ABSTRACT
The arguments in G.H. Bantock's influential book, for example, are explicitly based on the terminology of the mass culture critique, where three types of culture are identified: high culture, folk culture and mass culture. This chapter examines the assumptions underpinning the critique of mass culture. The debate over mass culture, entwined as it is with the sociological debate over the origins and consequences of a mass society, has a history which predates the rise of the modern mass media. C. Parker has drawn explicitly on the terminology of the mass culture critique in his analysis of contemporary rock music. The ideological nature of the high culture/mass culture distinction is also maintained through the establishment's attitude to the financing of the arts. The most important way in which musicians themselves categorise different types of 'popular' music is the degree to which the 'vocabulary of motives' for the production of the music is seen as a commercial one.
