Pop-Rock Music

Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity

Motti Regev

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745670904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Pop music and rock music are often treated as separate genres but the distinction has always been blurred. Motti Regev argues that pop-rock is best understood as a single musical form defined by the use of electric and electronic instruments, amplification and related techniques. The history of pop-rock extends from the emergence of rock'n'roll in the 1950s to a variety of contemporary fashions and trends – rock, punk, soul, funk, techno, hip hop, indie, metal, pop and many more.

This book offers a highly original account of the emergence of pop-rock music as a global phenomenon in which Anglo-American and many other national and ethnic variants interact in complex ways. Pop-rock is analysed as a prime instance of 'aesthetic cosmopolitanism' – that is, the gradual formation, in late modernity, of world culture as a single interconnected entity in which different social groupings around the world increasingly share common ground in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms and cultural practices.

Drawing on a wide array of examples, this path-breaking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in cultural sociology, media and cultural studies as well as the study of popular music.

THEORIES AND CONCEPTS

Miyuki Nakajima is a female singer-songwriter from Japan, who has enjoyed a successful and influential career since the 1970s. In 1979 she wrote and recorded the soft sentimental ballad “Ruju” (“Rouge”). In this song, about 90 seconds into the recording, an instrumental bridge (between verses) opens with a delicate electric guitar solo that soon soars to a dramatic height, to be joined by a full string orchestra before the vocals return. In 1992, the Hong Kong-based, Chinese female singer Faye Wong recorded her version of the song in Cantonese, for her album Coming Home. This version, called “Fragile Woman” (“Jung Ji Sau Soeng Dik Neoi Yan”), slightly dramatizes the string arrangement, but nevertheless retains the electric guitar part in the instrumental bridge. According to conventional narrative, the recording of “Fragile Woman” was the turning point in Faye Wong’s career. Following its enormous success in Hong Kong (and later in mainland China and other countries), and with subsequent albums and performances, she became during the 1990s and into the new century, “the reigning diva of Chinese popular music” (Fung and Curtin 2002), and especially of Cantopop, the soft-sounding pop style associated with Hong Kong. Indeed, while unequivocally labeled “pop” singers by journalistic and academic discourse, this song, and many others by Faye Wong or Miyuki Nakajima, exemplifies the blurred line between “pop” and “rock.” The soaring guitar solo is an emblematic sonic unit that symbolically represents the rock ballad, a song pattern that crystallized in the 1970s as a way to expose the supposedly softer side of hard rock bands. As much as they are sometimes perceived by fans and critics to be opposite categories, “pop” and “rock” are obviously linked together in their sonic textures and in their cultural histories. They form one musical and cultural category that can best be called pop-rock music.

Traveling from Anglo-American hard rock bands to East Asia (and to other parts of the world) and then between female pop singers in the region, the soaring electric guitar solo is but one element among plenty that epitomizes the multidirectional traffic of pop-rock music idioms across the globe, that is, not only from the UK and US to other parts of the world, but also between other countries and regions. Moreover, Faye Wong’s career and stature as a pop musician that represents, not just for her devoted fans, a certain sense of Hong-Kongian or Chinese contemporary identity, a late modern sense of national cultural uniqueness, also epitomizes the widespread position achieved by pop-rock music in many countries. In contrast to its early perception as a major manifestation of cultural imperialism or Americanization, pop-rock styles and genres have gained by the turn of the century extensive legitimacy, both as a form of musical art and as a genuine expression of contemporary indigenous, national, or ethnic culture. This happened partially because of pop-rock’s fusions with, and integration of, folklore and traditional elements. Consider, for example, this quote, by a notable Argentinean music critic and cultural commentator, who refers to stylistic developments in Argentinean rock of the 1990s:

Argentinean rock, where in the 1970s you’d be thrown away from stage by sticks and stones for playing the charanguito [a small guitar-like indigenous instrument, made from the shell of the back of an armadillo], begins to integrate in a natural manner Latin American rhythms, Jamaican rhythms like reggae, and also [Argentinean] folklore and tango. There starts to be a type of rock that has no shame to incorporate other genres, and for me this is richness. It is a new entity. (Alfredo Rosso, in program 8 of the documentary series Quizas Porque: Historia del Rock Nacional [Maybe Because: History of National Rock], first broadcast in Argentina in November–December 2009)

Adds veteran folk-rocker León Gieco, in that same program:

In the 2000s decade a certain fusion occurred between tango, folklore and rock. The folklore bands incorporated drum kits into their chacareras [an indigenous dance rhythm], and the rockers started to identify with folklore and inserted folklore elements.

With pop-rock evolving to become this “new entity,” as Rosso calls it, Argentinean pop-rock has joined folklore and tango as a legitimate expression of Argentinidad (Argentineaness) in music, a stature it had firmly consolidated among its fans many years earlier, in the 1970s.

Argentinean rock and Cantopop are two cases that exemplify how the very sounds and aesthetic idiom of pop-rock music, as well as its cultural position and meanings within national or regional societies, embody a major process that has been taking place in late modern world culture. It is a process of intensified aesthetic proximity, overlap, and connectivity between nations and ethnicities or, at the very least, between prominent large sectors within them. It is a process in which the expressive forms and cultural practices used by nations at large, and by groupings within them, to signify and perform their sense of uniqueness, growingly comes to share large proportions of aesthetic common ground, to a point where the cultural uniqueness of each nation or ethnicity cannot but be understood as a unit within one complex entity, one variant in a set of quite similar – although never identical – cases. Aesthetic cosmopolitanization is a term that is best suited to depict this process in world culture. That is, as can be inferred from Beck (2006), the term cosmopolitanism refers, literally, to an already existing world polity, while the term cosmopolitanization refers to the gradual formation of such polity. Following this, aesthetic cosmopolitanization refers to the ongoing formation, in late modernity, of world culture as one complexly interconnected entity, in which social groupings of all types around the globe growingly share wide common grounds in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms, and cultural practices. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism refers, then, to the already existing singular world culture, the state of affairs reached following the above.

A sociological theorization of aesthetic cosmopolitanism that involves forays into certain streams of current sociological theory may serve, therefore, as a highly adequate tool for explaining the emergence, legitimation, and consolidation of world pop-rock music and its global thriving; and world pop-rock may serve as a perfect empirical case through which aesthetic cosmopolitanism can be characterized, elucidated, and explicated. Put differently, this book seeks to offer a certain marriage between some currents in contemporary sociological theory and pop-rock music. While it may not add up to a tight coherent theoretical whole, the book offers a set of interconnected theoretical approaches, each framing a different facet of pop-rock music as a world cultural phenomenon. Three questions underlie this study of world pop-rock music and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: why did pop-rock emerge to become such a prominent cultural form on a world scale?, how did pop-rock music achieve its status and legitimacy?, and what are the cultural consequences of this achievement?

More than its mere reflection, pop-rock music is portrayed in this book as a resource in the formation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, in the re-figuration of world culture. Being primarily a complex web of meaningful sonorities, a set of “things” that have sonic-physical presence in the world, pop-rock styles and genres become objects of interactions, building blocks that afford individual and collective actors the arrangement and construction of life-worlds, of ways of being in the world. Being a prominent force in the very formation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is derived from the status of pop-rock music as a signifier of a universal modernity in the field of popular music. That is, as a signifier of universal modernity, pop-rock music became a world model for making contemporary popular music, and thus geared musicians and audiences around the world into active interactions with its sounds and meanings. These interactions led to emergence and consolidation of national, ethnic, and local styles of pop-rock music, and thus to the growing connectivity, proximity, and overlap between popular music cultures around the world.

This opening chapter discusses some preliminary issues and especially the key concepts of “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” and “pop-rock.” It sets the conceptual and theoretical framework for the chapters to come. The following section of this chapter offers a general explanatory framework, informed by sociological theory, to cultural globalization and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The second part of the chapter delineates in some detail what exactly is meant by the term “pop-rock music,” especially its particularity with respect to the almost identical, but more general notion of “popular music.”

Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: A Theoretical Framework

In her study of music videos by female pop singers in Mali, and the meanings attributed to these videos by (mostly) female spectators, Schultz (2001) notes the typical structure of these pop songs:

Whereas the song’s melody and rhythm are reminiscent of conventional Malian musical aesthetics, it is played with a combination of Malian and Western rock music instruments. The original melody and rhythm of the folk song are preserved and played by the Malian twenty-one-string instrument the kora, electrically reinforced drums (djembe), electric guitars (played like a kora), and a saxophone. (Schultz 2001: 358–9)

Based on her observations of routine spectatorship, she asserts that “as cultural bricoleurs,” the Malian female pop singers “combine ‘Malian’ morality and aesthetics with cosmopolitan life orientation” (Schultz 2001: 366). In this way:

The pop singers’ success shows that the increasing international flows of commodities and media images, rather than supporting the dislocation of identities, create new meanings and moral orientations for consumers … [It] enables Malians to claim membership of a consumer community that extends beyond the borders of the local yet is firmly rooted in an “authentic” Malian moral universe. (Schultz 2001: 367)

One of the videos analyzed in this study is of the song “Bi furu,” by Oumou Sangaré, a song that “has been one of the most popular hits since it was first broadcast in 1992” (Schultz 2001: 363). Oumou Sangaré, it should be noted, has enjoyed success since the early 1990s all over Africa and in the West. In 2009, a BBC music review referred to her new album, Seya, as “the best thing since her marvellous 1991 debut Moussoulou” (Jon Lusk, February 23, 2009, bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/nbzf, accessed June 23, 2011), while the influential music historian and journalist Charlie Gillett has called Seya “a masterpiece” (The Observer, February 15, 2009).

This brief glimpse at Malian pop illustrates the mechanism of cultural globalization as reflected through the prism of pop-rock music. Cultural globalization, the worldwide dissemination of products, artifacts, and activities determined by creative work and carrying symbolic meanings (see Krätke 2003) can be envisaged as a three-way circuit. In it, cultural materials that originate in the West flow into non-Western countries, where they are perceived as models of modernity. Eager to take part in modern culture, yet reluctant to fully embrace the Western variant of modernity, artists and consumers alike in these other countries selectively adapt elements and components from these materials and merge them with indigenous traditional materials. This allows them to preserve a sense of local uniqueness, while at the same time to feel participants in recent developments of modern culture. In addition, some of the cultural products created in this way in non-Western countries flow to metropolitan countries, to be hailed as genuine, albeit “exotic,” expressions of contemporary culture, and sometimes to exert some influence and inspiration on Western artists. All in all, the workings of this circuit usher world culture to a condition in which its different sub units, as much as they maintain uniqueness and distinction, display greater connectivity, overlap, and proximity than ever before or, in short, to a condition of aesthetic cosmopolitanism.

Characterizing Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

At its core, then, the circuit of cultural globalization that produces aesthetic cosmopolitanism consists of quests for recognition, for a sense of parity, for participation and membership in what collective and individual actors around the world believe to be the innovative frontiers of creativity and artistic expression in modern culture. On the one hand, new types and patterns of expression in all forms of art and culture, implicitly or explicitly presented as models to be followed in order not to lag behind “the new and exciting” in modern culture, are constantly disseminated by leading forces in different art worlds through the global media, the cultural industries, and, to some extent, the education system. On the other hand, collective and individual actors at various national and local levels, believing in the value and meaning of these models, develop interests to become recognized participants in these frontiers, and seek to contribute their own variants of these types and patterns of expression to the global circulation.

When portrayed in this way, the theorization of cultural globalization engulfs both the notion of power that metropolitan centers of cultural production (most notably in the West) exert on peripheral ones, and the notion of multidirectional flow, including counter-hegemonic ones. Indeed, as Crane (2008) notes, theoretical approaches to cultural globalization have been characterized by a certain movement, a development from the cluster of approaches underlined by the idea of cultural/media imperialism, to approaches that stress transnational, multidirectional flows of cultural products and meanings, and the emergence of global communities and cultural networks. The cultural imperialism approach, associated with terms such as McDonaldization, Americanization, McDisneyzation and Coca-Colonization (Ritzer 1993; Ritzer and Liska 1997; Ritzer and Stillman 2003; Wagnleitner 1994), is essentially a thesis about domination “of America over Europe, of ‘the West over the rest’ of the world, of the core over the periphery, of the modern world over the fast-disappearing traditional one, of capitalism over more or less everything and everyone” (Tomlinson 1999: 80). Domination leads, according to this thesis, to world monoculture, that is, to cultural homogenization.

The other approaches share the thesis that cultural globalization does not eliminate cultural diversity, but rather transforms older notions of cultural variance into new ones. Cultural globalization is not only about flows of products and meanings from the West to other parts of the world, but also from East Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the West, or from Japan to East Asia (Iwabuchi 2002). In addition, the reception, interpretation, and use of cultural products are not identical across the world. People in different countries or social settings tend to decipher and use the same products – television dramas, fast food – in ways that appropriate them to their local culture (Katz and Liebes 1990; Watson 1997). Moreover, actors in art worlds across the globe create their own indigenous variants of modern cultural forms, sometimes presenting them as expressions of resistance to the Western, hegemonic ones. In these works, aesthetic idioms, stylistic elements and genre components from multiple national and ethnic sources are mixed and welded to serve the preferences and interests of local taste cultures and identity formations. Hybridity, creolization, complexity, mixture, fusion, and deterritorialization are key concepts in the approaches that stress multidirectional cultural flows and networks (Appadurai 1990; Garcia Canclini 1995; Hannerz 1992) as well as the glocalization of world culture (Robertson 1995). Taken together, however, all approaches share the understanding that late modern world culture is, in effect, one cultural space. That is, the traditional and modernist perception of world culture as composed of distinct, separate cultural units – be they national, ethnic, local or indigenous – has been replaced by a perception of world culture as one entity composed of numerous sub-units that interact between them in complex ways. All approaches acknowledge that the nature of ethnic, national, local, and indigenous cultural uniqueness has been transformed. The sense of cultural uniqueness shared by any given social entity on earth can no longer stand in real or perceived isolation from that of other entities. Complex forms of connectivity, relations of power, and currents of influence render all frames of cultural uniqueness as sub-units in a single world cultural web. In the words of Beck and Sznaider (2006), a sociological account of world culture must therefore abandon “methodological nationalism” in favor of a “methodological cosmopolitanism.” That is, a methodology that partakes the idea of the world as one place, one society. In the case of culture, methodological cosmopolitanism translates to aesthetic cosmopolitanism as a concept that best reflects the existing global cultural reality of late modernity.

Works by Urry (1995), Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006) and Tomlinson (1999), have located aesthetic cosmopolitanism at the individual level, as a “cultural disposition involving an intellectual and aesthetic stance of ‘openness’ towards peoples, places and experiences from different cultures, especially those from different ‘nations’” (Szerszinski and Urry 2002: 468), or as having taste for “the wider shores of cultural experience” (Tomlinson 1999: 202; see also Hannerz 1990). In this usage, aesthetic cosmopolitanism presumes, self-evidently, the existence of ethnic and national cultures as spaces of exclusive expressive content, as symbolic environments to which certain cultural products and art works inherently “belong.” Thus, when individuals, as members of one national or ethnic culture, have a taste for cultural products or art works that unequivocally “belong” to a nation or ethnicity other than their own, they display aesthetic cosmopolitanism. If, on the other hand, individuals have a taste exclusively for cultural products and art works that conventionally “belong” to the ethnic or national entity of which they are members, they do not count as aesthetic cosmopolitans. Based on the modernist perception of world culture as composed of distinct, separate cultural units, this understanding of aesthetic cosmopolitanism does not fully cover the global cultural complexity of late modernity.

In late modernity, the disposition of overt openness toward “other” cultures is not just a matter of individual inclination, but rather a structural facet of national and ethnic cultures in general or, at the very least, of major sectors within them. It is not a whim of curiosity, but an institutionalized constraint. Practically any given national, ethnic, local, and indigenous culture displays openness to forms of expression and aesthetic idioms exterior to its own heritage – especially to those forms and idioms that gain global institutionalized status as the frontiers of creativ...