Keith Negus

THE WORK OF CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES AND THE ENDURING DISTANCE BETWEEN PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION

This article raises some critical questions about cultural intermediaries as both a descriptive label and analytic concept. In doing so, it has two main aims. First, it seeks to provide some clarification, critique and suggestions that will assist in the elaboration of this idea and offer possible lines of enquiry for further research. Second, it is argued that whilst studying the work of cultural intermediaries can provide a number of insights, such an approach provides only a partial account of the practices that continue to proliferate in the space between production and consumption. Indeed, in significant ways, a focus on cultural intermediaries reproduces rather than bridges the distance between production and consumption. The paper focuses on three distinct issues. First, some questions are raised about the presumed special significance of cultural intermediaries within the production/consumption relations of contemporary capitalism. Second, how ‘creative’ and active cultural intermediaries are within processes of cultural production is discussed. Third, specific strategies of inclusion/exclusion adopted by this occupational grouping are highlighted in order to suggest that access to work providing ‘symbolic goods and services’ is by no means as fluid or open as is sometimes claimed.

Belonging and detachment: musical experience and the limits of identity

Abstract In this essay, we offer a critique of a trajectory of thinking about the relationship between music and identity and argue for the adoption of approaches that are able to embrace more nuanced and less reductionist notions of how music may connect with, become part of, or be totally irrelevant to our sense of self and collectivity. We initially focus on enduring tension between so-called reflection and construction theories of identity and suggest that the “mutual constitution” of musical and social self might allow for retention of insights from both perspectives. In the second part, we argue for a move outwards from a focus on the vocabulary of identity. In doing this, we highlight some of the problems of thinking about musical practices via notions of community and solidarity and suggest that equal attention should be paid to instances when music is associated with ambivalence and detachment rather than belonging.

Plugging and programming: pop radio and record promotion in Britain and the United States

The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed towards one national non-commercial station, Radio 1, which plays an eclectic mixture of musical styles. In the United States radio promotion has been aimed across a complex of commercial stations which broadcast ‘narrowcast’ music very clearly defined according to various ‘formats’. However, the recent re-regulation of the broadcasting system in Britain has resulted in a proliferation of regional commercial stations that are responding to increasing competition by introducing narrowcasting policies similar to those of North America. With Radio 1s share of listeners declining and the prospect of national commercial stations being granted licences and further challenging Radio 1s dominance of pop broadcasting, it seems particularly pertinent to contrast the practices of record companies and radio stations in Britain and North America and highlight how they directly effect the production and consumption of pop music.

The Changing Sites of Sound: Music Retailing and the Composition of Consumers

At a music business convention during September 1992, Maurice Oberstein, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry the organization that represents the interests of British record companies, issued a blistering attack on music retailers. Referring to the increasing buying power of a few large chains, he declared that record companies would shortly need to ‘take action against the inexorable pressure of retailers who control what we sell to the public’.’ Employing rhetoric that is more commonly heard directed at record companies, he argued that the use of retail advertising was ‘denigrating’ music. Singling out Our Price, Oberstein argued that retailers were treating music as little more than baked beans, using it to promote their own corporate identity. The retailers immediately responded to this ‘baked beans slur’ by issuing a counter-argument that they were committed to providing a diversity of music. Simon Burke, managing director of Virgin Retail retorted that, far from the retailer’s own corporate advertising dominating the music, the ‘advertising said far too much about the product and not enough about the shop’.* That such exchanges should be occurring within the music industry, rather than between artists and the corporations, is a significant development. It is an indication of an important series of tensions that are emerging as a result of changes in the relationship between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ within the culture and entertainment industries. This paper focuses specifically on the changing character of music retailing in order to highlight the central place accorded to ‘the consumer’ within those industries. Through an analysis of contemporary developments in music

Musicians on Television: Visible, Audible and Ignored

This article focuses on the prominent anxieties generated by television broadcasts of musicians from the 1930s onwards. It explores three specific issues: first, a concern that television images of performing musicians are detrimental to the experience of music; second, negative judgments about the consequences of television sound quality; and, third, fears that musical value is undermined by the distracted character of television reception. Focusing on these particular points, the article also raises a series of more profound questions about how various strategies of looking and listening influence our understanding of music.

Narrative Time and the Popular Song

Drawing from Paul Ricoeurs work on how the uncertainties of temporality are given coherence through narrative, this essay explores how popular songs mediate the human experience of time. It develops this idea via a brief illustrative study of how “Waterloo Sunset” refashions ordinary time through a narrative that celebrates the cyclical repetition of a moment, and suggests a more general tendency for pop songs to humanize the paradoxes of the “triple present” and to harmonize the tensions between phenomenological “lived time,” “cosmic time,” and “clock time” (categories drawn from Ricoeur). The essay outlines ways that a cyclical popular song aesthetic resonates with a broader series of temporal experiences understood in relation to concepts of ritual, accelerating social time, and plotless biography. In arguing for the importance of time and temporality in the study of popular music and self-identity, the essay is deliberately exploratory, seeking to open up a series of issues with the intention of complementing existing approaches to the relationships between music, identity, and social life.

Songwriters and song lyrics: architecture, ambiguity and repetition

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways that words and music are combined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regardless of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

Living, Breathing Songs: Singing Along with Bob Dylan

Resonances and retentions of a living oral tradition are activated each night when Bob Dylan performs in concert and are continually renewed and referenced in his vocalizing and in the breath of the audiences who sing with him. In some respects, Bob Dylan might not seem to be the most obvious artist to sing along with—after all, he is not usually perceived as someone who goes out on stage to entertain and engage in dialogue with a crowd. Yet in other respects he is heir to the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that refracts from contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodic observations of medieval troubadours, and the sacred rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. Popular song works at the intersection of speech and singing, the elevated and the mundane. Song begins where talk becomes music, where the ordinary becomes special.

Bob Dylan's phonographic imagination

In this article I emphasize the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan’s creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a ‘performing artist’, one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Eisenberg’s discussion of the ‘art of phonography’, and the way recording radically separates a performance from its contexts of ‘origin’ (allowing recordings to be taken into a private space and subjected to intense, repeated listening), I argue that studio practice, a recording aesthetic and the art of phonography are integral to Dylan’s songwriting. The process and practice of songwriting is realised through the act of recording and informed by listening to songs and performances from recordings, regardless of how much time is actually spent in the studio. Exploring how Dylan’s phonographic imagination has been shaped by folk, blues and pop sonorities, along with film music, I argue that recording should be integrated into discussions of Dylan’s art, alongside the attention devoted to lyrics, performance and biography.

Copy Rights: The Politics of Copying and Creativity:

This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns – collective and individual interests and identities – are articulated and negotiated and within which notions of ‘originality’, ‘creativity’ and ‘copying’ are politically constituted. Set against the background of the increasing economic value attributed to the creative industries, the impact of digitalisation on them and the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy, the article reveals how copyright policy and the underlying assumptions about ‘copying’ and ‘creativity’ express (often unexamined) political values and ideologies. Drawing on a close reading of policy statements, official reports, court cases and interviews with stakeholders, we explore the multiple political aspects of copyright, showing how copyright policy operates to privilege particular interests and practices and to acknowledge only specific forms of creative endeavour.