Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the New Yorker in 2003, Alex Ross addressed the way cultural studies has infiltrated the world of pop music, transforming it from simply music that is popular to an “emanation of an entity called popular culture,” where the focus is on commodification rather than on the music itself. Describing a conference that brought academics and journalists together, allowing the latter to “drop arcane allusions” and the former “to loosen up a little,” he writes amusingly about academic obscurantism: Some of the presentations … lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin' on…. I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” … or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt school. Thus, I ducked … when I heard a sentence that began … “Invoking Walter Benjamin.” And I bailed on a lecture entitled “Bruce's Butt” – Bruce Springsteen's butt as seen on the cover of Born in the USA – when the speaker began to interrogate the image of the butt, which, under sharp questioning, wouldn't give anything away. (2003: 88) Now Ross can himself be tempted by rhetorical excess, but his critique nevertheless ... log in or subscribe to read full text