Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 4 Marxisms
Adorno claims? Simon Frith (1983) provides sales figures that suggest not: ‘despite the
difficulties of the calculations . . . most business commentators agree that about 10 per
cent of all records released (a little less for singles, a little more for LPs) make money’
(147). In addition to this, only about another 10 per cent cover their costs (ibid.). This
means that about 80 per cent of records actually lose money. Moreover, Paul Hirsch
has calculated that at least 60 per cent of singles released are never played by anyone
(cited in Frith, 1983: 147). This does not suggest the workings of an all-powerful culture
industry, easily able to manipulate its consumers. It sounds more like a culture
industry trying desperately to sell records to a critical and discriminating public.
Such figures certainly imply that consumption is rather more active than Adorno’s
argument suggests. Subcultural use of music is clearly at the leading edge of such active
discrimination, but is by no means the only example. Finally, does popular music
really function as social cement? Subcultures or music taste cultures, for instance,
would appear to consume popular music in a way not too dissimilar to Adorno’s ideal
mode for the consumption of ‘serious music’. Richard Dyer (1990) argues that this is
certainly the case with regard to the gay consumption of disco. He detects a certain
romanticism in disco that keeps alive a way of being that is always in conflict with the
mundane and the everyday. As he explains, ‘Romanticism asserts that the limits of
work and domesticity are not the limits of experience’ (417).
The analysis offered by the majority of the Frankfurt School works with a series
of binary oppositions held in place by the supposed fundamental difference between
culture and mass culture (Table 4.2).
Walter Benjamin’s (1973) essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’
is much more optimistic about the possibility of a revolutionary transformation
of capitalism. He claims that capitalism will ‘ultimately . . . create conditions which
would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself’ (219). Benjamin believes that
changes in the technological reproduction of culture are changing the function of culture
in society: ‘technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations
which would be out of reach for the original itself’ (222). Reproduction thus challenges
what Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of texts and practices.
Table 4.2 ‘Culture’ and ‘mass culture’ according to the Frankfurt School.
Culture Mass culture
Real False
European American
Multi-dimensional One-dimensional
Active consumption Passive consumption
Individual creation Mass production
Imagination Distraction
Negation Social cement