LINE GRENIER: ON THE (MIS)USES OF ”CONTEXT” IN POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES

W hat I want to address is not the future of popular music studies. Rather, I want to share with you my concern over how “we“ (myself included) approach popular music as a “complex” ob- ject of research by raising questions concerning our uses and mis- uses of the notion of context.

If I look back on the work that has been done over the last 15 years or so, what strikes me is the extent and variety of the develop- ments-theoretical, methodological, or epistemological-that have occurred in popular music studies. As a multidisciplinary domain of research, popular music studies has become highly complex-a com- plexity that may well be in keeping with that of the multifaceted phenomena under examination. For the purpose of my interven- tion today, let us assume that the complexity of popular music is an undisputed, taken-for-granted fact, and that the developments in popular music studies constitute distinct attempts at grasping this complexity. The questions I want to raise here concern the ways in which we have come to address or grasp this complexity.

The portrait I will sketch of how we deal with popular music’s complexity is far too simplistic, of course, and probably far more dogmatic than I would like it to be. But what I want to suggest is that our attempts at grasping this complexity have been focused largely on trying to come up with better ways of addressing “music in its context.” In other words, while numerous and different, our strategies for accounting for the complexity of music have revolved around developing different modes of contextualization. In my view, four different modes of contextualization coexist today in our field of study-four different ways in which researchers tend to deal with “music in context”-none of which is entirely satisfactory.

I call the first one the extra-musical mode, in reference to the ways in which context is defined by contrast with something called ”music.“ From this perspective, context stands for some form of broader environment that surrounds music, in which music is situ- ated. For example, analyzing the Qukbkcois chanson implies a de- scription of the larger cultural, sociopolitical, and economic con- texts of the 1960s. Whether the relationship between music and this environment is described in terms of determination,

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codetermination, or influence, this approach rests on a twofold assumption: first, that it is somehow possible to identify the attributes and boundaries of a given musical phenomenon independent from the context in which it is situ- ated; second, that it is possible to identity the attributes and boundaries of a given context without taking into account the music it "contains" as one of its components.

The second mode of contextualization can be described as localization, un- derstood in reference not to the local-global duality but to the process of defin- ing context in terms of the specific characteristics of a given locale, the limits of which are often defined in geo-political terms. This approach rests on an as- sumption that sociology has contributed to. That is, that society constitutes the basic unit of social organization and, accordingly, that each society has its own political system, its own traditions, its own culture, and so its own music. One could argue, however, that in keeping with the classical sociology writings of the late nineteenth century, this concept is often used as a synonym for the nation-state. For more than a century, the nation-state has been the predomi- nant form of social organization-the emergence and expansion of which Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and other so-called fathers of sociology tried to ac- count.

However, as many analysts have argued, in the wake of the increasing trend toward internationalization and globalization, the status of the nation- state as the primary form of organization has been challenged, as has its role as the key center of economic and political power. Yet, we still tend to take the nation-state as the determining context for analyzing many popular music forms, genres, or traditions. I am not suggesting that processes of globalization have led to the disappearance of nation-states, or that "national" musical formations are no longer important. Rather, I suggest that we avoid relying automatically on national boundaries as the means to delineate particular locales, the character- istics of which will determine the contextual elements of a given music.

In-depth/layering is the name I have given to the third mode of con- textualization. In this case, context refers to the underlying processes, struc- tures, or fields of social relations deemed common to particular types of social formations, whether pre-industrial, industrial, or post-industrial; modern or post- modern; and so on. Although they may not be visible, these hierarchically orga- nized processes, structures, or fields of social relations are said to inform, if not to predetermine, musical phenomena (observable) "from under," so to speak.

By analogy, this strategy resembles that adopted by geologists who ac- count for a particular terrain by mapping the underground-that is, by identify- ing the layers of rocks and soil whose patterns of organization, formation, accu-

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mulation, and movement characterize the terrain. In a similar way, popular music scholars can account for a given musical phenomenon using in-depth analyses that go beyond its observable properties, toward the underlying forces that produce it.

Although their hierarchical ordering varies from one school of thought to another, these forces may include the political, economical, technological, and so on. How do these underlying forces operate on or affect particular sets of practices or objects? In other words, how can they help account for the specifici- ties of a given music (by comparison with, let’s say, particular forms of eco- nomic or religious practices)? If these contextualizing forces are deemed rela- tively stable through time and space, does it mean that they are, in and of them- selves, acontextual, impervious to other underlying forces?

Finally, I want to say a few words on a fourth mode of contextualization, one that has become especially salient over the last few years. I call it the accu- rnulation of diflerence mode. It involves approaching context as a series of socially constructed categories-such as gender, race, age, and class-viewed as distinct sites of power struggles and, hence, particular sites of inclusion and exclusion. It tends to rest on two key assumptions that are problematic.

On one hand, while the power relations they inform may vary, these sites of difference tend to be viewed as discrete elements that have fixed, stable prop- erties. But is it the case, for example, that what defines gender as a site of differ- ence is always the same thing-that it remains impervious to the particular power relations produced by and informing specific music practices, perfor- mances, or texts? On the other hand, these sites of difference and the categories upon which they are based are assumed to be always and necessarily relevant, so that the more sites a researcher takes into account, the more thorough the analysis. But can we assume that, because language is a key site of difference constitutive of the context of QuCbCcois popular music, it ought to be taken into account in an analysis of, say, Anglo-American mainstream pop? Is it because race is central to the history of rock in the United States that it is equally so, or even relevant for that matter, in every other case? And if it relevant, are the realities of race and its relationship to music the same in each sociohistorical situation?

However simplistic and crude this portrait may be, it points out some of the most common ways we study popular music in its context. In most of our studies, regardless of our mode of contextualization of choice, context is not something to be analyzed but something to use, mobilize, or take into account. Whether it is viewed as the ”outside” of music, a particular locale, some under- lying structuring principle, or some site of difference, context tends to be taken

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for granted-as if it was always ”there” and readily comprehensible, and its relationship to music rendered essential, fixed, and necessary.

But context does need to be further problematized and made an integral part of our object of analysis. How can this be done? Without pretending to know the full and perfect answer to that question, the notion of “conjuncture” may offer an interesting starting point. To analyze a popular music phenom- enon in conjunctural rather than contextual terms means to interrogate its sin- gularity, to pay attention to its “eventfulness.” To focus on conjuncture means to interrogate the contingent links that create an entity-a given musical phe- nomenon, for instance-out of distinct entities that have no necessary, fixed, or essential relations. These entities cannot be given in advance, can never be taken as finite, and can therefore be linked differently, since they have no necessary ”belongingness.”

In the wake of what others have called a theory of context or a theory of articulation, this line of inquiry aims at examining the conditions of existence of a given phenomenon-the processes that produce it-and nothing else in their place. From this perspective, the relevant context that forms and informs a musical phenomenon in its singularity is not something that can be established prior to or at the beginning of the research; rather, it constitutes the end result of the research, the product of the analysis.

ANAHID KASSABIAN

There is no good name for the music that most interests me. Background music comes closest, even though it is sometimes in the foreground. What I mean is all the music we don’t consciously chose to hear: the music in public spaces, in films and television programs, on telephones, in audio books, and so on. None of these music forms and musical consumption practices are very present in popular music studies.

I cannot recall ever hearing a paper at an IASPM conference on Muzak. There may well have been one or two, it’s certainly not a music central to our dialogue. In the entire history of the journal Popular Music, there have been just four reviews of books and one article on film music, an article on music in commercials, and one on popular film song in India. In the bibliography of his excellent article in the journal Ethnomusicology on music in the Mall of America, Jonathan Sterne cited the following works on programmed music: an article from the Journal ofMarketing, an M.A. thesis, a Ph.D. dissertation, an article in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, one in Smithsonian, one in American Music,

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one in Performing Journal, Joseph Lanza‘s Elevator Music, and several of Muzak’s own publications.

This is the extent of research-almost none of it in popular music stud- ies-on the music that we (at least in the U.S.) hear more of per capita than any other kind. And that‘s without including film and television music.

How can we explain this glaring absence? What assumptions ground popu- lar music studies such that the acoustic wallpapers of our lives continually go unexamined? One answer might be found in yesterday’s wonderful plenary session (see ”Don’t Know Much About History,” in JPMS, 1996). David Sanjek brought together some of IASPMKJS’s most distinguished members to discuss historiography. The history at the center of their discussion was clearly rock history, and therein, I want to suggest, lies popular music study‘ indifference to background music.

1 suspect most of us would agree that methodologies and their objects are not discrete entities. Objects, cultural works, seem to invite some questions much more easily than others. Conversely, some questions seem to suggest some ob- jects more readily than others. Since the object of popular music study in its founding moments was rock, our questions and methodologies have developed in relation to rock. We think of popular music as oppositional to (even while constituted in) hegemonic cultural formations. And in this way, we write out the possibility of studying background music and resist theoretical insights that might help us see new objects of study.

If, as one future of popular music studies, we can stop inverting the high/ low distinction of elitist cultural discourses, we might be able to hear the many kinds of music that keep falling out of the middle.

DAVID BRACKETT: THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES

I don’t know if I’m going to address the title of this panel, “Future Directions for Popular Music Studies,” so much as discuss certain tendencies within a particu- lar construction of popular music studies that have produced a concentration on one type of music and theoretical concerns.’ I plan to be deliberately sche- matic and polemical, and I do not claim to be giving justice to the entire richness and complexity of the field. Nor do I claim to have avoided the very blind spots I am describing.

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The idea for this article originated while I was writing a review of two musicology-oriented books on popular music studies for an audience I assumed was not well-acquainted with the subject. While attempting to give some no- tion of the field's history, 1 noticed that my bibliography presented a particular genealogy of popular music studies in which the field's "foundational" texts were authored almost exclusively by white males. On the other hand, when I mentioned jazz in the review, suddenly black authors (and one female) ap- peared. While I had been aware of the rather skewed makeup of authorship in the field, being charged for the first time with presenting something that might be (mis)construed as an "official" history made me sit up and take notice in a way I hadn't before.

Of course, in terms of the demographics of its authors, popular music study resembles most other disciplines: If we examined the most-cited texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s in many other fields, we probably would find that most of them were written by white males. That, it could be reasoned, reflects the demographic within which institutional power resides. So, why should academia or, more specifically, popular music studies be any different?

One reason I find this homogeneity in popular music studies disturbing is the large number of important musicians in popular music who are African- American, and because many of the most influential styles were associated ini- tially with the African-American community or with African-American ver- nacular styles. Consequently, when a group of white people appears to control the production of knowledge focused around African-American music, it repro- duces an asymmetrical power relationship with a long history.

Be that as it may, given the often insuperable obstacles facing African- Americans who have aspired to academic careers, a number of African-Ameri- cans concurrently were developing an area of musical scholarship called Black music studies. This field initially was concerned primarily with the recovery of Western concert music composed by African-Americans and the expansion of research on spirituals, gospel, and jazz music. This concentration more or less ceded the nascent field of popular music studies to white scholars.

But the racial typology of the scholars initially involved in the discipline, and the low number of African-Americans in the field, although a crucial issue, is not really the focus of this critique. It would be silly to object to the influence of particular social locations (and of the predilections and prejudices of fandom) on the subjects chosen by the first wave of popular music scholars. That this particular set of preoccupations should prove to be so long-lived might be only mildly surprising since, until fairly recently, the same demographic group domi- nated the field.

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What I am criticizing specifically here are three different but interrelated problems we encounter in much writing about popular music:

the way in which writings about black popular music often neglect to use theoretical advances on race developed in African-American studies, cul- tural studies, and postcolonial studies;2

the inability or unwillingness to apply the insights developed for African- American music to a broader range of popular music, since all twentieth- century, U.S. popular music-regardless of the race of the musicians mak- ing it-owes a large debt to black vernacular forms; and

the failure to theorize race in popular music produced by people who are not African-American, as if only music produced by African-Americans is racially or ethnically marked, or the only possible meaning is that which is possible in relation to white, bourgeois s~bjectivity.~

It is important for scholars to theorize the role of race regardless of whether they perceive race residing in the object under analysis, for it is an inescapable aspect of meaning in popular music (at least in the United States), as I will demonstrate later. Of course, simply discussing ”race” as a component of music’s social meaning threatens to become banal if it is not part of an analysis of how specific constructions of race intersect with power relations and their concomi- tant impact on the conditions of production and reception.

Looking at the relative paucity of publications that specifically theorize the role of race on identity and subjectivity in the meaning of popular music tells us something about two things4: (1) the interests of the people who contribute to these publications and (2) how their editors conceive of the field. Additionally, the bibliographical references in these articles delimit a particular discursive field for “popular music studies.”

Of concern here is how so many articles published in journals explicitly associated with “popular music” frequently reinforce (through their choices of topics, methodologies, and references) a sense of the field as being about “rock music” (although this is changing). This, in turn, leads to a focus on white mu- sicians, which results in (or at least is accompanied by) the invisibility of race as an analytical category.

One way to address this absence would be for those writing about rock to theorize the role of race (and gender, for that matter) in styles in which the protagonists are white (and male), or to interrogate the role that whiteness (assuming they are white) has played in their choice of subject or their ap-

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proach to it.5 Another is to employ histories and perspectives of those whose voices are not typically heard in such studies, such as people of color and women. How, for instance, has ”alternative music” engaged black popular music? How has it avoided it? How has it signified racial or ethnic identity. And how does it position its listeners vis-a-vis race?6

Thus, the issue of race has been little theorized in popular music studies, despite its unquestioned importance in the construction of stylistic categories, fan alliances, and the formation of music scenes and communities. A crucial omission rests in the rare engagement of pop music scholars with the debates surrounding theories of essentialism or anti-essentialism that have concerned scholars working in cultural studies and postcolonial studies.

I will briefly describe the two poles of this debate as they manifest them- selves in popular music studies in order to offer a critique:

The essentialist view manifests itself with respect to black music in casual references that present it as a trans-historical essence, uninflected by time and place, which is transmitted into musical objects. The drawback of this approach is that it leads either to deterministic statements about the rela- tionship between race and musical style or to Romantic notions about black music, thereby conceived as a repository of emotional authenticity.

The anti-essentialist position points out that no such unvarying essence is possible, but ignores how a historically contingent sense of black music flows from social practices that construct it, rather than the other way around. This position ignores issues of cultural memory, including how a concept such as “black music” can function as a positive marker of identity and not only as a negative stereotype. At its most na’ive, the anti-essential- ist position pretends that the effects of racism no longer have the power to shape subjectivities.

There has not yet been much study of identity within popular music stud- ies using the kind of “anti-anti-essentialist” approach to race so eloquently de- scribed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic. Gilroy proposed a view of race as simultaneously socially constructed and part of a lived, social reality. Two meth- ods of popular music study to which this anti-anti-essentialist position might be applied are a highly theorized ethnographic approach (i.e., one that does not view the information provided by ethnography as transparent and unmediated) and an equally theorized form of historical discourse analy~is .~

I must interject that my primary scholarly orientation is as a music ana- lyst, and my main analytical concern is theorizing the connection between cul-

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tural identity, musical categories as discursively constituted, and musical style. One way of historically contextualizing the object of study while explicitly theo- rizing the role of race is to take seriously the idea of the “musical field” in its broadest sense. To do this, one must really be ”tasteless,” as recommended by William Brooks ( 1982).

In this approach, rather than concentrating on a single song, artist, genre, or style, one looks at the social meaning of any given style as being possible only in relation to other styles in the musical field at a specific moment. Of course, a host of methodological questions raise their ugly heads at the mention of such a proposition. How are histories and styles differentiated within this music field? How is the musical field itself delimited? How long is a “moment”? These ques- tions I (conveniently) don’t have time to address here. Proceeding from the assumption that such a project is possible, any further examination of produc- tion (in this case meaning the way in which institutions and discourses organize and construct categories) and consumption (the way styles and categories func- tion in the identities of individual subjects) must be seen as contingent on prac- tices located in a specific time and place.

This type of study could include Anahid‘s neglected Muzak (if it ranged far enough),8 and go beyond an analysis that is merely ”context-sensitive” by re- fusing to look at any song or style in isolation, however richly that individual style may be contextualized. Such a study could provide an example of “anti- anti-essentialism” in action: For example, the category of black popular music is ”constructed” by virtue of its only making sense in relation to other, “non-black” styles of popular music. Yet it functions as part of the social reality of those who identify or don’t identify with it, and of those who make marketing and creative decisions based on their conscious or unconscious understandings of musical categories that rely on the category as the irreducible sign of difference.

This addresses another gap: the difficulty music analysts have encoun- tered in communicating their insights to others without specialized training in music. This approach has important implications for music scholars who want to talk about the ”music itself” but who hold onto the hope that non-scholars in this overtly interdisciplinary field will learn the metalanguage of music analysis in order to understand their message.

Rather than waiting for this to happen, there is the possibility that, by emphasizing the meaning of styles always in relation to other styles, music schol- ars can establish a terrain of sufficient scope for comparative points to be under- stood by those without specialized training in music. This ability to make de- tailed points about the relationship between musical style and meaning could be a ”fringe benefit” for those looking for ways to discuss issues such as race,

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gender, and class without referring to essences that are somehow transmitted into formal features of the music. Of course, this suggestion implies a refocusing of the emphasis done in much musicological analysis of popular music from individual songs to entire genres and styles as they function in an historical context.

I want to repeat that I am not prescribing any one approach over any other; I am only trying to point out some historical gaps and methodological impasses in the discipline, and to convey some thoughts about how we might approach them. There was a time not so long ago (at the 1993 international IASPM meeting in Stockton) when U.S. scholars were criticized for their obses- sion with id en tit^.^ I would say that, far from having overdone it, the scholars who have shown interest in such matters have done so because it is obvious to them that the issue is crucial to understanding how popular music constructs subjectivities and audiences, and how institutions are sites where popular mu- sic produces categories and differentiates populations.I0

POSTSCRIPT, 1999

It is striking how much academic fashions have changed since I drafted this paper (1997). Race is increasingly theorized, African-American and other non- rock music styles are assuming a higher profile in popular music studies, and even "whiteness" studies have grown considerably. However, it is valid to con- tinue asking if the increased interest in these topics has resulted in greater un- derstanding of the intersections between racial identity and dominant power relations.

WORKS CITED

Brackett, David. 1997. "Review of Charles Hamm, Putting Popular Music in Its Place, and Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Eds.), Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies." Journal of the American Musicological Society (Summer/Fall): 507-5 19.

. 1995. "Writing, Music, Dancing, and Architecture in Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap,"' in Interpreting Papular Music, 157-1 98. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press.

Brooks, William. 1982. "On Being Tasteless." Popular Music 2: 9-18.

Chambers, Iain. 1976. "A Strategy €or Living: Black Music and White Sub- cultures," in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post- War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 157-166. New York: Holmes fr Meier.

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Chambers, Iain. 1985. Urban Rhythms. New York: St. Martin's.

Chapple, Steve, and Reebee Garofalo. 1977. Rock and Roll Is Here to Pay. Chi- cago: Nelson-Hall.

Ching, Barbara. 1997. "The Possum, the Hag, and the Rhinestone Cowboy: Hard Country Music and the Burlesque Abjection of the White Man," in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill, 117-133. New York: New York University Press.

Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. New York: Routledge.

Frith, Simon, and Andrew Goodwin (Eds.). 1990. On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. New York: Pantheon Books.

. 198 1. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n ' Roll. New

. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Garofalo, Reebee. 1996. "Historiography and Popular Music Studies: Tran- script of the IASPM/US 1997 Plenary Session" Journal of Popular Music Studies

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The BlackAt2antic:Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hamm, Charles. 1979. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W.W. Norton.

Hautamaki, Tarja, and Helmi Jarviluoma (Eds.). 1998. Music on Show-Zssues of Performance: Proceedings from the Eighth International Conference on Popular Music Studies. Tampere: Dept. of Folk Tradition.

Hill, Mike. 1997. "Vipers in Shangri-la: Whiteness, Writing, and Other Ordi- nary Terrors," in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill, 1-18. New York: New York University Press.

Keil, Charles. 1966a. "Motion and Feeling Through Music." Jotirnal of Aes- thetics and Art Criticism 24 (Spring): 337-349.

York: Pantheon.

8 70-76.

. 1966b. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Melnick, Jeffrey. 1997. "'Story Untold': The Black Men and White Sounds of Doo-Wop," in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, edited by Mike Hill, 134-1 50. New York: New York University Press.

Pfeil, Fred. 1995. White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. London: Verso.

Radano, Ronald. 1996. "Denoting Difference: The Writing of the Slave Spiri- tuals." Critical Inquiry 22(Spring): 506-544.

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Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies T(3): 368-388.

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Wald, Gayle. 1997. “One of the Boys? Whiteness, Gender, and Popular Mu- sic Studies,” in Whifeness:A CriticalReader, edited by Mike Hill, 15 1-167. New York: New York University Press.

END NOTES

1. This “particular construction” is based on a survey of publications including those by Frith and Goodwin (1990), Straw et al. (1995), and Hautamaki and Jarviluoma ( 1998), and journals such as Popular Music and Popular Music and Society.

2. I’m thinking here of work by scholars such as Samuel Floyd, James Snead, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Richard Dyer has done much to spur interest in “whiteness” as a scholarly field (see Dyer, 1997), as have Fred Pfeil, David Roediger, Eric Lott, and Ruth Frankenberg, who were de- scribed in a recent publication as representing a “‘second wave’ of work on whiteness” (Hill, 1997: p. 3).

3. Notable early exceptions to this were Chambers (1976, 1985), Chapple and Garofalo ( 1977), Hamm ( 1979), and I<eil ( 1966a, 1966b).

4. This comment is based on a survey of Popular Music from 1989 through the first two issues of 1997: out of 158 articles, 18 focused on specifically Afri- can-American topics, and 37 focused on popular music styles outside of the North America-U.I<. axis. It is only fair to note that the percentage of non- rock topics in Popular Music did increase during the period surveyed, a trend that has continued in the years since. I should also mention that Popular Music is cited here because its contents are symptomatic of larger trends in popular music studies; obviously, no one publication could be responsible for the phenomenon under discussion.

5. Here I must admit my own complicity, which is most apparent in my chap- ter on Elvis Costello in Interpreting Popular Music (1995: pp. 157-198).

6. Important exceptions to this include Will Straw’s comments on race in his discussion of alternative music (1991) and Fred Pfeil’s discussion of Bruce Springsteen, Ax1 Rose, and Kurt Cobain (1995). For a representative view of the shift that has occurred over the last 15 to 20 years on the theorizing of race, compare passages on black music in Frith ( 198 1 ) with those in his later work (1996). Three essays that explore some of the directions discussed are Ching (1997), Melnick (1997), and Wald (1997).

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7. My own earlier attempt to trace the formation of “black music” as a histori- cal discourse may be found in Brackett ( 1995: pp. 108-1 19). Ronald Radano (1996) also examined the idea of black music as it developed in nineteenth- century descriptions of the African-American spiritual.

8. This is a reference to the talk presented by Anahid Kassabian as part of this roundtable and included in the present issue of this journal.

9. As I recall, the arguments about identity at Stockton were as much about gender and sexuality as about race. One may note the absence of “class” from this list, and one thing for which U.S. scholars on popular music are routinely criticized (probably fairly) is their neglect of this issue.

10. Here I would also second Reebee Garofalo’s (1996) point that we need to go beyond black-white binaries in our discussions of racial identity.

WILL STRAW

I’m probably going to be crudely polemical here and say things that may be more extreme than I actually think. In fact, I’ve just been convinced by every- thing David (Brackett) said.

I teach and work in a communications department. I want to talk a little bit about the place of a communications approach within popular music studies and, maybe, about the place of popular music studies within communications as a discipline.

I‘ve been going to popular music studies conferences for almost 15 years. We were reminiscing the other night about the “old days,” and I remembered that one of the lowest points for me, at most of those events, was also one of the most predictable. Usually, it came in a final plenary, when people began to call for us to find ways of bringing together the various approaches to popular music and, in particular, to find ways of talking about the music itself. This is a phrase David himself used, and I want to be clear about what it is that I don’t like about these moments.

It’s not that I think any attempt to get back to the music itself will take us back to some kind of crude, contextless formalism. We are all, I believe, too smart, too sophisticated, too modern (or too postmodern) for that. Even the most conservative of music analysts today, I suspect, has some sense of the defining role of context, or of situatedness, of discursive formation, or of what- ever else you might want to call it. What I mean is that I don’t think the major advances in popular music studies are going to come through our refining of the

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relationship between a musical text and the circumstances of its production or reception, as if we simply had to work on this question a little more, devising better models of articulation or something similar.

My own temptation at this point it simply to set these questions aside, and this is one reason why I would like to consider the place of a communications studies approach within popular music studies. Popular music studies has be- come increasingly important to the study of communications generally. This is not simpIy because popular music is finding its place within the discipline, as the result of a process in which many of us have participated, but also because music seems an increasingly apt metaphor for and a highly effective example of the ways in which cultural artifacts exist in today’s world in a more general sense. In any study of cultural globalization, for instance, music is the best ex- ample available to us. For this reason among many others, it’s increasingly in- voked as an example in the study of communications.

In more obvious ways than do other cultural forms, music moves. Cas- settes travel the around world in the backpacks of travelers and in the suitcases of migrants. Musical artifacts become tokens of cosmopolitanism and hipness in other contexts. CDs move from formal to informal (and even to illegal) econo- mies in ways that tell us much about the shifting commercial relations of the modern city. In all of these ways, music is a powerful example and powerful metaphor.

I find myself interested in the analysis of this movement, rather than in the formal or aesthetic properties of any one musical text that is caught up within it. This is partly a question of my own choices and abilities. In my own most dogmatic moments, nonetheless, I think this is really the most important thing about music: the way its movement in the world creates vectors of cul- tural and intercultural communication, the ways in which relations of affinity take shape around musical practices and artifacts. As these relations take shape, they make and remake a social cartography.

The example of popular music also has a therapeutic effect on communi- cations studies, inasmuch as it reveals the limitations of an ongoing preoccupa- tion with relations between text and reader, message and recipient, and so on. Obviously, these preoccupations have been refined through an unending theo- rization of context, representation, and discursive form, but they remain fixed on questions of meaning. By contrast, music invites us to consider the ways in which cultural commodities produce and fracture the lines of solidarity, divi- sion, and affinity that mark the social world through their movement as much as through those moments at which they come to rest and are experienced, read, or consumed.

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One of the things communications studies might bring to popular music studies is an attentiveness to the role played by musical artifacts in structuring relations across space and in organizing a sense of historical time. I've been interested in these questions for a long time, but I've only recently become conscious of how deeply embedded such questions are in a specifically Cana- dian tradition of theoretical thinking about communications. This is a tradition represented by the works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jody Berland, and others. It brings up ways of asking questions that have long interested me and that I might offer as an agenda of sorts for the field: How do the cultures of Western dance club music maintain certain kinds of stability despite the fragile, transitory, ephemeral nature of any given record or style? How do national popularity charts bring different musical practices, with their distinct rhythms of change and life cycles, into a uniformly calibrated time in which they are made to seem directly competitive? How do musical reissues and processes of canonization help to produce what anthropologist Grant McCracken called "cul- tural ballast''-the sense of cultures as constituted of solid monuments, mile- stones, and so on?

In all of these things, musical artifacts are important signposts in the maps we make of relations in space and processes unfolding over time. The response I expect to this, of course, is this: What about the music? Where is the music in all of this? And again, to sound more extremist than I am, 1 would ask some- thing I ask my students when we speak of these things in class: If we were to analyze food-the ways in which it circulates in the world, the sorts of relation- ships on which food depends and which it helps to create-must we also grapple with the question of how the food tastes? Music is different from food in impor- tant ways, of course, but I want you to begin telling me about the ways in which it is different, and then for us to deal with them in turn, so that we can decide why discussion of the aesthetic dimension seems essential in one case and less urgent in another.

The developments in popular music analysis that interest me most these days have to do with the material culture of music, with what Susan Buck- Morss has called the "thingness of things." Buck-Morss invited us to consider the "objectness" of cultural artifacts. I am interested in studying musical record- ings in this way, in a material culture analysis that would look at the status of musical artifacts as they become embedded in physical objects, and so on. In this, I'm interested in seeing the recording as more than simply the commodity form in which an aesthetic practice is embedded or on which it is inscribed.

Recordings fill the collections that help to organize or disorganize our do- mestic spaces. They litter our thrift stores and yard sales in ways that raise inter- esting ecological questions about waste and cultural monumentality. They are part of what Arjun Appadurai and Ivan Kopytoff described as "the social life of

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things.” Recordings and other musical artifacts travel the world in circuits that map lines of affinity, flight, solidarity, and so on.

I find one particularly fruitful avenue of analysis in exploring the place of music within what Swedish folklorist Orvin Lofgren called “the cultural thick- enings of belonging.” I’m drawn to this as a Canadian who spends a good deal of time traveling, and much of that time rummaging through used record shops and thrift stores. Lofgren is referring to what he described as “the nationaliza- tion of trivialities, the ways in which cultural differences become embedded in the materialities of everyday life, found not only in the rhetoric of flag waving and public rituals, but also in the national trajectories of commodities.”

In Canada, we are used to the sense that our cultural differences frequently have little to do with broadly distinctive traditions and practices, and much to do with those minor ways in which commodities from elsewhere enter our culture and provide the very tactility of our cultural life. Canadian collectors of old vinyl records or comic books learn by experience to distinguish the textures of Canadian imprints, or to decipher that information on pressings which is so full of lessons about a global economy of ownership patterns and affiliation agreements. The extent to which vinyl is available in different countries, the distribution of singles or boxed sets, the ways in which each national market produces its secondary economy of budget reissue labels, secondhand record stores, and CD clubs-all of these form part of this nationalization of trivialities, part of the ways in which we acquire a sense of a fixed place and system of values.