Three ideas proved to be particularly relevant to later efforts to distinguish art from popular art. First, art is the product of genius. Art is constantly evolving, so successful new art involves progress. Second, the value of art is aesthetic, and aesthetic value is autonomous. Artistic value cannot be reduced to utility, moral effects, or social functions. Third, whatever is true about fine art is true about music. From the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, philosophers regarded music as a pillar of the emerging system of the fine arts.
As a result, music could not be regarded as art if it lacked genius and autonomy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, most intellectuals endorsed the elitist consensus that popular music lacks these features.
Despite its influence on subsequent theorizing, the eighteenth-century intellectual framework did not recognize a clear distinction between fine art and popular art. It places great emphasis on genius and artistic autonomy. These elements of the Kantian aesthetic are often cited to dismiss the art status of popular music. Many subsequent philosophical analyses of the distinction between art music and popular music draw on his proposal that the lesser arts dull the mind.
Lacking the interplay of ideas and formal experimentation that characterizes fine art, the popular arts are mere entertainment see Kaplan, Nonetheless, it is important to note that Kant does not himself recognize the field of popular art, so he does not align the lesser arts and popular art. Furthermore, his general position on the value of music is inconclusive. As such, Kant might assign greater artistic value to a folk song than to J.
Where we do find discussion of this topic in the eighteenth-century, popularity is not yet opposed to art. Mozart writes of the importance of providing his operas with memorable, popular melodies.
Even here, however, it would be anachronistic to suppose that Enlightenment categories support a clear distinction between art music and popular music. At best, philosophers of this period postulated differences between refined and vulgar taste. A more rigid distinction between art music and other music gradually emerges during the nineteenth century.
By the middle of the century, philosophical discussions of music begin to make sporadic reference to what we now recognize as popular music. Philosophy of music increasingly concentrates on explaining why recent European concert music is musically distinctive and superior. The art of music is the art of structuring tones. Only structural properties matter, and they matter only for themselves. Impure music that relies on words or emotional expression pleases audiences with non-musical attractions.
In this analysis, most popular music pleases its audience by its extra-musical rewards. A quarter century later, Edmund Gurney provides additional arguments for musical autonomy. Responding to the longstanding idea that music expresses emotion by generating a felt, bodily response, both Hanslick and Gurney insist that bodily engagement indicates an inferior response.
Again, they extend a Kantian theme. Together, Hanslick and Gurney are an important source of the view that popular music is inferior because its primary appeal is visceral, bodily, and felt.
In contrast, the abstract structures of classical music demand an intellectual response. The body hears, but only the intellect listens see Baugh , Gracyk Gurney is not entirely negative about popular music. Folk music comprises most of the latter category. This category also includes appealing melodies of operatic arias and other classical works. Gurney already recognizes, in , that the maintenance of social strata requires stereotypes that unnecessarily limit access to a wide variety of music.
Consequently, true popularity is seldom cultivated. For Gurney, music cannot be popular if its appeal is limited by social boundaries of any sort. Nietzsche initially defends the superiority of certain strains of European classical music. He praises composers whose irrational genius provides the Dionysian energy needed to correct the rational excesses of European culture.
Nietzsche eventually reverses himself. Nietzsche aside, philosophy of music has been dominated by the view that the best music is autonomous and formally complex John Dewey is almost alone in defending the vitality of popular art during this time period. Unfortunately, Dewey said very little about music. As recently as , philosophy of popular music consisted of variations on a single theme. As a result, most philosophers who bothered to discuss popular music concentrated on identifying the aesthetic deficiencies inherent in such music.
Theodor Adorno offers an influential, philosophically sophisticated account of the nature of twentieth-century popular music. He is the single best source for the view that popular music is simplistic, repetitive, and boring, and that it remains this way because commercial forces manipulate it in order to placate and manipulate the masses who passively respond to it.
Although a Marxist orientation influences almost all of his arguments, his influence is apparent in many writers who are not explicitly Marxists. Unfortunately, Adorno is a notoriously difficult writer. His writings on music are subtle, dense, and fill many hundreds of pages. Adorno begins with the insight that popular music is characterized by the synthesis of entertainment values and mass art.
Twentieth-century popular music is mass art because commercial forces now produce it on an industrial model. It is a commodity aimed at the largest possible number of consumers. Therefore it must combine a high degree of standardization with relative accessibility, and so the same rhythms and structures appear again and again.
As a result, popular music competes with and replaces local and regional folk traditions In the wake of the industrial revolution, genuine folk art is no longer possible. In a commercial world where one popular song sounds much like any other, popular music cannot function as a medium of genuine communication. At best, a philosophically reflective stance sees that its standardization and commercial presentation reflects important facets of the socio-economic conditions that shape it.
Its standardization reflects the alienating, oppressive standardization of modern capitalism. The momentarily pleasurable diversions offered by popular music are mere distractions from this alienation — a process that the music itself reinforces.
Since it fails to satisfy any genuine needs, exposure to popular music encourages an endless repetition of the cycle of consumption, boredom, alienation, and fresh distraction through consumption. We cannot complain about popular music if our culture cannot provide a more satisfying alternative. If nothing better is available, then there is nothing especially wrong with popular music.
Adorno argues that objectively better music is available. He is sophisticated enough to avoid a simple contrast of classical and popular music. For Adorno, almost all of the music that passes as art music is just as bad. It is barely comprehended by its audience, most of whom respond approvingly to its familiarity. Radical composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, however, provide art music that is socially progressive.
Artistic truth is relative to the time and place of its creation and reception. It requires music that is sufficiently autonomous from socio-economic pressures to permit compositional integrity. For example, our expectations for aesthetic pleasure previously placed a premium on beauty. The quest for beauty curtails genuine autonomy.
Therefore musical integrity comes at a cost: good music no longer offers us the beauty of conventional fine art. Instead, it must be compositionally complex enough to incorporate and display the contradictory demands that we impose on art. By comparison, music that is readily understood and immediately pleasurable is not autonomous.
Given these requirements, very little music succeeds in forcing listeners to deal with the contradictions of modernity. Popular music fares worst of all. Its requirement of accessibility deprives it of social truth, so it lacks any genuinely progressive social role. Adorno sees no important distinctions within popular music.
His analysis is subject to challenge on the grounds that some popular music lacks conventional beauty and easy pleasures. However, Adorno can reply that such music cannot simultaneously achieve popularity while offering artistic truth, for that truth cannot be conveyed by music that is accessible enough to generate a commercial profit.
Yet they created autonomous, challenging music. The commercial framework of twentieth century music has not eradicated artistic truth as Adorno defines it. Adorno aside, popular music received limited philosophical attention before the early s. Although neither Howes nor Stadlen cites Adorno, their analyses endorse many of his basic ideas. Where Gurney treats folk music as a species of popular music, Howes opposes the two categories.
Howes proposes that the communal composition and ongoing re-fashioning of folk music ensures a unique combination of simplicity and excellence. In a few short paragraphs, Stadlen encapsulates most of the position that Allan Bloom revived more hyperbolically in To summarize the modernist view, genres of art develop a hierarchy. Superior genres require attention to abstract structures, so they require active, focused listening. Therefore the best music is found in the classical repertoire, where composers have emphasized autonomy and cognitive complexity.
By comparison, popular music is aesthetically deficient. It sacrifices autonomy because its design is driven by functional demands for emotional expression and for dance rhythms. Popularity requires accessibility, so popular music cannot combine popularity and complexity. Richard Shusterman has produced several essays that challenge these standard dismissals of popular music. Bringing a more balanced perspective to the philosophical debate, these essays demonstrate that popular music is philosophically more interesting than modernism suggests.
Good popular music satisfies the aesthetic criteria routinely used to praise serious music. Although Shusterman concedes that a great deal of popular music is aesthetically poor and may have negative social effects, he argues that at least some of it succeeds aesthetically while offering a socially progressive challenge to prevailing cultural biases. He identifies and criticizes a core set of criticisms that are typically directed against popular music.
He focuses on its alleged lack of creativity, originality, and artistic autonomy. He also replies to claims that it degrades culture generally by offering an inferior substitute for better music, that its escapism makes for shallow rewards, and that it encourages an uncritical passivity that generates a disengaged populace b, pp.
Most of these arguments originate in Adorno. Shusterman recommends aesthetic criteria that are broad enough to endorse the functional dimension of every art form. The fundamental structure of popular music lies in its bodily rhythms, so movement is necessary for appreciating it. Since these movements bear meanings, a genuine response to music is both physical and intellectual.
This active, bodily engagement is also supplemented by awareness of lyrics because songs dominate popular music. The latter focuses on hip-hop recordings that are verbally complex, philosophically insightful, and rhythmically funky.
They are aesthetically satisfying in a way that integrates both bodily and intellectual responses. The best hip-hop presents a life philosophy. However, concentrating on a handful of exemplary cases does not demonstrate that popular music is generally complex in this manner.
These books feature essays that explore the philosophical underpinnings of groups such as the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Metallica, and U2. They also correct another major bias. It is clear that many accessible popular songs grapple with complex ideas and issues, however. Finally, Shusterman argues that some popular music has the additional merit of presenting a postmodern challenge to the modernist categories that have dominated philosophical aesthetics a. In particular, hip-hop often highlights postmodern strategies of recycling and appropriation.
It engages with the concerns of subcultures and localized communities rather than with an allegedly universal perspective. These strategies reverse and thus repudiate modernist standards of artistic value. This line of argument does little to address traditional criticisms of popular music, however. Instead, it acknowledges that popular music is deficient according to traditional standards while also contending that cultural change renders those standards irrelevant.
This argument does not answer critics who still endorse traditional views about art because the force of this argument depends on a complex understanding of historical developments in art and aesthetics.
Shusterman thus weakens his earlier charge that aesthetic theory has systematically misrepresented the nature of most art. Traditional aesthetic categories still frame the debate as popular music divides into two broad categories. Good popular music succeeds according to either modernist or postmodernist values.
Either way, popular music is evaluated according to fine art standards see Gracyk Shusterman supplements his discussions of rock and hip-hop with an independent essay on country music a. He focuses on a small genre of films about the careers of fictional country singers. This essay moves Shusterman away from the bifurcation just outlined. Country music is discussed without reference to either modernist or postmodernist standards. Instead of arguing that country music is aesthetically complex and socially progressive, Shusterman focuses on the issue of how country music succeeds in conveying emotional authenticity to its fans.
He thus endorses a line of analysis that is found in many ethnomusicological analyses of popular music. Shusterman concedes that country music is excessively sentimental and that commercial processes undercut its claim to authenticity. Nonetheless, it is comparatively authentic to its fans for a variety of reasons. Second, it is commercially positioned as more authentic than contemporary alternatives in popular music. Third, its emphasis on first-person storytelling has a self-validating authority.
Together, these factors give country music an aura of authenticity that explains its appeal. Hence, popular music should not be judged against the elitist ideals that have dominated aesthetic theory. It must be judged in relation to its capacity to embody and consolidate social relationships and values that are central to the society that creates and assimilates it. For several generations, both kinds of music have evolved organically in response to social change. These musical traditions have not changed for the sake of originality and novelty, as encouraged by modernist aesthetics.
Art music embraces progress that dictates continuously new forms, experiments, and innovations. Blues and country music constantly re-adapt established forms and signifiers.
They change as necessary to remain relevant in the face of changing circumstances. As a result, ongoing styles of American popular music are extraordinarily successful at expressing racial, generational, and class-specific values in a way that remains comprehensible and emotionally satisfying to almost everyone in their respective audiences. As such, the vitality of popular music is best seen by highlighting its commonalities with non-Western art.
Aida Amoako is a freelance writer from London. More by Aida Amoako. Subscribe to our newsletter Get the latest news, reviews, and commentary delivered directly to your inbox. Sign Up. Skip to content. Become a Member. Forgivable Lies, Three Painters Keep You Guessing In a psychological context, confabulation refers to obvious falsehoods invented by individuals to fill gaps in their memory.
Ancient Babylonian Comes Alive in Hollywood Blockbuster Eternals Assyriologist and associate professor Martin Worthington, who worked on translations for the Marvel movie, created the first film entirely in Babylonian in Aida Amoako. Cool story, tho. A lot of the counter arguments I have read or heard or discussed have said that pop music is entertainment, not art. That it is a largely soulless, calculated factory method of creating a consumable product that has no artistic merit.
That it would be like scanning a popular painting and then changing the saturation levels and printing 10 copies and calling them ten different paintings of art by seven different artists and using such a routine process to crank out variations of what may have originally been art just to profit. I wonder whether Justin Beiber considers himself an artist, an entertainer, or both? Most popular films are watched purely for entertainment value, and are strictly created to make money.
But I can't say that films aren't art. Of course Pop music is art, and just as in all fields of the arts, there is much dross to go with the good stuff. You must log in or sign up to reply here. Show Ignored Content. Share This Page Tweet. Your name or email address: Do you already have an account? No, create an account now.
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