comm2050

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comm2050

• Music, Sound Cultural Policy

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Sound, Society and EmotionThe significance of
aural space

• Lullabies
• Games, especially childrens games
• Work Music (British sea shanties, work songs)
• Dancing
• Storytelling (Bardic traditions)
• Ceremonies and Festivals
• Battle
• Communication
• Personal Symbol (Saami people (Lapps) and the
  joik)
• Ethnic or Group identity (indigenous Australians
  also marks ties to country)
• Salesmanship
• Healing
• Trance
• Religious ritual
• Gregory 1997, The roles of music in society the
  ethnom,usicological perspective, in David
  Hargreaves and Adrian North eds., The social
  psychology of music, Oxford University Press,
  Oxford, New York and Tokyo, pp. 123-140.

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Course overview

• This course is taught through a 2 hour
  lecture/seminar and 1 hour tutorial.
• Course staff Dr Susan Luckman Jon Dale
• Tutes start this week
• Course Reader available _at_ Campus Central Magill
  for 19
• Course home page http//www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au
  /Courses/course.asp?Course100386

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Approaches to young people and their behaviour

• Early to mid-20th century
• Popular (low) culture considered wholly
  inferior to elite (high) culture
• Media as tool for manipulating masses
• Only really in the post-second world war period
  that 'youth' emerged as the demarcated, visible
  group in Western society that we are aware of
  today.
• The need for consumer capitalism to find ever
  more expansive markets for its products gave rise
  in the fifties to the identity 'teenager'.

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Approaches to young people and their behaviour

• Previously, on the occasions when young people
  were being referred to as distinct from the wider
  community, it was generally in terms of
  deviancy as a source of moral panics
• 1950s/early 60s scene The economic power of
  performers and consumers driven by the sales
  growth in teen fan magazines, record players,
  transistor radios and youth clothing overcame the
  wider moral doubts of the music rock roll as
  a legitimate activity for youth. (Homan 2003,
  The Mayors A Square, pp. 53-54)

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Cohen - 'moral panic

• Cohen Stanley 1972, Folk Devils and Moral Panics
  The Creation of the Mods and Rockers
• Societies appear to be subject, every now and
  then, to periods of moral panic. A condition,
  episode, person or group of persons emerges to
  become defined as a threat to societal values and
  interests emphasis mine its nature is
  presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion
  by the mass media the moral barricades are
  manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other
  right-thinking people socially accredited
  experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions
  ways of coping are evolved or (more often)
  resorted to the condition then disappears,
  submerges or deteriorates and becomes more
  visible. (2002, p. 1)

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Moral Panics the key elements

• 1. Something or someone is defined as a threat
  to values or interests.
• 2. This threat is depicted in an easily
  recognizable form by the media.
• 3. There is a rapid build-up of public concern
• 4. There is a response from authorities or
  opinion-makers.
• 5. The panic recedes or results in social
  changes.
• From K. Thompson (1998), Moral Panics, London
  and New York, Routledge. p. 8.

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Subcultural Studies

• Subcultural Studies early-1970s onwards
• Posits popular culture as worthy of the same sort
  of attention given to high culture or
  anthropological studies of Other cultures.
• Key theorists Dick Hebdige Phil Cohen Stanley
  Cohen Paul Willis The Birmingham School
• Bricolage (Levi-Strauss) - the assembling of
  coherence from the available raw materials. The
  assembling of ones life in relation to others
  and in relation to the dominant ideology and the
  dominant culture.

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Subcultural Studies

• A crude summary--CCCS understandings of
  subculture as a series of binaries
• 'authentic' 'inauthentic'
• 'Us' 'Them'
• Insiders Outsiders and 'enemies'
• Youth Culture Parent Culture
• Working Class Middle Class
• Masculine Feminine
• Stylish Straight
• Originals 'Newbies', 'Part-timers'
• Resistant Hegemonous

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Subcultural Studies

• Hebdige on the life-cycle of subcultures how
  they go above-ground
• 1. diffusion the conversion of subcultural
  signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced
  objects (ie. the commodity form)
• 2. defusion the 'labelling' and re-definition
  of deviant behaviour by dominant groups - the
  police, the media, the judiciary (ie. the
  ideological form).
• Dick Hebdige 1979, Subculture The Meaning of
  Style, p. 94

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Critiques of early subcultural studies Gender

• Angela McRobbie, Jenny Garber, Mica Nava
• feminisation of the inauthentic, the uncool,
  less credible or hardcore by subculturalists
  (both male and female)
• because girls/women are seen as more closely
  connected to consumption (feminine/passive),
  rather than production (masculine/active)
• Birmingham School researchers emphasis on
  public, resistant spectacular subcultures and
  moral panics inherently privileged male forms
  of sociality.

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Critiques of early subcultural studies Gender

• Girls active engagements with culture far more
  likely to occur in their own or a friends
  bedroom (teenybopper culture)
• more limited access to income and hence grand
  expressions of consumption.
• more connected to the home and family
• material significance of a good reputation
• McRobbie and other theorists stress the fact that
  girls cultural engagements are social and
  active, even when they involve the consumption of
  popular forms of culture.

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Critiques of early subcultural studies
relationship with media

• Sarah Thornton 1995, Club Cultures Music, Media
  and Subcultural Capital,
• subcultural capital
• development of Bourdieu's notion of 'cultural
  capital'
• Subcultural capital confers status on its owner
  in the eyes of the relevant beholder. (11)
• it can be objectified (fashionable haircuts and
  well assembled record collections) or embodied
  (being in the know, using (but not over-using)
  current slang).
• Media
• not all media is 'mainstream'. Nor is it external
  to subcultures themselves.
• Three fundamental levels of media operating
  around and within subcultures micro, niche and
  mass

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Critiques of early subcultural studies

• Class - not all subcultures are working class
  (eg. hippies, and the Australian electronic music
  scene)
• Age - middle class subcultures, in particular,
  allow greater opportunity for people to continue
  their involvement over a longer period of time.

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Critiques of early subcultural studies
relationship to economy

• integral part of social world and hence of
  subcultural beginnings not just their so-called
  end.
• McRobbie contends that there have always been
  commercial relationships at the core of
  subcultural practice and that 'subcultural
  enterprise' is not necessarily a bad thing.
  (1988, Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the
  Ragmarket, in )
• Linear model--authentic subculture which is
  quickly diffused/defused--too rigid
• Subcultures are an important part of the
  consumer economy

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Music as a cultural industry

• "It's what we do now instead of bohemias," he
  says.
• "Instead of what?
• "Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a
  crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the
  two previous centuries. They were where
  industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of
  unconscious RD, exploring alternate societal
  strategies. Each one would have a dress code,
  characteristic forms of artistic expression, a
  substance or substances of choice, and a set of
  sexual values at odds with those of the culture
  at large. And they did, frequently, have locales
  with which they became associated. But they
  became extinct.
• "Extinct?
• "We started picking them before they could
  ripen."
• (William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties 174)

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What do we mean by cultural industries?

• We define the creative industries as those
  industries which have their origin in individual
  creativity, skill and talent and which have a
  potential for wealth and job creation through the
  generation and exploitation of intellectual
  property.  This includes advertising,
  architecture, the art and antiques market,
  crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video,
  interactive leisure software, music, the
  performing arts, publishing, software and
  computer games, television and radio.
• (http//www.culture.gov.uk/creative_industries/def
  ault.htm)
• television (including cable and satellite),
  radio, the cinema, newspaper, magazine and book
  publishing, the music recording and publishing
  industries, advertising and the performing arts.
  These are all activities the primary aim of which
  is to communicate to an audience, to create
  texts.
• Hesmondhalgh, David 2002, The Cultural
  Industries, p. 11.

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Hesmondhalgh, David 2002, The Cultural Industries

• A ray of hope for the music industry
• pp. 74-75 Much the same is true for the
  recording industry. It is incredibly difficult to
  gain access to the budgets and resources
  necessary to have a hit record. However, there
  are important differences between the recording
  and television industries. It is still possible
  to make a record outside the core recording
  industry, at relatively low cost, and to / find a
  small audience for it. Subcultures of
  consumption, maintained through niche media of
  magazines, radio stations, and increasingly
  websites, mean that there is a huge diversity of
  recordings being made every day, by all sorts of
  different people. And because music is often
  still associated with marginalised and
  transgressive living, a disproportionate number
  of musicians are working class or lower middle
  class, or black, or feel alienated from the
  mainstream of society, The recording industry
  isnt democratic but there is more space within
  music-making for access than in television.