Pop as craft

Pop as craft is the debate over whether popular music made to order, by professional writers, producers and musicians, deserves the regard given to music presented as its performers’ self-expression. Alec Wilder (1972) judged the songs of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway as composition. Theodor Adorno (1941) wrote that hits were still made by hand but argued that the handiwork hides their standardization. Simon Frith and Pierre Bourdieu treat musical value as a social judgment, and Jason Toynbee argues that conventions govern even music presented as pure expression. Matthew Gelbart’s history of classifying music by its origins dates the concepts of folk music and art music to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Keir Keightley argues that rock shored up its apparent authenticity by assigning the faults of mass society to pop. Jacqueline Warwick defends the girl groups’ records for combining artifice with truthfulness, and Daphne A. Brooks holds that intellectual theory and commercial appeal can coexist.

Popular song as composition

Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972) treats the popular song as composition, judged by its melody, harmony and rhythm on the printed page.¹ Of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale”, Wilder wrote that it was “extremely well written, though definitely an applicant for the art song series,” and that he found it “maddening in its pretentiousness.”¹ In his chapter “The Great Craftsmen,” Wilder wrote that the songwriters who worked outside the theater did so “at almost the same level of innovation as the best of the musical comedy composers.”¹

Ken Emerson’s Always Magic in the Air (2005) makes a similar case for the Brill Building writers. Reviewing it in 2006, Robert Christgau wrote that Emerson “details the musical acuity of these supposed hacks” and is blunt about “the vapidity of most Bacharach.”² Emerson also stresses, Christgau wrote, that Black singers recorded most of the writers’ lasting songs and “usually got totally screwed rather than merely exploited.”²

The case against: standardization

Theodor Adorno’s “On Popular Music” (1941) sets out the case against. He argues that the popular song is standardized throughout, and he calls the appearance of individuality in each hit “pseudo-individualization.”³ Adorno writes that the song itself is still made by hand: popular music “can be called ‘industrial’ only in its promotion and distribution, whereas the act of producing a song-hit still remains in a handicraft stage.”³ He holds that the handiwork serves the standardization: if it were abolished, he writes, “a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved.”³ Standardization, he adds, “keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were.”³

In 1982 Max Paddison wrote that Adorno’s critique of popular music “is generally considered the least convincing aspect of his otherwise impressive analysis,” and suggested that “hidden in his theory there remains a potential which was never properly recognised by Adorno.”⁴

Value as a social judgment

Simon Frith’s Performing Rites (1996) holds that popular songs merit aesthetic judgment, and it starts from the premise that in judging high and low art “people are employing the same evaluative principles.”⁵ The difference between high and low, in his account, “has become a social fact,” the product of history and institutions.⁵ Frith treats authenticity as something listeners hear in the music, and they apply it even to genres made to order, such as Eurodisco: what they hear, he writes, is “a perceived quality of sincerity and commitment.”⁵ Against rock’s standard story of a folk sound corrupted by commerce, he writes that its history could as well reveal “a commercial musical form continually being recuperated in the name of art and subculture.”⁵ Students “deeply implicated in the romantic mythology of rock,” Frith writes, are shocked by Sheila Davis’s songwriting manual The Craft of Lyric Writing (1984), mainly, he suggests, because “so many of her formulaic examples come from canonical rock texts, texts which precisely stand for individual expressivity.”⁵

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979; English translation 1984) distinguishes “three zones of taste which roughly correspond to educational levels and social classes.”⁶ Frith answers that popular taste builds hierarchies of its own: low culture, he writes, “generates its own capital.”⁵ Jason Toynbee’s Making Popular Music (2000) takes up Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field.⁷ Habitus is the set of dispositions an artist acquires, and Toynbee’s field of musical production is “a set of positions occupied by music makers.”⁷ He argues that genre conventions bind even music that claims to escape them: “generic coding is inevitable,” he writes, even “in the limited case of free music, which purports to be pure expression.”⁷

Where the standard of self-expression comes from

Matthew Gelbart’s The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music” (2007) dates the concepts of folk music and art music, each defined against the other, to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁸ In the publisher’s description, music was once classified by what it was for, but “for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines.”⁸ One of the book’s chapters takes up “individual original genius.”⁸

Keir Keightley’s “Reconsidering Rock” (2001) gives an account of rock’s claim to authenticity.⁹ Rock, he writes, displaces “the ‘bad,’” the faults of mass society, into pop.⁹ That displacement “serves to shore up rock’s apparent authenticity and autonomy” and “obscures rock’s own status as mass-mediated, commodity culture.”⁹

The case for commercial pop

Jacqueline Warwick’s Girl Groups, Girl Culture (2007) defends the girl groups’ records for combining artifice with truthfulness: their music, she writes, has a “unique ability to combine shameless artifice with truthfulness and honest attention to real experience.”¹⁰ In her account, working-class African American girls, often managed by white men, made up many of the prominent groups and “became emblems of girlhood for white, middle-class suburbia.”¹⁰ She writes that the girl groups’ performances of girlhood are “recognizably artificial,” and that for that reason histories wishing to uphold 1960s rock and roll as “genuine, dangerous, and rebellious” have maligned the music “as unoriginal, reactionary, and trite.”¹⁰ Following the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, she writes that “we can discern a sexist bias in the extolling of countercultural music.”¹⁰

Jennifer Szalai’s review of Daphne A. Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution (2021) reports that Brooks sets out to connect “intellectual theory and commercial appeal.”¹¹ In Brooks’s view, as Szalai gives it, the two can coexist, though rock critics have traditionally treated sales and “that vague and vaunted quality known as ‘authenticity’” as a trade-off.¹¹

Further reading

• Max Paddison, “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music,” Popular Music 2 (January 1982): 201–18 — on what Adorno’s critics have rejected in his account of popular music and what survives of it

See also

• The songwriter-performer divide — the debate over who is the author of a record
• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial production of pop
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• The color line in pop — the debate over race in the music industry and its categories
• Cultural capital — Bourdieu’s term for the advantages in manners, tastes, possessions and degrees that families pass down