I’d Still Call it Art if it’s Harmful

       Music as an art form has always been used as a tool of artistic expression. Everyone loves the artists that they do because in some way as an audience, we connect to them on an emotional level. When we here certain songs, they bring us perplexing feelings of nostalgia. With different music come different modes of expression through genres, but is the music industry relying too heavily on genres as a rudimentary source of identification in order to sell generic sounds too predictable demographics?

            We all have our personal tastes in music, and in the genres we love, we have also heard music that doesn’t appeal in the same way. The music industry’s main concern as a business is to gather as much income as possible in order to achieve an ever-increasing equilibrium economically. Pop music as a sociocultural construct inherently amalgamates music genres that are easiest to sell to the widest demographic. Even such genres as punk rock and hip-hop have found their way into the pop cultural atmosphere, though their entire conceptions were built off of ethical theories of rebellion against the societal norms that are shoved down the throats of the masses. In one article, it is said that the “explicit and expressed values of pop music are to capture the largest number of listeners as possible, and influence the attitudes and behaviors of the uncommitted” (Hirsch, 1986). Pop music is influenced by pop culture and vice versa. This explains the one his wonder phenomena in that any song at any time can sell, but that doesn’t make it art, it makes it a timely product. This excretes the artistic values from music by robbing it of it’s authenticity and realness. Pop music as a business in fact devalues the trueness and individuality of music as a whole.

            In a recent T-Mobile commercial a song called “Take back the Power” by The Interrupters appeared in the background, while the central message of the commercial was not having to settle for Verizon. The lyrics heard specifically come off as generic punk lyrics which go “What's your plan for tomorrow, Are you a leader or will you follow, Are you a fighter or will you cower, It's our time to take back the power.” In the context of the commercial with the voice over of a man telling the audience that they don’t lie helplessly under the oppressive boot of the Verizon Company, when instead they can take back the power, and be an individualistic T-Mobile customer. This is a prime example of how any genre can be manipulated by its effect on pop culture and the social relations that the genre brings to it’s followers. Anyone who believes in the original ethics of punk rock would never sell out to these cooperate factions, especially just to make a few thousand dollars on a phone commercial. Real people know that music like punk rock, hip-hop, and folk work as cultural agents to expose real problems going on in the world and not the fake oppression of phone companies.

            Music in the context of identity theorizes the relationship between the experience of music and the resonation of this experience of the identity. One’s identity is constantly changing and music constantly plays a huge roll in the formation of our identities. In an article, it was said that “Music seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective” (Frith, 1996). Music is an individual articulation of the self, and an esthetic doorway to the soul. All art forms relate people to much deeper parts of themselves, but music in the last 100 years has become indissoluble with the configuration of the self. Though the music industry works for a much different reason then true artists do, they continue to make much more money than musicians that care more for the aesthetics of their work opposed to the economic opportunities of it. Artists have always been found in the undergrounds and backroads of the music industry and continue to grow from an independent spectrum. The recognition of independent musicians as a cultural phenomenon has also began to take it’s role as a pop cultural entity. Ironic how an entire pop genre is emerging based off a genre that was conceived to oppose the popular norms. The cycle continues.

Bibliography

Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. Questions of cultural identity, 108-27.

Hirsch, P. M. (1971). Sociological approaches to the pop music phenomenon. The American Behavioral Scientist (Pre-1986), 14(3), 371.