Fragment Pop! (Part II)

In my last post, I wondered about “revolutions” in popular music, about how we use that term and what it often signifies in the stories we tell about pop music.  Several of the, like, five people I invited to read the blog wondered whether I was claiming that artists like Dylan and The Beatles were revolutionary in fact, and not just in narrative.  And also whether I thought rap or hip-hop was not revolutionary, in fact.  The argument lurking behind these questions is, of course, that claiming the first group of artists is revolutionary and the second not is to speak from a very narrow position, culturally and racially speaking.  Indeed, wasn’t the emergence of hip-hop in the 1980s experienced as revolutionary for many people, particularly young urban blacks, who felt little to no connection to the white pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s?

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The argument is undoubtedly true.  My initial point was not at all to suggest that “revolutionary” artists of the 50s and 60s should be privileged over all others because they fit some objective criteria.  It was, rather, that the way in which these artists are spoken of with respect to the canon of popular music – i.e. with respect to our understanding of its evolution – is different from later innovators.  The first group of artists are said to have made possible, or to have inaugurated modern pop music as such.  They drew the outlines of the domain itself, whatever those might be.  Hence Rolling Stone – a principle peddler of this type of speech – puts The Beatles, Dylan, Elvis, and The Rolling Stones at the top of their “The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time” list.

By contrast, innovations of later artists are usually depicted as groundbreaking for someone, for some group.  Here the emergence of hip-hop can be acknowledged as revolutionary, yes.  But the acknowledgment is conditioned: the genre made possible a new form of expression for young urban blacks within the domain of popular music.  We could draw on other musical innovations post-1970 that are somewhat less racially charged.  Disco and dance music, for example, have experienced a huge resurgence in contemporary pop.  But these genres are usually described as inflections within pop music itself, not as a fundamental re-ordering of its very existence.  The result is that innovations in music after the 1960s are spoken of more as supplemental fragmentations, less as Revolutions (with a capital “R”).  I also think that depiction is usually seen as pejorative, to the extent that artists of the 50s and 60s are depicted as pioneers par excellence.

Is this “revolution vs. fragmentation” narrative true?  Well, I don’t know: insofar as the narrative exists and has an affect on how we speak of popular music, it often takes on the force of truth.  That in no way means that the narrative represents “actual fact,” just that it has made itself felt.

But ultimately I don’t think this is the right question to be asking.  Make no mistake, I think the “revolution vs. fragmentation” narrative is deeply problematic.  But not because it is factually inaccurate.  It is problematic because it places such a strong evaluative weight on revolutions in the first place.  This emphasis leads to continuous efforts to establish and maintain hierarchies of order within popular music.  It encourages power claims at the expense of democratization.  It disciplines our listening.

There is every reason to dispute the traditional weight and status accorded to artists of the 1950s and 1960s.  The most productive response to the problem, however, is not to simply try and re-organize the way this weight and status is distributed, but to continually resist the fact it is distributed at all.  Fragmentation should be celebrated.