Musicology Meets Samantha

Musicology Meets Samantha Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music Author(s): Adrian Renzo Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , December 2018, Vol. 49, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 333-350 Published by: Croatian Musicological Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844650 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844650?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Croatian Musicological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music Adrian Renzo Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Building Y3A, Room 155 Macquarie University, Musicology Meets MELBOURNE NSW 2109, Australia Samantha Fox: Exploring E-mail: adrian.renzo@mq. an Everyday Aesthetics of edu.au UDC: 78.01:78.067 Popular Music Original Scholarly Paper Izvorni znanstveni rad Received: January 24, 2018 Primljeno: 24. siječnja 2018. Accepted: September 15, 2018 Prihvaćeno: 15. rujna 2018. Abstract – Résumé Musicological research on popular music has received criticism for not adequately capturing how ‘everyday Introduction listeners’ approach music. This article responds to such critiques by analysing the music tastes of One of the criticisms sometimes levelled against an ‘everyday listener’, de-identified here as ‘HP’. As an ‘every- the scholarly study of popular music is that the result- day listener’, HP diverges from ing studies do not reflect how ‘everyday listeners’ established approaches in 1 musicology: he listens primarily actually listen to music. Musicologists describe mu- to music which has not been sic using jargon that is opaque to scholars from other legitimated by the Anglo-Ameri- can rock press or the academy disciplines, not to mention the millions of listeners (for example, his music collecti- who may have propelled a song into the Top 40.2 on privileges Samantha Fox over the Beatles); he is drawn to More problematically, musicological analysis may ephemeral ‘moments’ rather than inadvertently ‘canonise by complexity’: songs are engaging with each track holisti- cally; and he openly ridicules legitimated and given a sheen of ‘importance’ simply some of his favourite songs by being subjected to scholarly analysis.3 In other rather than treating them as ‘quality’ music. The article argues disciplines such as sociology and media studies, re- that this kind of perspective is important for the study of popular 1 music. HP’s careful attention to Chris KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, in: Allan F. specific musical details – details Moore (ed.), Analyzing Popular Music, Cambridge: Cambridge that he himself hears as fleeting, University Press, 2003, 204; Susan McCLARY and Robert WALS- banal, or smutty – demonstrates ER, Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock, in: Si- that it is possible to engage with mon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop and popular music without neces- the Written Word, London: Routledge, 276-79. sarily canonising it. 2 Keywords: popular music S. McCLARY and R. WALSER, Start Making Sense!, 279. • musicology • sociology • 3 C. KENNETT, review of Allan F. Moore’s Sgt Pepper’s Lone- aesthetics • listening • ly Hearts Club Band, Popular Music, 19(2) (2000), 264. canon 333 This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music searchers have faced a parallel problem: by focusing on the responses of listeners (rather than recordings), the specifically musical pleasures of popular music have sometimes been overlooked. This article argues that we can learn much about popular music by paying closer attention to the listening practices and interpretations of ‘everyday listeners’, without necessarily abandoning a focus on the sounds themselves, and without necessarily ‘classicizing’ or ‘intellectualizing’ the music.4 As a preliminary step in this direction, the article analyses the listening practices and aesthetics of one such listener (de-identified here as ‘HP’), highlighting the differences between the participant’s responses to popular music and the kinds of analysis that have prolif- erated in popular music studies. The key findings of the research are as follows. First, the very distinction between ‘musicologists’ and ‘other’ listeners is problematic – the interview data demonstrates that HP is at least as attentive a listener as many scholars of popular music. HP’s heavy investment in music chal- lenges the idea that ‘everyday listening’ (that is, listening during everyday activi- ties such as cooking or a train journey or skateboard riding) is necessarily distracted. HP’s listening approach clearly indicates a deliberate and intense immer- sion in music which belies certain scholarly accounts of everyday listening as ‘distracted’.5 Third, the study of popular music does not necessarily need to focus on large-scale form or structure. In fact, ignoring such structure may be a useful starting point for an analysis, and may more closely reflect the ‘everyday’ listening approach. Finally, even though listeners may ridicule the producers of music they like, this does not necessarily result in a detached, ‘ironic’ form of listening.6 As this is a preliminary study, I have deliberately emphasised ways in which the respondent’s perspective differs from the findings of existing scholarship in popular music studies. However, existing scholarly frameworks (such as Richard Peterson’s production of culture approach and Bourdieu’s notion of distinction) are clearly still relevant to HP’s case, so the final section of the article addresses some examples of how existing theoretical positions in popular music studies and related fields can shed light on HP’s ‘everyday aesthetics.’ 4 Robert FINK, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 2005, 30. 5 C. KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, 204. 6 Andy BENNETT, Cheesy Listening: Popular Music and Ironic Listening Practices, in: Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, and Jodie Taylor (eds.), Redefining Mainstream Popular Music, London: Rout- ledge, 2013, 207. 334 This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music Musical and Socio-Cultural Complexity The mere act of describing musical phenomena can have the intended or unintended effect of ascribing complexity to the music. For Kennett, some studies of popular music tend to ‘canonise by complexity.’7 Writing about Moore’s (2007) study of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kennett states that »it is almost as if the mere fact that…voice-leading patterns, cognitive conclusions, etc., can be arrived at, becomes strong circumstantial evidence of the meisterwerk status of the text being studied.«8 Where vernacular descriptions of music prioritise a song’s simplicity (songs might be described as ‘catchy’ or as ‘earworms’9) academic responses tend to use ‘complexity’ as a legitimating mechanism. The academy arguably encourages research that teases out the unintentional or hidden or less- than-obvious complexity of a musical recording.10 Consequently, even ‘lowbrow’, ‘simple’ music is made to sound more complex. For example, Timothy Warner’s analysis of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ hinges on the claim that it is ‘a finely produced and musically sophisticated product’ and demonstrates this with detailed tables illustrating the complexity of the song structure.11 As Ian Maxwell points out, popular music scholars work under an ‘institutional drive to find something significant’ in popular culture.12 Some scholarship attempts to move beyond this tendency by avoiding canonical genres.13 Ultimately, however, a published analysis needs to draw attention to something for which we can make an academic case that the material was worth drawing attention to in the first place. Therefore, complexity – if not of the sounds themselves then of the song’s social context – still emerges as an implicit theme. Of course, not all scholarly analysis is underpinned by the search for musical complexity. In sociology and in media studies, scholars have often explored the meanings of apparently ‘simple’ music by focusing instead on audiences. For example, Melanie Lowe’s research on Britney Spears’s listeners responds to the 7 Chris KENNETT, review of Allan F. Moore’s Sgt Pepper, 264. 8 Ibid. 9 Kelly JAKUBOWSKI, Lauren STEWART, Sebastian FINKEL, and Daniel MÜLLENSIEFEN, Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11(2), (2017), 122-35. 10 Cf. David HESMONDHALGH, The Cultural Industries, London: Sage, 43. 11 Timothy WARNER, Pop Music – Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003, 79. 12 Ian MAXWELL, The Curse of Fandom: Insiders, Outsiders and Ethnography, in: David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (eds.), Popular Music Studies, London: Arnold, 2002, 113. 13 Ralf von APPEN, André DOEHRING, Dietrich HELMS, and Allan F.

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