Chapter 1.3: Beat Control, Power Chords

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

In the last two chapters, I set out the concept of the 'vocal-subject' in the pop song, as it exists within the 'song world' given form by the 'objective musical forces'. The relationship between these two elements of the song produces meaning through the distribution of power and control, agency and domination. In the chapters that constitute Part 1 of this essay series, I focus on just one particular direction of this power relation. This particular chapter will focus on the following two questions:

1. How is the vocal-subject dominated and controlled by the objective musical forces?
2. How does the vocal-subject resist this domination and control?

To address these questions, this chapter focuses on those pop recordings in which the objective musical forces exert a relentlessly dominating and structuring force, against which the vocal-subject has very little power. A vocal-subject can be controlled and structured through being 'contained' within a metre and key, coerced into following a certain structural progression or moulded into a pre-established melodic or rhythmic identity. However, these songs actually materialise their forces of domination sonically, allowing for a more overt playing out of power struggles, quite removed from the 'standardising' coercion evoked in Adorno’s critiques of pop and jazz, which allow an ‘illusory freedom’ to be maintained.

The two key musical dimensions by which instrumental forces in pop tracks manifest excessive power and control are: 1) through rhythmic-harmonic repetition, either on a small scale (beat-to-beat) or a larger scale (looped progressions/motifs), and 2) through ‘heavy’ and ‘powerful’ timbres (or textures). We might, after Michel Foucault (2004), label these as two ‘technologies’ of power by which the vocal-subject is subjugated, ordered and controlled. They vaguely correspond to his two categories of regulatory ‘discipline’ and spectacular ‘punishment’, and can be differentiated as below:

Rhythmic-harmonic    Examples: constant beats, grooves, looped progressions, pre-existent cyclic structures, grounds Dance Control Discipline Regulatory Seductive Centripetal ‘Black noise’

Timbre    Examples: thick, dense, heavy overwhelming timbres, distortion, overdrive, power chords Rock Power Punishment Spectacular Coercive Centrifugal ‘White noise’

In the essay that follows, I will discuss the particular qualities of each ‘technology’ of power, making particular use of the work of Steve Goodman and his book Sonic Warfare (2010), but extrapolating his ideas onto the terrain of the song itself, and the sonic battles fought between vocal-subject and instrumental forces.

Chapter 1.2: Adorno, Autonomy, and the Blues

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

Over the course of this essay series, I’m attempting to develop a political theory of pop music (as well as a theory of ‘political music’, or ‘the political’ in pop music). In the previous chapter, I framed the pop song in terms of an opposition between ‘vocal-subject’ and ‘objective musical forces’; this chapter will begin to ask what kind of relationships these two discrete elements can have. Much of my focus will be on the distribution of power in these relationships: control vs. resistance, autonomy vs. domination, freedom vs. constraint, structure vs. agency, repression vs. revolution, etc. In approaching these relationships, I’ll draw on the work of the twentieth-century theorist who has done most to explore them, as they are realised within the sonic structures of musical pieces themselves: Theodor W. Adorno.

It is well known that Adorno hated pop music. In fact, for those who’ve heard of him as a music theorist rather than a philosopher, it is often one of the only things that is known. Attempts to defend jazz and pop from the spectre of Adorno have largely involved the cultivation of alternative perspectives and ways of understanding the music (as resistant/freely expressive) which show up Adorno’s critical outlook as narrow, inappropriate and culturally imperialist. My tactic is to engage with pop music as music on Adorno’s terms. This will largely involve applying his critical work on modern classical music (as the music of his historical moment) to pop music (as the music of our historical moment). To do this, I will adapt his notion of the part-whole relationship within musical structures as homologous to social structures, replacing it with my notion of the relationship between vocal-subject and objective musical forces as homologous to various different structures (including social structures). By doing this, I will retain some of his focus on dynamics of power and control, freedom and coercion, but attempt to find resistant and critical potential in the pop music that he would probably have roundly dismissed.

Chapter 1.1: The Vocal-Subject

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

In the Introduction, I outlined three theses concerning the way in which pop music is experienced as meaningful by its audience. The first part of this series focuses on the first of these theses:

On recorded pop tracks, the vocals constitute a distinct 'vocal-subject' in relation to a non-vocal, musical 'situation'.

For each thesis, I will try to demonstrate a) how they are implicated in notions of power and control, b) how they can be used in analysis and criticism of pop music, and c) how this can inform hearings of political music, as well as political hearings of music. Part One is by far the most theoretical, philosophical section of the series, in that I try to explain what I actually mean by these terms, and how they might compare to existing theories of musical phenomenology: not only in the academic realms of musicology, philosophy and cultural studies, but also in everyday fan discourse and journalistic pop criticism.