The formation of a rock critic

The most important factor in my career was that I was born in 1946, the peak year of the post-war baby boom. I was, in consequence, shaped (and inadvertently helped to shape) a new kind of youth culture.Footnote ⁶ This had a number of elements, demographic obviously but also economic, political, and technological. To begin with, ‘the young were’, in the words of Harry Hopkins, ‘the outstanding financial beneficiaries of the postwar situation’, beneficiaries by the 1950s not just of their own unprecedented employment prospects and earnings but also those of their parents.Footnote ⁷ One consequence was the development of a distinctive youth market for consumer goods and leisure activities, a market that was both symbolically and materially marked off from adult culture.

Recorded music was central to the commodity world of the teenage consumer, and in financial terms the commercial importance of teenage music sales can be related to technological and institutional changes. The post-war development of vinyl recordings and the reorganization of the record market into 33⅓ and 45rpm formats reflected the rising demand for youth music, and singles were soon aimed almost exclusively at the young. At the same time, the development of television as the dominant leisure medium meant that non-domestic leisure businesses and spaces – cinemas and dance halls, city centre clubs and streets – became increasingly youth oriented.

While commentators tended to treat ‘youth culture’ as a single entity, it was, in fact, structured by class differences, particularly by different experiences of work, education, and leisure, even if these experiences were themselves changed by the post-war development of the welfare state and the raising of the school leaving age to fifteen. The point here, though, is that such differences were now articulated musically. By the 1960s young people's social groupings, cultural ambitions, and sense of identity were lived through shared and self-consciously ‘different’ musical likes and dislikes, through expressions of taste in music making, music listening, and music conversation. In other words, for my age cohort, teenagers in the 1960s, pop music was something that mattered. We organized our leisure and consuming activities around it; it fed our sense of generational difference, and complicated our understanding of class difference.

This sense of generational difference is well captured by a Sheffield newspaper reporter around 1960:

And certainly for a rural grammar school boy (as I was by this point), a vaguely beatnik or bohemian version of rebellious youth was more attractive than ‘teenage gang warfare’, and had an effect on my subsequent adolescent tastes (French films and novels, American beat poetry, African-American jazz and blues). This was the cultural context in which the music that mattered to me shifted from teen pop stars packaged by adult managers, songwriters, and producers (the essence of early British rock ’n’ roll, regarded by record companies at the time as a passing novelty) to young musicians making music for themselves, even if to begin with in imitation of admired adult jazz, blues, and folk artists. This cultural shift involved a judgement that the most valuable kind of popular music was anti-commercial, not made with sales in mind. The first example of such youth cultural music was skiffle, described in 1959 by Eric Hobsbawm (writing as Francis Newton) as

In the 1950s skiffle also had a considerable significance for the left. John Hasted's 44 Skiffle and Folk Song Group, for example, featured, among others, Shirley Collins, who was recruited from the London Youth Choir that Hasted had formed to take part in Communist World Youth Festivals.Footnote ¹⁰ Although, as Hasted later remarked, ‘very seldom was there any complaint that our folk revival was part of a communist plot’, its political stance was clear to me.Footnote ¹¹ The core elements of skiffle – New Orleans jazz, American folk and blues – were familiar as the musical accompaniment when I started to go on CND marches, and the folk revival as defined by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger was central to the meetings of York Young Socialists, an organization which was, as far as I was concerned, essentially a pub-based folk club.

In short, as Ben Harker has suggested, ‘skiffle managed to combine all the exotic glamour of American culture with a visceral, DIY, anti-commercial ethos’.Footnote ¹² The Americanization of British youth that Richard Hoggart and other Leavisite commentators bemoaned was not simply a commercial takeover. The strands of North American music that influenced rock – jazz, blues, the vernacular songs of the working class – were also of interest to the British Communist Party. It was the Young Communist League's Challenge Jazz Club that promoted George Webb's Dixielanders’ central London concerts in the 1940s, for example, and the dominant London jazz promoters in the 1950s (such as Humphrey Lyttelton's manager, Lyn Dutton) were, according to the 100 Club's Roger Horton, ‘all in a clique of members of the Communist Party’.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, one of the jazz musicians I most admired when I started listening to the Humphrey Lyttelton Band, saxophonist Bruce Turner, explored arguments within the party about commercialism and ‘pseudo-authenticity’ as a columnist in the Morning Star.

Early British folk clubs had similar political links. In 1954, London Communist Party members started the Good Earth Folk Club, as the first folk song club in Glasgow was launched by Marxist teacher and songwriter Morris Blythman and the first folk club in Bristol opened in the local Communist Club. In the same year the famous Ballads and Blues concert was staged in the Royal Festival Hall as a benefit for the Daily Worker. This concert arguably launched the 1950s folk revival in England, a revival in which the emphasis was as much on political or expressive authenticity as on truth to a perceived English folk tradition. As the concert programme put it, ‘what distinguishes the present folk-music renaissance from previous revivals is the fact that the people are demanding that their music be served up “neat”, and unadulterated, in the authentic traditional style’. The line-up included Ken Colyer's Jazz and Skiffle Bands and, as the programme asked:

From a rock perspective, the long-term effect of this concert (and the development of Ballad and Blues clubs) was therefore not a pressing concern for the ‘traditional’, for what one might call ancestral music, but, rather, for musical eclecticism. What developed in my generation was a sense of affinity with black American as well as white British performers, an understanding of ‘popular’ music in terms of a politics of ‘the people’, rather than by reference to sales figures, and a critical discourse in which ‘authentic’ and ‘unadulterated’ were indeed the key terms.

Certainly in the mid-1960s, as I began to read about popular music – in Melody Maker and New Society, in books by Francis Newton and Paul Oliver – the arguments that most interested me were those trying to make sense of commercially made music, to redeem it politically and aesthetically, while also addressing issues of race and class. In 1964, when I went to Oxford University, I had little interest in student politics but did go regularly to the city's jazz club, which by then primarily featured white British electric blues and R&B bands. It was a more interesting setting for arguments about socialism than the Oxford Union if one thought, as I did, that socialism concerned cultural inequality, power, and exploitation rather than which political party held the Union presidency.

In 1967, ‘the summer of love’, I enrolled in the graduate sociology programme at the University of California, Berkeley (as it turned out, another good career move), and discovered a different kind of campus politics with a different kind of musical accompaniment. I was there in the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement and towards the end of the Civil Rights Movement, during the rise of the Black Panther Party and at the height of the anti-war movement; I took part in sit-ins and experienced ‘Bloody Thursday’ at People's Park. I got a job on the local underground paper, the Berkeley Barb, and made friends with another music-loving graduate student, Greil Marcus. I spent a lot of time going to concerts, clubs, and bars and listening to rock and pop, jazz and soul, folk and country music.

Taking popular music seriously in this context meant accepting a hippie approach to the music's cultural value – in the libertarian terms of sexual freedom and the use of mind-expanding drugs. The Marxist scholar who was most referenced in cultural debates here was Herbert Marcuse rather than T. W. Adorno. Materialist arguments about class and music were more likely to be found in black American radical writing or ethnographic sociology. I read LeRoi Jones (he changed his name to Amiri Baraka in 1968) and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Howard Becker on jazz musicians, and Charles Keil's Urban Blues.

In 1970 (I was now back in Britain) Greil Marcus, who was reviews editor of the recently launched Rolling Stone, commissioned a couple of reviews from me (Gene Vincent and the Small Faces) and I started my career as a rock critic. Over the next two decades, I wrote for a great variety of outlets: the underground press (Styng and Oz), the British rock press (Cream and Let it Rock), the American rock press (Creem and New York Rocker), the British left political press (from The Leveller to Marxism Today), the American left political press (In These Times), and, eventually, for overground political and music magazines and newspapers (New Statesman, Melody Maker, Village Voice, Sunday Times, and The Observer).

Such a range of outlets was not unusual; it indicated not my particular gifts but the sudden explosion of music-writing opportunities. The institutional factors that mattered here were not just the changing conditions of popular music production, but also the changing conditions of the production of journalism.Footnote ¹⁵ On the one hand, as baby boomers became young adults so the demand expanded for the kinds of publication that had previously found only niche markets: the rock press developed out of collectors’ circulars and fanzines as well as the commercial music weeklies; the underground press took ideas from comics, student newspapers, and art school pamphlets. The distribution model came from the sectarian left press: direct selling at meetings, demos, marches, concerts, festivals, and parties. In production terms there was considerable overlap between personnel. My own writing mentor, Dave Laing, was involved in the publication of all kinds of magazine. Similarly, the first British rock magazine to which I contributed, Cream, was launched and edited by Bob Houston, who came from Melody Maker and went on to be both chief sports sub-editor of The Observer and editor of The Miner, the magazine of the National Union of Miners.Footnote ¹⁶

If music and underground magazines now had a bigger market and new sales opportunities, they also had a new source of advertising income: record companies. Ideologically the emergent rock culture was defining itself in terms of art and community rather than commerce and the market. Rock musicians, audiences, publicists, and promoters alike drew their discourse from folk and jazz club accounts of authenticity and creativity; they got their sense of collective, communal identity from political bohemia. At the same time though, as Steve Sparks puts it, ‘the music business was the engine room of the underground, the source of the finance’,Footnote ¹⁷ a source of finance too for the political press and, indeed, the reason why I was later appointed to be the Sunday Times’ first rock critic – the publisher wanted to attract album ads.

What is striking about this period (the late 1960s and early 1970s) is that rock, underground and political publications were serving the same readership (which is why I did not find it odd to write for all of them). Aspirationally, at least, this hippie-inspired community wanted, in Andy Roberts's words, ‘to be more than just consumers of entertainment industry’. There was a demand for musical events ‘where they could live out their lifestyle with like-minded people in a spirit of celebration and purpose’, such as Phun City, a celebration of ‘underground’ music on Ecclesden Common in West Sussex in July 1970.Footnote ¹⁸ Two years later, a ‘People's Free Festival’ was held in Windsor Great Park. Its political dimension can be seen in both its billing (a Rent Strike People's Festival) and its slogan: ‘Pay No Rent!’ As Roberts suggests, this sort of utopian politics was now tied into the growth of communes and squatting, a movement against property.

I did not go to either Phun City or the Windsor festivals, but I did understand that, for a ‘rock writer’, reviewing gigs and records was not just a matter of consumer guidance but also involved drawing a kind of imaginary map of an ‘alternative’ community shaped by political as well as aesthetic arguments about commodities, and I did not write differently whether for Let it Rock or The Leveller, for the Village Voice or Melody Maker. The issue was not just whether rock was ‘art’ (as against pop) but also whether and in what ways it was disruptive, liberating, and anti-capitalist.

I initially looked to jazz writing for answers. Jazz critics sought to distinguish ‘commercial’ from ‘authentic’ jazz, argued about the validity of white (European) people engaging with African-American culture, and wondered whether political progress had to be articulated by experimental or difficult music (and what this might mean for the concept of ‘the popular’).Footnote ¹⁹ These were the issues (with rock rather than jazz as the focus) that I discussed with fellow members of the Marxist Rock Writers Collective, journalist friends who had numerous political differences but were all committed to writing about rock politically and took for granted Marx's relevance for the arguments. It did not seem odd to me that when I was commissioned by Time Out to write a think piece on disco, I wrote it as a parody of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach.Footnote ²⁰

If rock writers drew on Marx, so Marxist organizations drew on rock writers, as they rethought their own attitudes to commercial music, and sought to recruit a new generation of members. I was mostly invited to Communist Party events, sitting on panels at the Communist University of London, supporting the Young Communists in their demand to be allowed to run discos. By then, though, my ‘expertise’ was also as a rock academic.

The formation of a rock academic

In 1972 I got my first university job, in the sociology department at the University of Warwick.Footnote ²² This was a new department with a predominantly young staff, which had been launched in 1970 by John Rex, who treated Marx as one of the founding fathers of sociology and organized the first-year undergraduate syllabus, on which we all taught, accordingly. Warwick turned out to be a particularly interesting university because of its place in the life of the city of Coventry, where it was situated. When it was launched in 1965 much was made of its links with local industry (then dominated by flourishing motor manufacturers), not least through the university's emphasis on the commercial value of its research – the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson had resigned from Warwick in protest against this policy shortly before I arrived.Footnote ²³ At the lower level of the university community, there were also links with local trade union activists and policy makers through shared membership of various socialist, communist, and Trotskyist groups.

Arguments about Marxism were thus commonplace in my everyday academic life and continued with even more intensity during the collapse of the car industry in the late 1970s and the transformation of Coventry from an unusually affluent working-class city to an exemplar of deindustrialization: a ‘Ghost Town’, as the Specials’ 1981 hit described it. At work I progressed from an illuminating Capital Reading Group to tetchy discussions of French Marxist and anti-Marxist theorists such as Louis Althusser and his critics while my sociology colleagues introduced me to the work of Bourdieu and Foucault.

The impetus to treat popular music as a suitable subject for academic scholarship came, though, from elsewhere, from the National Deviancy Conference (NDC), which launched in York University in 1968, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which opened in Birmingham University in 1964; I attended an inspirational NDC event in Cardiff in 1976 and went regularly to CCCS seminars, now under the leadership of Stuart Hall. These projects shaped my approach to youth culture and the media, and provided models of how to develop a Marxist approach to mass consumption that was not crudely deterministic. New criminology thus integrated a material approach to social deviancy (the inequality of wealth and power was still taken to determine crime) with labelling theory (or, as I had learned to call it in Berkeley, symbolic interactionism): deviancy also involved inequalities of discursive power. Cultural studies integrated Marxism (the Marxism of Gramsci and Walter Benjamin) with structural linguistics and semiotics. Youth culture was discussed in Birmingham with reference to ‘subcultures’, and youth pop consumption was understood as a form of ‘resistance through rituals’.

The important point for me here was not that these debates gave me a new way of thinking about popular music but that they made me realize that popular music, as it was already being reconceived by rock critics, was a significant setting in which to address the theoretical issues being raised by these scholars. To put this another way, I now realized that rock arguments about culture and commerce, about symbolic and material power, could be used to illuminate academic debates. This was the impetus for writing The Sociology of Rock, which also addressed a third strand of critical sociology in the 1970s, media studies.

By 1978, then, I had made the case for an academic sociology of popular music but not yet for popular music studies. This needed the engagement of music departments, of musicologists and music teachers. As Philip Tagg put it in 1982:

Very little maybe, but in researching the sociology of rock I had come across new musicological work on popular music. Richard Middleton's Pop Music and the Blues was published in 1972 and I knew of John Shepherd's project on ‘sociomusicology’.Footnote ²⁵ Both Middleton and Shepherd were graduate students at York University, in the music department founded by Wilfrid Mellers, himself the author of a 1973 book on the Beatles and, more to the point, an American music scholar with an interest in the relationship of art and secular music, of music and politics (as in the work of Marc Blitzstein). Meanwhile, in the Keele University Music department, Peter Dickinson had created a Centre for the Study of American Music, which among other things meant studying black American music. It was at one of its conferences (in 1978) that I first met like-minded musicologists, including Philip Tagg, who, as is the way with the English middle classes, turned out to have been at school with me.

The Keele event was a precursor, in skeletal form, of the cross-disciplinary network from which popular music studies as an academic field emerged. The first issue of Popular Music, which Richard Middleton and David Horn started as a yearbook in 1981, featured articles by ethnomusicologists (John Baily, John Blacking, Gerhard Kubik), scholars in American music history (Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers, Charles Wolfe, and John Cowley), a rock sociologist (me), a Trotskyist social historian and folk scholar (Dave Harker) and the Hungarian Marxist music theorist János Maróthy, author of Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian. This was a setting in which people with quite different disciplinary training could talk to each other, not least because arguments about the meanings and implications of various Marxist concepts were a common currency. This was equally apparent at the First International Conference on Popular Music Research, held in Amsterdam in June 1981, from which IASPM emerged, although its dynamic was different in two respects. First, the work to establish a scholarly organization was driven by music educators rather than music academics. Philip Tagg (in Gothenburg) and Gerhard Kempers (in Amsterdam) were both concerned about the increasing gap between the musical interests and ambitions of school children and the musical expertise and ideology of their teachers.Footnote ²⁶ In the Netherlands the problem was the educational bureaucracy and its definition of what ‘qualified’ someone to teach music; in Sweden, the question was how to prepare pupils to appreciate popular music critically. Either way popular music studies were seen as necessary educationally, a public good, a subject for policy discussion and essentially political. Second, many of the Amsterdam participants were not, in fact, academics and so ‘popular music research’ was discussed as a matter also for musicians, music journalists, deejays, and music entrepreneurs. For these participants ‘popular music’ was, on the whole, identified as rock, and popular music research meant dealing, for example, with the arguments among Europe's progressive rock performers and entrepreneurs about libertarian versus socialist ideology and the popular versus the experimental. In the early 1980s, at least, IASPM was effectively, if unofficially, in alliance with the musicians’ network, Rock in Opposition. Franco Fabbri, from the Italian band Stormy Six, duly became a leading member of both organizations.

My popular music studies contact list now spread into Eastern Europe, where IASPM soon had members.Footnote ²⁷ I engaged in new Marxist debates about the political significance of rock, whether at Festa de L'Unitá events in Italy, at meetings with musicologists from the German Democratic Republic such as Günter Mayer and Peter Wicke, whose PhD on the aesthetics of popular music was completed in 1980, or in friendship with the Russian rock writer Artem Troitsky. Sometime in the late 1980s I did a mini British Council tour of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In each country the role of rock music in the apparent and dreamt-of loosening of the state's cultural power was a matter of urgent conversation; at my talk on punk in Prague the secret service men drew attention to themselves by being the only people taking notes. The 1991 IASPM conference was held in post-wall Berlin. It had originally been planned (one reason for my trip) as the first IASPM event in a communist country.

The failure of success

In Britain, the high point of the engagement of socialist activists in music and musicians in socialist politics was the decade from 1975 to 1985. Punk was interpreted by politicos (according to their agenda) as either an eruption of ‘authentic’ and ‘unadulterated’ working-class musical expression and a protest against the corporate sell-out of bourgeois rock musicians or as the reclamation of counter-cultural anti-establishment bohemian anarchy or as the birth of a new do-it-yourself collective mode of cultural production. At the same time, the increasing daily threat of skinhead violence, ‘Paki-bashing’, and the National Front led to the creation of the most politically effective of all socialist music projects, Rock Against Racism (RAR). This was a Socialist Workers Party initiative but unusually unsectarian (in Coventry RAR's political organization was provided by the International Marxist Group) and rather successful in mobilizing musicians and fans.

This was, in general, a highly political decade, marked both by increased trade union activism and the miners’ strikes and by battles over ‘municipal socialism’, culminating in the abolition of the Greater London Council, issues with which many popular musicians (and music writers and scholars) were engaged. In the end, though, the decade marked a profound reactionary shift in cultural sensibility. Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, the year of publication of Dick Hebdige's Subculture. The Meaning of Style, the academic book which turned out to have the most influence on 1980s popular music writing (and, indeed, popular music making) in its exploration of the politics of music as a matter of gesture. Punk's do-it-yourself ethos was reconceived as a form of ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ individual enterprise; ‘resistance through rituals’ became a celebration of consumerism and the ‘new pop’; art (or ‘artifice’) was no longer opposed to commercial logic but driven by it.Footnote ²⁸ The rise of ‘identity’ politics from feminism to ethnic activism and their impact on cultural studies meant, for both good and ill, the declining relevance of Marxist class analysis.

In 1985 there were two moves to organize popular musicians for political ends. Red Wedge was founded to put on concerts with discussions across the UK in support of the Labour Party's election campaign; and Live Aid staged a stadium rock show simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, a show that was broadcast on television around the world. Concert tickets, TV rights, and the accompanying records were sold to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. In hindsight it is clear that Red Wedge's approach to music politics – a rock concert audience as potentially expressive of class consciousness – was anachronistic while Live Aid marked the moment when rock was irrevocably integrated into the economy of global entertainment.Footnote ²⁹ Four years later, the Berlin Wall came down and Marxist arguments lost their traction in the academy too.

But then, to return to my starting point, perhaps it was precisely because talk of the politics of popular music now seemed quaint and Marxist approaches to its analysis pointless that ‘popular music studies’ began to appear more systematically on university curricula. The intellectual case for taking this music seriously had been made; its value in developing existing concepts and debates in both the humanities and the social sciences was apparent. The next stage in the construction of a new academic field was institutional. In my experience (as an executive of IASPM and editor of Popular Music) this meant a kind of professionalization: popular music studies developed by adapting the usual academic trappings of peer review and conference programme committees, through the career structure of PhD study, scholarly publications and the hierarchy of scholarly status.

This process also seemed to mean adapting US scholarly practices. The IASPM Conference in Stockton, California in 1993 was a quite different sort of event from the IASPM Conference in Reggio Emilia in 1983. Participants were almost all now academics (in Italy musicians, music writers, and music activists contributed to discussion); the Stockton event took place on a college campus and its panels and presentations followed university teaching conventions (what I remember most clearly about the Reggio conference were the long debates over outdoor lunches in the city's central squares); there was no public interest in the Stockton meeting at all (the Reggio gathering was sponsored by the Communist municipal council). In Stockton small talk was about jobs, departments, and careers rather than political plots and betrayals.

Meanwhile, my own career flourished. Although I had no formal qualifications in music and my work had never been subject to peer review, my authority was assumed, perhaps because I had been around for so long. And I came to benefit from the turn-of-the-century political consensus on higher education and cultural policy. Universities were increasingly expected to compete in the market for students and to act as a training facility for ‘wealth creators’. University administrators were persuaded that courses in popular music were ‘vocational’ and attracted students; for arts policy makers ‘culture’ became ‘cultural industries’.

I was in an ironic situation. I had been drawn to Marx's writings when I was doing research on the history of education in the nineteenth century. I liked the argument that in order to understand cultural activity it was necessary to investigate the means, relations, and technology of production. I was by temperament an empiricist and so, in methodological terms, I thought of myself as a Marxist (as I still do). When I came to study popular music I was immediately interested in the material conditions of musical production, in musicians as economic actors, whether paid workers or sellers of musical services in the marketplace. The study of popular music had to begin with the empirical study of the popular music industry, which, among other things, meant talking to the people who worked in it. At the same time, and for the same reason, I was interested in music policy and, as both an academic and a journalist, I talked to music policy makers too.

Such interests and contacts became unexpectedly valuable in the new academic world of ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘research impact’.Footnote ³⁰ I got research grants from both the ESRC and the AHRC; I wrote research reports for Enterprise Boards; I was appointed to Creative Scotland committees. I was trusted by the music industry's trade organization, the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) to be the ‘independent’ chair of the Mercury Music Prize.Footnote ³¹ I undoubtedly had a successful career.

In 1970s rock culture, ‘success’ was routinely taken to mean ‘selling out’: sacrificing creative integrity to the exigencies of pleasing the public or subjugating artistic vision to a record company's marketing scheme. Rock scholars were as vulnerable to such accusations as rock musicians. This was why I became a target of Marxist polemicists such as Ben Watson: not because a petit-bourgeois scholar could not possibly represent ‘the people’ but because I had chosen the easy career path of empiricism over the snares of dialectical philosophy.

Looking back it seems to me that there were three strands of Marxist thought entangled with popular music studies. Opportunists developed an interest in popular music as a way of engaging with ‘the people’, but the declining cultural resonance of class action in the 1980s meant that the politics of the popular evolved into an uneasy populism (in the pages of Marxism Today, for example). Idealists addressed popular music with arguments about aesthetics and form (in early IASPM conferences, for example, it sometimes seemed that every speaker was in some sort of dialogue with Adorno). Materialists focused on the political economy of music and the technological means of musical production.

My ambition, when I started out, was not to establish popular music studies as a new field but to transform the existing study of music so that analytic and pedagogic distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music no longer made sense. Popular music studies did not turn out the way I wanted. It has taken its place in the academy, but in doing so the projected combination of sociology, musicology, and cultural studies was broken up. Popular musicology has been absorbed into music departments rather than transforming them; music sociology is being used to underpin degrees in ‘commercial’ or ‘applied’ music and industry-sponsored research.Footnote ³² If the origins of popular music studies were tangled up with the history of European Marxism in the late twentieth century, the way the subject gained a secure place in the academy in the early twenty-first century can be understood as marking the end of Marx's influence.