soundings issue 9 summer 1998 Thinking with music Angela McRobbie To relate music to cultural theory is not enough. Angela McRobbie argues that adopting a more materialist analysis will allow us to sample the artistry and literary voice of current music makers. Who is that by? Nowhere is the marriage between art and science more happily secured than in the extraordinary profusion of cheap-to-produce popular musics which over the last fifteen or so years have created a music-society to rival and even outstrip the image-society in which we now live. This forces a reassessment of what music means in everyday life, but so prolific is the output of so many different genres, which converse with and against each other, that few critics seem capable of creating a credible map, or writing a story of contemporary pop. Music-making defiantly slips the net of language, setting itself, as Susan Sontag memorably put it, back in the 1960s, 'against interpretation'. Current music styles leapfrog backwards and forwards in time, snatching phrases, chords and strains of sound from unlikely sources, placing one on top of the other, and making issues of authorship and ownership irrelevant. 'Who is that by?' becomes an absurdly naive question. These musics play teasing, competitive games with the audience, for whom, listening on the car radio or even half submerged in the local swimming pool, there is always the chance that they will never hear the same track again. (For a moment, last summer, I thought of getting out of the water at the Archway pool in North London, to ask the DJ/swimming attendant the name of the hip-hop track that was 57 Soundings playing. Its fluid inter-play of spoken word and backing track so evoked the bare-bone aesthetics of rap that it was good enough to drown in.) Hip hop and dance musics propose newness, not just out of the application of bedroom size computer technology to old, discarded fragments of sounds, but also by forging a different relationship with their audiences. So energetically bound up are they with their own musical inventiveness, with what can, at the present moment, be done with music, that the DJs, the musicians and the producers, can virtually ignore the audience, in the same arrogant way that early punk did. So dispersed and fragmented, so volatile and widely spread, are the various audiences for contemporary music, that it seems almost pointless to think, who will this please? who will want to buy this record? This allows music to turn in on itself, and enjoy a moment of almost sublime self-confidence. This challenge to the audience is reflected in the challenge to the critic - or to the sociologist - we too seem suddenly redundant. What role is there now for criticism or analysis? Indeed our critical vocabulary seems sadly lacking. None of the old words, like collage, montage, or postmodernism, seem capable of capturing the velocity and scale of this output. Likewise, the older ways of making sense of music by placing different styles into different categories, or by posing the commercial against the creative or experimental, or by talking about white or black music as though they were quite distinct, are equally inappropriate. Now, in the late 1990s, we have to start with an assumption of musical hybridity, with global cultural cross-over and profound inter-penetrations of style, coupled with a reliance on often quite basic machines to engineer a quality of D-I-Y eclecticism which even the huge and wealthy record companies have trouble knowing what to do with. Music, in short, has become 'artificially intelligent'. aced with the sheer challenge which music production poses, music writing and commentary in the more academic journals has actually pursued a Ffairly predictable course. The claim that current dance music styles appear to embrace a refusal of meaning, in the same way that they suggest a refusal of authorship and authenticity, is patently banal and unsatisfactory; and the conclusion which follows, which sees only political nihilism in sharp contrast to the political verve of punk, is equally fallacious and ahistorical. Jeremy Gilbert has recently argued that 'However nihilistic they may have seemed at the time, not even Joy Division ... can really be located outside 58 Thinking with music this discourse of protest'.1 But the problem with this kind of account is that it posits a style of music, i.e. punk, even in its most nihilistic form, as being inherently close to politics, as though politics was this quantifiable, identifiable thing at the centre of social life. Current dance music in comparison pursues a logic of pure pleasure rather than politics, and thus confirms the essentially apolitical identity of 'Music, in short, has young people in Britain in the late 1990s. Gilbert become "artificially explains this in terms of the rave generation's intelligent"' frustration with 'mainstream political culture'. Rave too is nihilistic, but it just, and no more, manages to rescue itself from the slur of having no politics whatsoever by refusing at least to share the nostalgic stage of national pride with Blur, Oasis and the other white boys of Britpop. In a similar vein the search for politics continues in Hemment's suggestion that 'The ecstatic dance is not in itself political, but it is a micropolitical event - an intervention in the formation of desire'.2 Finally, Hesmondhalgh warns against a too easy confirmation of the democratic potential of dance music on the grounds of these same features of authorless music, imagined and produced largely outside the corporate cultures of the big music companies.3 This is misleading, he argues, because it overlooks how dance music producers also get sucked into the star mythology of name DJs and the attraction of a record deal with a major company. Yet, despite this, Hesmondhalgh still wants to hold the torch for dance. Even though drum and bass has become 'yuppie cocktail music', he acknowledges in this music the 'often thrilling mixture of the dark and the uplifting'. In all three cases, and indeed across the field of writing academically about music, where it is recognised that, in some complicated way, something political is at stake, there is this same tension. It is certainly not satisfactory to discount the political dynamic from the viewpoint that 'it's just music, after all'; nor are most left critics willing to adhere to the argument that the writing and the discussion somehow spoil the whole 1. J. Gilbert, 'Soundtrack for an Uncivil Society; Rave Culture, The Criminal Justice Act and the Politics of Modernity', New Formations, No 31, 1997. 2. D. Hemment, 'e is For Ekstasis', New Formations, No 31, 1997. 3. D. Hesmondhalgh, 'The Cultural Politics of Dance Music', Soundings, Issue 5, Spring 1997. 59 Terry Hall by Elaine Constantine experience, that it robs the music of its whole reason to exist (as one of my own students recently put it). Perhaps the approach should be not to search around for a political and theoretical vehicle of such sophistication that it does justice to the significance of the phenonemon (which is how the presence of Deleuze and Guattari in the footnotes inevitably appears) but rather to be more realistic about the politics of music and the people who make the music, and adopt a more pragmatic, sociological approach, based on the question, what can academics say or do which might be useful? This would not mean the courting of political approval from a government attuned to the significance of the culture industries (indeed with a Culture Industries Strategy high on the agenda), by producing a string of policies, or 'good ideas' out of a hat. Quite the opposite, it might well mean the asking of very awkward questions of a government determined to use pop to look modern. But neither would such an approach simply succumb to the temptation to replace politics with theory, as though 'making sense' is achieved exclusively at that point where some convincing analogies can be drawn between a musical form and 60 Thinking with music the frequently opaque writing of a number of French philosophers (enjoyable though such an attempt might be) . Livelihoods in music The more politically relevant point is surely that music today is also a place of employment, livelihoods and labour markets. This fact is obscured because being creative remains in our collective imaginations a sort of dream-world or Utopia, far apart from the real world of earning a living; and the irony is that the philosophers are as spellbound by the idea of art and creativity as the rest of us. Baudrillard, for example, is reported as having said that the real attraction of retirement is that it means he can become a real writer, an artist no less. The popular music industry has drawn on the conventional language of genius, talent and charismatic personality, which is how modern society has understood the role of the artist. The artist is the romantic outsider whose exceptional gifts are manifest in how different he (occasionally she) is from the rest of us. But this is now a hopelessly anachronistic way of understanding music (and art) production in Britain in the 1990s. For a start there are a lot more people making music and hoping to earn a living from doing so. This is no longer a completely futile dream. The old jobs, which for many people meant a lifetime of unrewarding labour, have gone forever, and there has been instilled into a younger generation, at some deep level, a determination for work to mean something more than a hard slog, for work to become a labour of love, a source of creative reward, a sort of poetics of living.