Peak Music Experiences

A New Perspective on Popular music, Identity and Scenes

Ben Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000474060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música pop

Peak music experiences are a recurring feature of popular music journalism, biography and fan culture, where they are often credited as pivotal in people's relationships with music and in their lives more generally. Ben Green investigates the phenomenon from a social and cultural perspective, including discussions of peak music experiences as sources of inspiration and influence; as a core motivation for ongoing musical and social activity; the significance of live music experiences; and the key role of peak music experiences in defining and perpetuating music scenes. The book draws from both global media analysis and situated ethnographic research in the dance, hip hop, indie and rock 'n' roll music scenes of Brisbane, Australia, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. These case studies demonstrate the methodological value of peak music experiences as a lens through which to understand individual and collective musical life. The theoretical analysis is interwoven with selected interview data, illuminating the profound and everyday ways that music informs people's lives. The book will therefore be of interest to the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies as well as sociology and cultural studies beyond the study of music.

1 Introducing peak music experiences

DOI: 10.4324/9781003093244-1

Why do people engage with music, by listening to it, making it and in myriad other ways, often involving substantial investments of time, energy and money? To answer this, we are led first of all to ask what music can do, and how. This bundle of questions is fundamental to understanding popular music as a social, cultural and economic phenomenon. As it happens, they are questions that the fans, musicians and others who engage most intently with popular music are inclined to answer, more or less explicitly and sometimes spectacularly, when they talk about music and about themselves. This is epitomised by the tendency to single out experiences with music that are especially affecting, meaningful and memorable, which I call ‘peak music experiences’.

Peak music experiences are remembered and described for a range of purposes. The evaluation of songs and artists in popular music, from personal favourites to widely recognised canons, is justified not only by their technical features and objective criteria but more often by reference to that time they induced that effect. The meanings that people attribute to songs depend in large part on specific encounters with them, subjectively linking music with people, events and inner states. In the same way, musical experiences are remembered as windows onto constellations of events, people, places and past selves. People narrate their biographical trajectories and turns through successive musical epiphanies, which chart processes like becoming a fan (‘When I first heard…’) and becoming a musician (‘That’s when I knew I wanted to…’), as well as broader developments like youthful identity and independence (first album, first concert, first dance, with these categories themselves tracing generational changes). Occasionally, a peak music experience is credited with profound importance as a pivotal moment that changed someone’s life. More often, the transcendent, rewarding, healing or simply satisfying experiences associated with certain music and musical practices are cited as motivations for ongoing commitments: to performing, recording, attending and listening.

Underlying these various narratives about peak music experiences is a fundamental orientation towards music. It is the conscious belief and embodied knowledge that music has a unique capacity to create affecting and meaningful experiences, which can affirm or renew our identities, our relationships to other people and our world. This is a major reason why people value music and a factor that guides their engagements with it. It is a key element of the ideology of popular music, reproduced partly by the narratives described above. The primary intention of this book is to take seriously the claims that are made about peak music experiences. This means paying attention and understanding them on their own terms, as well as critically analysing their causes and effects.

A popular concept

This book will present and consider many instances of people speaking about peak music experiences, drawing on original interviews and media sources. The sheer proliferation of these stories is a central theme. In selecting a first example that is especially clear in its claims about what music can do and why it matters, a reliable source is Bruce Springsteen, a rock musician known for addressing such themes in his performances and interviews. In 2016, he offered the following quote to an Australian journalist (Hann 2016):

It’s coming on stage with the idea: OK, well the stakes that are involved this evening are quite high. I don’t know exactly who’s in the crowd. But I know that my life was changed in an instant by something that people thought was purely junk – pop music records. And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel. You can contextualise very, very difficult experiences. Songs are pretty good at that. So all these are the stakes that are laid out on the table when you come out at night. And I still take those stakes seriously after all that time, if not more so now, as the light grows slightly dimmer. I come out believing there’s no tomorrow night, there wasn’t last night, there’s just tonight. And I have built up the skills to be able to provide, under the right conditions, a certain transcendent evening, hopefully an evening you’ll remember when you go home. Not that you’ll just remember it was a good concert, but you’ll remember the possibilities the evening laid out in front of you, as far as where you could take your life, or how you’re thinking about your friends, or your wife or your girlfriend, or your best pal, or your job, your work, what you want to do with your life. These are all things, I believe, that music can accommodate and can provide service in. That’s what we try to deliver.

Springsteen defines the ‘stakes’ of popular music in terms of what it can provide and accommodate, and on this he is clear: it can change someone’s life. Popular music can affect how a person thinks and how they feel, generally or about certain experiences, people and problems. As to how music can do this, Springsteen is equally clear that it happens in an instant. The instant might last for a song or a whole evening, and indeed music can create a transcendent moment that is experienced as outside the rest of life and time, so there is no ‘last night’ nor ‘tomorrow night’ but only ‘tonight’. However, such a moment lays out possibilities stretching into the future, and is remembered long after it has passed. In fact, moments like this are anticipated and worked for, by musicians and audiences. This points to the dual character of transcendent musical experiences: people can lose themselves ‘in the moment’, but through the search for and reflection on such moments, they can find themselves. According to the quote above, Springsteen draws his motivation as a career musician from the memory of what popular music has done for him in an instant, and he finds purpose in trying to provide the same for others.

It is reported that Springsteen made this speech ‘without pause, without any errs or urrms, in a single perfect paragraph, that requires not one piece of tidying in the transcription’ (Hann 2016). This presents the statement itself as a kind of performance, whether conscious or not; the words and sentiment were well worn if not rehearsed. Springsteen had in fact spoken of such instants in the past, beginning with his childhood memory of watching Elvis Presley perform ‘Hound Dog’ on television’s The Ed Sullivan Show: ‘When I heard it, it just shot straight through to my brain. And I realized, suddenly, that there was more to life than what I’d been living’ (Kreps 2016). In any case, Bruce Springsteen was far from the first musician, or music fan, to say such things. In challenging the perception of ‘pop music records’ as ‘junk’, he is tracing narratives of their power and significance that must by now be familiar to many fans of popular music. Members of the Beatles, with whom Springsteen credits another life-defining experience watching The Ed Sullivan Show again in 1964, have been quoted numerous times about encounters with the music of Elvis Presley and his contemporaries that touched and changed their own lives (as discussed in Chapter 4). It is likely that Springsteen had heard his musical heroes speak in this way. His story about ‘Hound Dog’ was told on a BBC radio programme called Desert Island Discs, on which such anecdotes are frequently related by guests. However, the narrative is not restricted to famous musicians. Cultural anthropologist Daniel Cavicchi (1998) found the practice of talking about musical ‘epiphanies’ to be common among Springsteen’s own fans in the 1990s. The proliferation of these stories in particular groups and media suggests a phenomenon of cultural practice as well as musical experience.

The currency of peak music experiences as a concept is demonstrated by its use in marketing. During the television broadcast of the Australian Football League Grand Final in 2012, soft drink manufacturer Coca-Cola debuted a commercial that ‘follows a young girl at a music festival as she is lifted above the crowd to view the stage, experiencing a memorable moment that she will forever connect to the song being played’, culminating in the tagline, ‘every moment has a song’ (Campaign Brief 2012). References to such transcendent experiences are used to promote live music events themselves. These events now form part of the ‘experience economy’, in which the business opportunities for music lie in facilitating and designing settings for certain kinds of experiential encounters as opposed to selling services or objects (Pearce 2013). This might explain why, even as music consumption is domesticated and individualised, live performance is an increasingly lucrative and important sector of the broader music industry (Frith 2007a). At the same time, music is also understood to have profound effects in private and intimate experiences. This was played upon by a 2015 poster campaign for digital music platform Pandora, in which public transport users were invited to share their personal ‘music journey’ using such social media hashtags as #firstsong, #firstgig and #firstkiss (Lowe 2015). As in the Coca-Cola advertisement, the implication is that every moment has a song and, likewise, every song has a moment.

These examples begin to illuminate two related ways in which music assumes importance for individuals and groups. First, music sometimes gives rise to singular experiences that stand out from other experience, as especially affecting or meaningful and occasionally transcendent in a holistic sense. People cherish these experiences and consciously seek them out, such that they structure ongoing activity as a teleological cause. Second, these experiences form the basis of stories that are shared by musicians and music fans who attribute autobiographical meaning and sometimes profound consequences to them. This is a popular way to remember and explain things about music and also about people’s lives. It would therefore seem that peak music experiences play no small part in music’s social and cultural importance. This book seeks to develop a sociological theory of peak music experiences, and it will be argued that this perspective offers new insight into the relationships between popular music, identity, memory and embodied practice, within the context of music scenes and in everyday life.

Defining peak music experiences

The term ‘peak music experiences’ captures the essential elements of the phenomenon. They are peaks because their defining characteristic is that they stand out – in perception, in memory and in description. While the term is reminiscent of Maslow’s (1962) concept of ‘peak experiences’, it is not intended to import his psychological theories such as a hierarchy of needs. However, the similarity is apt, as both concepts (discussed further in Chapter 2) use the connotations of ‘peaks’ to distinguish especially affecting and meaningful experiences from general experience, while also recognising how they arise out of and influence the rest of life. As philosopher John Dewey (2004b: 269 [1934]) states, ‘Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations’. Meanwhile, the presence of peaks is not without consequences for the surrounding earth. Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy is concerned with restoring continuity between ‘the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art’, and everyday experience (ibid.: 268). Likewise, this book will consider what makes peak music experiences distinct as well as how they relate to the rest of musical experience and social life. In Chapter 2, Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy will help to frame this approach, including his relevant definition of ‘an experience’ as an aesthetically and emotionally unified arc of doing and undergoing. However, this is only a starting point for sociological inquiry into how those aesthetic and emotional parameters are constructed. In other words, this book will consider how peaks in musical experience are socially defined, as well as how they define the social.

In focusing on experience, this book will build on what have been termed ‘post-cultural turn studies in the sociology of popular music’ (Bennett 2008: 429). As it has been recognised that cultural meanings and social identities are produced through the continuing, complex interaction of various influences, in relation to which people exercise awareness and agency, the detail of subjective, lived experience has come to the fore. Study that is close to experience has proved especially important in relation to music, as the very malleability of music’s meaning is key to its social significance. Accordingly, as detailed in Chapter 2, the focus of research has shifted from semiotic readings of what music signifies within structurally determined subcultures, to ethnographic explorations of locally articulated, subjective appropriations of music within more loosely bounded scenes and individualised lifestyles. Still, work in this area has been more concerned with general experience that is typical of particular genres, groups and perspectives, than with discrete and extraordinary experiences that might have unique significance. An understandable emphasis is placed on the study of existent meanings, established practices and objectified tastes. There has been a growing interest in how music forms part of ‘everyday life’ (DeNora 2000; Vroomen 2004; Bennett 2005) and this is associated with a focus on the ‘mundane’ aspects of experience. However, the now substantial body of work arguing that musical taste and practices are not pre-determined opens up questions about why and how people do commence, continue and alter their relationships with music. A burgeoning body of work considering social memory and social ageing in relation to music (Strong 2011; Bennett 2013) begins to address the relationship of popular music and biography, and the study of peak music experiences advances these understandings. Similarly, the broad abandonment of a simplistic account of unilateral, universal media effects leaves open the question of how music might actually affect people and, as DeNora (2004) asks, how music ‘gets into’ social reality. The study of peak music experiences responds directly to these questions. The focus on experience is a holistic approach, placing attention on the meeting between music and a person in a specific context, and taking into account perception and reaction, thought and feeling, doing and undergoing. Much emphasis will be placed on the contiguities, interactions and co-productive relationships between these dualisms, drawing on perspectives from pragmatist philosophy and from the sociology of music (DeNora 2004; Hennion 2010) and emotions (Ahmed 2004; Crossley 1998).

This book and the concept it names are concerned with musical experience, even though music itself is only one part of the cultural worlds that will be considered. Subcultures involve a range of stylistic practices, objects and symbols clustered around music consumption (see for example Hebdige 1979), and music scenes are understood to comprise both ‘hard infrastructure’ such as physical spaces and ‘soft infrastructure’ such as social networks (Stahl 2004). In terms of experiences, people might attribute profound feelings and meanings to a personal encounter with a favourite musician, an achievement in their own musical career, or a social interaction far away from the stage at a music festival, to use examples that arose in the ethnographic research for this book. However, I am most interested in experiences to which ‘music’s specifically musical properties’ contribute (DeNora 2004: 36; emphasis in original). I do not suggest that it is useful or even possible to separate these musical properties entirely from other aspects of a peak music experience. In fact, a major benefit of considering music in terms of specific experiences is that it brings forward the multitude of internal and external factors that inform music’s meaning and effects for a particular individual at a particular time. On one hand, this allows a degree of contingency, consistently with the popular belief in fateful encounters and people’s...