Research: Popular Music Theory

Popular Music Theory

Why is it important to understand theory?

By finding out different theorists and their theory, has helped me to understand more about the music industry. I will be talking about six theorists; Popluar Culture, Antonio Gramci - Hegemony, Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, Birmingham School and Dick Hebdige. By researching bout these people, it has he led me the different views about music videos and their genres. 

Popular Culture

Popular Culture is the understanding of ideas and attitudes of how the mainstream culture have an affact on the music industry and how they are represented within it. In the 1980's, popular culture became more mainstream due to advancing technology. The bourgeoisie influenced popular culture and they had a division of two sides, one side represented their tastes and attitude, and the other side represented populate culture which included everyone that was not a part of the bourgeoisie. 

Popular culture includes mainstream music which reinforce dominate cultural ideologies such as partying, drinking, dancing and socialising. Some of the genres of music that are associated with this are pop, r&b, hip-hop and at times dance as they appeal to a large audience. 

In today's society, popular culture is mostly displayed on the internet, Tv shows, movies and apps that could be downloaded onto technical devices. The younger generation mostly follows popular culture. 

Antonio Gramci - Hegemony



Hegemony means to look down upon an individuals social class over others. Hegemony moistly includes the ideologies that are created by the bourgeoisie which is also reinforced down and accepted by the working class. Moreover, linking this to music,  ideas such as love, family, money and working hard are repeated in the lyrics, so the audience is constantly hearing this without realising. So this is why working class and educated audiences are more likely to follow these ideas because they constantly hear them. 

Frankfurt School


The Frankfurt school was based in Germany in the 1920's, and they were the earliest version of the Neo marxist theory. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are also two theorists from the Frankfurt school. The Frankfurt school suggests that the audience accepts the message ‘injected’ into them by the mass media. 

Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno was a german socialist, he is a theorist from the Frankfurt school. He was popular for his theory which was divided between popular culture and true art. Adorno recon Popular culture by standardisation, as he believed that the masses intake popular culture such as; chart music. 


The division between popular culture and true art is called 'Hegemony.' 

To interoperate this table the true art that appeals to the bourgeoisie is music such as classical and jazz music which will only appeal to you if you have a upper class and educated background. 

Popular culture which appeals to the masses consists music such as love, family, money and working hard. 

Birmingham School

Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist and sociologist along with Richard 

Hoggart.  He made some contributions to the music industry by commenting on the ideas that applied to the content of the music we listen to through popular forms such as the radio, TV and on the internet.

Hall’s work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies, he believes that the lyrics  and melody used in a song are constantly repeated but slightly changed every time in order to reinforce hegemony. Stuart Hall’s work also illustrates the link between racial prejudice and media. Stuart Hall argued that the study of popular culture should always begin with what he termed “the double movement of containment and resistance.” This means that there was always a continuous struggle over the languages, traditions, and ways of the labouring classes, the uneducated, and the poor. 

One of Hall’s theories was the Reception theory which included the idea of Encoding and Decoding.

• Encoding is the process by which a text is constructed by it’s producers.
• Decoding is the process by which the audience reads, understands and interprets a text. 

Dick Hebdige 

Dick Hebdige argues that consumption is an active process in which differences in audiences’ social and ideological construction which is lead to different readings of the same cultural products. The audience is free to resist the power of large companies by ignoring them or by finding alternative products to consume them. Also, major companies will attempt to assimilate this resistance by attempting to provide products which these audiences or subcultures will consume. 

Conclusion

From this post I have learnt about the different theorists and how they could have an impact on my work. In my opinion, I agree with Theodor Adorno's theory because there is a division between popular culture and true art.