“Sex’n’drugs’n’roll,” sang cheeky chappie Ian Dury three decades ago. It’s that third element of youth culture’s unholy trinity that is seen most as defining generational consciousness and change. But has pop music (a synonym for rock’n’roll) ceased to have its once assumed insurrectionary impact?
In part it’s become institutionalised. Our parents have grown up with it. “Pop music studies” on the tertiary curriculum is no longer a novelty, courses and syllabi are widespread in old and new universities alike. The landscape is changing faster than the textbooks can though. The academicisation of pop may frequently focus on the white western rock canon, but music itself has broadened out into all sorts of directions. Rapid technological and broader socio-economic shifts have affected all of these. “World” music for example is a form traditionally taken to be “unspoilt” and “primitive” yet it too has been irreversibly altered in the past decade. The continued cultural effects of mass migration have changed the soundscapes we inhabit. The music journalist David Toop once described his late-1980s encounter with a group of Yanomani who promised to sing tribal songs in return for a listen to the new Michael Jackson album. Such a scenario in this day and age would be improbable, since the Yanomani in question would likely have downloaded the album on release.
Gloomy predictions of the final end of music recording as a business proposition that were in circulation at the turn of the millennium with the advent of file-sharing appear to have staved off for the time-being. Yet iPod and iTunes, backed up by a slew of anxiety-driven reforms to copyright law, have made the music business look increasingly obsolescent. Tour receipts and t-shirt sales far outstrip CD sales.
Then of course there are downloads. Music has become increasingly intangible in the internet age. When CDs were being phased in purists complained that sleeve-art would be a casualty as the smaller booklet size could never accommodate Sergeant Pepper style designs. Downloads do not come in exquisitely packaged box sets or even with flimsy stapled booklets. Meanwhile the world around music has changed and continues changing.
Politically, the world has looked very different after 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, and it already begins to look different again after the election of Barack Obama feted as the first “hip hop President” – why else would Dizee Rascal pop up on the BBC election coverage to be interviewed by Paxman? The migrations within Europe and across the southern border of the USA and the credit crunch between them threaten to reorder power. Culturally, the world looks very different since the development of Web2.0’s general democracy of participation and criticism, and more specifically through MySpace and YouTube’s democracy of performance and production. Such sites are the youth cultural equivalent to the political blogosphere – the Guidos and Recess Monkeys have their equivalent in popbitch.
In some ways just as pop product is more fragmented than ever with the primacy of individual tracks rather than albums representing a body of work, audiences are also divided: celebrity star performers whose stock-in-trade tours and big festivals compete with talent “discovered” through reality TV contests. Nevertheless the iPod, illegal p2p file-sharing and web2.0 phenomena such as LastFM and make-your-own programmes like Apple’s Garageband and Sony’s Acid continue the transformation of musical knowledge, taste and choice. The incredible popularity of the guitar hero computer game also has implications for the democratisation and demystification.
Perhaps it’s only a matter of time then before some start declaring that rock’n’roll is the new politics.