In his wide-ranging book Pop Cult, through a series of case studies, Rupert Till compares popular music and religion as cultural phenomena. As he quickly suggests, in recent years the term ‘religion’ has become more flexibly used, contested and subjected to reinterpretation to the point where it now encompasses a variety of secular elements. Rather than attempting to write from an outside position and describe the way that the shift has changed public discussions of music, Pop Cult participates in the discourse directly by saying we have much to learn from viewing pop culture as substitute for religious practice. For any cultural field to be seen as religious, Till notes, it has to engender a high level of peer pressure, comprise of a degree of social organisation, offer a shared set of symbols and provide sense of shared norms. From that perspective, religious activity does not always require a deity as its focal point.
Perhaps the strongest aspects of Pop Cult are its accessibility and ambition. Written in a style that is easy to grasp, it leads its readers through a series of music phenomena and suggests that they exist in the sacred popular: ‘a realm of popular culture often thought of as secular, but in fact drenched in meaning, belief, faith, worship and ritual, and thus presented here as religious’ (p. 5). Till explores the relationships between the music industry, performers and audiences as part of an interdependent system saturated by a subtext of sacredness. Pop Cult's approach is neither historical nor highly theoretical. Its main chapters connect the religiosity argument to various elements of music culture by way of themes that include sexuality, celebrity, notions of locality and the transformations wrought by the digital era.
To open the volume, Till explains that the use of the word ‘cult’ in the book's title ‘is both provocative and deliberate’ (p. 2). If accused of cult membership, music fans might disagree, but they often use religious language to outline their feelings of transcendence; what the argument forgets here, however, is that we employ metaphors to highlight aspects of the world that we want to emphasise, rather than to make literal claims. Till adopts the role of seemingly innocent fan keen to understand more about how the power of popular music works as a socio-cultural system. He explains, ‘This book stems from a lifelong involvement in popular music. Perhaps it was becoming a teen fan of Adam Ant that first gave me an experience of a pop cult’ (p. x). Beyond insuring the author against the charge that he has interpreted a culture he has not really experienced, his stance here is reminiscent of media scholar Henry Jenkins, who started his first book Textual Poachers in Reference Jenkins1992 with a passage about how ordinary fandom prompted his quest for understanding. Jenkins chose to locate himself as someone who became an academic in order to help a fan community, yet Till does fully interrogate his own position as a representative member of the music audience. For a book that is primarily focused on the behaviour of music audiences, the voice of actual listeners is rarely solicited.
Since its interpretive frame is defined from the outset, Pop Cult neither pursues an inductive approach nor goes far beyond secondary material to dialogue with the supposedly worshipful audience. When the clubbers that Till actually speaks to say ‘I have never felt the presence of God or any one supernatural deity’, he frames them as in denial, ‘in contradiction to elements of religiosity described above, and elements of religion and spirituality that seem to be present. This is perhaps because I interviewed UK clubbers, and they were differentiating themselves from Christianity, the predominant British religion’ (p. 145).
The book's general avoidance of field investigation both allows it a distanced, deductive stance on the pop process and means that the book does not have to engage with more empirical research traditions like audience research and fan studies that might have questioned some of its fundamental assumptions. The chapter on dance music aside, there is neither new information from the field, nor a very sustained application of more classic ideas by scholars like Emile Durkheim or Victor Turner. Pop Cult also fails to examine the academic debate on religiosity and popular music that took place about a decade ago, which included contributions from Erika Doss and Sean McLeod. Instead, much of Pop Cult draws on material that is available elsewhere to form a fair introduction to various celebrity icons, but its analysis of religious elements offers less insight. In fact the prose is peppered with cycles of generalisation and interpretation like this one: ‘Sex is of course a fundamental form of human interaction, and a vital part of human culture … an issue for boy and girl bands and teen stars; is part of the pop cult holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ (p. 176).
While it is hard to completely disagree with the author, neither can one come very close to a either a stake in the writing here that might put anything at risk or move the discussion much further forward, since the book is premised on affirming rather than challenging an initial position. In that sense, while Pop Cult is not explicit about doing so, it strategically pushes a one-sided argument to its extreme in order to see what will happen. Part of the problem with this process, however, is that, although Till's descriptions outline some differences, the notion of sacred popular is too blunt to accept much meaningful distinction between, say, Cliff Richard's more pious odes and Norwegian black metal. Indeed, this flexibility of meaning, which arises because the key concept is actually a metaphor, is both a rhetorical advantage and an unexamined theoretical problem. No argument organised by a metaphor can ever really be tested or rejected; depending on the reader's own preconceptions it can only be more or less persuasive.
As Pop Cult's back jacket explains, it is focused on ‘investigating the sex, drug, local and death cults of the sacred popular’. To be fair, this summary was probably written by the publisher rather than the author, but the rapid inclusion of sex, drugs, death and religion offers a clue about the perspective of the research. Partly for commercial reasons, Christian paperback writers have also sometimes compared fandom and religion in their efforts to generate controversy around the idea that rock bands are tools of the Devil (see Stowe Reference Stowe2011). Pop Cult wrestles with its own place in that respect – not making the comparison for completely moralistic or sensationalist reasons, but making it nonetheless. Till's targets tend to be industrial: after discussing multimedia music marketing he explains that stardom and the music industry ‘work to maintain the obsessive fanaticism of [the] commitment of the fan to the cult of the star, and where the multi-million pound marketing machines of the entertainment industry use every manipulative technique available’ (p. 52). The terminology speaks for itself, reviving an oft-repeated cliché that says music fans are the duped end-point of an industry so their engagement with popular culture is not worthy of sustained analysis as a form of cultural practice.
To fully understand the perceived relationship between music fandom and religion, ontological distinctions must be made not just between the perspectives of fans and others, but also between three different objects: what happens, what is said about it, and how the process is then mediated in the images of stars. On the level of action, fans participate in a process of symbolic exchange which they only grasp by its thrilling results, so they sometimes use spiritual language as a convenient label. In the absence of a better understanding of fan phenomena, outside commentators can confuse what is happening for a literal kind of religious activity and suggest that music enthusiasts are in effect ‘worshipping’ their idol. On a linguistic level, fans simply explore religious rhetoric while critics can use that to parody fandom as social practice. Finally, performers also play with religious iconography in their images. Commercial portrayals of them exploit that as fodder for stereotypes that sell products by entertaining wider audiences. Pop Cult fails to grasp the inside/outside distinction and tends to stay on the last level. The result is that it cannot really conceptualise the symbolic exchanges, only examine their depiction in iconography and reiterate that in the world of popular music culture looks like cult. Ironically, then, since Pop Cult is led by a stereotype that circulates in the marketplace it arguably participates in the same process of commercial manipulation that it aims to critique. Till's framework and approach indicate that sharper tools are needed to dissect the anatomy of pop culture but, by taking a position that allows the discussion to stay open, the book is a valid contribution to the debate.
