|
Page 7, AUDIENCES Negus, Keith. 1996. "Audiences."
In Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction.
CHAPTER ONE KEITH NEGUS With so many people participating in numerous musical events around the world at any one time, a chapter that attempts to introduce theories about music audiences will inevitably be highly selective. After all, the audiences for popular music can range from the thousands of people who gather in stadiums to witness performances by well-known bands and singers (and perhaps the additional millions who might be receiving transmissions of such events oil radio and television) to those dancing to music at a wedding or birthday party. Music audiences can include people engaging in devotional activity, the crowds hearing a cacophony of different melodies and rhythms as they pass through a shopping mall and someone listening to a cassette tape on a Walkman while cycling through the countryside. If you add to this the fact that before the introduction of recorded music at the end of the nineteenth century much of this activity was not even possible - the audiences for music always listened, looked and danced in the presence of performing musicians - then you will realize that any approach to music audiences could encompass a wide variety of historically changing and geographically variable experiences and activities. This modest introductory chapter does not even begin to attempt to address such complexity and diversity. Instead, my main concern here is with how the audiences for music have been theorized in the years since the development of modern recording technology, and in particular since the growth of the associated media technologies of radio and the moving image in the latter part of the twentieth __________________________________________________________________ Page 8 AUDIENCES century. Furthermore, the audience theorizing oil which I will be focusing in this chapter is concerned mainly with the issue of 'reception' - that is, with how people receive, interpret and use music as a cultural form while engaging in specific social activities. This has been one of the most influential strands of reasoning in studies of popular music since the 1970s and this chapter is intended as a critical summary and assessment of this particular approach. In adopting such a focus, for many years the theorists of music audiences have been concerned with the activities of young people. During the 1950s the focus was on the 'teenager'. In the 1960s the terms of reference shifted to a concern with the problems of 'youth', which in turn led to numerous writings about youth subcultures. During the 1980s and into the 1990s there has been a broader interest in fails and music scenes in general. In tracing the development of theories about popular music and young audiences I shall be recounting a tale about an increasingly ,active' audience. This is a theoretical trajectory which offers a direct challenge, but which also owes an enduring debt, to the critique of popular music listening proposed by Theodor Adorno. I shall therefore start this chapter by giving some details about Adorno's ,approach to the audiences for popular music. Adorno's children: the regression of listening Adorno wrote about music and culture between the 1920s and the 1960s. He was a member of a group of predominantly German Jewish scholars who have become known as the Frankfurt School, and his thought is frequently riven with a pessimism that is derived partly from observing a period of considerable political turmoil. Adorno had lived through the futile bloodshed of the 1914-18 war, the failure of the working-class revolutions that had spread across Europe after the Russian revolution of 1917 and the growth of fascist parties from the 1920s. When the Nazi party seized power in 1933 Adorno had to flee Germany, and eventually relocated in the United States. Adorno was also living at a time when technological changes had led to the improvement and increasing popularity of recorded music on the phonograph disc and when radio broadcasting and the introduction of sound in cinema had provided opportunities for __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 9 commercial marketing and political propaganda. While the Nazi party were making maximum use of these media technologies in Germany, Adorno arrived in the United States to find the same media being used to produce and distribute forms of commercial culture. Adorno was thus writing at a formative moment in the development of the modern communication technologies and mass media that have had a major impact on the production, distribution and consumption of popular music. In exile, Adorno made a connection between what he had observed in Germany and then in the United States and developed all argument in which the domination and manipulation of the people (who are reduced to 'masses') became explicitly connected to the production and dissemination of a particular form of culture (produced as 'mass culture'). In pursuing this argument, Adorno was concerned with how forms of culture could contribute to authoritarian forms of domination and thwart any prospects for political critique or emancipatory social change. I will be giving more details about what Adorno had to say about the production of popular music as mass culture in the next chapter; here I want to outline what lie had to say about consumption. For Adorno, the popular music that was being distributed by the music industries as 'mass culture' required the listener to make very little effort. He argued that it led to 'de-concentrated listening' in which listeners rejected everything that was not familiar and 'regressed' to the point where they began to 'behave like children' (1991: 44-5). One particularly 'child-like' type of consumption that Adorno identified was what he called 'quotation listening.' By this he meant that, instead of listening to music and attempting to grasp an entire piece of work as a whole, the regressive listener dwelt upon the most obvious fragments of melody. In doing so audiences adopted a 'musical children's language' and listened to different works 'as if the symphony were structurally the same as a ballad' (1945: 213). Such listening was not because of the inherent stupidity of listeners but due to the way in which the recording and publishing industries had promoted standardized, repetitive music: songs that encouraged audiences to make no effort when listening to music. Adorno (1976) referred to the very successful category of 'easy listening', arguing that this was clear evidence that music was deliberately being created to encourage distracted audience activity. He asserted that such sounds were made up of the most familiar har- __________________________________________________________________ Page 10 AUDIENCES monies, rhythms and melodies that had a 'soporific' effect oil social consciousness. Not only was this music generating a sleep-inducing form of diversion and distraction, Adorno claimed that in doing so it prevented people from reflecting on their position in the world. In their leisure time, the regressive listeners were pacified by music that merely provided a temporary escape from the boredom of tile factory, assembly line or office. Adorno maintained that music, like other art forms, should have the potential to provoke listeners to think critically about the world. However, the popular music that was produced for tile purpose of entertainment led merely to passivity. It was a type of music that made people accept the status quo and engendered obedience towards authoritarianism. Popular music, argued Adorno, was indeed responsible for contributing to social passivity, as audiences regressed to a 'child-like' state and were thus easily manipulated by the adult authority of capitalist corporations and fascist states.
Adorno's listeners: alone in the bedroom and lost in the crowd It is Adorno's somewhat despairing view of passive music listening that subsequent theorists have sought to challenge. Of particular relevance to some of the theorists who followed him, and to many everyday discussions about music consumption, are 'two types' of music listener that Adorno identified. The first type was the person who was lost in the crowd, the type of human being who was easily manipulated by the collectivity. The second was the obsessive individual. This was the type of person who was alienated from the people around them and not fully integrated into social life. For Adorno, during the 1940s,the
collective experience was most visible during popular forms of
dancing such as the jitterbug. Adorno argued that this flamboyant
and jerky form of dancing was ritualistic and an act of 'compulsive'
mimicry. Those who danced to the jitterbug were losing their
individuality, responding to the music by 'whirring around' like
fascinated insects. Observing with distaste, Adorno remarked
that people dancing the jitterbug were engaging in a 'stylized'
type of dancing that had 'convulsive aspects reminiscent of St.
Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals' (1991: 46). AUDIENCES page 11 Such comments displayed a poor understanding of how the body and dancing have been employed throughout history and across the world to respond to music. Yet similar words have often been used to condemn dancing to popular music, whether to the charleston, rock-'n'-roll, disco or techno music. Such fears have often managed to combine a distaste for overt expressions of sexuality, a fear of 'civilized' behaviour being corrupted by 'primitive' rhythms (usually overtly racist) and a concern that young people are being manipulated by forms of crowd psychology. In contrast to this, Adorno identified the opposite type of music listener. This he characterized as the eager person who leaves the factory and occupies himself with music in the quiet of his bedroom. He is shy and inhibited, perhaps has no luck with girls and wants to preserve his own special sphere ... at the age of 20 he is still at the stage of the boy scout working on complicated knots just to please his parents. (1991: 46-7) This is an image Of the alienated, poorly socialized loner in his bedroom (it is a gendered type). This person takes solace in the illusion of intimacy that is created through music and prefers this to social contact with other people. Over forty years after Adorno wrote this, such an image was often used to caricature the male fans of The Smiths and the other melancholic guitar rock bands that followed them. As one journalist wrote in a review of the first album by the British band Suede: 'This is music for the boys who don't dance, who prefer an evening's self-pitying wallow in their bedroom' (Gill, 1993:16). The two types that Adorno
identified have not been used simply as caricatures, as in the
quote just cited, but have frequently reappeared to justify the
anxieties of concerned moral guardians. The obsessive individual
has often been identified as the young fan of heavy rock music,
listening alone in a small town bedroom, estranged from family
and friends, neurotic and prone to irrational, suicidal or aggressive
behaviour brought about through intense and prolonged exposure
to this music. More socially integrated, but just as manipulated
by the products of the music media, are the amorphous crowds
of ravers who gather in fields and large warehouses and who lose
their individuality in a sea of waving arms and trancelike swaying
bodies. Both of these images were conjured up and then used as
a cause for social concern by religious leaders, parents Page 12 AUDIENCES and social workers during
the 1980s and 1990s. Both are remarkably similar to the types
identified by Adorno forty years earlier. The active minority against the majority In an article first published in 1950, David Riesman (1990) reported on research he had conducted on the listening habits of teenagers and made a distinction that was to have an enduring influence on later studies. The distinction Riesman made was between two groups of music listeners: a majority group and a minority group. Riesman's theory forms a link between Adorno's arguments and the ideas of later subcultural theorists. Having interviewed groups of teenagers in Chicago, Riesman reported that most of the young people to whom lie had spoken formed a majority group that had undiscriminating tastes in popular music. They were the audience for the large radio stations and the well-known 'name' bands. These were young people who paid attention to the star singers and who listened to 'the hit parade'. Members of this majority group were not very concerned about how music was produced and their listening habits were fairly indiscriminate. Music and performers were principally a subject for superficial everyday conversation and gossip. In contrast, the minority group adopted a more critical and questioning posture. Riesman found this group to be composed of discriminating active listeners. This audience had developed quite elaborate and sophisticated standards of music listening and appreciation. Members of the minority group involved themselves in detailed technical discussions about the composition and performance of music. In contrast to the majority, members of the minority group tended to dislike the name bands and big stars and were dismissive of most of the music that could be heard on the radio. __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 13 Instead, these listeners preferred what they considered to be 'uncommercialized', unadvertised less-known bands. Riesman found that members of the minority group had developed their own 'private language' as an exclusive way of talking about the music and musicians that they liked. However, they stopped using this vocabulary when it was adopted along with 'their' music by the majority group, perceiving this to involve a process of commercial exploitation. Hence, members of the minority group were explicitly positioning themselves against and above the tastes of the majority group. The distinction that Riesman made was between an active, hip and rebellious minority and a passive, undiscriminating and conformist majority. Such a way of dividing listeners partly retains Adorno's assumptions about passive and indiscriminate music consumption, but it adds an additional, more active and engaged minority group. Not all music consumption is passive, although most of it still is. This is a distinction that has been used by numerous music fans throughout the world for many years to differentiate themselves from other listeners, and it is a division that was developed further in academic writing during the 1960s. The young generation In a book first published in the early 1960s, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel (1964) recast this distinction in generational terms. For these two writers, the minority group was what they referred to as the 'younger generation'. This was identified as the 'creative minority' within the social structure of British society, as Hall and Whannel emphasized the 'generation gap' which had been created between older people and those who had come into their teens during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Hall and Whannel argued that this younger generation were beginning to challenge the staid conventions and 'puritan restraints' of bourgeois morality. As they did so they developed a ,subculture' that combined new attitudes to sexual relationships and linked this to various expressions of anti-establishment radicalism. The ideas and attitudes of the subculture were often directly connected with musical consumption, in particular the listening to and participation in folk, blues and rock music. __________________________________________________________________ Page 14 AUDIENCES Hall and Whannel observed that the use of music by young audiences was a contradictory combination of what they referred to as the 'manufactured' and the 'authentic'. Like Adorno, they argued that commercial interests were attempting to exploit and manipulate musical preferences and activities. But at the same time they suggested that young people were also creating products that 'expressed' their own interests and which communicated these to other members of the young class. This was apparent in the music of The Who, a band whose recording My Generation - with its constant refrain of 'talking 'bout my generation' - was emblematic of Hall and Whannel's description of pop music as symbolically affirming a spirit of rebellion and independence. Although embracing some of the sentiments of such a song in their analysis, Hall and Whannel ultimately remained unconvinced about the wider potential of such generational tensions. Like Riesman, who had found both active and passive musical audiences, they suggested that while teenage culture was an 'area of self expression for the young' it was also a 'lush grazing pasture for commercial providers' (Hall and Whannel, 1964: 276). In making this distinction they argued that there was a tension between tile attempts at manipulation by the commercial providers and the responses and interpretations of the audience. Such a distinction, between an active young minority who were creating a 'subculture' and a passive older conservative majority, was then integrated into a more theoretically developed subcultural theory. Subculture and style Subcultural theory was first introduced in studies of crime and socalled deviant behaviour, initially by sociologists in the United States, as far back as the 1930s. During the 1940s and 1950s writers such as Howard Becker (1973), who studied dance musicians, sought to understand how the social activities associated with music involved the active adoption of alternative value systems (as opposed to 'deviant' or 'dysfunctional' behaviour). From the late 1960s and during the 1970s this approach began to be applied to youth subcultures. In giving a brief introduction
to this approach here I am going to avoid skating across the
many details of different studies and focus AUDIENCES page 15 on one of the most influential accounts, that of Dick Hebdige (1979). Titled Subculture, and covering the appearance of punk in Britain and the subcultural styles that preceded it, Hebdige's book has had a great influence on later theoretical approaches to music audiences. In developing his theory of subcultures, Hebdige drew on Raymond Williams's conception of culture as 'ordinary'. Against a classical and conservative approach that had been concerned with culture as a standard of aesthetic excellence and which was derived from an 'appreciation' of European 'high' culture, Williams advocated a more 'social' approach to the term. This took culture to refer to 'a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour' (Williams, 1965: 56). Following this less elitist
and more anthropological approach to the concept, Hebdige set
out to examine culture as a broad range of social activities,
meanings, values, beliefs, institutions and commodities and to
consider how these elements were related in 'a As the term implies, a subculture is a subdivision within a culture. However, in British subcultural theory, the term has been specifically employed to refer to groupings within subordinate cultures. Like other subcultural theorists (Clarke et al., 1981; Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Willis, 1977) Hebdige stressed that there was not simply one 'culture' in Britain. An individual's social experience, and hence their cultural activities, was shaped by a variety of specific factors, such as gender, ethnicity and age, with class being the most significant mediating influence. From this perspective, cultural life could be thought of as composed of a number of 'cultural configurations' which do not hold equal status and in which dominant and subordinate cultures are created along the broad divisions of class. In this context, distinctive youth subcultures (such as the teddy boy, mod and punk) were seen to emerge as a 'response' to a subordinate social class position. Writing against conservative criminologists and concerned policy makers who viewed the activities of these groups as deviant anti-social behaviour, subcultural theorists argued that subcultures developed as a means by which groups in a subordinate class position attempted to contest the dominant system of values. Youth subcultures appeared as an __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 16 attempt, through ritual and style (rather than conventional political activity), to resolve the problems and dilemmas that were encountered as a result of being in an inferior social class position. In adopting this approach, Hebdige used the concept of style to refer to how various elements were combined to generate meaning and to signify and communicate a way of life to the surrounding world. He conceptualized the style of any subcultural group as made up of an 'ensemble' of bodily postures, mannerisms and movements, clothes, hair cuts, an 'argot' (way of speaking and choice of words), and specific activities that involved the use of music and various commodities. In focusing on the styles of subcultures Hebdige took the previous contrast between a majority and a minority and drew a distinction between subcultural styles and the styles of the 'mainstream'. This has become a key division within subcultural theory and an influential distinction that has been made in much writing on popular music. Hebdige argued that subcultural styles can be distinguished from mainstream styles by the intentional way that they have been 'fabricated' by members of a subculture to actively construct a sense of difference from the conventional outfits worn by the 'average man or woman in the street'. The construction of a style involves the ,appropriation' of existing clothes, commodities, languages, images, sounds and behavioural codes. Through a process of repositioning and recontextualizing these are then reused to generate the meanings of a particular subculture. Hence, any element of a subcultural style could not be understood in isolation. Its meaning was generated in relation to other elements. In observing how subcultures produced a sartorial and sonorial challenge to the conventional codes in the surrounding culture, Hebdige found a parallel in the 'radical aesthetic practices' of Dada and Surrealism (artistic movements that immediately followed the First World War in Europe). During this time artists such as Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp had combined and juxtaposed conventionally incompatible elements in an attempt to subvert common sense and undermine bourgeois conventions. Hebdige drew an analogy between this and the aesthetic practices of audiences and performers during the punk era: Like Duchamp's 'ready mades'
- manufactured objects which qualified as art because fie chose
to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items
- a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor
blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk
(un)fashion ... objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts
found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped
in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners.
Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context
and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip
... fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school
ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti,
or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather
drains or shocking pink mohair tops ... (Hebdige, 1979:106-12) AUDIENCES page 17 These visual 'disruptions' of existing conventions were accompanied by similar challenges to mainstream styles of dancing, music recording and performance. Dancing became a caricature of the 'solo' individualistic gyrating that had been developed to accompany rock music; punks adopted a blank robotic stilted shuffle or engaged in frenzied pogoing by-jumping up and down on the spot. The music was unpolished, informed by an amateur aesthetic that exposed its rough edges in opposition to the sophisticated wellproduced studio music of popular singers such as Elton John and 'progressive rock' bands such as Genesis. Punk music was fast, uniform and based on a limited musical repertoire which relied upon repetitive drumming and a 'barrage of guitars'. The treble was turned up, the bass frequently buried in a muddy mix, and a mannered angry vocal style adopted in which words were screamed, snarled or shouted with lyrics that deliberately opposed the conventions of songwriting as poetry or romance. Hebdige claimed that punk combined music, dancing and visual style in such a way as to signify 'chaos' and 'noise' at various levels. This was a noise that interrupted and disrupted conventional ways of dressing, making music and dancing. Hebdige made an important contribution to theories about the relationship between music, dressing and dancing by indicating how a wide range of visual codes and cultural practices are interrelated and brought together as a style and in opposition to other styles. He demonstrated how young people actively use a range of existing artefacts and in doing so give new meanings to old commodities (against the idea that the commodity will lead to one particular type of consumption). As I have already indicated,
Hebdige's theory drew on but also extended the ideas proposed
by earlier writers who had sought to understand music audiences
in terms of a majority and a minority. Hebdige's little book
has been very significant: it has influenced the Page 18 AUDIENCES ideas of fans who present themselves as 'underground' or 'alternative'; it has influenced the musical and visual styles Put together by musicians; it has influenced the way that journalists have written about subsequent styles of music; and it has provided a model for many subsequent academic research projects. With this in mind, I now want to introduce four criticisms of this type of subcultural approach to music audiences: its male bias; its elitism; the issue of the mainstream; the problem of homology. Subcultures and gender: the boys on the street Feminist writers were quick to spot the ways in which subcultural theory had tended to marginalize the cultural activities of girls and women. As Angela McRobbie (1980) observed, it was the who adopted the clothes of the Edwardian gent; the skinhead's exaggerated working-class boots and braces were male; it was tile female punks who wore the traditionally 'feminine' suspenders. When it came to the issue of gender, the spectacular subcultures did not look quite so 'oppositional'. McRobbie argued that, by emphasizing the highly visible, 'masculine' and public forms of cultural expression that they had observed displayed on the 'street', subcultural theorists had neglected the visual styles and musical practices of girls and women. Furthermore they had neglected the way that the musical activities of girls were often more home-oriented and less immediately visible. By romanticizing the public appearance of subcultures, male theorists had overlooked the very real dangers that are posed to girls and women on the street. With its connotations of female prostitution, 'excessive loitering on street corners might be taken as a sexual invitation to the boys' (McRobbie and Garber, 1991: 5). More than this, the street is a public site from which many women feel excluded due to the way in which such connotations are directly connected to the possibilities of sexual and physical violence. As a result, girls and women are often forced to negotiate 'different leisure spaces' that have been marginalized or rendered 'invisible' from the perspective of subcultural theory. McRobbie and Garber suggested
that these are more likely to be found within a web of family
relationships, friendship networks and off-street sites such
as a youth club. On this point, subcultural theory completely neglected the consumption of music in the home. Hebdige did not even acknowledge the home as a site for the combination of a style before going out into public. Nor did lie consider the domestic context of listening within the dynamics of variety Of family relationships. In pointing to these neglected issues, McRobbie (1994) raised the question of whether there are any differences between the way that men and women, or boys and girls, consume and use popular music. She suggested that theorists of youth Culture should be more attuned to the way that musical activities intersect with gender codes, differing attitudes to sexuality and changing modes of femininity and masculinity. (Such issues do not just arise in consumption and will be pursued in more detail in Chapter 4). The elitism of subculture theory For Gary Clarke (1990), Hebdige's
theory was elitist and Adornofs influence still present, detected
in the casual way in which the vast majority of audience members
were ignored. Clarke argued that, by In addition, the focus of
this type of subcultural theory was on the aesthetic strategies
of the members of subordinate classes. Hebdige was concerned
with their 'art' rather than any explicitly Political activities;
it was in this as ect that 'opposition, was located. The 'solutions'
offered by subcultures were ultimately portrayed as a form of
'symbolic resistance'. Yet many punks were active within a contradictory
array of anarchist and socialist political organizations. Punk
audiences frequently participated in anti-racist struggles, particularly
the Rock Against Racism movement, which was attempting to engage
in Political activity that was far more than symbolic resistance
(Gilroy, 1987; Widgery, 1986). Page 20 AUDIENCES The subcultural minority and the mainstream In his critique, Clarke (1990) asked whether the subcultures that were readily visible to the observing academic were in any way oppositional or alternative to the mainstream. For Dave Laing (1985) they were certainly not, and Hebdige was mistaken in his assumptions that punk was separate from mainstream styles. Tile error that Hebdige had made, according to Laing, was to interpret punk simply as a subculture. In contrast to Hebdige, Laing argued that punk was primarily punk rock, a music genre that existed alongside other music genres. This was firmly part of the 'all-maleguitar-dominated rock' tradition. Far from being outside, it was part of the mainstream, as the style and commercial success of bands like The Stranglers and The Clash bore out (Laing, 1985). Since Hebdige was writing
there has been a proliferation of music genres associated with
different youth groups, each with its own stylistic codes and
conventions. There has also been a growth of leisure practices
that are associated with music consumption (video For Sarah Thornton (1995) it is not, and the mainstream is an uncritically received idea that has been used by various music enthusiasts to distinguish their own 'uncommercial' and 'hip' tastes from those whom they perceive to be corrupted by commerce and the mass media. This has then been represented even more uncritically by academics, such as Riesman with his minority group and Hebdige with his subculture. In contrast, Thornton suggests that the mainstream is not an undifferentiated majority and that the use of this concept conceals a diversity of discriminating practices that are occurring among various musical crowds and taste publics. These may well be labelled subcultures by the media, but they are far from innocent. Through a case study of British rave clubs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thornton argues that audiences are not spontaneous subcultures. Instead, they are carefully created by commercial-oriented club owners who use flyers, magazines, telephone calls and posters to 'deliver a particular crowd to a specified venue on a given night. To a large degree, then, club crowds come pre-sorted and pre-selected' (Thornton, 1995: 22). Although ac __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 21 knowledging that club goers are both 'active and creative', Thornton's main argument is that their activities and distinctions are usually a 'phenomena of the media' (1995: 116). While the club owners are organizing clubbers by 'delivering' them to a venue, their identity is being given by the 'communications media', who 'create subcultures in the process of naming them and draw boundaries around them in the act of describing them' (1995: 162). In place of the voluntarism and spontaneity of Hebdige's subculture, Thornton presents a more calculated process in which the media and commercial interests have been building a subcultural audience for their products since the beginning. Unlike Hebdige, Thornton is more critical of the self-definitions presented by members of subcultures. Setting out to understand how audiences imagine themselves and draw boundaries around their own social world, she argues that the activities of young 'clubbers' consist in acquiring various media products and accumulating cultural knowledge and employing these as a form of 'subcultural capital' (a concept drawn from Pierre Bourdieu (1986) which rests on an analogy with the use of economic capital). Subcultural capital is used by aspiring youth groups as a way of gaining status and to differentiate their own preferences and activities from those of other social groups. Similar ideas about how audiences use musical knowledge as a form of 'symbolic capital' (Roe, 1990) have been pursued by a number of researchers who, considering how audiences think of their own lives in relation to different types of music, have found that patterns of music purchasing and listening vary from place to place and according to education, social class, race, gender and age. Such differences have also shown how preferences for genres, songs and artists are employed as markers of 'distinction' - as a way of indicating a sense of affiliation to and a distance from other individuals, peer groups and classes (Ala et al., 1985; Bourdieu, 1993; Lewis, 1991; Roe, 1985, 1990; Roe and von Feilitzen, 1992; Trondman, 1990). Such activities involve a more conformist struggle for status seeking and recognition rather than any alternative gestures of opposition or resistance. The contrast that this approach
establishes with the subcultural theory of Hebdige takes me back
to Hall and Whannel's point that audiences seem to receive what
they want, need and can creatively use, yet at the same time
they also get what they are given. Popular music seems to provide
opportunities for conformist aspirational Page 22 AUDIENCE status seeking and for more rebellious oppositional activities. Such contrasting conclusions may have been reached because different cultural practices were observed and then interpreted at distinct historical moments (Hebdige in the late 1970s, Thornton at the end of the 1980s), in which case a further issue might be whether certain music audiences are more oppositional, creative and spontaneous than others (and other audiences more manipulated and constructed by media and commercial interests from the start). With the dynamics of commercial manipulation and spontaneous creativity so intricately interwoven and changing over time, the argument about whether music audiences are oppositional and spontaneous, or conformist and manipulated, seems set to continue. From subcultures to scenes Ail alternative perspective, and an attempt to move away from the idea of subcultures, has been suggested by Will Straw (1991) with his development of the concept of a 'music scene'. Although this term has been used for many years by music fans and deployed casually in a number of academic studies, Straw has attempted to apply to it a degree of conceptual rigour. Arguing against the idea of a musical 'community that is stable and rooted in a specific place, Straw suggests that a scene 'is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization' (1991: 273). Although at first sight this
may appear vague, Straw shows how such an approach can be applied
by elaborating on these points in relation to the alternative
rock and dance music scenes in North America. Through this he
shows how scenes can have variable 'logics' and how the participants
in a scene develop different ways of understanding temporal and
spatial change. Straw argues that such logics are directly connected
to the commercial circulation of music recordings. So, for example,
the alternative rock scene is understood by its participants
in relation to a canon of music recordings (usually albums) that
encode a particular sense of historical time and geographical
place. Dance has a faster temporal logic, organized more usually
around single tracks rather than albums, and operates within
and across different spaces that connect to AUDIENCES page 23 gether urban locations from where important dance music has emerged. Straw contends that music scenes are not necessarily oppositional or disruptive subcultures, but neither are the practices of the people who make up a particular scene simply shaped by the music industries. He suggests that scenes do not spontaneously emerge from a particular group, class or community, but from various 'coalitions' and 'alliances' which have to be actively created and maintained. It is through such practices that specific boundaries are erected and social divisions drawn. Straw points out that both the alternative rock and dance scenes are notable for creating boundaries in relation to class, race, gender and age. Straw's concept provides a framework for thinking about musical audiences that is looser and more fluid than theories of subcuIture. However, it affords relatively little indication of the dynamics that might be involved. It is not clear how scenes emerge and what social processes might contribute to the establishment of audience alliances - unlike Hebdige's analysis of the intentional construction of a style in an attempt to create meanings in opposition to the mainstream and conventional. On this point, the rather abstract model of a scene as sketched by Straw seems to tell us little more than that people form musical taste groupings around particular genres of music. It doesn't really indicate how such musical preferences might lead to the formation of 'alliances' which are anything more than shared consumption habits. Homology and the internationalization of subcultural styles Straw's concept of the scene has been proposed as an attempt to move away from the idea of a necessary relation between social location and musical consumption. It is a challenge to the assumption of a 'homology' - the idea that all of the parts that go to make up a style (most notably dress, dancing and music) form a unity that expresses the 'whole way of life' of the subcultural group (Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1990). Although Hebdige acknowledged that the relationship between experience, expression and signification may be 'disrupted', his general argument was that the punk subculture emerged as a re- __________________________________________________________________ Page 24 AUDIENCES sponse to very specific social circumstances. In addition, while Hebdige certainly presented far more than a straightforward 'reflection' theory (the participants actively create their style as a response to specific social conditions), this approach does leave two problems. One pertains to the direction of the implied causality in Hebdige's homology. The other issue concerns what we are to make of subcultural styles that have 'moved out' from the initial location of their first appearance. I shall deal with each in turn. In presenting a theory of how the punk subcultural style emerged as a response to a subordinate class position, Hebdige tended to produce a one-sided causal theory of homology. In emphasizing how audiences reconstructed the texts (clothing, music and body movements), he neglected the way that 'texts construct their own appropriate audiences' (Grossberg, 1992: 41). This point can be pursued further by returning to Laing's argument about punk rock. In maintaining that punk was not outside a mainstream, Laing (1985) stressed that it was first and foremost a music genre rather than a subcuIture. By doing this Laing sought to challenge Hebdige by placing music as central to any understanding of punk, arguing that the activities of its fans and performers were shaped by its character as a music genre rather than a subcuIture. Laing suggested that, rather than subcultures spontaneously generating their own sounds and visual conventions, the emergence of a new music genre can create the conditions for subcultural activity. From this perspective it is the music that provides the impetus for groupings of people actively to come together and create a style. In contrast to Hebdige's account of subcultural style which treated the music as one (rather unimportant) element, Laing suggests that the music is far more significant in providing the preconditions and impetus for any subcuIture to form in the first place. The other point, about subcultures moving away from their local origins, can be pursued by asking a more general question about punk: how are we to make sense of the internationalization of this particular way of dressing, dancing and making a noise? What does a subcultural style mean as it has moved from its authentic point of origin and been adopted in different parts of the world? What do the sounds and visuals of punk style mean as they are exhibited in the clubs of San Francisco, on the streets of Tokyo or on the beaches of Rio? One response might be to assert that this process merely involves acts of imitation and commercial exploitation; the original was an __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 25 authentic example of cultural expression whereas subsequently punk has become a commodified fashion. This would certainly seem a plausible argument when considered in relation to the appearance of the punk look in shopping malls, on TV comedy programmes and on tourist postcards. However, the punk style and way of making music has also been adopted to register similar forms of social disaffiliation and to disrupt dominant conventions in comparable, but more politically charged ways to those described by Hebdige. The sounds and images of punk were transformed and reappropriated by many musicians and audience members in the Stalinist states of Central and Eastern Europe during the 1980s. Punk noises and visuals were used to register a sense of distance from and opposition to political repression and to challenge state-promoted culture (such as officially sanctioned rock bands). Punk styles of music and dress were adopted to register,opposition in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the German Democratic Republic. These were often greeted with censorship, physical assault, sanction and detention Ryback, 1990) - a historical echo that is not too far away from the actions of local government during the 1970s in Britain which banned particular artists from performing, audiences from meeting and recordings from distribution (Savage, 1991; Cloonan, 1993). The sounds, words and images that have been distributed via the media and music industries can be used in different ways and provide possibilities for a variety of conformist or oppositional activities. But they are not necessarily always going to take on the same form or fit neatly into subcultural categories. There is, then, more than a 'homology' connecting social experience and musical expression. Creative audiences and imaginative fans A number of writers have responded to the criticisms of subcultural theory that I have just outlined by focusing on the audiences for music in less exclusive terms. Here I shall refer to two authors who have made contributions to this area of study, Lisa Lewis and lain Chambers. Lisa Lewis has carried out
studies of the viewers of MTV and the activities of fans at concerts
and at various public'fan events'(1990). Page 26 AUDIENCES In her own work, and by drawing together writers for a collection of articles (Lewis, 1992), Lewis has thoroughly challenged the types of listeners identified by Adorno and the focus on hip minorities by subcultural theorists. Like Joli Jensen (1992), she has suggested that fans are neither regressive, obsessed, alienated individuals nor a manipulated collective mass. Instead, fans are imaginative, discriminating people who are capable of making a number of fine distinctions and who actively participate in creating the meanings that become associated with popular music. Fans contribute an integral element to how we understand popular music and particular artists. Lewis suggests that fans create communities with a collective shared sense of identity that is built around their appreciation of a particular performer. Such groups produce important ,reservoirs of knowledge' that contribute directly to the meanings attributed to performers. This is relevant to the most obvious subcultural styles (Hebdige clearly shows how a large part of the meaning of punk came from the activities of its audiences), but Lewis's argument is also relevant to the teenage and pre-teenage fans of pop performers such as Take That, New Kids on the Block, Menudo, and The Osmonds. Here again the activities and appearance of the fans became an integral part of how the identity of the performers was understood. But such connections are also relevant to a wide range of performers. How could we understand the enduring popularity of Bob Dylan, for example, without reference to the legions of highly intelligent people who have followed him around for years and who have continued to find profound meanings in some of his most banal and wilfully ironic utterances? Like Lewis, lain Chambers's (1985, 1994) work can be read as a refutation of Adorno's thesis that the activities of listeners can be explained as manipulated by the recording industry. Chambers argues that record companies, radio stations and the music press are unable to control the meanings of the texts and technologies that they produce and distribute. While the industries might have a direct impact on how music is produced, they are unable to control the way it is used by audiences. Like Hebdige, but less concerned
to find easily identified subcultures, Chambers argues that the
commodities of the music industry are actively transformed as
they are 'appropriated' by various groups and individuals and
then used for the expression of individual identities, symbolic
resistance, leisure pursuits and forms of collective and democratic
musical creativity in everyday life. Cham- AUDIENCES page 27 bers draws examples from the 1960s when hippies used music in festivals, anti-war demonstrations and various 'happenings' that were associated with the counter-culture, and develops his narrative through to the middle of the 1980s when vinyl records, turntables, tape machines and mixing equipment were reused to create the distinctive styles of rap and hip-hop. In narrating a predominantly British history, Chambers (1985) has emphasized the diversity of pop styles and the constant changes that popular music had undergone since the middle of the 1950s. He has also highlighted how music has been central to audiences' and listeners' lives, frequently having a direct impact on the surrounding society and culture. This might range from individual expressions of sexuality through dancing in a disco, to large-scale musical events that attempt to contribute to-the creation of cultural and political solidarity with oppressed people in another part of the world. This is the complete antithesis of Adorno's model of passive easy listening, individual alienation and mass manipulation. It is a theory about diversity, plurality and the active individual and collective participation in musical practices - a social activity during which the texts and technologies of popular music continually provide opportunities for a wide range of people to participate in aesthetic, political and cultural activity. Drawing on similar theoretical traditions to Hebdige, Chambers has emphasized the way that popular music is 'polysemantic' - it has many meanings. The music industry cannot simply churn out standardized products with a sole meaning and only one possible use. Instead, many possibilities are made available at the same time, and it is ultimately the audience who are able to 'appropriate' these and determine which will predominate. For Chambers popular music can provide insights into how people receive and then actively use cultural forms in different ways throughout everyday life, not just in the rare and exclusive moments of subcultural style formation. Popular music in everyday life Chambers's work can be read as an attempt to move beyond a concern with exclusive subcultures and to consider how music is experienced across 'the immediate surfaces of everyday life' (1985:211). __________________________________________________________________ Page 28 AUDIENCES However, his approach still retains many of the assumptions of subcultural theory. Like subcultural theorists, Chambers argues that powerful new sounds emerge from the margins and challenge existing musical conventions. He also privileges the idea of resistance, characterizing music as 'an important counter-space in our daily lives' which can escape from or challenge various socially enforced routines and categories (1985: 209). In these respects, Chambers has not pursued music very far across the surfaces of daily life and still seems to be searching for the extraordinary moments identified by subcultural theorists. III contrast to such an approach, research conducted in Sweden suggests that much music listening takes place within existing conventions and routines rather than contrary to them. Following empirical studies of children and young people (a broad age group between three and 24 years old) Celia von Feilitzen and Keith Roe found that, 'depending on age, 75-90 per cent of all music listening occurs in connection with some other parallel activity' (1990: 62). Unlike that of subcultural theorists, this research focused less on public display and more on the home and domestic context. Von Feilitzen and Roe found that the most common activities that accompanied music were waking up, eating, homework and housework. Such findings support Simon Frith's (1983) criticism of subcultural theory, and his argument that music is more frequently a background to other activity than a central part of any 'counter-space' or 'cultural struggle'. However, if we pursue this theme too far we will be led to a dichotomy: music as foreground or music as background. Such a distinction can be misleading, implying that music can be identified as central/ foreground or peripheral/ background, when more often it is an integral part that should be understood in relation to other very particular cultural practices and activities. Such an approach has been pursued in much folk-music scholarship that has been carried out concurrently with the growth of subcultural theory. As Mike Pickering has observed of this strand of research, the aim has been to get close to 'the lived realities of popular song in vernacular milieu' (1990: 38). Via studies of particular musical events and performances, and through tracing the way songs have been actively used and transformed as they have endured through time (Pickering and Green, 1987), such research has sought to understand the 'localised usage of song, as it is assimilated into the fabric of everyday life' (Pickering, 1990: 38). A similarly more open and __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 29 less subculturally exclusive approach to the use of music in everyday life has also featured in more recent studies by Ruth Finnegan and Sara Cohen in Britain, Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi and Charles Keil in the United States and Jocelyne Guilbault in the Caribbean. These researchers have been particularly significant in pushing the study of audiences into a broader approach to music as an integral part of everyday life. Through a study of amateur musicians in Milton Keynes, Finnegan (1989) has highlighted how musical consumption is an integral element of everyday musical production. Finnegan's anthropological study focused on musical practices grounded in a specific town, where she found much creativity as local musicians invested considerable effort in acquiring instruments, rehearsing, recording and performing. Finnegan suggested that 'consumption' was central to the way in which musicians created their own identities and sounds by imitating and learning from existing recordings. Hence her study sought further to undermine the idea that consumption is passive (and directly in contrast to the idea that production is more active) by highlighting how becoming a musician involves consuming as well as producing music. Like Finnegan, Cohen has studied music making in an English city. Her research has been focused on the way that music is part of everyday social relations and interactions in Liverpool, from the devoted audiences for unknown rock bands to the various groups of people who seek to claim The Beatles as their own (1991a, 1995a). A particularly interesting, and unusual, case study is Cohen's account of how music fits into the life of 88-year-old Jack Levy. Through an anthropological study that starts with the details of one person's unique experience, Cohen (1995b) shows how music can be closely connected with memory - both of past events in an individual life and also in the historical memory of being Jewish in England. She highlights how music is often an integral part of many social gatherings of the Jewish community, but also provides a tangible and tactile connection to family and friends through the exchange of music recordings. Cohen evokes the idea of Liverpool Jews living in a 'circle', one part of which is formed by the exchange of music recordings. She quotes Jack recalling that 'somehow those records came around. And one person got hold of one, and it was passed all around! Jewish records and songs became part of the circle and part of the process of defining it (Cohen, 1995b: 437). ___________________________________________________________________ Here Cohen gives ail indication of ]low people of varying ages are joined together through quite specific 'musical circles' - created through the circulation of songs and recordings that is far removed from the logic of youth-oriented subcultures and scenes. The concept of musical circles, which remains slightly underdeveloped in Cohen's study, may provide a useful metaphor for exploring some of the quite tangible ways in which albums, compact discs and cassettes are used to create connections with other people that are defined through the circulation of music. Like Cohen's work, tile research conducted by Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi and Charles Keil (1993) for their 'Music in Daily Life Project' has involved detailed study of the musical activities of people who span a broad range of social backgrounds and who are between the ages of four and 83. In their book they recount how music is important for children as lullabies, for dancing and as an accompaniment to outdoor activities, and focus oil older people who have gained significant religious and military experiences in association with music. The authors also provide details of flow people use various types of music as a mood enhancer and for the emotions that it generates. While this material is presented with little theoretical framing or discussion, as George Lipsitz has written in his Foreword, the research clearly shows that 'people listen across the spectrum of genre categories, and very few individuals identify themselves as interested only in one kind of music' (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil, 1993: xiii). This research suggests that musical preferences do not simply correspond to market research categories and cannot 'easily be clustered into subcultures'. However, there is more than an implicit theory of free market individualism on offer in this book. Charles Keil acknowledges this explicitly when he writes that'each person is unique. Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an "idioculture" or idiosyncratic culture in sound' (Crafts, Cavicchi and Keil, 1993: 2). Unlike Cohen, who uses one individual's experience to show how music listening leads into and is part of a range of social relationships, this book simply ignores the characteristics that individual musical activities (or 'signatures and fingerprints') might share with other people and atomizes musical preference into a plurality of unique individual choices. __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 31 Finally in this section I shall mention Jocelyne Guilbault's study of zouk in the Caribbean. In this research Guilbault also starts from individual experiences but she then relates these to her broader concern with how 'various cultures respond to the same music' (1993a: xvii). Focusing mainly on the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia and Dominica, she shows how zouk has generated a complex of responses and interpretations. Some people love the music as a way of unwinding and relaxing, for its sense of freedom and youthful vibrancy, for providing a feeling of home or for contributing to pride and unity among people. Others hate it for its banality and monotony, for its alienating impact oil young people and for being a thoroughly 'degenerate music'. As -we begin to hear echoes of Adorno arguing with Chambers, Guilbault provides a sophisticated analysis of such contrasting ideas by relating these musical meanings to various geographical, generational, gender and class divisions. She also shows how the interpretation of the music changes as it becomes more popular around the world as a result of commercial tie-ups with the recording industries of France. Although zouk is a focus for marking social divisions when relatively confined to the islands, as its popularity spreads it begins to provide a sense of home and a proud 'we' feeling for different people, both on the islands and among those dispersed from tile islands. Guilbault, like Cohen, indicates how music is closely related to cultural identity. She also shows how the meaning of music changes (both at home and away) as it moves out from its point of origins - just as the meaning of punk changed for different audiences as it moved out from Britain to other parts of the world. These four studies are notable in many ways. Here I want to identify four reasons why I consider them to be important in relation to the general discussion in this chapter: The activities associated with 'consumption' and the idea of the, audience' is by no means straightforward. The practices of musicians are those of both 'consumers' and 'producers'. Rock musicians learn riffs from recordings and perform these on equipment purchased as consumers, yet can very soon be playing concerts and making their own recordings as producers. Likewise, many rap musicians have started out as consumers of existing recordings, turntables and mixing equipment in the process of becoming the new producers. __________________________________________________________________ page 32 AUDIENCES The audiences for music are composed of more than just young people. As I have already indicated, research since the 1950s has been characterized by an overemphasis oil young people (now only a small part of the world-wide audience for various popular musics) and an overobservation of the public activities and styles of the street and the club. It should be fairly obvious that such an orientation privileges a very specific type of activity and person and neglects an enormous amount of musical activity engaged in by a variety of other audiences across the world. o These studies indicate that the activity of music audiences does not fit neatly into many existing theoretical models or commercial music marketing categories (look in your own music collection, no matter how large or small, and see if you agree). The research above shows that individual tastes are eclectic and that the mixture of music in many people's lives is lived across commercial and scholarly categories. Musical activity cannot be contained within the discrete boundaries proposed by theories of subcuIture, nor by the music industry's segmentation of social life into marketing categories or taste publics. o The same musical genre or piece of music may be enjoyed and engaged with in completely different ways. Quite different audience experiences and activities are associated with listening to the same music in a performance event in stadiums, while driving or jogging with a Walkman or while dancing to a juke box in an open-air bar. These studies suggest that the meaning of music is very hard to tie down, and indicate that we could learn much about music audiences by studying the same music in different contexts and among different people. Conclusion: the active audience and the industry I started this chapter with Adorno's model of a passive and manipulated audience and, through a discussion of theories that made a distinction between a passive majority and an active minority, I have concluded with a consideration of theories about a great variety of different activities. As the writers I have been discussing in the latter part of this chapter have shown, behind the simple terms ,audience' and 'consumption' there lurk a wide range of behaviours, creative activities and discriminating practices. __________________________________________________________________ However, some critics have raised questions about where such theoretical orientations might lead and asked: do music audiences confront so many possibilities? Are we all so free in our choices and spontaneously creative when experiencing music or using recorded music products? Do theories of the active audience provide merely an uncritical celebration of the free market ideology of consumer capitalism? These were the types of questions that a number of theorists started asking in the early 1990s, not only those thinking about popular music (Thornton, 1995) but writers studying other media and cultural forms where ideas about the active audience had grown in popularity (Curran, 1990; Frith, 1991; Morley, 1993). The questions concerned how 'active' audiences actually are and how ,open' to interpretation and different. use the texts and technologies might be. Pondering these points in relation to similar debates about the audiences for television, David Morley observed that being active is not the same thing as having power and influence; for viewers and listeners to 'reinterpret meanings is hardly equivalent to the discursive power of centralised media institutions to construct the texts that the viewer then interprets' (Morley, 1993: 16). Morley asked whether the activities of viewers and listeners might be limited by being directed towards certain 'preferred' meanings and social uses. In raising this question Morley was drawing on an earlier model of 'encoding/ decoding' that had been formulated by Stuart Hall (1980). Hall had suggested that, while media texts could be interpreted in various ways, such possibilities were limited and that audiences were directed towards particular meanings. Audiences then had to adopt particular strategies in relation to this; viewers could accept the dominant meaning, negotiate and only partially accept this or they could develop an independent interpretation. Hall thus made a schematic distinction between audience activity based around dominant, negotiated and oppositional interpretations of media texts - a contrast with the assumption of one 'effect' or the idea of numerous 'polysemantic' possibilities that has informed much of the active audience theory discussed in this chapter. Hall was referring to news and current affairs programming, and I do not want to leap straight from an analysis of television viewing to popular music reception; there are vast differences in the way that the two cultural forms are received and used. This model also __________________________________________________________________ page 34 AUDIENCES has its problems, not least the difficulty of identifying what the preferred meaning might be and where it might be found in the encoding-decoding process. However, Morley has suggested that Hall's ideas might provide a way of taking a fresh look at the issue in order to ask a number of more critical questions about the activity of audiences. For example, in what ways do performers and the music industries direct fans to certain 'preferred' meanings? How do musical technologies and texts 'encode' particular meanings, uses and interpretations and how do audiences then actually 'decode' these? Do some forms of music encourage a more 'passive' acceptance of dominant societal codes while others provide possibilities for more 'oppositional' activity? Surely there are many differences- in the activities of audiences for rock, rap, country, classical, jazz, folk, easy listening, film soundtracks and stage musicals - how does audience activity vary and what impact does the place of audience activity have on the use of music? Are the groups of people singing in karaoke boxes more 'active' than the audiences applauding at concerts or the individuals listening alone on their personal stereos? Such questions are particularly important in light of the way that music has been used in a deliberate attempt to influence human behaviour. Buried away in many business magazines and management journals are reports of behavioural studies which seek to understand how 'functional music' can be used to manipulate the buying patterns of supermarket shoppers, the eating habits of patrons in restaurants, the well-being of passengers waiting in airports and the productivity of workers in factories, shops and offices (see, for example, Bruner, 1990; Lanza, 1994; MacLeod, 1979; Milliman, 1982). Simon Jones and Thomas Schumacher (1992) have pointed out that since the 1950s (the moment when audiences seem to start becoming more active) this functional music has been used in more and more situations: on passenger ships and airlines, in sports stadiums, zoos, hospitals, public parks, cemeteries, health clinics, bars, swimming pools and hotel lobbies. This has been integrated into quite particular environments and given specific sound levels depending on whether that environment is a restaurant, an airport, a clothing store or a children's toy shop. Companies such as the Muzak Corporation and their clients have been spending vast amounts of money on acquiring copyrights to songs, employing arrangers to modify well-known pieces of music __________________________________________________________________ AUDIENCES page 35 and then profiling and monitoring the behaviour of various 'audiences' (Jones and Schumacher, 1992; Lanza, 1994). The Muzak Corporation's own research suggests that they are effective - that their music programming can make us purchase more or work harder. So, how imaginative or resistant can an active audience be in such circumstances? While clearly showing that audiences for popular music are not passive dupes, most of the arguments about active audiences tend to ignore the influence of the music (and muzak) corporations. This they do despite the fact that the 'audience' features prominently in the commercial strategies of such corporations. After all, if audiences are so active and can create their own 'oppositional' messages and meanings without giving in to any 'preferred' ideas, why do entertainment corporations spend so much money on promotion, marketing and advertising? Why are the audiences for star performers the subject of extensive market research, analysis and carefully targeted marketing? As Morley observed, being active is not the same as having power and influence. Theories about the active audience tend to evade the issue of how the activities of consumption might be shaped by the industries involved, how musical products and visual styles are made available for 'appropriation' in the first place and how they may limit the opportunities for creative use and interpretation available at any one time. Following Morley's argument, it might be suggested that, while audiences have historically been physically separated or dislocated from most of the sites of musical production, they are not separate from the processes of musical production. The contribution of active audience theory has been to challenge Adorno by showing how audiences are not easily stupefied and contribute much to producing the meanings of popular music. But, perhaps we should now follow Adorno's tracks back into the world of musical production and start asking further questions about the relationships between the music industries and the audiences.
END OF ARTICLE |