An interesting feature was broadcast last night on Jarvis Cocker’s BBC6 show about right-wing rock and roll. The argument was hung on rather lightweight, anecdotal examples (interesting examples mind you: the Tories Songs for Swinging Voters, Radio Caroline broadcasting Tory propaganda, worst of all Pete Townsend's shameful shilling for the USAF in 1967... I heard the US airforce was quite busy in those days). I think the point was still clear and valid.
The illusion of the 60s and 70s countercultures* blinds us to what rock music is, and what the music industry is. The rock scene may be described as aristocratic, an elite legion of gods on earth. The similarity between area gigs and nazi rallies has long been noted. Dance music on the other hand is run on thoroughly capitalist line, Fordist composition, sampling, assembling music often from prefabricated parts. With manufactured pop it couldn’t be more explicit; Berry Gordy, Robert Stigwood, Simon Cowell. All of them are examples of musical capitalists, CEOs.
They are a jumble of observations but the more you think about it the more it becomes clear popular music is not a democratic pastime.
Marxists must bear in mind Walter Benjamin’s warning: “concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled application… lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense”. A rather hot statement, but then he was writing in 1936, and you can still see the sense of the statement. Creativity, genius, eternal value and mystery are all prized, especially in rock music. We need to look at culture from a different angle.
Modern culture is owned by the capitalist class, run by them for them and is generally about them. That’s not to deny the brilliance of any particular work of art, nor its value to society or the joy it may bring to experience it. Any culture for the working class is won from the bourgeoisie. It has to be hung onto. But we must not invest the products of capitalism with qualities they do not have. If you wear a V mask you are endorsing a Wachowski Brothers film, a capitalist endeavour not anti-capitalism. If you fetishise culture you give a part of yourself back to the commodity system, you start to lose the very thing you want keep hold of.
* Note as well the anti-capitalist outlook had to be fought for. Without socialists intervening in the British punk scene, which was wearing swastikas to nightclubs to begin with, the punk scene might have gone in a very different, very ugly direction.
