Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The Popular Arts 55
express the drive for security in an uncertain and changeable emotional world. The
fact that they are produced for a commercial market means that the songs and
settings lack a certain authenticity. Yet they dramatize authentic feelings. They
express vividly the adolescent emotional dilemma (280).
Pop music exhibits ‘emotional realism’; young men and women ‘identify with these
collective representations and . . . use them as guiding fictions. Such symbolic fictions
are the folklore by means of which the teenager, in part, shapes and composes his
mental picture of the world’ (281). Hall and Whannel also identify the way in which
teenagers use particular ways of talking, particular places to go, particular ways of dancing,
and particular ways of dressing, to establish distance from the world of adults.
They describe dress style, for example, as ‘a minor popular art . . . used to express certain
contemporary attitudes . . . for example, a strong current of social nonconformity
and rebelliousness’ (282). This line of investigation would come to full fruition in the
work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, carried out during the 1970s,
under the directorship of Hall himself. But here Hall and Whannel draw back from the
full force of the possibilities opened up by their enquiries; anxious that an ‘anthropological
. . . slack relativism’, with its focus on the functionality of pop music culture,
would prevent them from posing questions of value and quality, about likes (‘are those
likes enough?’) and needs (‘are the needs healthy ones?’) and taste (‘perhaps tastes can
be extended’) (296).
In their discussion of pop music culture, they concede that the claim that ‘the
picture of young people as innocents exploited’ by the pop music industry ‘is oversimplified’
(ibid.). Against this, they argue that there is very often conflict between the
use made of a text, or a commodity that is turned into a text (see discussion of the
difference in Chapter 10) by an audience, and the use intended by the producers.
Significantly, they observe, ‘This conflict is particularly marked in the field of teenage
entertainments . . . [although] it is to some extent common to the whole area of mass
entertainment in a commercial setting’ (270). The recognition of the potential conflict
between commodities and their use leads Hall and Whannel to a formulation that
is remarkably similar to the cultural studies appropriation (led by Hall himself) of
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (see Chapter 4): ‘Teenage culture is a contradictory
mixture of the authentic and manufactured: it is an area of self-expression for the
young and a lush grazing pasture for the commercial providers’ (276).
As we noted earlier, Hall and Whannel compare pop music unfavourably with
jazz. They claim that jazz is ‘infinitely richer . . . both aesthetically and emotionally’
(311). They also claim that the comparison is ‘much more rewarding’ than the more
usual comparison between pop music and classical music, as both jazz and pop are
popular musics. Now all this may be true, but what is the ultimate purpose of the
comparison? In the case of classical against pop music, it is always to show the
banality of pop music and to say something about those who consume it. Is Hall
and Whannel’s comparison fundamentally any different? Here is their justification for
the comparison: