ABSTRACT
This chapter, and the two that follow, consider popular music in relation to aspects of identity. Identity, rather than being fixed and static, is a process of becoming, which is developed out of points of similarity and difference, involving both self-description and social ascription. Popular music is an aspect of attempts to define identity at the levels of self, the local community and national identity. Self-identity can be expressed through the use of music consumption to indi-
cate membership of constituencies based around class, gender and ethnicity. At times, this is more loosely organized around particular scenes and sounds, as with rave culture and contemporary dance music. Self-identity can also be based on activities, such as fandom, and practices, such as record collecting. These identifications are not fixed and constraining; they produce differentially constructed identities, which can draw on an amalgam of factors and are subject to change. Self-identity also involves situating the self in relation to competing discourses. For example, adherence to a musical genre can be used to distance oneself from the parent culture, community and social authority. Popular music plays a prominent role in the creation of community identity in
the links between music and locality, especially in local scenes and subcultures (the subject of Chapter 12). These have remained significant, with the internet helping to consolidate links between physically removed scenes. At the national level, identity is a part of cultural policies (e.g. quotas) aimed at promoting locally produced music. National identity can be regarded as a social construct as much as a quality associated with a physical space. While such identities may be constructed or imagined, they are mobilized for particular interests and emerge partly in relation to different ‘others’. Particular genres are often associated with specific national settings (as with ‘Brit Pop’ in the UK in the 1990s), although this, at times reductionist process, has been open to debate. This chapter begins with an introduction to the general nature of audiences
and of cultural consumption, relating these to the social construction of individual subjectivities and identities. I then consider the various modes of popular music consumption, the social categories associated with these (age, class, gender, ethnicity) and the variety of social practices through which such consumption occurs. I argue that two factors underpin the consumption of popular music: the role of
music as a form of cultural capital, with recordings as media products around which cultural capital can be displayed and shaped; and as a source of audience pleasure. To emphasize these is to privilege the personal and social uses people make of music in their lives, an emphasis that falls within the now dominant paradigm of audience studies. This stresses the active nature of media audiences, while also recognizing that such consumption is, at the same time, shaped by social conditions. Beyond patterns of demographic and social preferences in relation to popular
music, there exists a complex pattern of modes of consumption. These include buying recorded music, viewing MTV and music videos, listening to the radio, home taping and downloading music in digital form. To these could be added the various ‘secondary’ levels of involvement or the social use of music texts, such as discussing music with friends and peers groups, reading the music press and decorating your bedroom walls with its posters; dancing and clubbing; and concert going. Several of these have been dealt with elsewhere in this study; here I examine how we actually access music texts in their various modes, and the associated social practices, through two examples: dance and record collecting. I conclude with the role of social network sites, which have added a new and increasingly important dimension to popular music culture and its consumption.
The study of media audiences is broadly concerned with the who, what, where, how and why of the consumption of individuals and social groups. Historically, a range of competing media studies approaches to the investigation of audiences can be identified. At the heart of theoretical debates has been the relative emphasis placed on the audience as an active determinant of cultural production and social meanings. Music is a form of communication and popular music, as its very name suggests, usually has an audience. Social theorists critical of the emergence of industrial society in the later nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries first used the term ‘mass audience’, alarmed at the attraction of new media for millions of people. Their fears were based on a conception of the audience as a passive, mindless mass, directly influenced by the images, messages and values of the new media such as film and radio (and, later, television). This view emphasized the audience as a manipulated market. In relation to popular music, it is a perspective evident in the writings of high culture critics and the Frankfurt School (see Shuker, 2012: ‘culture’ and ‘mass culture’ entries). Later analyses placed progressively greater emphasis on the uses consumers (the
term represents a significant change of focus) made of media: uses and gratifications, which emerged in the 1960s, largely within American media sociology; reception analysis and cultural analysis all stressed the active role of the audience, especially fans and members of youth subcultures. More recently there has been an emphasis on the domestic sphere of much media consumption and the interrelationship of the use of various media. The emerging information age is seeing
a reorganization of everyday life: ‘people are integrating both old and new technologies into their lives in more complex ways’ and within an increasingly cluttered media environment, this means ‘being an audience is even more complicated’ (Ross and Nightingale, 2003: 1). Related to this is an emerging literature on music and everyday life, in a variety of settings, including the workplace and in public space (DeNora, 2000). The opposition between passive and active views of audiences must not be
overstated. What needs highlighting is the tension between musical audiences as collective social groups and, at the same time, as individual consumers. The concept of consumer sovereignty is useful here, emphasizing the operation of human agency. As an influential approach within cultural studies during the 1980s, consumer sovereignty was tied to the notion of the active audience, to produce a debated view of semiotic democracy at work. Advocates of consumer sovereignty consider that people’s exercise of their ‘free’ choice in the marketplace is a major determinant of the nature and availability of particular cultural and (economic) commodities. While the elements of romance and imagination that have informed individual personal histories and the history of popular musical genres are frequently marginalized in the process of commodification, they remain essential to the narratives people construct to help create a sense of identity. While economic power does have a residual base in institutional structures and practices, in this case, the music industries and their drive for market stability, predictability and profit, this power is never absolute.
