'Empire' Records
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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School The College of Communications ‘EMPIRE’ RECORDS: A STUDY OF RESISTANCE AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE NETWORK AGE A Dissertation in Mass Communications by Douglas G. Tewksbury © 2010 Douglas G. Tewksbury Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 The dissertation of Douglas G. Tewksbury was reviewed and approved* by the following: C. Michael Elavsky Assistant Professor of Communication Dissertation Advisor Co-Chair of Committee John Nichols Professor of Communication Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research Co-Chair of Committee Matt Jordan Assistant Professor of Communication John Christman Associate Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and Women's Studies *Signatures are on file with the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the way in which the cultural politics of popular music function as a strategy of governance by examining two case studies: Rage Against the Machine and M.I.A. The shape of musical media using a politics of resistance has fundamentally changed in recent years due to the massive influence of the rise of the network society and digital distribution. Yet this resistance, I argue, is responding to an equal change in the way that dominant institutions exert their influence through these same means. In both cases, it is the new uses of media that shift the locus of power to the everyday lives of global citizens. I use Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitical production as the primary strategy through which power is exercised as a mode of postmodern governance. Yet as the scope of this power expands to a global scale, this strategy appears to increasingly be supplanting traditional means of exercising power. Furthermore, I argue these strategies of governance have been the primary strategy of the global neoliberal project, particularly in its utilization of mediated cultural forms as a central conduit to populations. The place of music in this arrangement is as a unique and vital site of power negotiations of these relationships. I argue that there has been a real and fundamental change in the way in which these cultural forms are politicized in the era following the introduction of digital distribution networks. Following an introductory chapter, the next three chapters of this dissertation provide a theoretical and analytical background on the ordering of power, resistance, and the global music industry, dealing respectively with the rise of globalization and global capital structures, contemporary strategies of governance, and the political economy of the global music industry. Chapter Five uses as a case study the fascinating and problematic Rage Against the Machine, perhaps the most notable musical artist representing anti cultural resistance the pre-network 1990s. Chapter Six studies M.I.A., daughter of a notable Sri Lanka resistance fighter, as an artist whose music symbolizes the cultural politics of resistance representative of the various conceptualizations of iii postmodern power relations in the network age. Chapter Seven provides an in-depth conclusion to this dissertation by comparing and contrasting the structure, order, and exercise of power during these two eras. I find that new uses of global media represent an understated but great threat to human freedom as cultural forms become increasing politicized, yet at the same time offer great promise if certain strategies of popular resistance can be cultivated. In either case, popular music serves as a media form with great influence on a global scale for the articulation of the public’s values, beliefs, actions, and discourses, making it all the more important to consider as object of study in the network age. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE SPEED OF SOUND……………………………...……………………1 CHAPTER TWO FLOWS AND NEGOTIATIONS: GLOBALIZATION, CAPITAL STRUCTURES, AND MUSICAL POSSIBILITIES……………………………………………20 CHAPTER THREE EVERYDAY CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS: DOES MUSIC SET US FREE OR OTHERWISE?...........................................................……………………………………………49 CHAPTER FOUR THE PAST SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE GLOBAL MUSIC INDUSTRY......................................………………………………………. 68 CHAPTER FIVE CASE STUDY: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE…………………………………………...90 CHAPTER SIX CASE STUDY: M.I.A………………………………………………………………………….131 CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………………………………….177 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………219 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my parents, Anne Roberts and John Tewksbury, for their love and support, over and over again. To my brother, Drew Tewksbury, thank you, more than you could possibly know. To my friends and loved ones, academic and otherwise, how can I even begin to list you all? I’ll thank you privately, but know this: You are the ones that have made my life so enjoyable and these times as routinely interesting and amazing as they could be. I’ll miss you all - thank you, thank you, thank you. To my advisor, Michael Elavsky, for his guidance and incredible patience in this project, and to the many others at Penn State who have contributed to its various stages, Matt Jordan, John Christman, Nancy Love, Ron Bettig, Jeanne Hall, and Jeremy Packer. Great thanks are also due to Nina Huntemann. To John Nichols and the College of Communications at Penn State, who have given me every opportunity I asked for (and some I didn’t) but more than anything, for treating me so well as a graduate student. Betsy Hall deserves a special thank you for keeping the world going round. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory my grandfather, Herndon Albert Oliver, Jr., whom I like to think would have been particularly proud, and to great teachers everywhere. vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE SPEED OF SOUND This dissertation is one that tells a story of disruption, a cleaving from the past of not just political music but the very politics of music making. The traditional modes of musical production and distribution are surely still dominant – these structures are too firmly embedded in political and economic institutions to simply disappear – but the treatment of popular music media as secondary to societal events, as a soundtrack to other, more important happenings, is changing under a new rumbling of discontent. Yet present times are seeing a massive restructuring of the global flows of information. There is a new exercise of power that is beginning to take shape, a generalized destabilization of long-embedded structures, and even to the casual observer of the material conditions of these relationships of cultural and political resistance, it becomes quickly apparent that for a variety of reasons, the current negotiations of power are unlike any that we have seen in the past. Political action is shifting increasingly to new sites of power through new mediations of everyday life. Among the central ways that this process occurs is through popular music forms. It clear that music has power as a cultural form able to drive political change, and while there are many vantage points to approach its various media, studying the political uses of popular music necessarily requires an examination of a broad swath of perspectives. Music is moving in multiple senses, certainly important for media scholars in the sense that it travels over space and time, but perhaps more so for critical cultural researchers is the way in which it constitutes both political culture and political change. This – the examination of the various approaches toward the global production and distribution of media content and the political potentials contained 1 therein – is the goal of media studies. It is up to the critical scholar to use this examination as a liberatory exercise. Taken seriously, the field’s inquiries are driven by one overarching question: What can music do? But why popular music? After all, “popular” has a wide variety of meanings, not all of which are entirely flattering1. And some less so than others: In 1971, self-proclaimed ‘Dean of American Rock Critics’ and former Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau, arguing with a “Marcuse translator just out of grad school,” was censured on this very subject: “You’re really very intelligent. Why do you waste your time on rock?” (Christgau, 1998, p. 1). Indeed, the cultural history of popular music historically has been written as a genre of critique in the popular press, often relegated to the marginal back pages of the arts section or dismissed as a preaching-to-the-choir medium of list-making fanboys debating the nuances between screamcore and deathcore, as if it made the least bit of difference. Or at best bemoaning the “egghead academics and journalists who think too much for their own good” (Middleton, 2001, p. 213). Literary circles treated popular music analysis even worse. Perhaps high literature’s focus on the canon (or at least the canonical form) left the mainstream tendencies of popular 1 Indeed, this word – ‘popular’ - is so problematic yet central to the study of culture that Raymond Williams’ landmark Keywords (1983b) devotes two full pages to the various meanings of the term. Some critics of mass culture may laugh on how history repeats itself: Early uses of the word were pejorative, meaning ‘base,’ ‘vulgar,’ or ‘of the common people’ before its nineteenth century meaning of first ‘widespread’ and later as a positive celebration of mass appeal. Kassabian (1999) writes that this shift was important because