Why Popular Music is Political

This paper will give an overview of the ideas explored in my book, Mixing Pop and Politics: a Marxist History of Popular Music, refuting standard aesthetic and affective approaches, in which music is effectively sealed off from history. Where music is understood politically, it is either dismissed as a capitalist commodity – denying popular agency within the marketplace – or parcelled off as ‘protest song’, which narrows music’s political scope. This paper, instead, will enlarge that scope, offering a wider and more nuanced understanding of the many ways in which music can be political.

First, music can be political regardless of its content – as with Motown’s diffusion of black talent amid the 60s civil rights movement, or the fact of trans artists Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s transatlantic 2003 number 1, ‘Unholy’. Second, pop can be political due to its makers’ actions, whether that be David Bowie declaring himself gay in 1972, or Charli XCX anointing Kamala Harris as ‘Brat’ in 2024. Thirdly, and most importantly, popular music is indicative of what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’, recording the temper of the times. Hence, the optimism of 60s pop amid social democratic security, or the soporific domesticity of soft rock and the hedonic escapism of disco amid mid-70s recession, or the brittle upbeatness of 80s pop, buoyed by an artificial boom. Not all pop is a superstructure of feeling, however: both rock’n’roll and beat music were lateral expressions of racial solidarity, while glam can be regarded as a popular diffusion of the ideals of Gay Liberation.

Finally, the paper will position popular music as political for being a social activity, from production to dissemination to reception. Where most cultural commentators regard our contemporary, social media-saturated culture as a debasement of popular culture, this paper will present the essential sociality of music in a competitive individualist society as a resource of hope.

All welcome. No booking required.

Image credit: Childish Gambino on stage in 2012., Eli Watson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.