Musician in the Museum

Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture

Charles Fairchild

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501368899
• eBook ISBN: 9781501368905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed "musical capitals" of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music. This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.

Part I

The place we’ve ended up

1

The democratic [sic] vistas of popular culture

It was an inspired move, characteristic of all great counterrevolutionary theories, in which the people become actors without roles, an audience that believes it is onstage. (Robin, 2011:66–7)

In 2015, a freelance photographer publicly circulated a contract he was expected to sign to get work. The contract was drawn up by Taylor Swift’s management company. It demanded, among other things, that any image the photographer took could only be used once in print and once online and then only for ‘news purposes’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc. . . . ’, n.d.; ‘The Row Between . . . ’, 2015; Zhang, 2015a). The images could not be duplicated or republished anywhere and could not be exploited commercially in any way without written permission (i.e. signing another contract like this one). Swift, however, reserved the right to use any image taken by the contracted photographer anywhere, forever, without restriction. If the photographer breached the conditions of the contract, the management company reserved the right to ‘confiscate and/or destroy the technology or devices that contain the master files of the Photographs and other images, including, but not limited to, cell phones and memory cards’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc . . . ’, n.d.). Conversely, the management company would also be held ‘harmless from and against any and all claims, losses, injury, damage, and expense incurred’ (‘Firefly Entertainment Inc . . . ’, n.d.). After an apparently significant enough backlash erupted on various social media platforms, those representing one of America’s more recent sweethearts, much lauded as a champion of the rights of musicians and fans alike, relented. The offending passages were removed and the world continued to turn. While Swift’s offence was to overshoot the mark, she did so only marginally. Other artists, the Foo Fighters most visibly, have routinely made similarly onerous demands on photographers, specifically granting themselves ‘the right to exploit all or a part of the Photos in any and all media, now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe, in perpetuity, in all configurations’ (Zhang, 2015b). That is so rock.

Few involved in this social media squall took much notice of the terms from the old, bad contract that were more or less reproduced in the new, improved version. These continuities are interesting not only for their content and general ubiquity in the entertainment industry, but for the kinds of power relations they establish between the ‘Artist’, our ostensibly ‘free’ media and the public. Swift demanded the following in her new, good, amended legal document:

You will only take photographs of the performing artists during the first and second songs of the concert in the credentialed media area, and you will not use a flash or lighting device while photographing the performing artists. . . . You acknowledge that any unauthorized use of photographs or use of unauthorized images taken at the Concert may cause irreparable harm, injury and damage to FEI and Artist. . . . If it is determined that you have taken photographs beyond the rules of this agreement while at the concert, you may be asked to delete those images. (‘The 1989 World Tour . . . ’, n.d.)

The new contract would seem to be, at best, a barely perceptible change of emphasis and methodology, not character.

What is important to understand about this entirely common and somewhat revealing dispute is the type of power the ‘Artist’ has over others drawn into their orbit. First and foremost, the term ‘Artist’ does not refer to an actual person. It stands in for a range of interconnected corporate entities. The Artist is the entity in which the rights and benefits of those owning music are encoded and to whom they accrue. Second, contracts of this sort are almost entirely set in pursuit of the Artist’s intellectual property rights through which the Artist can usurp and control the work of others and use that work in a variety of ways depending on the circumstances. They are to be held blameless for any harm that results and they are allowed to cause as much unrecompensed damage as they wish. Those over whom they hold this power ‘voluntarily’ lose their rights to their property and free speech when they enter into these sorts of agreements. Given that most of the photographers involved in these situations are freelancers with only as much job security as their next offer from a newspaper, magazine or website might guarantee, the inequality of consequential agency here is stark. As one photographer noted, some of his colleagues ‘fear losing income if they get blacklisted for speaking out against these kind of contracts’ (‘The Row Between . . .,’ 2015; Zhang, 2015a). These situations are far from recent phenomena. As many have noted, celebrities of all stripes have long gone to what mere humans can only regard as extraordinary lengths to protect their images and reputations. In fact, the music industry only began to pursue these kinds of media relations comparatively recently whereas other parts of the entertainment industry have done so for much longer (see Forde, 2001).

What contracts such as these show us is that the noble, empowering imagery and ideals that others are contractually obligated to drape over a wide range of artists are more than capable of disguising their material foundations. The range of measures that allow the more powerful to exploit the less powerful by shaping public perceptions and amassing power and property appear in public far too infrequently. When they do, the most important of them show us vividly and instructively how the subtle, gradual and seemingly relentless expansion of the scope of economic exploitation in the music industry is only seriously contested when it is pushed too aggressively by one party or resisted too publicly by another. The kinds of formal and informal power made real by these contracts form a pervasive infrastructure of consequence in the music industry that is only occasionally apparent, but always active and effective. They shape our understandings of music as much as the far more obvious things do and, as such, they are unavoidable in our understanding of the central concerns of this book: tracking those forms of agency and power that are the most consequential.

The forms of power contained in the contracts wielded by artists such as Taylor Swift and the Foo Fighters are of a very particular type widely apparent in most areas of our social and economic lives. People employed in precarious, contracted and time-bound work have the availability of their labour strictly rationed and th e content and practical parameters of that labour carefully controlled. The results of their labour are owned by someone else to do with as they please. As with other forms of neoliberal commerce, the owning party accumulates the manifold benefits of property rights and open access to the labour and productivity of others. This is neoliberal economics in its most definitive form. In this case, the benefits include regulating how others see, imagine and represent you. That Taylor Swift can be routinely honoured as a champion of the little person and gormlessly lauded for both her ‘chart success and clarity of artistic vision’ suggests that paltry concerns over exactly how she accumulates the power she appears to bestow so generously are at best irrelevant (Gormley, 2014). That power comes directly and indirectly, formally and informally, from labouring parties that can only accumulate a reputation for completing a certain type of work efficiently and effectively. Their work is only really valuable in order to gain the opportunity to do more of the same kind of work under similar conditions. The owning party has the power to fashion their own image, perceived character and legally validated identity while the labouring party only has the ability to gain a reputation for successfully fashioning the owning party’s image, character and identity as well. Again, this is hardly a new circumstance.

This little story of empowerment and submission is meant to critically frame one of the more foundational ideas that has shaped the study of popular culture for a long time, the claim that popular culture is democratic. This claim is most often made in two ways. First, it is commonly argued that popular culture and consumerism create open, free and democratic social relations between ‘us’, the people, and those who make things for us to consume and enjoy. Second, it is also widely claimed that this places the power over popular culture in ‘our’ hands. And yet, these social relations are produced within the circumstances of power that are made possible by many different forms of agency which are almost all dominated by corporations of one sort of another. They are only occasionally regulated or constrained by forces we might loosely call ‘politics’.

The claim that popular culture is democratic can only be made by ignoring particular circumstances within which the contents of popular culture are produced and consumed, and the vehicles through which this power is exerted most consequentially. In short, it is fairly easy to find a cultural democracy if you don’t see capital throwing itself around in the form of the demands of investors, or through the power of quarterly reports, sales targets and legally binding contracts. The forces of capital move through means such as these. These forces are powerful enough to create magical visions of unreal worlds that a lot of people seem to intuitively accept as truthful and authentic. In fact, as we will see in Chapter 3, whole precincts of major cities are devoted to the material facilitation of the expression and inhabitation of these worlds. Those that exercise and benefit from these forms of power receive levels of public largess, subsidy and goodwill that are sometimes difficult to fathom. It is remarkable that the mode of politics that supports and facilitates these forms of power is routinely called ‘democracy’. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to explain how I plan to go about analysing popular music museums by looking at the kinds of social relations they produce while bearing in mind that the terms most often used to describe these social relations, such as ‘democracy’, ‘consumerism’, ‘popular’ or ‘the market’, have not proved themselves capable of recognizing the animating forms of power that sustain them. We need a way of analysing the broad circumstances of experience in popular music museums in a way that can account for these forms of power and how they shape our understanding and perception beyond the pro forma use of a set of familiar terms that are simply not up to the task.

Attributions of liberation and democracy

Across many fields of endeavour for a very long time, an impressively broad range of scholars have attributed the quality ‘democratic’ to the workings of popular culture. A crucial piece of the theory on which this lengthy tradition of attribution rests is the assumption that popular culture forms a kind of ‘other’ to so-called elite culture or ‘not popular’ culture (Levine, 1988; Pattison, 1987). The main pillar of the conceptual foundation for this ‘otherness’ is the fact that the perpetuation of many of the social relations found throughout popular culture are said to have been both tested and validated through the special kinds of social relationships created and experienced between artists and fans. This validating arena is almost always described as, but rarely actually called, ‘capitalism’. In almost every case, the use of the actual term ‘capitalism’ has been replaced with ‘the market’. As the economist Richard Wolff has explained, ‘the market’ is a very different concept than ‘capitalism’ despite being used more or less synonymously, and more often than not, incorrectly (Wolff, 2018). Usually ‘the market’ is defined as people making choices about how to use their time and spend their money. Social relations constituted and mediated by this thing many simply call ‘the market’ are in turn said by many to create a free and open sphere in which we all have the opportunity to interact with one another on as equal a footing as our civilization is capable is creating. Market relations are imagined by many to be a kind of gigantic, informal, yet decidedly binding referendum in which allegedly arbitrary traits like taste, habit, status or lived experience can be managed, deployed or tempered as needed, in the service of the greater collective truths of freedom and liberty. Very often the implication is that if capitalism can simply be pursued at the right scale or with the correct ethics then everything will be fine (see Born, 2013:64).

The social basis of economic exchange is supposed by some to naturally reveal the most intimate, authentic and consequential desires and values of our society. This robust and persistent line of thought unambiguously equates free markets with free people (see Dardot and Laval, 2013). I would like to be able to suggest here that there is more to these claims than this fiendishly simple calculation, but there isn’t. This framework of thought, action and consequence is most accurately called ‘market populism’. As one of its most incisive critics has noted, market populism is the defining popular ideology of the neoliberal era, an era which runs roughly from 1975 to the present. It is defined by the core conceit that ‘in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets [a]re also mediums of consent’ (Frank, 2000: xiv). Not only is the market said to be freedom inducing and sustaining, it is also said to be ‘democratic, perfectly expressing the popular will through the machinery of supply and demand, polls and focus groups, superstore and internet’ (Frank, 2000:29).

Importantly, a corresponding form of academic populism has also run alongside its market-based sibling producing a particularly influential tradition of complementary thought. Often thoug ht to be reflective of a broader ‘postmodern’ age, this variant of cultural studies has been sharply summarized by Graeber (2011). He describes a set of interpretive assumptions and methods surrounding the study of consumer culture that he argues were produced in response to a broadly myt hic misreading of the baleful demon known as the Frankfurt School. This ‘little morality tale’, as he calls it, goes like this:

Once upon a time, it begins, we all used to subscribe to a Marxist view of political economy that saw production as the driving force of history and the only truly legitimate field of social struggle. Insofar as we even thought about consumer demand, it was largely written off as an artificial creation, the results of manipulative techniques by advertisers and marketers meant to unload products that nobody really needed. But eventually we began to realize that this view was not only mistaken but also profoundly elitist and puritanical. Real working people find most of their life’s pleasures in consumption. What is more, they do not simply swallow whatever marketers throw at them like so many mindless automatons; they create their own meanings out of the products with which they chose to surround themselves. (Graeber, 2011: 490)

Graeber argues that this line of thinking and theorizing represents ‘a political choice’, one in which academics align themselves ‘with one body of writing and research – in this case, the one most closely aligned with the language and interests of the corporate world’ (500–1). If you contest the terms of debate or the framework of assumptions that guide this intellectual tradition, its adherents will say that you are a cynic, or worse, a ‘pessimist’ (Weisbard, 2014; Twitchell, 2004; Cowen, 1998). This chapter and the next will be devoted to working through this intellectual formation as an act of conceptual triage in order to establish a foundation for an understanding of popular music museums that is not based on the same conceptual slights of hand or similar forms of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The place we’ve ended up
• Part II Ideal musical objects
• Part III Ideal musical subjects
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright