Popular Music and Politics: In, Against and Beyond Identity
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Huddersfield Repository Popular Music and Politics: In, Against and Beyond Identity Jessica Sylvia Winterson A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Huddersfield September 2018 Abstract The research establishes radical modes of theorising for an explicitly anti-capitalist musicology able to celebrate music’s enactment of post-capitalist desire and to understand how music helps to ‘make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable’. Adopting a sharp focus on the 1960s to the 1990s this thesis combines popular musicology and autonomist Marxism to argue that music functions as politics in transforming consciousness and shifting domains of acceptability in thought and feeling. Emancipatory politics must destroy the appearance of a ‘natural’ order and the thesis develops perspectives on ‘popular music and politics’ that can account for past struggles against capitalism, demonstrating how and why these struggles are naturalised with the discontinuity they signify necessarily erased or appropriated. Music performs emotional work of political significance such as in the embodiment of hope and confidence necessary for political mobilisation. The capacities of music to articulate the emotions that empower people are deployed here to suggest contradictions contained in, against and beyond identity bear utopian orientation. This statement is developed to ask what it means to counter hegemony and break social cohesion. ‘Insubordination’ forms the macro-arguments of the research. These arguments are around the roles of politics in popular music experience in the translation of mid-twentieth century revolution to capitalist realism and neoliberal modernity. Flows of rebellion are drawn out carefully in discussions of non-subordination, listening and identity. Hidden structures of rationality undermine the power of the imagination and therefore hinder possibilities for enacting non-capitalist futures. The research takes its cue from new trends which are cultivating different habits of thinking for post-capitalist politics and defining political action. It sets frames for the subversive potential of music as affording liberatory experience. Many of the concepts and ideas, such as psychedelic consciousness and punk performativity, used to discuss artists from Jimi Hendrix, to Patti Smith and John Cage (Destiny’s Child, Pussy Riot and Tupac) do not have recourse to assured theoretical principles. The reader should expect to access the work of a wide range of authors, not least Mark Fisher. 2 CONTENTS Preface 4 Introduction 7 In, Against and Beyond Identity 21 Chapter One - Anti-Capitalist Musicology 29 All of this is Temporary 34 Politics and Popular Music 46 Chapter Two - The Political Framework 56 Autonomy 60 Counter Hegemony 73 Identity Politics 80 Chapter Three - The Musicological Framework 86 Deconstruction 92 Reconstruction 98 Transcendence 111 Chapter Four - Beyond Gender 118 Three Songs 126 Feeling Good 135 Chapter Five - In and Against the State 154 The Subject: ‘Fuck Tha Police’ 159 The Individual: ‘Holla If Ya Hear Me’ 170 Conclusion 180 Bibliography 188 78,828 words 3 PREFACE The historical a priori conditions of society determine collective and individual experience in the present. Past, present and future ways of existing in the world will be explicable in terms of social relations, historical experience and material conditions. Hence, all of popular music will continue to accrete meaning historically. With recourse to a differentiated range of relationships, as engaged through a wide range of scholarship, this thesis examines political histories from the 1960s – 1990s in popular music (punk, hip-hop, pop) that, it will be argued, engender new worlds of insubordinate reference. It focuses on moments of historical confluence for popular music and politics to explore the production of subjectivity and agency. The emphases are placed on how the social world improves. It is a politically committed thesis written in, against and beyond capitalism in the Global North. The thesis is a personal testimony to popular music as able to engender political movement. Whether it represents more than this is a highly subjective question. Theorists are a product of their immediate times, circumstances and social connections. It is worth noting the following passage from Richard Schechner on ‘performance studies’ to expand this point. In anthropology, for the most part, the “home culture” is Western, the “other” non-Western. But in performance studies, the “other” may be a part of one’s own culture (non-Western or Western), or even an aspect of one’s own behaviour ... In this active way, one performs fieldwork. Taking a critical distance from the objects of study and self invites revision, the recognition that social circumstances – including knowledge itself – are not fixed, but subject to the “rehearsal process” of testing and revising ... Many who practice performance studies do not aspire to ideological neutrality. In fact, a basic theoretical claim is that no approach or position is “neutral”. There is no such thing as unbiased.1 There is no aspiration to ideological neutrality in this research. Not only because it is impossible to approach a study of ‘popular music and politics’ except from one’s own cultural position but, also, because of the nature of the subjects in the thesis – identity, affect, political and musicological philosophy – it feels appropriate to share with the reader from the start that I have biases and limitations. Indeed, that there may be an un-ironic and underlying sense in which this is a thesis about confrontations within the limits of one’s own thinking in, against and beyond identity. Objectively there have been epochal shifts in the way the world and society is organised over the course of twentieth century. These are important in thinking about how politics play out 1Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 2. 4 in the twenty-first century. Popular music scholarship is uniquely placed to build on these shifts. Popular music constitutes a significant part of the material reality of recent collective history and it therefore has roles in shaping the possibilities of subjective experience in the present and future. Articulating and arguing for the significance of syntheses between popular music and politics requires that one is attentive to the value that is being attached to music: that value is a political one, and the processes that attribute value are themselves forms of political organisation. The artists that receive the most attention in this thesis (Jimi Hendrix, John Cage, Patti Smith, Pussy Riot, and N.W.A) are chosen, in part, because of the roles they play in constructing my identity: channelling anger, pleasure and individualism and crafting escape from the everyday experience of life in and against capitalism. As musicologist Philip Bohlman states in his essay “Ontologies of Music” ‘Ideally, I should endeavour to represent non-Western ontologies of music; I should draw on ‘other’ metaphysics no more or less than my own. I can’t.’ 2 Bohlman helps to underline how this thesis is simply too individually rooted to make claims on what is essentially my perspective on the legacies of these artists. A purpose of the preface is to identify myself, in a project around identity, as a ‘libertarian communist’ with the aim of ensuring that the conjectural conditions of the thesis’s larger arguments become quickly intelligible. Having said that, I do not have an overwhelming interest in political labels, preferring to side-step dogmatic conviction. So, on the one hand anarchist/socialist/communist also suffices but, on the other, none of these labels need be used with much frequency in the discussions that follow. This should be read as indicative of a (libertarian communist) belief in contingency, variability and experimentation over determinist readings of politics and dissent. In this light it is also necessary to state that the thesis is ‘Marx inspired’. It is interested in how capitalism organises, limits and distorts social and political life, but it is not ‘Marxist’ in the specialised sense of the knowledge of these processes that can be found in Karl Marx’s original writings (and that contain within them immanent possibilities for the kinds of society that could be created given specific conditions and trends within capitalism itself). To be Marx-inspired is to share the belief that a new and morally superior and more sustainable civilisation could succeed capitalism. More specifically the thesis is rooted in autonomist and anarchist thought. It therefore characterises a purpose of theory as to shape (or re-shape) the 2 Philip Bohlman, “Ontologies of Music” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook, and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17 5 power of the working class. Hence, the focus is on ‘insubordination’ as those processes through which workers subvert, resist and transcend, and thus rebel against – and shape the evolution of – capitalism. The project uses personal experience to build a cautious optimism for enacting imaginative possibilities of a post-capitalist world. It therefore builds theoretical reflections on the relations of hope and confidence that are necessary to fight for political transformation. According to Franco ‘Bifo’