Research - Popular Music Theory

It’s important to understand theories and the theorists who made them because we as an audience don’t actually understand the background to why music is how it is today. We are working class people who are seen as dumb and stupid because we follow the popular culture and we need to understand this. As media students, we should definitely have some sort of understanding to the music culture we are around/what we follow everyday of our lives.

Popular Culture Theory.

Popular culture is the understanding of ideas and attitudes of the mainstream culture in society which has a large influence upon us an audience. Popular culture became mainstream in the 1980’s and was influenced by disseminating the cultural material. It was produced through mass media and was able to through the audiences’ cultural products. Mainly our generation follow the popular culture due to how much it relates to our lifestyle. The popular culture theory says that popular music uses slang, imitates our lifestyle and can relate to us as teenagers/young adults.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony.

Gramsci was a leading Marxist thinker. He rejected economist and insisted on the independence of ideology from economic determinism. Gramsci also rejected cruse materialism which offers a humanist version of Marxism, also focusing on human subjectivity.

Hegemony - The term means to look down upon the predominance of someone's social class over others (bourgeois hegemony). This represents political and economic control and the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world. This is so that those who are subordinated by accepting it as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural’. This is involving willing and active consent.

Gramsci emphasizes struggle. He said that ‘common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself’.

Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt school refers to a group of german-american theorists who developed powerful analyses of changes in the western society during the war. Two main theorists in the Frankfurt school are max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

Both theorists said “Programmes watch for their audiences and popular music hears for those who listen”.

Theodor Adorno.

Adorno made the Hegemony triangle. This explains how the bourgeoisie (higher class people like the government, royal family, politicians, etc.) are the smart ones that know the real meaning of ‘True art’, which consists of jazz, classical and ancient pieces of art. It explains that the working class people (everyone else) are dumb and everything is ‘dumbed down’ for us to understand. The in between is where stars, artists and other entertainers belong. They distract us from the true art that only the bourgeoisie deserve to have as the triangle represents that they will be the only people to understand ‘true art’.

Birmingham school and its theory is also based around the hegemony. Stuart hall is a cultural theorist and sociologist that supports Antonio Gramsci's theory. Stuart Created his theory from 1973 to 1980 and created the 'encoding' and 'decoding' theory. Encoding is a process by which a text is constructed by its producers. Decoding is when the audience read, understand and interpret. Stuart was inspired by Barthes Theory of Decoding and Encoding to create this.

Dick Hebdige mainly studied Subcultures and how they are made within the masses on the Adorno triangle. He is against Adorno's triangle as he suggests that within the working class group they are different personalities and different groups of individuals which will have an interest in different genres of music. not everyone listens to Pop or Hip Hop.

Conclusion: I learnt many different theorists/theories which may agree with each other to go against each other within the music industry and why people are entertained in different ways. My beliefs in the Popular Music Culture Theory is that it is made to entertain and relate to a wide range of audiences and is only made to keep us as an audience entertained. It creates no morals or life lessons which will help an individual, it just entertains with the typical beats and lyrics which everyone hears every single day. Popular Music Culture is repetitive and audiences fall for it all the time.