• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuBc4P_gl_s TOP OF THE POPS ( THE STORY OF 1980 ) Séquence de 13.42 à 21.08 Synth Pop Séquence de 41.50 à 43.00 Roger Daltrey • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU4RwwPKZFU Top of the Pops - The Story of 1982 (SD) • Séquence de 10.50 a 15.54 • Séquence de 26.00 à 27.30 « Golden Brown » Stranglers • Séquence de 38.26 à 43.33 Pigbag • Séquence de 52.07 à 56.48 Boy George • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzSM3pRtgcM Tubeway Army - Are Friends Electric '79 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaF9KTH0SEg Gary Numan - Down in The Park
• Punk and two-tone had two very important consequences. First, in dis-interring the entire wardrobe of postwar styles, they both decoded these styles and greatly expanded the field of stylistic options for an increasingly self-reflexive and stylistically mobile youth culture. After punk, virtually any combination of styles became possible. To name but a few examples: the revival of skins, mods, and teds; rude boys; suedeheads; a psychedelic revival; rockers—both the traditional type and the younger, denim-clad heavy metalists; Rastafarians; soulheads (short-haired blacks); disco; Ant-people; Northern soul; jazz-funkateers; Bowie freaks; punk (subdivided into Oi, “hardcore,” or “real” punk, plus the avant-garde wing); futurists; new romantics; glam revivalists; beats, zoots, and so on. Second, the “new wave” eroded the distinction between “teenyboppers” and youth, which was largely based on the distinction between progressive LPs and pop singles of the early seventies. Punk made singles and singles artists acceptable. • Lawrence Grossberg “Is There Rock After Punk?” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word 1986
• As Linda Dowling has argued, beneath the debate between sense and reason in matters of taste was the “question of how legitimacy is to be achieved in the liberal polity, how a state that derives its authority from the consent of its people may pretend to be founded upon anything more secure than […] the restless, irrational appetites of an ignorant population.” To counter such irrational forces, Shaftesbury conceived of taste as a force that educated one to choose virtue and reason over pleasure, thereby fostering an ideal political order. Building on Shaftesbury’s theories, Kant’s philosophy of aesthetic judgment placed artistic consumption in explicit opposition to the kind of sensual consumption by which the pornographic reader made use of his “art,” claiming that “A pure judgment of taste has, then, for its determining ground neither charm nor emotion, in a word, no sensation as matter of the aesthetic judgment.” Disinterested aesthetic contemplation was figured as antithetical to the kinds of physical reaction prompted by the pornographic. Throughout the eighteenth century, the aesthetic was viewed in its most dominantly understood forms as an invisible social contract. The aesthetic was no hedonistic cult of individual sensibility, as it came to be figured later in the nineteenth century, but rather a binding structure between what Kant saw as “on the one hand, the universal feeling of sympathy, and, on the other, the faculty of being able to communicate universally one’s inmost self – properties constituting in conjunction the befitting social spirit of mankind, in contradistinction to the narrow life of the lower animals”(CJ 226). Art was that which allowed the growing community of educated and propertied individuals to represent itself to itself. (Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity)
• I do not see anything more useful than an encyclopedia • I cannot think of anything more secure than a credit card • I cannot conceive of a state where citizens would have no rights • He was educated to be a winner. He was trained to win • He made an appearance on TV, thereby earning a good reputation • Disco was considered as the opposite of punk • I view him as an imposter. I consider them as losers • I am no fool (to give all my money away) • He is no hero (to change the world)
• It does not follow from this that there is no meaning in speaking of the culture of an individual, or of a group or class. We only mean that the culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of the group, and that the culture of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society; and that our notion of "perfection" must take all three senses of "culture" into account at once. Nor does it follow that in a society, of whatever grade of culture, the groups concerned with each activity of culture will be distinct and exclusive: on the contrary, it is only by an overlapping and sharing of interests, by participation and mutual appreciation, that the cohesion necessary for culture can obtain. A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshippers who know what is being done. • It is obvious that among the more primitive communities the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven. The Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping, carving and painting his barque of the peculiar design required for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising several cultural activities at once - of art and religion, as well as of amphibious warfare. As civilisation becomes more complex, greater occupational specialisation evinces itself: in the "stone age" New Hebrides, Mr. John Layard says, certain islands specialise in particular arts and crafts, exchanging their wares and displaying their accomplishments to the reciprocal satisfaction of the members of the archipelago... (T.S Eliot, Notes on Culture)
• Even in the nineteenth century the possibility of the domestic cultivation of music—like the entirety of bourgeois private life—represented only the reverse side of a social corpus, whose surface was totally determined by production through private capital. The dialectic of capitalistic development has further eliminated even this last immediacy offered by music—in itself already an illusion, for in it the balance between individual production and understanding by society was threatened. Since Wagner's Tristan, this balance has been totally destroyed. Through the total absorption of both musical production and consumption by the capitalistic process, the alienation of music from man has become complete. This process involved, of course, the objectification and rationalization of music, its separation from the simple immediacy of use which had once defined it as art and granted it permanence in contrast to its definition in terms of mere ephemeral sound. At the same time, it was this process which invested music with the power of far-reaching sublimation of drives and the cogent and binding expression of humanity. Now, however, rationalized music has fallen victim to the same dangers as rationalized society, within which class interests bring rationalization to a halt as soon as it threatens to turn against class conditions themselves. This situation has now left man in a state of rationalization which—as soon as the possibility of his further dialectic development is blocked—crushes him between unresolved contradictions. (Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, Music and Mass Culture)
• The same force of reification which constituted music as art has today taken music from man and left him with only an illusion [Schein] thereof. This force of reification could not simply be reconverted to immediacy without returning art to the state in which it found itself before the division of labor. Music, however, insofar as it did not submit to the command of the production of commodities, was in this process robbed of its social responsibility and exiled into an hermetic space within which its contents are removed. This is the situation from which every observation upon the social position of music which hopes to avoid the deceptions which today dominate discussions of the subject must proceed. These deceptions exist for the sake of concealing the actual situation and, further, as an apology for music which has allowed itself to be intimidated economically. They are also the result of the fact that music itself, under the superior power of the music industry developed by monopoly capitalism, became conscious of its own reification and of its alienation from man. Meanwhile, music, lacking proper knowledge of the social process—a condition likewise socially produced and sustained—blamed itself and not society for this situation, thus remaining in the illusion that the isolation of music was itself an isolated matter, namely, that things could be corrected from the side of music alone with no change in society. It is now necessary to face the hard fact that the social alienation of music— that assembly of phenomena for which an overhasty and unenlightened musical reformism employs derogatory terms such as individualism, charlatanism, and technical esotericism—is itself a matter of social fact and socially produced. For this reason, the situation cannot be corrected within music, but only within society: through the change of society. (Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, Music and Mass Culture)
• The question regarding the possible dialectic contribution which music can make toward such change remains open: however, its contribution will be slight, if it—from within its own resources—endeavors only to establish an immediacy which is not only socially restraining today, but by no means reconstructable or even desirable, thus contributing to the disguise of the situation. (Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, Music and Mass Culture)
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the whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. The primary effect of this relation between the framework and the detail is that the listener becomes prone to evince stronger reactions to the part than to the whole. His grasp of the whole does not lie in the living experience of this one concrete piece of music he has followed. The whole is pre-given and pre-accepted, even before the actual experience of the music starts: therefore, it is not likely to influence, to any great extent, the reaction to the details, except to give them varying degrees of emphasis. Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterized: Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme. The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either. Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject. This mode of production, which engenders fears and anxiety about unemployment, loss of income, war, has its “nonproductive” correlate in entertainment; that is, relaxation which does not involve the effort of concentration at all. People want to have fun…. The question is further to what degree music—insofar as it might intervene in the social process—will be in a position to intervene as art. Regardless of the answers which might be given, here and now music is able to do nothing but portray within its own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its own isolation. Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express—in the antinomies of its own formal language—the exigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society: it fulfills its social function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws—problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique. The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. (Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, Music and Mass Culture)
• Pleasure is seen as intrinsically disruptive or at least outside the sphere of social control. In either case, daily life is the scene of a constant struggle against the dominant, hierarchically organized modes of modem cultural power. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• It is important to criticize such celebrations of daily life, not only because they are becoming the new common wisdom of cultural studies, but also because they have made it even more difficult to come to terms with the specific nature of contemporary daily life and its articulation to the politics of the social formation. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• After all, structures not only constrain and oppress, they also enable and empower. And certainly not all structures are equally oppressive. By equating resistance with the deconstruction of any structure, it often unconsciously reproduces those positions of power which, at any moment, for whatever reasons, escaped the deconstructive onslaught. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• Consequently, such theories of daily life are unable to explore the relations between the forms of pleasure and survival with which people maintain some control over the construction of their own differences, their own lives, and their own possibilities, and the structures and tendential forces of the social formation. Instead of offering an analysis which is empowering— since empowerment itself has to be contextually articulated—they substitute one which always finds empowerment already there. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• My students regularly oppose classes on rock because, in some sense, they know that too much intellectual legitimation will redefine the possibilities of its effectiveness; it will become increasingly a meaningful form to be interpreted rather than a popular form to be felt on one’s body and to be lived passionately and emotionally. Popular culture is not defined by formal characteristics but by its | articulation within particular formations and to specific sensibilities. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• Difference is relocated so that only affect matters. And all images, all realities, are affectively equal—equally serious, equally deserving and undeserving of being allowed to matter, of being made into sites of investment, of being incorporated into mattering maps. If the equality of all images assures a perpetual search for difference, the irony of this sensibility ensures not merely the impossibility but the absurdity of such difference. That nothing matters itself does not matter! (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
• Authentic inauthenticity is in-different to difference. It does not deny differences; it merely assumes that since there are no grounds for distinguishing between the relative claims of alternatives, one cannot read beyond the fact of investment. To appropriate, enjoy or invest in a particular style, image or set of images no longer necessarily implies any faith that such investments make a significant (even affective) difference. Instead, we celebrate the affective ambiguity of images, images which are “well developed in their shallowness, fascinating in their emptiness. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
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The identification of popular culture as an instance of a more general process of communication needs to be challenged, for it has had important consequences. In particular, two assumptions have, I believe, hindered cultural studies' attempts to analyze popular culture. The first is structural: the model of communication assumes a relationship between two discrete and independently existing entities: whether between individuals, or between audiences and texts, or between signifiers and signifieds. The result is that any cultural relation takes on the form of an unspecified and unspecifiable exchange—a mediation—between encoding and decoding. It makes little difference which term in the model is given priority as long as the distance or gap between them remains […] The model remains the same even if one hypothesizes a process of negotiation in which each is granted some power. The distance between them remains sacrosanct. […] The concept of difference entails a sustained critique of any assumption of such guaranteed and necessary relationships. Just as structuralism argued that the identity and meaning of any sign depends upon its place within a system of differences, poststructuralist theories of difference argue that no element within the cultural field has an identity of its own which is intrinsic to it and thus guaranteed in advance. A text can never be said to have a singular meaning, or even a circumscribed set of meanings. Perhaps texts cannot be treated singularly and in isolation: the meaning of a text may depend upon its formal and historical relations to other texts (its ‘intertextuality’) An audience can never be said to have a singular identity, or even a finite set of identities. Each is replete with multiple and unrelated differences, each is potentially infinitely fragmentable. Theories of difference emphasize the multiplicity and disconnectedness within and between texts and audiences. By erasing the identity of the terms of the relationship, the relationship itself becomes impossible or at least necessarily absent. Communication itself is an illusion which it is the critic's job to deconstruct. (Grossberg, We Got to Get out of Here)
