Research: Popular Theory

Popular music theory

Introduction

Popular culture is the idea of popular theory and various perspectives and attitude of mainstream culture. The understanding of Popular theory consisted of various theorists such as Gramsci, Frankfurt School and Adorno. This could be applied not only to music. It could be applied to Fashion, Movies, Television.

Popular culture

An example of Popular theory would be what was consider popular during certain time period. For example, the 70s, the most popular music videos were Bohemian rhapsody since that was different compared to any music videos at the time. Popular theory is linked with the music industry since they may promote songs and artists and specific genres are the most popular at the time.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci was a leading Marxist philosopher and He had use Hegemony as a way to describe there is one group have a dominant ideology the masses of culture compared to other ideology. The opposite of this is pluralism. This is when there are multiple ideologies from various groups in one culture. An example of Hegemonic existence is Sony, Warner and Historically EMI and Virgin. Since they have the controls over distribution and production of music across the world. An example Sony music vs George Michael; Sony music tried to force to George Michael to keep to several genres however he tried to get out of the contract to deal to do other types of music which led to a court case between both of them. After a long court battle George Michael won over Sony.
Dominant culture that take over from
Another example is how mainstream is popular and dominant over niche/independent music. This is because of the rise of various artists and pop bans and most music intuitions prefer certain genres over others because of the popularity of those genres.

Frankfurt School:

Frankfurt school or the Frankfurter Schule was an school of social theory at Gothe University in Frankfurt. During the interwar period the school consisted of dissidents from a capitalist, fascists or communist system. The people at the school were critical to both captlism and soviet socialism

Theodor Adorno:

Theodor adorno was one of the leading members at Frankfurter Schule Hes theory was about how capitalism allows the audience is more likely to listen to popular culture rather than true art. Moreover popular culture can influence the masses (mainstream audiences) in different ideologies.
because of his critical theory  as well work he did various other members.

Birmingham School: 

The Birmingham school of cultural science is where a university in which they studied cultural sciences one of the theorists who went there “Stuart hall” who was a cultural theorist and sociologist attended the Birmingham school. One of his theory’s was regarding issues around hegemony and cultural studies. His theory included encoding and decoding.
Birmingham school theory was more about how the audience isn’t passive because they would have to decode and encode the message of the narrative.

Dick Hebdige:

Hebdige was a music theorist and sociologist. His mostly known as for his study and understanding of subcultures and how it’s against the ideals of mainstream of society. He believed the idea that how a people will resist the power of large companies and how they control music. And how the audience may choose an alternative music or publishers and how a mainstream audience differs from an alternative audience.  His theory also explains why niche genres and subcultures may have a large appeal. However he also says that shows like x-factor tries to bring some of the niche genre to an mainstream audience and how sometimes that they will try to replicate some ideas that belong to niche genre. An example of this would be Madonna who emerged at the end of the punk scene and seen as the acceptable level of punk by mainstream culture and society. She had clothing that closely resembled punk style however was more mainstream in her marketing strategies and therefore evident of how subculture eventually become mainstream culture

Conclusion

All the theory’s discussed has an impact on the music industry. Since it shows how the audience is portrayed to the music industry and how popular culture can be used to influence the audience. I would disagree with both Theodor theory since making music for the popular culture is still as hard as making as making music for the “true art”. Since the music is most likey to be mainstream I would need to ensure it would need to look at an song that will appeal to Popular culture and the masses. [