The Trouble with the Sociology of Pop

That's "no one aspires to be rockist or berates himself or others for being insufficiently rockist."

Happened upon this thread because I just started reading Performing Rites and feel similarly to Mark S -- i.e., that Frith's thesis a brilliant idea that isn't quite pulled off (I found myself continually nodding along in Chapter 1, and then disoriented for the next 100 pages.)

But what compelled me to seek out that book in the first place was that I've been thinking about how popular music is generally neglected in the academy -- apart from the now-cliche, ideology-driven, cultural-studes investigations into things like "the image of Elvis." And as Josh suggested upthread, I do think there are substantial reasons for why music is treated differently from popular film/literature/art.

I think a lot of what it comes down to is this: Popular film/lit/art were accepted as valid fields of study once they could be considered properly "intellectual" -- the notion of the "auteur theory," for example, totally jump-started film studies. But it is much more difficult to see pop music as "intellectual."

Viz:

1. Unlike novelists and visual artists, who study the history of their discipline as a matter of course, popular musicians themselves are not seen as intellectuals participating in an unique discourse. (e.g., Beck is not reviewing Bjork in the NY Review of Books.)

2. There is a relative absence of legitimizing institutions (like the gallery complex) or gatekeepers (respected novelist-critics) to isolate significant works for study. (This is partly why writing about the Wonder Stuff, in the Pinefox's example, seems trivial: among all the music ever recorded, that band seems arbitrary to spotlight.)

3. While the lines between popular and high-culture art and literature are quite blurry (cf. the Jonathan Franzen debacle), thus giving more leeway for popular works to sneak into syllabi, they are much more stark with respect to music (composition or bust) -- and thus easier to justify pop music's exclusion.

4. Compared to literary and artistic "themes," the focus of much academic inquiry, it is not always obvious what popular music is "about" (it is often more functional).

I realize that some of these might be symptoms rather than causes. It's hard to say. But I'm curious to know if any of these thoughts make sense. Please pick 'em apart!

OK.

>>> Unlike novelists and visual artists, who study the history of their discipline as a matter of course, popular musicians themselves are not seen as intellectuals participating in an unique discourse. (e.g., Beck is not reviewing Bjork in the NY Review of Books.)

That's a good point, but they do TALK about each other all the time. So, I suppose, do footballers. I guess different levels of discursive elaborateness are involved.

>>> 2. There is a relative absence of legitimizing institutions (like the gallery complex) or gatekeepers (respected novelist-critics) to isolate significant works for study. (This is partly why writing about the Wonder Stuff, in the Pinefox's example, seems trivial: among all the music ever recorded, that band seems arbitrary to spotlight.)

But who legitimates a legitimating institution? The distinction between galleries and rock venues, or art magazines and pop ones, itself seems 'arbitrary' to me. (But we may be able to agree that 'The fact that the divide is a construct doesn't make it less real'.)

I'm not sure why it would be esp. 'arbitrary' to write about the Wonder Stuff. If you take pop 'seriously' (a dubious, un-Morleyesque word), then you might be interested in the Wonder Stuff - or violently uninterested.

>>> 3. While the lines between popular and high-culture art and literature are quite blurry (cf. the Jonathan Franzen debacle), thus giving more leeway for popular works to sneak into syllabi, they are much more stark with respect to music (composition or bust) -- and thus easier to justify pop music's exclusion.

I think that's true. But I would have thought that the last couple of generations of pop institutionalization - Sir McCartney, Dylan And The Poets, etc - have changed that. Or more generally, the post-Q / CD idea of the Back Catalogue. (Perhaps this is standard Rockism.)

>>> 4. Compared to literary and artistic "themes," the focus of much academic inquiry, it is not always obvious what popular music is "about" (it is often more functional).

Really? I think it's usually much clearer what pop music is about than what abstract painting is about.

I suppose that novels - White Noise, Lolita, The Trial - are about things. But they are usually about more things than pop songs (watering cans, sprinklers, queues): so it is less clear what they are 'finally', or 'ultimately', about.

Wow: I have just reread this thread: so many various and interesting things happen on it.

i had my first bad-tempered argument with argument with JtN!! :(

Sociology as I know it stopped 'aspiring to be a science' in the 50s.

http://oregonstate.edu/~scarbost/huh/oops.gif

Sociology as I know it stopped 'aspiring to be a science' in the 50s. Outposts of naive positivism do remain (primarily American undergraduate textbooks, in my experience). And c'mon, the discipline boasts no greater proportion of badly written or ill-reasoned work than any other. The world's full of crap reasoning and bad writing. I could provide a list of sociological work *full* of a sense of the 'how and why' of its subject matter, which you could all rigorously ignore in favour of a 2-dimensional caricature of the discipline. (It would probably start with MArx and Engels, except that their aspirations to scientific status would be embarrassing).

Ellie (Ellie) on Friday, 6 September 2002 06:30 (4 years ago)

but it was a quasi-scientific marxism that launched the major attack on 'naive positivism' in the first place...

I opened this thread expecting to be embarrassed by my post from four years ago, but I'm still interested in some of the things I said.

derrida was an anti-positivist not because he thought it was faulty but because he thought it would lead to fascism!