Production & Consumption of Music

Alan Bradshaw, Avi Shankar

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415612067
• eBook ISBN: 9781317982661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This collection considers music within the spheres of production and consumption and pulls together an interdisciplinary collection of music studies from around the world, ranging from an ethnomusicological analysis of the condition of Tibetan music and its role within the Chinese state, the changing reception of anti-apartheid music by white musicians in South Africa according to new configurations of society and its memory of recent history, a lyrical exploration of jazz as a signifier of crime and other nefarious activities within film history, an analysis of how music charts and maps the social network and gender roles in Jamaica and a landmark commentary on how music is framed by David Hemsondalgh. As opposed to other studies which explore music just in terms of its reception or its composition and distribution, this collection should make necessary reading for anybody interested in the wider nexus of music's existence and how it waxes and wanes with ideology, politics, gender, business and much more besides.

Introduction

Alan Bradshaw^a and Avi Shankar^b

^aSchool of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; ^bDepartment of Marketing, University of Bath, UK

Music is the water of life, whiskey of passion, it uplifts us, releases us, marks our joy and sadness, it is to live for and to die for, it caries the spirit of truth and freedom, it demands to be shared beyond the bounds of race and tradition.

(Michael O Suilleabhain)

A principle agenda of Consumption, Markets and Culture relates to interrogating and collapsing distinctions between production and consumption. As previous Editor-in-Chief Fuat Firat passionately argued, the consumption–production nexus is a defining aspect of a modernity that alienates us from creative living and reduces art “into objects that acquire permanence to allow economic exchange and speculation toward monetary amassment” (1999, 289).

In such a context, the condition of music emerges as a sort of magical domain that can captivate audiences, provide cathartic and embodied experiences, and ground identities and communities, but also introduce us to rich exchanges between peoples while somehow both reifying and subverting power structures. Before the advent of recorded sound, music was the ultimate intangible experience rooted to time and place, simultaneously created and destroyed, produced and consumed. Even after the advent of recording technologies, Jacques Attali notes how music simultaneously exhibits three dimensions of human works: “joy for the creator, use-value for the consumer and exchange-value for the seller” (1985, 9); and as the musician may be creator, consumer and seller at once, music can be thought of as a social model in which consumption and production co-exist and are mutually constitutive. Beyond this nexus, Attali theorizes the interferences and dependencies between society and its music; music as ordering of noises is understood as a demonstration of the very possibility of society and as harbinger of future orders and a negotiation of power.

In agreement with Attali, the goal of this special issue is to locate music both within and beyond such consumption–production nexuses. The Attalian challenge is no less than mapping dependencies between societal power and its music and to understand the act of making and listening to music as a production and consumption of social meaning. We are delighted how the contributing authors have risen to the challenge and how the articles found in this special issue all locate music as a point through which ideology, state, crime and community values all intersect with personal identities, subversion and relationships. An important aspect of this journal relates to its inter-disciplinarity; hence herein we find ethnomusicology, film studies, sociology and consumer research studies. This is an issue that, we are confident, provides excellent documentation of the wider theoretical and methodological ramifications of music within consumption, markets and culture.

The special issue begins with a conceptualization of how music allows us situate relationships within Jamaica via Barbara Olsen and Stephen Gould’s paper on lovemaps. Rather than freely floating texts, Jamaican dancehall is demonstrated as embedded within a rich fabric of sexual and romantic relationships that reveal a tapestry of Jamaican life. Following from this is the outcome of Anna Morcom’s extensive travels through Tibet where she reminds us of the highly charged political nature of music and describes the problematic production of Tibetan music within a state-controlled market conscious of the subversive potential of music. From there, we move to South Africa and to Michael Drewitt’s fascinating description of the attempts to create a retro-market for anti-apartheid music created by white musicians during apartheid. Just as the original subversive recordings were initially ignored by South African broadcasters, the attempts to re-launch the music are demonstrated to be almost as difficult because the role of white anti-apartheid movements jars with emerging dominant discourses of black resistance creating an unusual branding context.

The links between music and criminality are next explored via Morris Holbrook’s description of how jazz is semiotically deployed in film soundtracks to advance plots in the crime film genre. Last, but certainly not least, David Hesmondhalgh draws upon empirical research to argue against what he takes to be the optimistic trend of positing a generally positive relationship between music, emotion and self-identity and calls for a more critically reflexive understanding.

The six papers that we are publishing were selected from the 22 that we received and that went into the review process. We would like to thank all the reviewers for their conscientious and considerate responses. Our selection of papers are exciting reviews of important conceptual issues relating to the production and consumption of music which, we hope, will contribute to wider discussions of music more generally within our field.

References

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Firat, Fuat A. 1999. Rethinking consumption. Consumption, Markets and Culture 3, no. 4: 283–295.

Extra acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the support of Fuat Firat and Jonathan Schroeder. We also note the accompanying special session that was presented at the 2007 European Association for Consumer Research conference in Milan and included contributions by Taçli Yazicioglu, Linda Scott and Robin Canniford as well as the rocking sax jam of the great Dougie Brownlie.

Revelations of cultural consumer lovemaps in Jamaican dancehall lyrics: An ethnomusicological ethnography

Barbara Olsen^a and Stephen Gould^b

^aSchool of Business, State University of New York at Old Westbury, New York, NY, USA;

^bDepartment of Marketing, Baruch College, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

We believe that dancehall music’s more sexually explicit lyrics, labeled “slack” and maligned as evocatively misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic, mirror historically discordant social and economic tensions that entangle men and women in contested couplings, and thus render sexuality an instrument of socioeconomic power. Applying an ethnomusicological analysis, this paper fills a void by situating the slack Jamaican dancehall/DJ lyrics within a revitalizing indigenization socialization perspective. By probing the cultural roots of this increasingly popular yet disparaged musical tradition that disturbs moral etiquette, we hear sexual bravado and counsel on love that betray important gender codes. For a particular social class, gender socialization nurtures a cultural consumer lovemap inscribed by a harsh economy during a particular point in time.

Pre-mix

The quest to understand people’s lived experiences through musical production and consumption is a recent, but under-explored, research pursuit. Frith suggests because “music is now the soundtrack of everyday life” (2003, 93), more research should be collected to understand why “particular music gets particular attention at particular moments, and how these moments are, in turn, imbricated in people’s social networks” (101). Similarly, Negus, albeit working on the British music industry, asks that researchers question historically inscribed power dynamics exercised by cultural intermediaries acting as gatekeepers for entertainment production (2002, 512). At the individual level, music has become a means to interpret one’s life experiences and validate “identity or sense of self” in a process Shankar calls “grounded aesthetics” (2000, 27–28). We also use popular music as our emotional jukebox accommodating transformations of self, while it also influences concomitant changes in social values. Toward this end, we apply an ethnomusicological analysis to extend earlier ethnographic research that situated dancehall/DJ music as a mirror of life experiences (Olsen and Gould 1999). We explore the multiple metaphorical meanings of this music as we understand them. Rice found a meaningful application for the metaphors “music as art, as entertainment, as emotional expression, as social behaviour, as commodity, as referential symbol and as text for interpretation” in his study of Bulgarian music (2001, 23). McClary, at the forefront of interpreting “gendered metaphors” in the “new musicology” claims that music is indispensably equipped to convey “the organization of sexuality, the construction of gender, the arousal and channeling of desire” because it communicates seemingly independent “of cultural mediation” (2002, x). She continues:

It is often received (and not only by the musically untutored) as a mysterious medium within which we seem to encounter our “own” most private feelings. Thus music is able to contribute heavily (if surreptitiously) to the shaping of individual identities: along with other influential media such as film, music teaches us how to experience our own emotions, our own desires, and even (especially in dance) our own bodies. For better or for worse, it socializes us. (53)

We concur with Titon that “Ethnomusicologists … invoke a cultural relativism in which all musics have a legitimate claim to be understood: first in the terms that their own culture understands them, and then in terms of their contribution to our understanding of music as a worldwide phenomenon” (2003, 172). We probe DJ dancehall and slack genres for metaphors “music as art, as entertainment, as emotional expression, as social behaviour, as commodity, as referential symbol and as text for interpretation” as did Rice (2001, 23). We also explore socio-historical processes contributing to a blueprint (Holt 1995) for class-gender defined relationships heard in “slack” song lyrics. As slack means “vulgarity” (Francis-Jackson 1995, 48), we regard it sexually. The English-Jamaican definition of slack leans toward female moral degeneracy, that contests “conventional definitions of law and order; an undermining of consensual standards of decency…[and] …challenges the rigid status quo of social exclusivity and one-sided moral authority valorized by the Jamaican elite” Cooper (2004, 4). This has historical connections.

We find dancehall and its slack variant are part of the African continuum whereby people of the Diaspora celebrate communication in bouts of rhyme or in solo exhibiting brilliance, which Abrahams (1983) discovered in the “man-of-words” across the West Indies. In the process of creolization, local music combines multiple African tribal, European and other immigrant musical traditions originally brought together in the context of plantation slavery where music and dance were a means of preserving tradition as well as creating new forms of entertainment. Bilby says that musically:

Not only the centrality of drumming and percussion, but also a number of stylistic features – such as the close interaction and communication between musicians and dancers, as well as the presence of a “metronome sense,” overlapping call-and-response singing, off-beat phrasing of melodic accents, and occasionally polymeter – reveal the African origins of these traditions. (1985, 186)

Jamaican music then, is a most profound conversation with history. It incorporates, especially in slack lyrics, the playful articulation of an erotophilic culture reminiscent of the “…songs sung at slave dances” that were often “satirical vehicles, commenting on, and often ridiculing, the behavior of local personages” (185). Sex talk in lyrics reproduces authority and refines gendered metaphors over time.

Cross-cultural ethnological research with contemporary societies and inference from archaeological records, finds that “music and dance are inseparable” (Levitin 2006, 257). Historically, music has been a participatory event engaging the body with rhythm or added hand clapping and vocalizations as it encourages social bonding (258). Levitin claims scientific evidence corroborates “the evolutionary origins of music… developed through natural selection as part of human or paleohuman mating rituals” (246). Quoting Darwin in The Descent of Man, “musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male and female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex” (249), Levitin thus proposes that music’s function is perhaps to attract a mate. His analysis of musicians’ sexual proclivity leads to a love of sex. “The number of sexual partners for rock stars can be hundreds of times what a normal male has” (252). Musical ability and expression is one such way to advertise sexual availability, and mental and physical fitness.

Our theoretical analysis has been informed by years of fieldwork in Jamaica by the first author, a female anthropologist, who established a home there in 1970. She and her ex-husband lived near a newly emerging town where neighboring family networks became an extended family in the field. In the 1980s, she began collecting life histories. Regarding sex and love very little changed from one generation to the next. Love stories from respondents (renamed Clive, Duncan, Eunice, Gladstone, Glenda and Zoe), during fieldwork were influenced by a shared intergenerational experience (see Olsen 1995, 1997, 2003, 2005). Their retrospection illuminates music as metaphor for emotion, social behavior and interpretative text. Lyrics drive the heart of this paper because they resonate poignantly with the life histories captured in the field. Economic development was uneven, and it framed everyday life experiences. Few we knew would benefit from the wealth that tourism brought. For instance, on one visit:

I wondered how tourism could survive at all in such a hostile psychological climate. I wondered why were the people so bitter? Amidst the economic depression, there was a party atmosphere always accompanied by music either from the radio or cassette deck playing traditional reggae or a new variant called DJ, named for a disc jockey talking over the music. After I actually listened to some of the lyrics, I realized another layer of consumption was going on. (Journal entry, July 1987)

While Jamaican DJ musicians (often used synonymously with dancehall) inscribe this socio-economic emic dissonance experienced within their own culture, Borgerson and Schroeder found a different situation in Hawaii:

[Most Hawaiian] popular songs were written by white tunesmiths and were produced by mainlanders, though the liner notes attempt to represent the music as authentically Hawaiian by focusing on the use of Hawaiian instruments, musicians, and song lyrics that invoke the natural qualities of an island paradise. (2003, 226)

This packaging of a national “musical identity, provides a performative example of what has been called ‘sonic branding’” (220). However, within this branding, the authors discovered sexist and racist stereotypes inscribed as national id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Revelations of cultural consumer lovemaps in Jamaican dancehall lyrics: An ethnomusicological ethnography
• 3. Getting heard in Tibet: Music, media and markets
• 4. Developing a retro brand community: Re-releasing and marketing anti-apartheid protest music in post-apartheid South Africa
• 5. Music meanings in movies: The case of the crime-plus-jazz genre
• 6. Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self-identity
• Index