?

•  Does this capture enough detail?
•  What does it omit? Basic drum pattern
 Part 1 Melody

Release cover Harmony

Music video Lyrics

Release
Text Rhythm
Format

Images Structure

Liner notes Timbre

 Audience
Part 2 Politics
demographic

Musical field Economy

Lineage Artistic
movements

Promotional
Context Religion
campaign

Reviews Location

Live Date/historical
performances
Texts and Contexts
•  ‘The more we know about how people listen to a piece of
music, how they evaluate it, what they do it with, and the type
of meanings they attribute to it, the clearer idea we can get of
what is pertinent in a text’ (Brackett, 2000: 18)

•  Texts are shaped and understood through their context

•  Popular music studies sometimes places more emphasis on

context than the text
Things to Consider
1.  Popular music is repeatable –
performances are repeatable

2.  Sounds become specific and

identifiable rather than general

3.  Performances are manipulated, if

performed at all
Choosing Tools for Analysis
•  In popular music analysis, we choose specific tools for specific
tasks.

•  You will choose four elements for your own analysis

assignment

•  Potentially Bad Ideas

•  Harmonic analysis of a traditional blues track
•  Melodic analysis of drum’n’bass
•  Textural analysis of acoustic singer/songwriter

•  Potentially Good Ideas

•  Lyrical analysis of Hip-Hop
•  Structural analysis of electronic dance music
•  Melodic analysis of chart pop
 Choosing Tools: Example
Marika Hackman: Drown

Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball

Jon Hopkins – Form By

Firelight

Harmony, melody, rhythm, structure, lyrics, texture, production, instrumentation

 Why Analyse?
•  Interrogation of assumptions

‘The point of theory isn’t to make

analysis easier, more mechanical.
It is to make analysis harder, to
force it to interrogate its
assumptions.’
Cook (1998)

•  Implication of value

‘To analyse music is to be

committed to the premiss that
music is…more than just a pile of
notes…’
Cook (1998)
Conclusive Thoughts
•  Popular music analysis looks at both the text, the context
and their relationship

•  Traditional musicology has useful tools for analysis but

these are often limited – timbre
John Storey reading on SPACE –
p5-15

Questions?