Sound effects: youth, leisure, and the politics of rock 'n' roll. - book reviews

Monthly Review, Feb, 1984 by Greg Gaut

The popular music known as rock 'n' roll often seems like a vast wasteland. On the radio you hear the same handful of carefully screened "hits" programmed by computers. In the newspapers, you see ads for giant arena concerts by an endless stream of mean-spirited heavy metal bands (like Judas Priest, .38 Special, and AC/DC) or by corporate soft-rock groups riding big selling records (like Fleetwood Mac, Chicago, and Asia). Or you turn on a nationally syndicated Tv show like Solid Gold, where hits are sold with sex and sex is sold with hits.

Why shouldn't reasonably sane observers turn their back on this scene? Because it's not the whole story. It leaves out rock's occasional explosions of passion and grit, from its birth in 1954 to its resurgence in the late 1960s, and most recently with the punk rebellion in 1976. It misses rock's relationship to countercultures and oppositional subcultures. Those few corporations which control popular music have never completely succeeded in keeping the lid on rock 'n' roll.

some have argued that the rock phenomenon, like punk, is a bourgeois trick to pacify youth. Others are blind to popular culture altogether. Some just want to dance to the beat. But we can't afford to ignore pop music, a bigger industry than either the movies or pro sports. You can dance the night away and reflect thoughtfully on rock in the morning. In the United States, much is written about rock, although little of it offers useful analysis. In England, where clearer class consciousness seems to generate keener analysis, Simon Frith and Dick Hebdige have been listening intently to rock and have a great deal to say about it.

Rock as Mass Culture This is not Free Europe Nor an Armed Force network This is Radio Clash--Using audio ammunition This is Radio Clash--Can we get that world to listen This is Radio Clash--On pirate satellites Orbiting your living room--Cashing in the Bill of Rights This is Radio Clash--On pirate satellites This is Radio Clash--Everybody hold on tight --The Clash, "This is Radio Clash" (1981 Epic single)

In Sound Effects, rock critic/sociologist Simon Frith has written the most complete and thoughful account of rock's production and consumption now available. Every chapter contains insights that will make even experienced rock listeners see some aspect of rock in a new way. He ultimately fails to explain why rock sometimes transcends the inherent limitations of mass-produced popular culture, although his attempt is the richest and most ambitious to date. The central strength of the book is Frith's insistence that rock's status as a mass-culture industry "must be the starting point for its celebration as well as its dismissal." The ideological power of popular music comes precisely from its popularity, because "records which don't sell, which don't become popular, don't enter mass consciousness." In defending rock on these terms, he attacks those who have argued that mass culture in advanced capitalist countries is inherently corrupting. He traces this position from the "Frankfurt School" Marxists like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to the New Left journalists Chapple and Garafalo, who wrote Rock 'n' Roll Is Here To Pay (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977). According to this theory, rock is worthwhile only when spontaneously created by musicians who appear on independent labels. As soon as these same musicians sign with major labels, their music becomes a "commodity," and inherently cooptive tendencies begin to destroy the music. The assumption behind this approach is that rock is defensible only when it can be classified as "art" or as "folk music," in other words, as something other than mass culture.

This doesn't mean that Frith ignores the limitations of mass culture. A large section of the book is a comprehensive explanation of how the major labels are organized around the goal of meeting audience demand in the quest of an acceptable rate of profit. He explains what you already know if you listen to commercial radio, that it is in the music industry's interest to produce music which is "safe" enough for mass consumption. And Frith supplies the details of how the industry operates.

But he doesn't stop with explaining how rock is produced, as most writers have done. For him, how rock is consumed is equally important. He denies that the music industry creates "false" needs which it then services with record production. Instead he argues that the industry is organized to discover the real existing needs of young people for meaningful leisure and to meet that demand. And further, he shows that the manner in which the product is consumed is unpredictable and not within the control of the industry.

He takes us on a tour of rock consumption, showing how rock has always been part of youth culture, yet used differently by workers as opposed to students, by men as opposed to women, by British as opposed to U.S. youth.

Drawing on all this, Frith argues that the traditional "mass culture-equals-cooptation" model is an oversimplification, because the major labels are unable to completely control either musicians or audiences. He takes the position that rock's commercial production does not determine its meaning. By pointing in this direction he favors a quite different strand within Marxist writing on mass culture, that of the German critic Walter Benjamin whose work was closely tied to Brecht's. Writing in the 1930s, Benjamin argued that the new technology of mass culture (he spoke of photography and film) was profoundly progressive, because it shattered the "aura" of traditional works of art, making all observers equally "expert" in interpreting a cultural product. In other words, there was now a potential for radically democratizing artistic production and consumption.