The Value of Popular Music

An Approach from Post-Kantian Aesthetics

Alison Stone

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319465449
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Estetica in filosofia

In this book, Alison Stone argues that popular music since rock-'n'-roll is a unified form of music which has positive value. That value is that popular music affirms the importance of materiality and the body, challenging the long-standing Western elevation of the intellect above all things corporeal. Stone also argues that popular music's stress on materiality gives it aesthetic value, drawing on ideas from the post-Kantian tradition in aesthetics by Hegel, Adorno, and others. She shows that popular music gives importance to materiality in its typical structure: in how music of this type handles the relations between matter and form, the relations between sounds and words, and in how it deals with rhythm, meaning, and emotional expression. Extensive use is made of musical examples from a wide range of popular music genres. This book is distinctive in that it defends popular music on philosophical grounds, particularly informed by the continental tradition in philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2016

Alison StoneThe Value of Popular Music10.1007/978-3-319-46544-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Evaluation, Aesthetics, and the Unity of Popular Music

Alison Stone¹

(1)

Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

End Abstract

1 Introduction

In this chapter I aim to motivate my argument for popular music’s aesthetic value and to begin to establish my framework. In Sect. 2, I expand on why popular music needs defence. In Sect. 3, I suggest that we need an account of the aesthetic value that is particular to popular music as popular music. We need not claim that every popular song has aesthetic value or that all such songs are equal in aesthetic value. Rather the cultural form popular music has aesthetic value in particular respects, value that individual songs can share in to varying degrees, depending on how they realise this form. In Sect. 4, I argue that, despite their immense variety, there is enough unity among the songs and genres that make up the popular music field that we can justifiably regard them as belonging to a unified cultural form―albeit one with porous boundaries and great internal diversity. In Sect. 5, I ask whether popular music’s principal value is socio-political and not aesthetic. Aesthetic considerations tend to creep back into politically focused accounts of popular music’s value, though. The question of its aesthetic value is thus unavoidable. ¹

2 Formulaic and Always the Same?

As I’ve noted already, one might think that popular music is so ubiquitous that it needs no defence. The vast majority of the music that is bought, listened to, and ‘used’ today is popular music. According to the British Phonographic Industry, only 3–4 % of the albums sold from 2004 to 2014 were ‘classical’, whereas ‘pop’ commanded 31 % of the market share and ‘rock’ a further 33.8 % (BPI 2014). ² Album sales aside, popular music provides the backdrop to much of our lives, and for many people, especially but not only in their teenage years, it is important in structuring their social relationships and identities.

For critics, the ubiquity and power of popular music are damaging, since the music is formulaic and homogeneous, providing entertainment but lacking real aesthetic value. A common line of critical thought―often informed, directly or not, by Adorno―is that the music industry churns out songs designed to sell. Accordingly they are made highly simplified, requiring no intellectual effort that would compromise their enjoyability. Each new product is purposely modelled on others that have already succeeded; hence the products become homogeneous, and consumers come to expect as much and to shun anything innovative or challenging. Thus the industry reduces culture to its basest level and trains people to respond to cultural artefacts in crude, unthinking, conformist ways.

Many people accept some aspects of this critical stance, as when the music industry is condemned for reducing rock-‘n’-roll to ‘the corporate spine of American entertainment’ (Eliot 1996: 201). But often critics of the music industry, such as Chapple and Garofalo (1977), identify conflicts between the creative urges that inspire musicians and the economic constraints that the industry imposes. Relations between musicians and the music industry are thus taken to be antagonistic. ³ Even so, the implication remains that because of the financial imperatives driving the industry its products will tend to the homogeneous and formulaic, much as musicians may wish otherwise.

Such concerns about homogeneity are regularly voiced in the public domain. A media fanfare greeted an article published in Nature in 2012 by Joan Serrà and co-authors, ‘Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music’ (Serrà et al. 2012). They begin: ‘Isn’t it always the same? This question could be easily posed while listening to the music of any mainstream radio station in a western country’. Serrà et al. then analyse data from 464, 411 songs spanning 1955–2010, obtained from the Million Song Dataset. ⁴ They identify three statistical tendencies. The first is towards increased intrinsic loudness in recordings―a result of the ‘loudness war’ between record labels since the 1990s, with albums engineered at increasing volume levels to better grab listeners’ attention. Yet it is unclear why this tendency is problematic for Serrà et al., since they find no corresponding reduction in the average dynamic range within songs: intrinsic loudness has increased but dynamic range has been preserved (they claim). ⁵ Second, Serrà et al. find that the range of timbres used in popular music fell between 1965 and 1980 and, again, in the 2000s. Third, they find that since 1955 the most common transitions between pitches have become steadily more common while more unusual transitions have become even less frequent.

One problem with Serrà et al.’s analysis, noted by Stephen Graham (2014), is that they neglect rhythm, yet it is particularly central to the metagenres of rap and electronic dance music. To some extent, then, the focus of popular-musical innovation and experimentation has migrated from harmony to rhythm. Serrà’s co-author Martin Haro overlooks this when, interviewed by Macrae, he says that 1950s and 1960s music was more artistic, experimented with sounds and harmony, and conveyed messages concerning politics, whereas contemporary music is for dancing and relaxation and focuses on energy and rhythm rather than experimentation (Macrae 2012). Here Haro neglects the possibility that rhythm has become the focus of experimentation and that this shift in focus might itself convey political messages, perhaps by re-orienting music towards ‘black cultural priorities’ (Rose 1994: 65).

Critics might reply that even if musicians’ priorities have indeed shifted towards rhythm, popular-musical rhythms generally lack complexity compared to classical music, for the vast majority of popular songs are in 4/4 metre throughout (i.e., each measure is divided into four equal-length parts or ‘beats’). However, 4/4 metre is only a base on which an infinite variety of kinds of syncopation occur in popular music. If popular music tends to metric simplicity, this is not so of its rhythms. In any case, even when popular songs do have simple rhythms, we should remember that simplicity is not necessarily bad.

As Graham notes too, Serrà et al. neglect meaning and context, which can lead relatively small differences, say between timbres, to assume considerable significance. To give just one example: in the 1980s and 1990s Candida Doyle of the ‘Britpop’ band Pulp used a range of synthesisers and electronic organs that were by then obsolete―such as the Farfisa Professional, originally issued from 1968 to 1975. Doyle thereby created a deliberately ‘cheap’ and old-fashioned sound, tying in with the band’s evocations of working-class life in Sheffield in the 1970s. But when the same Farfisa models were originally used they sounded futuristic and modern, as used by some ‘Krautrock’ bands for instance. Thus the same timbres can take on different, even opposed, connotations. So we cannot directly infer from a decreased range of timbres at a purely sonic level that there has been a corresponding shrinkage in popular music’s range of meanings.

That Serrà et al. neglect these possibilities indicates another problem: although they present their findings as purely objective, they seem determined to portray popular music unfavourably. Thus they conclude that its volume dynamics are now ‘potentially poorer’―by intimation, already somewhat impoverished―when their actual analysis is that, despite the loudness wars, no such impoverishment has yet occurred (Serrà et al. 2012: 5). Ultimately, Serrà et al. do not justify their conclusion that popular music is becoming increasingly homogeneous so much as presume that that conclusion is true all along.

Unsurprisingly, then, Serrà’s finding about decreased variety of timbres and pitch transitions has been challenged (by Mauch et al. 2015). But why would it matter if popular music’s harmonic and melodic vocabulary was becoming increasingly restricted? This might matter because it would mean that popular music’s emotional range is shrinking, compared not only to earlier popular music but also to classical music. Or, at least, this would follow assuming that harmony is of primary importance for popular music’s emotional expression. Yet arguably harmony does not have the same expressive primacy within popular music that it does in common-practice classical music. Rather (I’ll argue in this book), harmony within popular songs typically generates emotional qualities, along with other meanings, in co-operation with popular songs’ other elements and parameters. And since popular songs retain considerable diversity under these parameters―such as rhythm, texture, vocal style, production style, and so on―we need not fear restriction of their emotional palette.

To see this, let’s consider the comedy song ‘Four Chords’ by the Axis of Awesome, released on video on YouTube in 2011 and quickly garnering millions of views. The band performs a succession of short passages from 47 songs, passages that all use the same chord sequence, I–V–vi–IV. ⁶ Thus ‘Four Chords’ simply cycles through this sequence over and over again. For some listeners, such as Independent journalist Katy Guest, this confirms that,

as Joan Serrà put it after analysing 55 years’ worth of songs from the Million Song Dataset, ‘We found evidence of a progressive homogenisation of the musical discourse’. This is nothing new, as shown by the band The Axis of Awesome, who can demonstrate that ‘all the greatest hits from the last 40 years just use four chords’. (Guest 2012)

Guest exaggerates greatly: a composite of parts of 47 songs is hardly telling about 40 years of greatest hits, let alone all the music that never reaches the charts. Moreover, the songs that Axis of Awesome excerpt do not share the same four chords in absolute terms, because those songs are in many different keys. Rather the excerpts share the same relative chords. For example, a song in the key of D major that follows the I–V–vi–IV sequence will move through the chords D-major–A-major–B-minor–G-major, while a song in the key of A♭ major following that sequence will move through A♭-major–E♭-major–F-minor–D♭-major. Axis of Awesome transpose all the songs that they use into the same key, D major, so that they can be seamlessly amalgamated.

The original songs included in ‘Four Chords’ are actually very diverse. We see this from one brief sequence in which Axis of Awesome render four measures of first John Denver’s ‘Country Roads, Take Me Home’ (on Poems, Prayers, and Promises of 1971), then Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’ (on The Fame of 2008), then U2’s ‘With or Without You’ (on The Joshua Tree of 1987)―respectively from the genres country-folk, dance-pop, and rock, and conveying very different connotations. The first is warm and nostalgic, the second steely and metropolitan, the third anguished.

Even harmonically these songs differ significantly, as Table 1.1 shows. (A dash denotes no chord; straight lines mark divisions between measures.)

Table 1.1

Chord sequences in John Denver, ‘Country Roads, Take Me Home’, Lady Gaga, ‘Paparazzi’, and U2, ‘With or Without You’

‘Country Roads’ acoustic guitar:	‘Paparazzi’ keyboard synthesiser:	‘With or Without You’ bass guitar:
(verse)	(verse)	(throughout song)
| I | I | vi | vi	| i | – | – | –	| I | V | vi | IV
| V | V | IV | I	| VI | – | i | –
	| i | – | – | – | VI | – | iv | iv^7
(chorus)	(chorus)
| I | I | V | V	| I | V | vi | IV
| vi | vi | IV | IV	| I | V | vi | IV
| I | I | V | V	| I | V | vi | IV
| IV | IV | I | I	| I | V | vi | IV

Thus ‘Country Roads’, which is in A major, actually follows I...