ABSTRACT
Suddenly two books on popular music and policy appear. In fact these volumes represent quite different research traditions. Rock and Popular Music is propelled by the recent ‘policy turn’ in cultural studies associated with, among others, editors Bennett and Frith. In Bennett’s case Foucault on self and government provides the theoretical frame. Recent work by Frith has been informed more by a pragmatic liberalism; he wants to douse the outdated subcultural ardour which he suspects still glows in the odd academic hearth (slippers, glass of rioja, ‘White Riot’ on the stereo?). In the eighties Frith was instrumental in bringing a new specificity to the study of popular music. Work in the previous decade had treated pop as a soundtrack to subculture. Frith and a handful of other writers like Dave Laing achieved a twofold advance. They showed that rock authenticity was a (renewable) cultural construct; an aesthetic, rather than an oppositional, strategy. At the same time they began to investigate the musical apparatus, examining the processes, institutions and technologies which spanned production and consumption. From this perspective the communality of rock was always already a marketing device. Musicians had to work through the prior commoditization of ‘their’ form. Yet, crucially, industry control seemed to be incomplete. On the one hand young musicians continued to call the aesthetic shots as genres and technologies proliferated. On the other the major record companies were finding it increasingly difficult to regulate markets and modes of distribution.
