"RIGHT, you guys down the back of the class: turn off that Doom video game and cue track three on your interactive CD Rom of Zoorapa. This morning we're going to deconstruct Numb, according to Sheila Whitely's concept of `psychedelic decoding' which, as we all know, was developed nearly a quarter of a century ago in 1992. And any cheeky little reprobate who dares to give me a literal interpretation of lyrics like give me some more/of that stuff love will be made to key in that line a hundred times - in Swahili! Focus instead on how the spatial relationships evoke the hallucinogenic experience, what the subtextual tendencies tell us about Bono's background - before he became President of Ireland".
Okay, okay. This form of futuristic scenario is largely farce. Perhaps. But it's not quite as farcical as some of the responses to Minister Michael D. Higgins's suggestion, in 1993, that the work of groups like U2 should be studied in Irish universities. Worst of all were those media commentators and professors of English who did yield to their most literal inclinations and scream: "Good God! Is the man mad? Is he seriously trying to suggest that songs like Numb are poetry?"
Actually he wasn't. Because Michael D. knows damn well that the "are rock lyrics poetry?" debate is as politically loaded as attempting to determine the true worth of movies by comparing them to their "social superiors", novels and plays. Rock and cinema are clearly different beasts altogether: two of the most important new art forms spawned by the 20th century; though, as Higgins observes, this is not mirrored in the curriculum of most Irish schools and colleges.
Not so in UCD, however, where in response to the Minister's suggestion Dr Seoirse Bodley, professor of music, stated that the potential is certainly there to include U2 and we already have lectures on rock music". Unfortunately he then went on to compare rock to "serious modern music", found it "limited" in terms of "innovations" and thus revealed his own prejudices or, at least, the inherent limitations of the purely musicological approach to evaluating cultural artefacts such as pop. Recognising this, other third level lecturers felt that U2 would have more to offer to students of sociology, with one unnamed source from Cork University suggesting that: "to study the social background of U2 and the effect of their music on Irish society might be a more profitable exercise".
Right. But not quite. Because sociology has always been shamefully slow to acknowledge the significance of rock, as Simon Frith first indicated in his seminal book, The Sociology of Rock (1978) which he wrote "with one eye on my sociological colleagues, still ignoring music in their account of the mass media, and the other on my fellow rock fans, still making sense of their music with loose political assumptions left over from the 1960s".
The former may have changed, to a great degree, in British educational institutes such as Birmingham University, but the latter still applies world wide - particularly to the majority of time warp wrapped rock critics, who still become apoplectic and mumble phrases from Presley's All Shook Up the moment you mention the word `sociology'. As part of their party piece they also invariably go on a really cute retrorant about how "it's only rock'n'roll, you sing along, dance, make love to the music, what the hell has sociology got to do with it?" Everything, in fact. Or rather, almost everything.
Indeed, it could be argued that it is only by starting from a sociological base and hauling in similar material from Cultural Studies, plus Media Studies, Womens' Studies and History, that we can even begin to fully understand the meaning of rock, both as an art form and as a means of cultural expression. It may not be cool to say it - but let's face it, when it comes to the question of analysing, popular music as opposed to even film, political infantilism has ruled the roost for far too long.
And that is precisely the argument put forward by at least three books published in the past year: Popular Culture by Dominic Strinati, Understanding Popular music by Roy Shuker and, most recently, Popular Music And Society, by Brian Longhurst.
STRATINI basically glides over music in his much broader based introduction to the theories that are most frequently applied to pop culture, accurately suggesting, for example, that rap, hip hop and house can best be analysed within the parameters of postmodernist theory. Shulker, in his more specific case study, also draws on the latter but stresses from the outset that it is just one of the "ways" into an examination of pop. He also happily taps into the "the high culture tradition, identified with Leavisite English criticism, the mass society thesis associated with Frankfurt School Marxism and three variants of critical media theory political economy, Structuralism and Culturalism".
I know. What would Little Richard say if you told him that his war cry of "awopbopaloobopalopbamboom, tutti frutti, aw rooti" was being analysed along structuralist lines? Well the self professed king (and "queen") of rock might actually smile, content in the knowledge that, once broken down into its most minute structures, the "non sense" lyric will be seen to capture the sound of a gay man's pleasure at the sight of a "good booty" - which, in jive talk means "good ass". Though that, understandably, is not something Little Richard could articulate in anything other than a coded manner in 1954. Particularly as a gay black man.
Of course, we don't need structuralism to lead us to "filthy" insights such as this, many would argue. Obviously not. But Brian Longhurst's book, in particular, is written in the hope that "the pleasures of pop music and its analysis can be combined", a commendable aim and undeniable truth, surely? And Longhurst clearly takes great pleasure in directly addressing the theories of Theodor Adorno, whose name inevitably turns up in every book about popular culture. And in any serious study of pop music.
Indeed his oppositional stance against pop has undoubtedly been the single most outer productive position taken by any social theorist this century. Specifically in terms of his pivotal role in the aforementioned Frankfurt School of theoreticians, which also included the Sixties "campus revolution" icons such as Herbert Marcuse and which deeply influenced subsequent debate within "Structuralism and semiology, through Althusserian and Gramscian Marxism, up to feminism and postmodernism," according to Strinati's book, Popular Culture.
And this Adorno achieved mostly through writing, in 1941, a searing indictment of what he called the "culture industry". Rooted in a Marxist view of society he argued that popular music, radio, Hollywood movies, mass produced journalism and advertising had all become so "standardised" as to be meaningless in any pure artistic sense and, were instead merely "products geared to the larger demands of a capitalist economy. And maybe even a capitalist ideology. "Under monopoly all mass culture is identical," he wrote, claiming that it adapts to the prevailing mode of production which, in turn, adapts its consumers to the same mode, therefore killing the potential for "critical thought" which had been evident in bourgeois art of the nineteenth century.
Pinpointing pop music, in particular, Adorno believed that: "Music for entertainment seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people, moulded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility."
Pretty pessimistic lot, these unreconstructed Marxists, aren't they? Needlessly so. And although much of Adorno's criticism is still valid, time - as Longhurst points out, has also revealed his other blind spots.
Adrono's critique focuses almost exclusively on Tin Pan Alley songwriting and pre dates the rise of rhythm'n'blues, rock'n'roll and all the permutations of popular music that followed; and it was written before the advent of the "album, not to mention cheap cassettes and synthesisers, all of which give both the creator of music and the consumer previously unparalleled choice.
Indeed, in the second half of his book Brian Longhurst accurately identifies one of the major problems with the original position taken by Marx in relation to culture. Namely, the naive notion that the ruling class controlling, say, the media, can act as "hypodermic syringe injecting messages into the audience" as if it were a mindless, homogenised mass. Ironically, this "hypodermic model" of music, and its effect on young people, was also much loved by right wing American conspiracy theorists such as Tipper Gore, who founded the Parents' Music Resource Centre in 1985, claiming that heavy metal music was a "threat to youth" because it "pounded" into listeners - who were, presumably, helpless to resist endlessly "sadistic" messages.
HOWEVER, anyone with even half a heavy metal pounded brain knows that we negotiate meaning in a far more complex manner than this, as Longhurst notes, pointing out that "people are social beings who live in groups which mediate media messages" and who "do not always receive the same message from a text as the producers thought they were putting into it."
Furthermore, drawing on a study entitled Common Culture: Symbolic Work At Play In The Everyday Culture Of The Young, Longhurst suggests that being a pop fan can, in fact, lead to a process of self empowerment. The authors of that study argue that "the basic elements of symbolic work include language and the active body, and symbolic creativity involves the production of new meanings intrinsically attached to feelings, to energy, to excitement and psychic movement" - all of which, obviously, come into play when we become creative listeners to music.
Though, of course, "creative" is the operative word. And that study clearly states that consumption can be creative, in five particular areas: listening and buying, home taping, interpreting sounds, dance and interpreting songs and symbols. Even more importantly, it highlights how consumption can lead to production in relation to forms of music such as DIY recording and mixing and musicmaking and performance. Roll over Adorno, and tell old Marxists the news.
And let's not forget that production can lead directly to employment, which is another irrefutable reason rock should be studied in Irish colleges. If or, hopefully, when that happens, these three books will be required reading. They should be right now, for anyone who wants to see the future of rock'n'roll. Or, at least, the future of the analysis of rock'n'roll.
Class over.
