The Capitalist Imaginaries of Popular Music
Traditionally, popular music has long been said to intrinsically contest, resist, and defy the powers that be. This new book challenges this long-standing orthodoxy, arguing that popular music more often participates in the social reproduction of the biggest power there is: neoliberal capitalism. This is done mainly through the widespread mediation of a very particular and remarkably cohesive ideology of greatness and value. This ideology is drawn from principles and prescriptions that have long been constitutive of neoliberal capitalism. We have been told this story over and over again for decades.
The music is real. The music is powerful. The music is defiant.
It is a story that has gradually spread to encompass everything from classic rock to contemporary pop to hip hop to dance music. This suite of ideas came to dominance since the mid-1980s and persist to the present, an era in which the vast majority of people have been disempowered, impoverished, and marginalised at home, at work, and in politics. This book explains why such a robust, pervasive, and persistent set of ideas about popular music has taken such a tenacious hold in a historical era which has repeatedly and thoroughly demonstrated the utter falseness of those same ideas nearly everywhere they have been experienced.
Charles Fairchild is an Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Sydney and the author of Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), Sounds, Screens, and Speakers (Bloomsbury, 2019), Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Music, Radio and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2012). His work focuses on cultural mediation in the music industry, focusing especially on the period from 1975 to the present, examining how intermediaries within different kinds of institutions shape the ways people consume and make meaning from music.