Chris Rojek,Pop Music,Pop Culture

Chris Rojek, Pop Music, Pop Culture Polity: Cambridge, 2011. 237 pp. £16.99. ISBN 9 780 745 642 642

Chris Rojek’s Pop Music, Pop Culture, opens with an argument that the term ‘pop music’ has a lot to recommend it, and we’re not better off just using ‘popular music’ instead, as Simon Frith has suggested. This argument turns on two points: (1) that the pop genre (as opposed, say, to rock or hip hop) has wide appeal and (2) other forms of ‘popular’ music – Bob Dylan and 2Pac are Rojek’s examples – share many characteristics with pop. Both arguments are compelling. In consumer society pop has a real claim as ‘the people’s music’, as Rojek says. And the term ‘popular’ has so many overlapping implications with ‘folk’ or ‘vernacular’ that it potentially obscures the obvious commerciality of artists such as Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Talking about those artists in the same breath as Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber is perfectly appropriate, and labeling them all ‘pop’ nicely emphasizes the very common circumstances of their production, promotion, distribution and consumption, even if fans of the former would prefer not to think so.

But the two approaches lead in different directions. This book is not, it becomes clear, an analysis and celebration of pop specifically. Instead Rojek inverts Frith’s suggestion, expanding the meaning of ‘pop’ to include everything ‘popular’ – and perhaps a lot more. By the middle of the book Rojek’s topic seems to be a very broad view of music in society, so even in a discussion of ‘pre-capitalist, tribal societies’, Rojek mentions the ‘general features of pop music in this period’ (pp. 61–2). And elsewhere Rojek seems to turn back on his own early valorization of pop, saying, for instance, that the Beatles transformed pop songs from ‘mere entertainment’ to ‘channeling the myths, dreams, and popular politics of the day’ (p. 68) – seeming to dismiss as trivial the same entertaining pop he initially set out to defend. This is too bad. By expanding the term so far outward from entertainment and commerce, we lose the initially promising project of examining the genre of pop music as a privileged site in the expression of consumer values – a project that would have substantial interest for an audience in consumer studies.

Rojek’s argument is that ‘pop music’ has undergone a ‘tectonic shift’ in the last generation, which becomes apparent if we look at changing patterns of production, distribution and consumption. The emphasis throughout is on technological change, and for a book that repeatedly emphasizes the ‘online revolution’ I was surprised by the relative absence of engagement with the vast empirical and theoretical literature about social media, mobile media and digital technology, which provides support and some challenges to Rojek’s view of ‘cultural monadism’. Rojek identifies a process of ‘cultural de-differentiation,’ where a track by Puff Daddy might include samples from 1980s New Wave and African American spirituals, ignoring boundaries of genre and culture (p. 6). Much later Rojek acknowledges that borrowing, sampling, pastiche, collage, and ‘cut and paste patterns’ (pp. 122–3) are commonplace in many musical traditions, including most forms of pop, but he does not explain why, then, the sort of genre mixing represented by a Puff Daddy song is unique to the contemporary moment. And Rojek does not address the common, and converse, observation that, rather than de-differentiating, pop music is increasingly fragmented into finer niches of audience and genre.

The first half of the book examines a wide range of theoretical approaches to the role of music in society, with sections that range from Plato to Bourdieu, much of which will be familiar to scholars of music or cultural studies (although it is not clear what the section on ancient Greek philosophy adds to Rojek’s account of contemporary musical change). This part of the book suffers from a very fast pace, with unclear examples and poorly elaborated claims. A single page, for instance, includes the following statements, with no further explanation: ‘In private life pop is used to express love’; ‘The baroque pop of Coldplay’s song ‘Viva la Vida’ (2008) and the anthemic opening riffs of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984)… summon up the sensation of a time and place beyond individual and group preoccupations or memories’; ‘Upon activation [of the random ‘shuffle’ function], it is debatable whether you are playing the iPod or the iPod is playing you’ (p. 46). I’m left with only questions: What practices is Rojek thinking of when he says we express love with pop music? Do people sing pop songs to romantic partners? Play recordings in place of stating their feelings? Trade mix-tapes à la the film High Fidelity? (The last at least is familiar, but doesn’t fit with Rojek’s interest in pop’s very recent history.) And what is it about ‘baroque’ or ‘anthemic’ sounds that summons sensations of ‘togetherness’? This account of musical meaning is not obvious, and at moments like this I wish Rojek weren’t so quick to dismiss ‘musicology’, which would help fill in some of the details about how musical sounds produce or reflect social sentiments. Finally, if it is ‘debatable’ that an iPod’s random play feature undermines the agency of listeners – even when the same device also allows those listeners to construct their own playlists of songs from any album – this reviewer wishes that Rojek would go ahead and debate it. In many similar moments, Rojek simply races through examples without giving the reader any insight into the sort of facts or analysis that might make those examples illuminating.

The latter part of the book provides a useful and concise overview of changes in the popular music environment over the last generation in terms of corporate structure, relations between artists and audiences, and technological changes. These chapters slow down and provide more detailed analyses of individual artists, corporations and technologies, which could add a useful perspective on music to an undergraduate course about consumer culture or media. With its very general scope (and glossary-like notes explaining terms such as ‘homology’), students appear to be the book’s target audience, but these later chapters have enough interest that consumer studies scholars interested in an overview of pop music might consult them as a starting point. Unfortunately the bulk of the book is dedicated to a theoretical review that is both frustratingly vague and likely familiar to most cultural studies scholars, and probably too abstract to be valuable to students.