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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or pseudo-involuntary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance. By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography, while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Pop Music Is a Form of Indexical Art
Hey, Bo Diddley!
Listening to yourself remembering
Billie and Lee: voice, percussion and effect
Recording beyond nature and culture
Magic, misfits and mishaps
Mortality and death: ethnography, spiritism and voices
Noise, makeup, ringing the bell: laboratory and studio, medium and form
Notes
2 Pop Music Belongs to the Second of Three Culture Industries
Culture industries and contradictions
The three culture industries
Notes
3 At the Heart of Pop Music Is No Object, but an Impulse to Connect
Configurations and constellations of the arts and media: linking and recognition
Recipients built the pyramids
Music as default storage
Recognition
Interconnection, mass identification and engagement
4 An Assembly of Effects and Small Noises
Social visibility
Teenage bedrooms: vestibules of society
Singularity and authenticity
The case against phoniness: youth culture and counterculture
Re-emergence of the high–low divide
Connections and disconnections
Autonomization
Notes
5 Minus Music: Popularity and Criticism
Four negations of music
Pop music and the popular
Politics and pop music: the age of manned space travel
Notes
6 Production Aesthetics
Music is noise made by a subject; pop music is noises generated when subjects are not subjects
Who do you love?
Performance and pose
Interruption and disunity
Camp and the ontology of stardom
The making of
Pop minus music
Non-teleological music
Aesthetics of causation
Communities and elites
Reporting the event, being the event
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Diedrich Diederichsen, Aesthetics of Pop Music
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Boris Groys, Becoming an Artwork
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Aesthetics of Pop Music
Diedrich Diederichsen
Translated by George Robarts
polity
Copyright © Diedrich Diederichsen 2023
This English translation © Polity Press 2023
The right of Diedrich Diederichsen to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5204-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022952031
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
I have opted for the term ‘pop music’ (not pop, not rock, not R&B) because it has the widest possible scope. What I will discuss in the following chapters is as applicable to Britney Spears as it is to John Zorn, encompassing styles complex and simple, sophisticated and unsophisticated, and covering a historical period of around 65–70 years. As such, I cannot and will not go into the specific details of this corpus (beyond giving examples), but will attempt instead to pin down a general conception of pop music, proposing the contents to a theory rather than expounding the theory in full; in two far more extensive books published in German – Über Pop Musik [On Pop Music] (2014) and Körpertreffer [BodyHits] (2017) – I have begun to attempt the latter.
Though my intellectual background is varied, I am influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School – although I do not by any means share its scepticism and its judgements, perhaps even its resentments towards the cultural phenomena explored here. I shall also draw on the methodology of an old adversary of the Frankfurt School: so-called German media theory (Medienwissenschaften), as formulated by Friedrich Kittler. Although I disagree with some of its historical and intellectual foundations (Heidegger), I ascribe considerable importance to the construction of cultural regimes and systems by media technology. As you will see, I also take inspiration from other notable theoretical approaches (Luhmann’s systems theory, Hall’s cultural studies). My books, however, are not primarily academic by nature. They tend to combine the genres of the discursive text and the manifesto.
1Pop Music Is a Form of Indexical Art
Hey, Bo Diddley!
The aesthetics of pop music, not its sociology, not its history! What is stimulating and attractive about pop music, what desires does it elicit or even satisfy, what does it instigate? Does it cause experiences of a specific nature (aesthetic experiences), and who does what kind of business with these experiences? Is business limiting the possibility of experiences? And first and foremost: is this not part of an aesthetics of music? No, on the contrary: pop music is only partly music. In fact, I shall attempt to define pop music as an entity constituted by very specific peculiarities that – across the unimaginable volume of productions, names, anecdotes, stylistic concepts and life stories that positivist pop-geek scholarship has engaged with to date – exhibit a certain consistency. Pop music always involves a musical recording, but it is also fundamentally reliant on visual images in various media and outlets; on performances connected to the recordings; on a non-teleological, more African- than Europeanin-fluenced form of music; on the veneration of the star performer’s body; and on the direct physical presence of the (human) voice and of (specific mechanical or electronic) sound effects, which are transmitted via indexical signals and which can be recognized in public and live settings, whereby the recipients are activated in a certain way. These aesthetic qualities demand a different approach from that of theories and histories of pop music focused principally on sociology/ethnography or musicology – not to mention the countless autobiographies penned by musicians and fans.
Seen from this different perspective, pop music’s practitioners and recipients have discovered that the involuntary, the appeal of a specific physicality, is more valuable than the skilful. They flaunt themselves, they are licentious, they flirt – but they produce no detachable, transportable objects; neither masterpieces nor trash. Rather, they produce countless fetishes and access points: links, relay stations, but hardly autonomous works – and it is not for nothing that the most work-like link in the pop music chain is called an ‘album’. An album being a collection of memory-preserving photos.
Porn, reality TV, gastronomy, tourism, Tik-Tok and Instagram have long known about the economically expedient and extremely profitable resource of the involuntary, and have now, in the footsteps of pop music, developed vitality art into vitality marketing. Whether pop music has thereby become irrelevant or in need of change, whether it has ever been anything but a laboratory for exploiting the involuntary, as opposed to a genuine emancipatory machine, needs to be discussed.
Pop music makers must find techniques and methods of purposely manufacturing the involuntary, the alluring, the very fabric of desire – which is actually impossible. You cannot be purposely purposeless, you cannot craft a plan to wander aimlessly and get lost. The paradox that might help here is a device I call the pose: adopting a posture that can help make something involuntary happen. Mastering the act of passivity.
But some artists have better ideas of their own. Take Bo Diddley, who at the very start of his career, in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, jiggles down the steps onto the stage to a seemingly endless West African-sounding guitar riff, and greets himself, his own artificial persona: ‘Hey, Bo Diddley!’ And his band answers: ‘Hey, Bo Diddley!’ This is the true self of pop music: a persona, totally fabricated and yet someone very specific, a fiction and yet an utterly unique character, ratified by a very specific physicality – that of Bo Diddley. However, he also needs the television set that enables him to propel sound and image, the singer, songwriter and guitarist Bo Diddley and the persona Bo Diddley, onto a public stage, whooped on by countless conspicuous teenagers in the audience, to whom the camera occasionally pans, simultaneously broadcasting them into cosy living rooms and bedrooms, where a teenager is sitting alone and not alone. This teenager will step out into the world, and will not only rediscover the source of the sound in public, but will also recognize for themself the squealing recognition performed by the teenagers on television – when he or she recognizes another or the same performer on another stage, and shouts: ‘There he is!’
Listening to yourself remembering
Narcissism and self-reference are key elements of pop music’s genesis and of the reference complex that constitutes it. The function of an electronic madeleine was first identified before pop music as I characterize it ever existed. In a very early essay,1 Adorno explains how we hear technologically recorded music – and all pop music begins with a recording – no longer as music (that is, classical European music as he understands it: as a performance of a score in need of constant refreshment), but as a memory of a specific recording and thus as a memory of one’s own specific hearing. He calls this effect the ‘photo album’: listening to recorded music on a record player or any other playback device is like leafing through a photo album. If I look at a photo of my husband in front of the Rialto Bridge or my wife on the Matterhorn, I see not the Matterhorn or the Rialto, but an indexical record of the physical presence of my spouse (and the photographer) on a specific day and in a specific place. Beethoven’s piano sonata op. 111 is the Rialto; my listening to a recording by Glenn Gould of the same sonata, which I first listened to on Suarezstraße in Berlin through an open window at sunset one evening in early summer, corresponds to the Venice trip with my husband. But any disappointment with the loss of a very specific musical tradition through the (perceived) shift in its meaning – from reception as reconstruction of artistic intention, and of the supra-subjective plan that such works claim to follow – to pure narcissism via the technological medium of recording, fails to recognize that we still absolutely need the Matterhorn or the Rialto to make these people visible. We likewise still need music to create the connections that constitute pop music as a constellation, as a dispositif.
Billie and Lee: voice, percussion and effect
Let us cast our minds back for a moment to 2021. The teenage superstar Billie Eilish brings to market a new, widely acclaimed album (Happier Than Ever), masterful and artful in equal measure. And with the death of the reggae producer, writer, singer and visual artist Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Afro-Caribbean music loses one of its most important artists and innovators, a towering figure for his pioneering of dub. These two perhaps represent the poles of what I call pop music (as distinguished from rock, a subdomain of pop music, or soul, another subdomain, or popular music, a domain that intersects with pop music but is not identical to it; and as contrasted with pop culture, a misleading term that we must eventually return to; and as opposed to pop – a hazy prefix for all occasions).
What is striking about Billie Eilish is a particular artificial usage and staging of her voice. Its aesthetic precept lies not in the expansion or elaboration of musical possibilities: it is not about voice control, volumes or novel sounds; it is not about innovations that could plausibly be pinned down through notation. What is particularly striking about this is that it occurs in a segment of the pop music complex that appeals largely to a younger audience.
In every form of music, the voice represents the conjunction of what is naturally – and involuntarily – given as a precondition, with its use in artistic creation founded on learning, ability, knowledge and intention. This natural precondition, however, entails not only the physical laws of acoustics (as with a trumpet), but also a sentient human body. In pop music, the individual, contingent, mortal, specific body is more important than the learnable skills of mastering it or of mastering an instrument. The primary concern is the vestiges of the body captured through sound recording, albeit usually secondarily embedded in a – by no means arbitrary – musical performance. The relationship between musically describable elements and phonographically particular elements (i.e., what recording enables to be repeated and reproduced through the artist’s body at the moment of recording, via the materiality of machines and instruments) can be balanced in innumerable ways: in terms of which is structurally dominant, which element governs the other and renders it intelligible, and also in terms of the percentage of music versus physical contingencies and/or specifics. In the case of Abba, for example, compositional and notational elements are almost entirely responsible for a song’s success and reception, as with the hits and popular songs of the olden days; sound and recording are demarcated to the maximum: the ‘spectacle of the melody’ (Terre Thaemlitz) dominates. In the case of J Dilla or Drake, by contrast, notatable elements are negligible or cryptic in the extreme, eluding the instructional symbols of musical notation. Again, however, it would be a mistake to confuse pop music with pure sound art; just like music, it is sound art only in part.
Eilish performs an enjoyment of her own voice that is both historical and unprecedented. Such enjoyment was first exhibited in the 1950s by individuals – usually seen as hotheads or mavericks – who dared to use their individual, ‘flawed’ voices with confidence, despite having no formal vocal training. But these voices were often found at the fringes of society, ethnicized or marginalized by the mainstream. Voice was still bound up with vote: new voices signified a broadening of the democratic spectrum. In the 1960s and ’70s, the age of counterculture and of men with long (feminine-coded) hair, using a ‘weak’ voice on the public platform became a sign of sensitivity; nasalization was cool (Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Lou Reed), and even the loud, booming, often roaring voices that emerged in this period (Robert Plant, Roger Chapman,
