1 Introduction 2 Class and Popular Music Theory

Notes 1 Introduction 1. A problematic assertion as class representation is not specific to music aligned with particular subcultures. However, it often acts, as with the punk subculture, to be a unifying factor that can be used to achieve a level of homology and communion. 2. The differentiation between ‘popular’ and ‘rock’ here is significant. Rock discourse operates as a subsection of a broader discourse that relates to all popular music in more general ways. Most of the examples used in this work can be understood as rock music, and often the way in which that claim is made is precisely because of specific attempts to authenticate made in opposition to more obviously commercially oriented pop. Where the term ‘popular music’ is used it can be understood as an umbrella term within which ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ reside with their own stylistic concerns. 3. For discussions of gender pertinent to this work, see Solie (1993), Koskoff (1987), Whiteley (1998, 2000), McClary (1991), Padel (2000), Fast (1999) and Gottlieb and Wald (1994). 2 Class and popular music theory 1. Obviously class is never the only determining factor in a listener’s engagement with the sphere of music, an infinite number of variables are constantly in play. For the purposes of this chapter, however, class and its role in musical interaction is the focus. 2. Although such claims assume a level of generalization that makes them almost wholly unusable. 3. The starting point here is often considered to be the CCCS publication Resistance Through Rituals (1993) originally published in 1975 as Working Papers in Cultural Studies no. 7/8, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. Contributors such as Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, Iain Chambers and Angela McRobbie forged a template that allowed an understanding of youth culture, and particularly subculture, that was highly determined by class affiliation. While the inclusion of popular music is not always present in such works, the connection between youth subcultures and popular music allows for one of the first engagements between pop music and social class. 4. A somewhat problematic term in that it embraces a huge variety of musical and visual styles. However, Simon Reynolds (2005) sees it as music influenced both by punk and the fallout of punk from approximately 1978 to 1984. Its stylistic variety becomes a primary facet of post-punk’s significance. 5. A closer examination of punk and Oi! can be found in Chapter 7. 6. What Laughey describes as ‘the neo-Marxist resistance frame’ (25). 7. Although Weber’s ‘status groups’ do provide a way of understanding class in terms other than economic determinism (1924). 174 Notes 175 8. One’s perception and articulation of one’s own class position rather than Marx’s use of the term which stresses a coming to terms with the contradic- tory nature of capitalism and a removal of such contradictions within class to fulfil revolutionary ends. 9. The ways in which such strategies may occur will be treated within the case studies in subsequent chapters. 10. Beverley Skeggs expands her discussion of the appropriation of working-class imagery in Class, Self, Culture (2004a). 11. Rebranding in Skeggs’ analysis is not to be confused with social mobility in an economic sense. 12. My use of the term myth here needs to be understood as a modification of Barthes (1973). Barthes sees myth as ideologically inflected practices and bodies of ideas. My own use of the term takes the ideological implications asserted by Barthes, but adds a level of the fantastic, in other words the need to replicate reality mimetically through cultural forms is made fantastic through the discourses surrounding popular music. As such ideology can be perpetuated in a form that might seem ‘overblown’ or ‘stereotypical’ in other spheres of cultural or social life. That is not to say that my use of myth is pertinent only to popular music (much the same could be said of Hollywood cinema or British soap operas), but the discourses potentially engaged with when listening to popular music allow a level of disengagement from lived experience while performing a mythical engagement that stands in for that lived experience. More will be said on this when the subject of rock discourse is dealt with later in this work. 13. For a fuller analysis of the discourse surrounding ‘Common People’, see Chapter 4. 14. In this particular case there is the further option of identification with the object of the song from a male perspective. 15. See Chapter 5. 16. The same is likely to be true even for a small audience engaging with a performer in a live context, but it is the specific mechanisms that allow for this prismatic effect on a large scale that I wish to engage with here. 17. Although they will no doubt be an influencing factor. 18. As supported by ancillary media operating alongside the artists themselves, such as television, the music press, radio, biography and so on. 3 The problem of authenticity 1. As Dyer points out, the division between grass roots and professional music making is complicated by the acknowledgement that most popular music production, in Britain and America at least, is predicated on professional models and standards even where it is made at an amateur level. ‘Any notion that rock emanates from ‘‘the people’’ is soon confounded by the recognition that what ‘‘the people’’ are doing is trying to be as much like professionals as possible’ (412). 2. An idea made explicit in the reception and resurrection of folk music in Britain in the twentieth century. See Chapter 6. 3. Keightley (2001) does identify strands of documentary authenticity in rock music that evolve historically from early soul and electric blues artists, which he describes as ‘performed autobiography’ (119). 176 Notes 4. Authenticity, while prioritized within rock music, can often be an issue within what might be understood as mainstream pop. 5. A move mirrored by the success in the United Kingdom of the MVC chain of record stores, designed again to appeal to this very market. 6. As we shall see later, such associations of authenticity in Young’s case may be tempered or complicated by his middle-class southern upbringing against Gates’ working-class northern origins. However, within the mainstream pop idiom such class signification is often less valued than a relationship to historically validated pop music forms and predecessors. 7. A point that rearticulates Dyer’s assertion of the professional template of popular music. 8. Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album (1992) makes similar claims to show that guitarist Tom Morello’s innovative guitar sounds were not created through any inauthentic means such as a sampler or a synthesizer. 9. Robert Cantwell (1996) recognizes this liberal strand in relation to the American folk revival: This libertarian spirit, the spirit of the patriot, has often been characteristic of the folklorist in America, especially where mistrust of central authority, as in the post-Reconstruction south, has been particularly strong. Here one thinks of the Texas folklorist L. Frank Dobie, John Lomax, Jimmy Driftwood, the Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph – the person in love with her locality, the regionalist, often associated, after the invention of the rotary press, with a newspaper, the novelist who draws on the characters and stories of her place for her material, but with a sense that her audience lies in distant parts, who shares with her forbears a distrust of outsiders, especially if they represent urban sophistication, book learning, or central government. (367) 10. For more on the influence of this, see the subsequent chapters on the folk voice and folk rock. 11. His analysis of Blur and Oasis shows how both traditions inform both artists, although they are diametrically opposed in terms of class and aims. 12. Even regarding the influence of art schools on glam and punk, where working-class students came into contact with avant garde and pop art. See Frith and Horne (1989). 13. From the 1989 album Thunder and Consolation. 14. Interestingly, Cromwell himself resisted Leveller tendencies within his army and was even responsible for the deaths of three of his own soldiers with Leveller sympathies at a failed uprising in Berkshire in 1649. The name was again taken up by the band The Levellers who supported New Model Army through their early career and shared much of their audience, although they went on to become significantly more successful. 15. In the late 1980s New Model Army had a significant following in north Essex, a relatively affluent area at the time, and by no means northern in a national sense. 16. And the concurrent values associated with that term (see above). 17. Prior to his disappearance in 1995. 18. John Harris (2003) shows how Frischmann was actually at the heart of the London mid-1990s pop scene, exposing her image as a Johnny-come-lately parasite as somewhat erroneous. Notes 177 4 Performing class 1. While Frith is talking about performance art, it is a category that he allies with music hall and vaudeville, comedy and popular song. 2. A repetition that Butler relates to Derrida’s concepts of iterability and citation. 3. ‘Text of Pentagon’s New Policy Guidelines on Homosexuals in the Military’, New York Times (22 July 1993) qtd. in Parker and Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995). 4. See Chapter 3. 5. Mark Liechty’s analysis (2002) of the development of a new middle-class performative identity in Kathmandu understands class as a practice adopted by practitioners to form subjectivity in a changing economic environment. 6. A somewhat simplistic statement but it provides a nexus for the economic- determinist models of class analysis in relation to popular music.

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