Research:Popular music theory

 

It is important to understand theory because its good to understand how artists can become successful and what elements I may need to make my music video successful. This post will be about different theories of the music industry and theorists and their thoughts.

 

Popular culture
- popular culture is a chosen culture based on the taste of ordinary people rather than the bourgeoisie elites. popular culture is everywhere such as the internet, music, TV or concert. Today anything with a buzz is deemed pop culture as it is a collection of thoughts, beliefs, ideas, actions or attitudes. A mass audience is influenced by pop culture because its what's popular to a mainstream audience. In the music industry pop music is the main focus of pop culture and is considered mainstream because there is a wide audience for that genre as its typical, reliable and accepted by lots of people.

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

- I have gained so much more knowledge whilst learning about all the ideologies of all the theories we have studied. As a spectator, I do strongly believe that the audience should be active and have their own rights whilst listening to a song or watch a music video rather than being passive about it. In my music video, I plan to represent my artist in an appropriate way that is appealing to the audience and also my audiences will rather be active.