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.

Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject: Introduction

Around half a year ago, I began to draft a blog post outlining some ideas that had been floating around my head for ages. I kept writing and writing, one essay split into two and those two split into four, and the argument kept escalating until I had something book-length planned out. I was excited enough about my ideas not to want to give them too short a shrift. As it happens, by this point, the shrift is very long indeed, but I’m happy enough with the results to stop writing and start editing, and the results will appear on this blog over the next few months. This first post is the introduction, then, to what I’ve been calling my blogbook. Copyright fees are far too expensive for song lyrics and music examples, which are central to most of my arguments, for any hope of paper publication in the near future, and I’m keen on the idea of open culture publishing anyway. I hope to put together a downloadable PDF version of this book, and ideally some podcasts with real-time analyses; while the essays do make incursions into some pretty dense and wide-ranging academic domains from time to time, I would like to keep it as accessible as possible. I hope it also might provide some nice jumping-off points some very exciting texts that I’ve been enjoying over the last year or two (since I started my MA).

I intend to publish a new chapter every week, and I will link them all to a new index page, which will also feature a bibliography that grows as each new chapter is added. By the time all eighteen chapters have been published, it should constitute a pretty comprehensive Night Mail reading list for anyone interested in my key musicological, theoretical and critical influences. Many of the essays and reviews that I have already published on this site since 2010 have contributed to this study in some way or another, and I revisit a few of these old ideas within the new, more codified context of my larger project. It is certainly possible to read individual chapters separately – some are more 'academic' in style than others – but in order to fully comprehend my critical position, it's probably best to work through the chapters in order, or at least familiarise yourself with the three theses I outline at the end of this introduction.

Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject: NEW POSTS COMING SOON

I’ve been putting all my blogging on hold this Autumn, in order to complete what has become a rather monumental project of music writing which I’m provisionally titling Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject. This will initially be a series of essay-chapters outlining something like a systematic analytical approach to pop music, in both recorded and live forms, which veers fairly erratically between musicology, pop criticism, cultural studies and phenomenology. The aim of this approach is, in turn, to inform analyses, critiques and reviews of pop music (of any style or genre) which aim to discuss the political (critical, emancipatory, utopian) potential of the music as music (i.e. bearing sonic elements in mind, rather than just lyrics, or a collection of ‘extramusical’ discourses). The project includes a large number of attempts at such an analysis, of music ranging from Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and Donna Summer, via Burial, Björk and the Knife, to the Smiths and Nirvana.

I hope to format the essays into a PDF e-book thing which can be downloaded, as well as to make Soundcloud podcasts of chapters with musical examples, in the style of Rouge’s Foam.

I hope that, as a project, it won’t be too restrictively academic, but should nevertheless stand as my proposition for an informed, imaginative music criticism that is neither reduced to a purely subjective or coldly consumerist assessment of value, nor a quixotic academic search for the empirical ‘truth’ of a particular musical work, or of ‘music as such’. Most of all though, it’s been an opportunity to siphon off some of the more volatile and distracting (music-related) ideas from my brain and arrange them into something approaching coherence. With any luck, I’ll be back to posting more frequently by the end of January 2014.

WATCH THIS SPACE…

Some recommended reading...

1)1)1)

Check out this Guardian interview with The Knife, getting all politisch
-::---

There's a narrative that culture or music should not have to do with politics. We are learned all the time to not think, and that of course comes through in many cultural workers. But I believe that it's in the music where you can really try out political alternatives and utopias. I have many friends who play around with these issues in their music – Planningtorock, for example, is doing that in really exciting ways – but the kind of vocabulary used around these artists is that it's pretentious or the production is not good enough. And that makes me think more about who is writing those things. (Olof Dreijer)

or how about:

We are constructed to like certain things... We've been teaching a bit at this summer camp for teenage girls who want to make electronic music, and there we often talk about this idea of quality in music and what informs our ideas of what is supposed to be good and bad music. You know that music history is written by privileged white men, so we can ask ourselves how important it is to repeat their ideas. (Olof Dreijer)

Read the full interview HERE (ignoring the snarky, reactionary commentary from the interviewer), and get excited for Shaking the Habitual on April 8th.

2)2)2)

More importantly though, this fabulous essay from n+1 magazine (Jan 2012), by Richard Beck, wryly styled as a 'review of Pitchfork' (he gives them 5.4 out of 10). 

Ten Favourite Albums of 2012

My last post was a total downer, I know, but it'd be wrong to suggest that 2012 was a total musical disaster. On the contrary, there've been some really excellent records out this last year. As usual, I've been pretty penniless (and I don't download records, or use Spotify because it gives me vertigo) so naturally I've only encountered a small section of the year's output. But still, all the records listed below are both interesting and important. Rather than simply throw around the standard adulations, I've tried to consider how each achieves its particular effect, and what it might tell us about our times, our culture, and the future of music. So here it is, finally,

here are my Top 10 Favourite Albums Of 2012...

2012: The Year in Musical Disappointments

2012 was a frustrating kind of musical year for The Night Mail. Despite the fact that there were significant new releases from practically all of my super-official, fantasy-league, pantheon artists* (including my two hyper-ultra-official, gun-to-my-head favourite bands**), it was actually a pretty disappointing year for music. Or maybe it was because of that fact. There's nothing quite so conducive to disappointment as looking forward to things.

For one thing, I didn’t really latch onto any earth-shattering new artists or stylistic ideas, and - while admittedly this might be due to some personal critical oversight on my part - skimming over the various ‘End of Year’ lists on my most trusted blogs and webzines would suggest that my own awareness of the year’s hypees wasn’t too far removed from that of the broader blogosphere hegemony.

For another thing (strike two), 'Call Me Maybe' aside, it was an incredibly bad year for proper pop too. It's a good indication of the state of affairs when learning the 'Gangnam Style' dance becomes a significant plot thread on Glee. (Notes for a future thesis: Arguably the success of the first two seasons of Glee had a lot to do with the quality of the chart pop circulating at the time. To some extent, the requirement to include hit songs has a determining factor on the direction of the plot and the nature and affective quality of the musico-dramatic set-pieces available to the writers. Glee has been crap all year, go figure.)