ABSTRACT
As we have already seen, the lack of easy separation between “work” and “life” is among the most widespread observations in recent scholarly accounts of cultural or creative labor. The expectation that works of art—in this case, popular songs—are deeply connected to, and expressive of, the feelings of songwriters and the artists performing them, and are thus connected to their private lives and based on their personal experiences, is also nothing new. In this chapter, however, I specifically address the ways in which musicians and music industry workers construct, dissolve or negotiate the boundaries between work and non-work, between professional and personal relations in relation to making music. I look at how this labor of negotiation is divided, how it is gendered, and how it is embedded into the power relations of the music industries. chapter 4 has demonstrated that musical labor on the semiperiphery is deeply embedded, economically and socially, in households and the labor and resources informally provided therein, and pointed to the ways in which gender and family relations shape music-related work and its division. I proceed to explore how these broader social networks and relations, such as friendship and intimate relationships, are integrated into, managed in, and complicated by musical labor. The analysis primarily draws on Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) theory of emotional labor, arguing for its relevance in the context of the mixed economy of popular music.
