Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
The point behind such comparisons ought not to be simply to wean teenagers
away from the juke-box heroes, but to alert them to the severe limitations and
ephemeral quality of music which is so formula dominated and so directly attuned
to the standards set by the commercial market. It is a genuine widening of sensibility
and emotional range which we should be working for – an extension
of tastes which might lead to an extension of pleasure. The worst thing which
we would say of pop music is not that it is vulgar, or morally wicked, but, more
simply, that much of it is not very good (311–12).
Despite the theoretical suggestiveness of much of their analysis (especially their
identification of the contradictions of youth culture), and despite their protests to the
contrary, their position on pop music culture is a position still struggling to free itself
from the theoretical constraints of Leavisism: teenagers should be persuaded that their
taste is deplorable and that by listening to jazz instead of pop music they might break
out of imposed and self-imposed limitations, widen their sensibilities, broaden their
emotional range, and perhaps even increase their pleasure. In the end, Hall and
Whannel’s position seems to drift very close to the teaching strategy they condemn as
‘opportunist’ – in that they seem to suggest that because most school students do not
have access, for a variety of reasons, to the best that has been thought and said, they
can instead be given critical access to the best that has been thought and said within
the popular arts of the new mass media: jazz and good films will make up for the
absence of Beethoven and Shakespeare. As they explain,
This process – the practical exclusion of groups and classes in society from the
selective tradition of the best that has been and is being produced in the culture –
is especially damaging in a democratic society, and applies to both the traditional
and new forms of high art. However, the very existence of this problem makes it
even more important that some of the media which are capable of communicating
work of a serious and significant kind should remain open and available, and that
the quality of popular work transmitted there should be of the highest order possible,
on its own terms (75).
Where they do break significantly with Leavisism is in that they advocate training
in critical awareness, not as a means of defence against popular culture, but as a means
to discriminate between what is good and what is bad within popular culture. It is
a move which was to lead to a decisive break with Leavisism when the ideas of Hall
and Whannel, and those of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson, were brought together
under the banner of culturalism at the Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies.