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Rock
music has always been at odds with mass culture.
It is at the same time one of its essential
components and among its most vocal critics.
Rock benefits from mass culture's economic
framework and in return feeds it with its
remarkable energy. But musicians and fans alike
have repeatedly expressed feelings of uneasiness
or even downright rejection at this close
interdependence.
It
is precisely such tensions that give rock music
its momentum.
The ambivalent nature of rock music as regards
mass culture stems in fact from a well known
dichotomy that permeates most 20th- century
analyses of cultural productions. For Marxian or
Veblenian1 criticism, the ideological contents
of rock music derive from its economic status.
Being nothing more than a merchandise, it has to
abide by manufacturing and marketing principles
such as market research, standardization,
advertising and profitability.
These imperatives deprive the consumer of
his free-will and turn rock music into an anti-revolutionary
art, more concerned with profit margins than the
advancement of radical theories or popular
causes. Such views were particularly propounded
in the 1960s by journalists or academics like
Donald Horton and Paddy Whannel in England, or
Jean-François Hirsch in France, but all agreed
on the fact that rock music defied
reductionistic analyses and was a more delicate
subject to tackle than other aspects of mass
culture.
Paradoxically,
Marxian perspectives linked up with the harsh
comments passed on rock music by numerous
conservative scholars (Allan Bloom, Alain
Finkielkraut,etc.) who, drawing on, and
distorting, Theodor W. Adorno's theories on
jazz, described rock as a degrading and
stupefying music. For them, it had nothing to
offer but an ersatz of individualism, as it in
fact standardizes cultural tastes and practices.
But rock music can be seen as more than the
stale product of capitalism. Contrary to the
early hostile reception, a different and more
positive analysis gradually emerged, prompted by
F.R. Leavis' works in the 1930s, and more
particularly D. Riesman's in the 1950s. It
upheld the opinion that rock is a popular and
authentic artistic medium, the spontaneous
expression of minority groups (colored people,
the youth...), which was reflected by the change
in terminology: from the analysis of "teen
culture" rock studies became that of "youth
culture." The most active representatives
of this new trend were to be found at Birmingham
University, at Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige's
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which
conciliated Marxian theories with a positive
approach of rock music, thus rendering
traditional political divisions obsolete.
Patrick Mignon synthesized perfectly these
contrasting viewpoints when he noted that
"rock music is the universalization of both
market logic and individualism, the standardized
product of cultural industries and the true
expression of the people."
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