It is hard to be tasteless.

It is not so hard to have bad taste, I grant, but that is another matter. To have bad taste, one simply must consistently make choices which offend those with good taste — an ability which is relatively commonplace. For some, bad taste seems to appear naturally, as a birthright; others must learn to cultivate it. But no matter how acquired, or how skilfully employed, bad taste is not tastelessness.

… it is not a question of introducing out of nowhere a science of everyone's individual life, but of innovating and rendering critical an already existing practice. (Antonio Gramsci)

Some years ago the concept of ambiguity was proposed as a central category in the analysis of everyday life. Henri Lefebvre, unorthodox French marxist and sociologist, suggested that precisely there, in the ‘explosive chronicle’ of daily life, it was both possible and necessary to find common ground between what was socially and culturally familiar and its eventual critique (Lefebvre 1958). The study of pop music, although rarely given attention in this context, brings us up immediately against the oscillating tensions of that cultural ambiguity which Lefebvre considered the heart of everyday life.

Popular music analysis-why? One of the initial problems for any new field of study is the attitude of incredulity it meets. The serious study of popular music is no exception to this rule. It is often confronted with an attitude of bemused suspicion implying that there is something weird about taking ‘fun’ seriously or finding ‘fun’ in ‘serious things’. Such attitudes are of considerable interest when discussing the aims and methods of popular music analysis and serve as an excellent introduction to this article.

In urbanised Britain by the nineteenth century, the long symbiosis of the oral tradition with songs transmitted at least in part through printing was turning firmly in favour of the latter. Despite this — and largely because of the welcome rediscovery of industrial folk song — our picture of popular song between 1800 and 1850 is currently dominated by music in the survival of which oral transmission has played the greater part. Even when the music we hear can be shown with any certainty to have been in circulation at that time, a major cirticism of this emphasis arises. The oral tradition is a sifting process; what survives has passed ‘the test of time’, and this can only obscure the picture.

‘All good things are born of wonder’, remarked Aristotle. Today, as ever, listening to good music one cannot cease wondering at the mysterious spell of sound combinations. The phenomenon becomes even more mystifying when one deals with a simple and popular tune.

Interest in the processes of change involved in the transformation of rural African recreational music into popular music under urban conditions has grown substantially over the past decade (see Nettl 1978; Mukuna 1980). This interest has largely focused on two complementary problem areas: what such change can tell us about the principles and dynamics of musical development, and what processes of musical change may reveal about human behaviour (see Rycroft 1977, pp. 216–17) and the role of musical expression in social reorganisation. If the study of the urban music of modern Africa is to advance our knowledge in these areas, we must formulate ‘a conceptual framework in which changes and retentions of musical style and context can be understood within a synthesis of social and cultural change’ (Szwed 1970, p. 220). The results of my research into the past three centuries of urban musical change among black South Africans have suggested some tentative steps toward constructing such a framework (see Coplan 1980A).

‘What kind of music?’ This question has been put to me by hundreds of people, always for different reasons: by fellow train passengers who want to know what I do; by hi-fi dealers anxious to advise on the right type of speakers for listening to my record collection; in record shops when I enquire about the latest releases; by theatre managers when I have asked to hire their premises for a concert; by a young spectator while I am tuning up my '63 Stratocaster; by other musicians when I have asked to join a group; by civil servants responding to my application for a state grant; by sound engineers when I have hired a recording studio or amplification system; by the RAI* when I have proposed programmes or when I am engaged as a guitarist and they want to determine how much I should be paid; by policemen and frontier guards throughout Europe when I go through customs with my instruments and identity card on which is written: ‘Profession: Musician’.

Henry Pleasants has argued that the significant revolution in musical style to occur at the turn of the century was not that represented by the works of composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and their successors but that constituted through the advent of Afro-American and Afro-American influenced musics and the very substantial impact that these musics subsequently made, not only on main stream Western culture, but on world culture as a whole (Pleasants 1969). Yet despite the radical shift in musical and social aesthetic that has been maintained since the turn of the century through successive waves of so-called ‘popular’ music, remarkably little attention has been paid to popular music as a cultural form. As Jenny Taylor and Dave Laing have remarked, ‘popular music remains a poor relation in cultural theory, usually being tagged onto a list in which film or television takes pride of place’. A reason for this neglect, Taylor and Laing continue, ‘is its lack of status … which has the effect that rock is usually studied or taught in odd corners of the curriculum … In addition’, they conclude, ‘music as such poses great problems in the determination of meaning and signification’ (Taylor and Laing 1979, P. 43).

Well the blues come to Texas lopin' like a mule

Well the blues come to Texas lopin' like a mule

You take a high brown woman man she's hard to fool

You can't ever tell what a woman's got on her mind

Man you can't tell what a woman's got on her mind

You might think she's crazy ‘bout you she's leavin’ you all the time

She ain't so good looking and her teeth don't shine like pearls

She ain't so good looking and her teeth don't shine like pearls

But that nice disposition carries a woman all through the world

I'm goin' to the river gonna carry my rocker chair

Well I'm goin' to the river carry my rocker chair

——— have the worried blues right here

I think I heard my good gal callin' my name

Hey hey good gal called my name

She couldn't call so loud but she called so nice and plain

Adorno's critique of popular music is generally considered the least convincing aspect of his otherwise impressive analysis of the predicament of Western music in the twentieth century. The immediate reasons as to why his views on popular music are difficult to accept are obvious enough, and it must be admitted that the usual criticisms – that Adorno is prejidiced, arrogant and uniformed in this field contain more than a grain of truth. However, my intention here is not to add anything new in the way of invective, nor is it to attack Adorno's basic thesis regarding the dilemma facing twentieth-century culture as a whole. Instead, I propose to offer some suggestions as to how Adorno's writings on popular music may be approached so that the end result is something more than outright dismissal of his extreme and often dogmatic value judgements. It is an attempt to rescue the baby from the bath water, so to speak, as it seems to me that hidden in his theory there remains a potential which was never properly recognised by Adorno.

Music has rarely exerted such positively hypnotic fascination on such masses of listeners as it has since the meteoric rise of the English group, the Beatles, at the begining of the 1960s. Under this influence the leisure behaviour of young people began to undergo lasting change, focusing around music to an extent that no one — despite the periodically recurring waves of enthusiasm for specific vogues within dance music — would have thought possible. Young people in their thousands took up music making as a leisure activity once again, to say nothing of the masses that a single rock concert was capable of mobilising. At the same time, music has become a sociopolitical problem on a scale never seen before, concerning teachers, sociologists and psychologists equally — and it has become so in both capitalist and socialist societies, even though with quite different emphases. Evidently, then, for a whole age group with a lower age limit of about twelve (and steadily falling) and an upper limit of between twenty and twenty-five (when family responsibilities intrude — see Dollase, Riisenberg and Stollenwerk 1978), the process of attainment of selfhood within society is being realised, essentially, with reference to the assimilation of this kind of music.