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Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and Everyday Aesthetics Andy Bennett

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Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and Everyday Aesthetics Andy Bennett Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and Everyday Aesthetics Andy Bennett Central to the cultural turn in humanities and social sciences scholarship is a reinter- pretation of culture not as the consequence of socio-economic forces, nor the product of capitalist post-industrial expansion; rather culture is recast as a reflexive process encap- sulating elements of the former but consid- ering their significance within a framework of lifestyle projects constructed by active agents through everyday practices of cultural consumption.1 Early forays into the field of cultural consumption as a reflexive process inscribed it with a rhetoric of resistance and opposition derived from first generation cul- tural studies analyses.2 Subsequent work, however, has been more invested in the idea of plotting the contemporary cultural ter- rain not as a dominant mainstream with a series of oppositional offshoots, but rather as 1 D. Chaney, The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History, London, Routledge, 1994; D. Chaney, Lifestyles, London, Routledge, 1996. 2 See, for example, J. Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, London, Routledge, 1989; J. Fiske, Reading the Popular, London, Routledge, 1989. 244 • Andy Bennett inherently pluralistic and fragmented.3 The concept of lifestyle has thus become framed not as a necessarily oppositional form, but rather a means through which individuals mark out collective identities for themselves demarcated through collective cultural practices. Within the transforming arena of analytical approaches that characterise the fields of consumerism, identity and lifestyle research, popular music has become a significant topic of academic study and debate. Signalled by Frith’s landmark study The Sociology of Rock (later republished as Sound Affects), aca- demic research on popular music has gathered considerable momentum over the last three decades with a central focus being upon the significance of pop- ular music as a cultural resource in everyday life.4 As discussions continue regarding the fixity or not of musical taste and attendant stylistic expression within fields of class, gender, ethnicity and so on,5 the horizons of popular music research have, at the same time, broadened considerably to embrace a new series of analytical and empirical foci in which issues of ‘value’, ‘authen- ticity’ and ‘transcendence’ have assumed centre field.6 There is also increasing awareness of an emergent set of critical questions relating to the generational impact of popular music and the extent to which questions of value, authenticity and transcendence, as these coalesce around musical practices and resources, are becoming tied to collective articulations of cultural memory. As research across a variety of popular music genres in 3 D. Chaney, Cultural Change and Everyday Life, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002. 4 S. Frith, The Sociology of Rock, London, Constable, 1978; A. Bennett, Culture and Everyday Life, London, Sage, 2005. 5 G.H. Lewis, “Who Do You Love?: The Dimensions of Musical Taste,” in J. Lull (ed.) Popular Music and Communication, 2nd ed., London, Sage, 1992; A. Bennett, “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes?: Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style and Musical Taste,” Sociology vol. 33 no. 3, 1999, pp. 599-617; D. Hesmondhalgh, “Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above,” Journal of Youth Studies vol. 8 no. 1, 2005, pp. 21-40; A. Bennett, Culture and Everyday Life. 6 M. Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, Oxford, Berg, 2000; T. DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; A. Hennion, “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology,” Cultural Sociology vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 97-114..
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