ABSTRACT
Studies focusing on the significance of popular music for audiences have tended to stress the consumption of music as a relatively ‘serious’ form of cultural practice, linked to a variety of socio-cultural sensibilities, including resistance (Brake 1985), identity politics (Lipsitz 1994), taste (Lewis 1992) and aesthetics (Frith 1987, 1996). Such uses of popular music are argued to cut across and complicate its economic function as the product of the cultural industries – an argument that is considered relevant not merely for niche and underground popular music but also those that characterize the mainstream. Thus, according to Negus (1992: 70), even as mainstream popular music audiences acknowledge the constructedness of their favourite music artists, ‘at the same time [they] accept them as “real”’. Underlying this interpretation of popular music's cultural significance is the notion of ‘authenticity’ – that is, different genres of popular music, including mainstream genres such as pop, rock and heavy metal, are argued to speak in particular ways to and for particular audiences, and to inform at some level their identity and/or lifestyle. This view is supported in Frith's (1987) account of how, as a music critic, he has often received hostile correspondence from fans who believe that, in criticizing their favoured artists, he is ‘deriding their way of life, undermining their identity’ (143–4). In the same essay, Frith draws attention to the problems inherent in attempting to unpack and lay bare the processes around musical tastes: ‘Some records and performers work for us, others do not – we know this without being able to explain it’ (139, my emphasis). Here again, there is an implication that music that works for an individual is music regarded relatively seriously by that person – and, in many cases, as an extension of the self.
