Voicing the Popular

On the Subjects of Popular Music

Richard Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136092824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

How does popular music produce its subject?How does it produce us as subjects? More specifically, how does it do this through voice--through "giving voice"?And how should we understand this subject--"the people"--that it voices into existence?Is it singular or plural? What is its history and what is its future?

Voicing the Popular draws on approaches from musical interpretation, cultural history, social theory and psychoanalysis to explore key topics in the field, including race, gender, authenticity and repetition.Taking most of his examples from across the past hundred years of popular music development--but relating them to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "pre-history"--Richard Middleton constructs an argument that relates "the popular" to the unfolding of modernity itself. Voicing the Popular renews the case for ambitious theory in musical and cultural studies, and, against the grain of much contemporary thought, insists on the progressive potential of a politics of the Low.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“We're Low, We're Low, We're Very, Very Low”

“The voice of the people is the voice of God:” so proclaimed the British Chartists in the revolutionary year of 1848.¹ The singularity of the grammar — one god, one people — obscures the political reality of contestation: where was this voice to be located, who owned it? While for many Chartists the slogan no doubt simply implied that “God is on our side” — a position memorably satirized a century later by Bob Dylan — or perhaps that democracy can claim divine inspiration, readers today can hardly fail to note the motif of usurpation: the authority vested in what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the “Name-of-the-Father” is claimed by a new god, the People, a transposition concretely pursued by many post-Chartist socialists and communists.² But not always with one voice; nor, often, without drowning out alternative sounds. Who, then, is entitled to this voice of the people? And what do they have to tell us?

Ernest Jones, the “Chartist poet laureate,” was one who certainly laid claim to it, for instance, in the political soirées (or “evenings for the people”) he organized in London in 1856, at which such pieces of his as “The Song of the Lower Classes” were sung by his composer friend John Lowry.³

We plough and sow — we're so very, very low

That we delve in the dirty clay,

Till we bless the plain — with the golden grain,

And the vale with the fragrant hay.

Our place we know — we're so very, very low,

‘Tis down at the landlord's feet:

We're not too low — the bread to grow,

But too low the bread to eat.

Chorus: We're not too low — the bread to grow,

But too low the bread to eat.

Down, down we go — we're so very low,

To the hell of the deep sunk mines,

But we gather the proudest gems that glow,

When the crown of a despot shines.

And whenever he lacks — upon our backs

Fresh loads he deigns to lay:

We're far too low to vote the tax,

But not too low to pay.

Chorus: We're far too low [etc.]

We're low — we're low — mere rabble, we know,

But, at our plastic power,

The mould at the lordling's feet will grow

Into palace and church and tower —

Then prostrate fall — in the rich man's hall,

And cringe at the rich man's door:

We're not too low to build the wall,

But too low to tread the floor.

Chorus: We're not too low [etc.]

We're low — we're low — we're very, very low,

Yet from our fingers glide

The silken flow — and the robes that glow

Round the limbs of the sons of pride.

And what we get — and what we give,

We know, and we know our share:

We're not too low the cloth to weave,

But too low the cloth to wear!

Chorus: We're not too low [etc.]

We're low — we're low — we're very, very low,

And yet when the trumpets ring,

The thrust of a poor man's arm will go

Thro' the heart of the proudest King.

We're low — we're low — our place we know,

We're only the rank and file,

We're not too low — to kill the foe,

But too low to touch the spoil.

Chorus: We're not too low [etc.]

Example 1.1

The discursive territory is familiar, and was so at the time Jones wrote, organized as it is around the opposition of rich and poor, property and labor. While it would have had enormous resonance in the 1840s, the theme was ancient (as John Ball's couplet from the time of the fourteenth-century Peasants' Revolt put it, “When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?”), and there is nothing in the words to tie it specifically to the turmoil accompanying the birth of the world's first industrial working class: none of the categories of work (farming, mining, building, weaving, soldiering) is new, and the language is hardly “proletarian,” rather “poetic,” even biblical. Similarly, the style of Lowry's tune, as János Maróthy points out, derives from that of the bourgeois marches that developed out of song-types typical of the vaudeville, comic opera, and pleasure-garden repertories of the late eighteenth century. (Papageno's music in Mozart's Die Zauberflőte offers the most familiar example today.) At the same time, the initial

upbeat — a call to attention, or to arms — recalls the beginning of the Marseillaise (a model followed by innumerable other marches and political songs of the nineteenth century). Moreover, Maróthy argues that the lyrical, balanced shapes of the melody — typical of song patterns in the emergent bourgeois culture — are broken up rhythmically and energized by slogan-like repetitions (“we're low, we're low”), internal rhyme and variation, and “heavy,” even “stamping,” or “smashing” crotchets (“our place we know”), which, as a musical tactic, he finds to be at the same time characteristic of nineteenth-century worker's song and typical of a plebeian song lineage traceable as far back as the Middle Ages. The figure of the Low conjured up here, then, faces in several directions: towards the people constructing themselves as the revolutionary citizenry of the Marseillaise; as an emergent working class, poised to smash the bourgeois system; as representatives of long-suffering yet resilient plebeian forces recently conceptualized by Romantics like Jones as a Vőlk.⁴

Interestingly, Maróthy takes his version of the song (Version 1 in Example 1.1) from a Workers Music Association pamphlet published much later. Comparing this to the first song sheet (Version 2), we find that the “smashing crotchets” are less evident in Lowry's original tune (see bars 8–10, for example), which contains a level of lyrical decoration that is simplified out in the later version (bars 6–7, 15). Presumably a process of folklorization has taken place. The slogan-like rhymes and heavy rhythm on which Maróthy comments are certainly present in Jones's text, and it is as if the music — probably as a result of its performance history — has been made to “catch up” (most of Lowry's other extant compositions fall into the category or style of drawing-room ballad). Perhaps this is also why the chorus indicated in the original publications — implying solo performance of the verses — has disappeared in the WMA version: by now, the music suggests collective delivery throughout.⁵

Still, even if we detect a slight mismatch in the original between text and tune, the prettiness of the melody finds its complement in Jones's romanticized language and imagery. As a comparison between the “dynamizing” dotted notes of the Marseillaise

and the Mozartian lyrical quavers of “We're Low” suggests, this “people” is, whatever qualifications might be entered, quite well-bred. Jones's “evenings for the people” were, as he put it, “an attempt to combine elevating Recreation with Political Instruction — to raise Politics from the Sphere of the Tavern, by associating them with the refinements of Music of the choicest character, the finest Professional Talent, Vocal and Instrumental, being engaged for each Soirée.”⁶

Raised and educated in rural northern Germany, Ernest Jones was deeply influenced by Vőlkisch conservatism, and by the German and English early Romantics on whom, in diluted forms, this tendency drew. On his return to England in 1838, he studied law, moving in aristocratic London circles, and also broke through as a writer of verse and romances. An increasing sense of social mission in the early 1840s led to his conversion to the Chartist cause, but, despite a friendship with Marx and Engels (beginning in 1847), Jones's basic historical picture, rooted in a vision of lost pastoral harmony, disrupted by industrialism and a ruling-class usurpation, never left him. It was a mythic construction not untypical of the Chartist leadership. “If these histories had a ‘people’ as their subject, then the people were simple peasant folk … Primitive rebels perhaps, but nothing more.”⁷ In the early 1850s, as some elements in a now declining Chartism were moving lef, Jones's main cause, promoted in novels and in the newspapers he was producing, was land nationalisation; and by the 1860s he had moved into mainstream reform politics.

This is not to denigrate Jones's devotion to the people's cause, which was generous and unstinting. Rather, this example draws attention to some important scene-setting points. First, “the people” was searching for, and to some extent, finding a voice. In the era of democratic and industrial revolutions, this was not surprising. Second, this voice was plural; it was, implicitly or explicitly, internally contested. In a period when social and political formations were in flux, this too was not surprising. Third, this contestation was overdetermined by the effects of the larger social nexus, which we can begin to think of in terms of class; most notably, the people's voice was often, to a greater or lesser extent, spoken for it from elsewhere — or, at least, was forced to move within an orbit conditioned by “higher” cultural forces.

None of these features, considered separately, was completely new. What was novel, in the century or so leading up to 1848, was their combination, which was both the result and the motivating force of a new sense of social space — a space we must understand as “theatrical,” that is, set on a stage peopled by social actors whose self-presentations can be grasped only in terms of their interactions. On one level this trend finds its manifestation in the new or reformed political assemblies, and the theories of, and debates over, representation of the various social interests that accompanied them. In the cultural sphere, the key genre was musical theater: opera, of course, but also lower forms such as pantomime and then music hall and (in the United States) minstrel show, and even pleasure garden and dance hall, where, in a sense, patrons, with the aid of the musical and other entertainments, “played themselves.” Small wonder that nontheatrical popular songs in the nineteenth century often drew on musical theater repertoires for their tunes, a tendency that continued in the relationship between Broadway and Hollywood on the one hand, Tin Pan Alley on the other, in the earlier part of the twentieth century. It is on this stage — a social stage in a broad sense — that the “Song of the Lower Classes” airs its voice.

What was developing was a new type of musical semiotics of the social, a new mode of musical representation, replacing even as, to some extent, it drew upon, the older, more abstract codes associated with the relatively enclosed worlds of court and church music. The principal source, from the early eighteenth century, lay in the range of comic opera genres — opera buffa, ballad opera, opéra comique, Singspiel, and so on — genres which opened up the possibility, and also required, that composers should develop ways of putting “low” characters and situations on the stage and of representing their relationships with their betters. Mozart's Die Zauberf őte provides the classic case.

First performed in 1791, a mere two years after the beginning of the French Revolution, Mozart's Singspiel is shot through with ideals of deistic rationalism and universal fraternity; its hymn-like moments, indeed, can be heard as transposing the voice of God into a context marked by visions of secular illumination: enlightenment, potentially, for all. But the work does much more. In peopling his stage with representatives of interlocking social hierarchies — of gender and race as well as class — Mozart not only tells a story with universalistic claims, he also points (at least for those familiar with twentieth-century deconstructions of Enlightenment narratives) to the contradictions and foreclosures on which these claims were built. For there is, it seems, only one way to the truth and it comes from on high. I have written elsewhere⁸ on the way that Mozart constructs, through musico-narrative structure and contrasts of musical style, a series of intersecting, alteritous relationships in which identities (of class, gender, race) are represented in terms of their others; for example, the birdcatcher Papageno is presented not only as a peasant simpleton (in relation to the heroic Tamino) but also as “girlish” — and yet at the same time capable of both learning (from his betters, the female heroine Pamina as well as Tamino) and of achieving patriarchal normality (marrying the equally low-class Papagena in the end), and also of mastering his other, the Moorish villain Monostatos and his black slaves.

The ideal selfhood, to which Tamino and Panima ultimately win through, is possible only through a set of distinctions which at the same time function as constitutive relationships: hierarchies that are always tending towards binary simplification. Crucially, the terms...