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.The big multinational corporationsthat dominate the music industry themselves organise their music divisions into unitseach concentrating on a different genre and audience.Black audiences are marked outfrom white, and certain genres (notably so-called  modern rock ) are given moreattention because of their history of profitability (Negus 1999, 496).It s because ofmusic s capacity to segment and germinate that, for instance, the concept of the  sub-124POPUL AR MUSI Cculture , appropriated from sociology, has been developed in cultural studies termslargely via work on popular music.And it s because of that capacity that culturalstudies work on African diaspora cultures and drug cultures also tends to be mediatedthrough music  even if this emphasis exposes the study of music to certain distortions.Of course rock music in particular has also become hegemonic.Even  authenticrock stars can belong to the establishment, if, in general to the liberal establishment.Over the years they have acquired significant political clout, of which there are fewbetter instances than Bono of U2 s role in increasing US aid to the world s poorestnations.At the UN Conference on Development in Monterey, Mexico in March 2002,the USA increased its aid budget for the first time in twenty years by $5 billion.TheWhite House confirmed that lobbying from the rock star was significant in the USA sunexpected change of direction (which led to the European Union increasing its aidbudget also).In the light of this clout and respectability, rock s history of, and carefullymaintained image of, rebelliousness begins to fall apart, as we shall soon see in moredetail.What, for instance, happened to  alternative rock which can now be used tohook youngish viewers into a truly mainstream product such as Fox s Dallas revampThe O.C.? But the mainstreaming of rock generates new internal divisions, as musiciansinvent modes to counter its influence.Punk and reggaeThe first popular music genres to come under the examination of British culturalstudies were reggae and punk, the street music of the disaffected young in the lateseventies when the discipline was young.British punk was a reaction against its variouspredecessors, namely: (1) the highly industrialised and show-biz music that heavymetal and other rock genres had by this time become; (2) the faded utopianisms of thehippie movement with their middle-class overtones; and (3) the foppishness andperceived pretentiousness of  glam rock whose biggest stars were David Bowie andRoxy Music.Punk was urban, working-class, young and aggressively anti-establishment.Some of its elements (including the name and its revisionist  back toreal rock n roll music credo) had been imported from avant-garde New York art-school scenes (and in particular ripped off the New York Dolls) by Malcolm McLaren,the Sex Pistols manager.Nonetheless, British punk was a whole new thing.As to reggae: this was the time that reggae was exploring studio-based techniquessuch as dub and perfecting the technique of  toasting which had developed in the earlyfifties in Kingston s sound systems.(A sound system is a portable record deck, ampli-fiers and speakers used for street and other parties and was mainly popular in thepoorer neighbourhoods.) Toasting DJs, working for and individuating the soundsystems, improvised slang lyrics and interjections on top of records, a tradition whichbegan to fade among the Jamaican systems in the late eighties at a point when hip hop,125MEDI A AND T HE PUBL I C S PHEREwhich can partly be regarded as an offshoot of toasting, was already a major genre inthe USA.(In Jamaica it transformed into  dancehall or  ragga , one of the most innova-tive, technologised music genres of the nineties.)In the seventies too, roots reggae , as produced by stars such as Bob Marley, BurningSpear and Culture, had incorporated Rastafarianism, a Jamaican religious cult muchinfluenced by Marcus Garvey who preached a  Back to Africa doctrine in the firstdecades of the twentieth century.Rastas reject the white man s materialist world andbelieve Haile Selassie, the last Ethiopian monarch, to be divine.Their religion is also astyle: dreadlocks, ganja-smoking, patois-speaking.During the seventies Rastafarianismbegan to spread beyond the working-class Jamaican men who had formed its base sincethe thirties.Simultaneously, in London, reggae began to enter into complex interactionswith punk, most obviously in the music of groups such as the Clash and the Slits as well asin the lyrics of tracks such as Marley s 1977  Punky Reggae Party.(Marley s sense ofwhere popular music could go was influenced by hearing the Clash.)In his book Subculture:The Meaning of Style (1979), which did much to popularisecultural studies in the Anglophone world,Dick Hebdige theorised punk as a transgressive signifying practice.According to him, punk  cut up and recombined various working-class styles, past and present, in a  phantom history motivated by parody.Its safety pins,bondage trousers,S&M paraphernalia,ripped clothing  a radicalised  ragamuffin look are interpreted as imitations of impoverished British working-class styles, worn brazenlyand out of context to express the emptiness and meaninglessness of the social situation inwhich British working-class youth found themselves under Thatcherism, i.e [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]